Days Since The Internet Was Normal

A board of small complaints, mostly reading zero

Why most of these say zero

A counter that reads zero is not broken. It is the joke. Every number on this board is the number of days since the thing described last happened, and for most of them the honest answer is that it happened today, and yesterday, and will happen again before you finish reading this. A cookie banner has been asked of somebody, somewhere, in the last four seconds. The counter is accurate. That is what makes it funny and slightly bleak.

The ones that count up

Three counters move, and they are there for contrast. A board where nothing changes is a poster; a board where everything changes is a dashboard. The interesting thing is a wall of zeroes with a couple of numbers ticking quietly in it, because the moving ones make you check the still ones again.

About those dates

The dates behind the counting ones are made up. Not approximate — invented. The headline counter says the internet stopped being normal on a particular day, and that day was chosen because it produced a satisfying number, not because anything happened on it. Any real date would be a claim, and claims about when things went wrong are the least interesting conversation on the internet. We would rather be obviously arbitrary than quietly wrong.

Why it looks like a factory sign

The visual grammar here is borrowed from two places, and both are doing work. The first is the industrial safety board — the enamel sign bolted to a wall reading DAYS SINCE LAST ACCIDENT with a number slotted in underneath. Those boards are peculiar objects. They are supposed to encourage, and they mostly produce dread, because everyone reading one knows what the number resetting means. A big honest number, publicly displayed, with nowhere to hide.

The second is the split-flap board, the kind that used to clatter through the alphabet in railway stations. Split-flaps have a quality no screen quite reproduces: the information is physically committed. A flap has to turn. That is why they are still used decoratively long after they stopped being practical, and why a grid of blocky tiles with one number each still reads as authoritative even when the content is nonsense about tooltips.

Borrowing that grammar does something specific to a list of small complaints. Set a trivial grievance in the typography of an industrial safety notice and it acquires a weight it has not earned, which is the entire joke. "Days since a menu closed itself before you reached it" is mildly annoying as a sentence. Bolted to a wall in signage type with a zero under it, it is funny.

The particular comedy of zero

Zero is doing more here than any other number could. It is the only value that says both "this happens constantly" and "we are keeping score anyway", and the second half is what makes it land. Nobody keeps a tally of something that happens every few seconds. Building the tally regardless — with the units labelled, the number formatted, the board maintained — is a kind of stubbornness that is funnier the more carefully it is done.

It also means the board fails at its stated purpose in the most complete way available. A safety board that reads zero every single day is not measuring safety, it is measuring the pointlessness of measuring. Thirty of these reset before you loaded the page.

What is deliberately not on this board

There are grievances missing that you might expect, and the omissions are a rule rather than an oversight. No company is named, anywhere, in any counter — not once, not even the obvious ones. Nothing here is about a law, a business model, or any technology people currently argue about. Nothing is pegged to a news story.

The rule that produces all of that is narrow: a counter has to be about something that visibly happened on a screen in front of you. A banner appeared. A button moved. A form forgot. Those are experiences rather than positions, everybody has had them, and they will still be true in five years — which is more than can be said for most complaints about the internet.

It also means the board never tells you who to be annoyed at. It only tells you that you were annoyed, and that so was everyone else, at approximately the same moment.

Today's featured grievance

One counter is promoted each day, chosen by the date rather than at random, so everyone visiting on a given day sees the same one. It rotates through the whole board before repeating.

Suggesting one

There is a link at the bottom of the board. The bar is the rule above: something that happened on a screen, no names, nothing that will need updating when the news changes. Suggestions that clear it get added; the counter for when that last happened is on the board, and it will start moving the first time somebody sends a good one.

What this page knows about you

Nothing — no account, nothing saved, no number here personalised. The board is identical for everybody, which is the point of a board.