One of my favorite projects when I was an editor at the Wired Magazine was the monthly back page item Found: Artifacts From the Future. Each installment was a full-page image of some found object from a speculative near future. All explanation of what the object was and how it worked had to be diegetic—i.e. the page had to explain itself entirely through context and in situ text, with no annotation or caption. This was a great challenge for me as a writer/editor and for all of the designers and illustrators and photographers I had the pleasure of working with. These pages never made much of an impact online because the fun was always in the fine print, which rarely came through at web resolution. I’m republishing them here to drill down on those cool details.
This piece ran in the September 2007 issue, and it’s a more successful attempt to build one of these pages around greeting cards than this misfire from 2003. The page is shot from the POV of a man celebrating his 150th birthday. His whole extended family is there, including his 95-year-old grandson with a walker and a sweatshirt with I ❤️ Grandpa printed on it. The birthday boy is reading his birthday card, which has handwritten messages from all of his progeny, as well as a gift certificate for a cell therapy treatment that will hopefully help G4pa reach his 160th.
Transhumanism and extropianism and cryonics were (and are) a big deal in Silicon Valley, and Wired had been covering the idea of living past 100—or even transcending your body entirely and becoming immortal—since its inception. One problem that life extension organizations like the Methuselah Foundation (“Make 90 the new 50 by 2030!”) bump into is the Hayflick limit. That’s the number of times a normal somatic cell can divide before it putters out due to telomere shortening. I had an idea for a Found that took place at a birthday party for a sesquicentarian in which the present is a gift certificate at a clinc that helps people dodge the Hayflick limit. I wrote all of the birthday wishes, but enlisted mutliple different people to sign the card so that we’d have a nice variety of signatures.
The photographer for this page was Erik Pawassar and the photo compositor was Alex Katz. Here are closeups of the card followed by a list of all the text on the card.
TEXT ON GIFT CERTIFICATE
Hello Murray Nuemann ! Your family has purchased you ONE COURSE OF TELOMERIC EXTENSION GENE THERAPY (a $249,999 value!) to celebrate your 150th birthday
Hayflick LE Clinics—Why Die?™
A six-visit treatment is proven to extend your life 4 to 6 years! This coupon is redeemable at any Haflick Life Extension Clinic on any date before: 09-01-2079
HANDWRITING ON CARD
You’re like a fine wine, you just keep getting better with age! Keep on keeping on!
Many Happy Returns! ❤️—Mildred
xoxoxoxo xoxoxoxo :-) —Britney
Felicitations! Remember G3father, you may be coming up on two centuries, but if you lived on Saturn, you’d only be twelve! — Kwame
PUNCHLINE PRINTED ON THE INSIDE OF THE BIRTHDAY CARD
…but then, Methuselah didn’t have to keep transferring his address book onto new gadgets! Happy Sesquicentennial, you old coot!
HANDWRITING ON CARD
Hope I’m as spry as you are when I’m your age! — Derrick
We’re so glad that your great great great grandchildren got a chance to meet you! — Liz
You still have to finish telling me that story about your automobile that ran on petroleum! — Darrin
Hope you live for another 150! Ryan
hapy birfday g4pa! susan