1987: A 2X21 Story About the 80s and Money
Plastic Love and Plastic Money, and the beginning of the end of the Cold War
I finished this series, “1987”, a few months ago, as part of a longer work, “2X21”.
”2X21”, which I also named “2921”, is a book. I didn’t know it at the time but it all began in early 2021 as a 30 part series of shortform 300 to 600 word essays, “2X21”, which were part history and part future epic.
The entire thing was finished in another series, “1999”, which I’ll write about in a post after this one, and it all lives on “web3” platform Mirror - all 150 chapters.
The “1987” series is the last one compiled on a Notion page.
“1987: A 2X21 Story, Plastic Love, Plastic Money
” hopefully will live on there for awhile.
This series of “1987” focuses on a “secondary character” from 2X21, Fernanda Marie Therese Roque, who is veteran of the abruptly ended “Long War”, who must start over.
It’s an origin story for a flamboyant character from “1648”, the “Lady Fernanda”, a promoter who discovers a new artist and entertainment star, “Elena”, but who started from nothing like her protege. This is that “Day One” of Fernanda’s backstory.
It was also my way of learning more about art, entertainment and stardom, and the limits of fame and fortune. I wanted to explore the backstory of someone who “had it all” and then gave it up for a dream.
Fernanda, like her protege Elena in “1648”, comes from working-class background, and is a soldier in the final years of the “Long War” but now must survive the violent ending of that war, and reinvent herself.
As was done in 2X21’s essays, each day’s story, written for 30 days straight (!), one half is history and mythology, and the other half of the day’s chapter is fiction.
Here is the first essay from the fiction half of the first day’s post.
The fun part was writing about the 1980s and the music playlist has an new wave vibe.
Give it a play, and you’ll see the first tune is a rehash of Japanese tune, “Plastic Love”.
It was all inspired, by the craze of the web3 art scene this past year of Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs). I wanted to look at the money scene too.
The Crash of 1987 was the inspiration for the title. It’s all ancient history now.
But I also get into things like the 1980s emerging private networks that become America Online, and the rise of the “bicycles of the mind”, personal computers, and the end of the Cold War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which I wrote a lot about in the earlier series, “1961”. This was the era of post-Vietnam and post-1970s ennui and malaise and inflation. It was a time for consumerism and “new wave” experiments.
Here was the first essay about music, the rise of “techno” thanks to cheap synthesizers.
Here is one about the Crash of 1987.
There is only so much ground covered in 30 days of 2 essays a day but it was fun.
Here’s one about the birth of digital mail, “email” in the early 1980s.
A lot of things were happening, that took on momentum and became much more. The 1980s were a reinvention of ideas from the 1960s and 1970s, that would really grow in the 1990s: the fall of USSR and Cold War, and those networks, and the rise of a new one, the “Internet”. BUT I get into that in the “final” 2X21 series, “1999”.