2026-06-12                             dispatches from helix
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   I've always had a complicated relationship with nostalgia.
   I'm prone to it, and when I indulge in it, I feel guilty
   about it.

   But I think that as I've gotten older, my relationship to it
   has changed, and it's more positive. It used to be a kind-of
   "resistance to change", more than any yearning to "go back".
   I was nostalgic for things basically immediately after they
   happened, which is not really nostalgia at all, I think.

   Now I see it as placing ourselves in history. If you live in
   the developed world then you are basically living in the
   "ruins" of an ancient civilization (ours). My house was
   built ~130 years ago by Irish immigrants. I can see the
   axe-marks on the beams that hold up my floors.

   The people who bought my old house in England are living
   with my decision to route CAT5 cable into the coal-shed:
   because I wanted to put a server in there. But the reason we
   had a coal-shed: because the midlands used to run on coal.
   The past is everywhere.

   I was talking to a friend last night about the fact that I
   am fascinated by old tech companies, and what happens when
   they fail and their assets (particularly their real-estate)
   are re-purposed.

   When I started working at Slice we co-worked at 150 Elgin:
   the old Shopify offices. Shopify still exists, but there is
   a 2010's optimism to their old office, combined with a
   2020's depression of the fact it's been repurposed by a
   company that is just _not good_ at maintaining what was good
   about those offices in the first place.

   Colocataires' rack is in an old Mitel building. (Mitel were
   a huge Ottawa telecoms company, created by a couple of guys
   who left Nortel). Mitel was a poster-child for a
   semi-conductor boom that is long past. (The company exists
   but is in bankruptcy).

   Speaking of Nortel: there's a pretty large former-Nortel
   campus at the corner of two major roads, near where I live.
   It's now a Government of Canada office building, as the feds
   spend $177 million buying the campus to "help out" the
   ailing company after its fortunes declined. It's a nice
   building. Not Google-campus-nice, but nicer than I think
   most government offices are. Those people go to work in the
   90's-optimism campus.

   My current employer is based in Silicon Valley. They are not
   in an old tech company's building (that I know of) but they
   are surrounded by them, including some companies that still
   exist but are past their glory, as well as fully
   non-existant old brands.

   I wanted to tie these thoughts together, but I'm not sure
   that they are more than superficially connected. Maybe it's
   that tech companies boom and bust so much quicker than other
   kinds of company? Like you can wander the British midlands
   and remember that we used to make stuff in the UK -- cars,
   steel, engines. And they still do, but less. And those
   things generally flourished for 50-100 years. Some of the
   dead company offices I get to work around came up, peaked
   and declined -- all inside my lifetime. Sometimes all within
   the span of my career.