I made the covid shortages map and it launched my career, but I wish I had never noticed them.
“Have you found anything good to watch on streaming?” I asked.
I knew the answer was going to be no. There was nothing new and interesting to watch on streaming, because Hollywood had been on strike for the entire summer with no end in sight. After some discussion, I landed on a possible solution to my thirst for new content: I could cancel all of the streaming apps I already have, that I had long ago exhausted of anything at all entertaining, and subscribe to whatever platforms were left. “Hulu? Is there anything on there? Maybe I could check out AppleTV.” We rattled off a list of streaming platforms nobody seemed to be using. Paramount+ had Star Trek, which, we supposed was good for some other group of people somewhere, maybe people in cosplay outfits. Disney+ had cartoons, so the child demographic was covered. But we, the adult millennials in cars and swim gear, were out of content, and there was no end to the source of the problem in the immediate future, and even when that happened we knew it would be at least 3 or 4 months before anything new was released. A hopeless situation, truly.
For a few days I had been willing to turn on the TV and flip through the apps watching my options dwindle, but I gave up after realizing it was like opening the door of an empty fridge a second or third time. Without any new premium content, the streaming apps had become a sort of content graveyard for discarded seasons of reality shows and random chefs. Aka a total waste of time.
If this all seems like de-ja vu, it’s because it is.
Pretty much all of my covid era career accomplishments and the much greater number of social media followers I have now go back to one big thing: I was the first person I know of out there anywhere tracking the covid era shortages. I set up a page to track them in February of 2020 when I started to see the first impacts outside of Asia crop up among my European friends. I continued tracking those shortages through August of that year, when it seemed like there was just not much further value to be gained from the experiment because everybody knew it was impossible to find toilet paper or paper towels. By then the covid shortages map had been viewed 45,000+ times, I won a cash prize from a hackathon, I gained thousands of Twitter followers, and I was able to get the wind at my back enough to change into a totally new job field creating software.
When I first started working on that project, a shortage of anything in the USA was a freak event. Maybe after a hurricane you could have a shortage of bottled water or gasoline, but in general a shortage was, like the Paramount+ Star Trek episodes, a thing that happened to other people somewhere else. America was the land of abundance. We had McMansions! Too many McMansions. Too large of McMansions. Too many McDonald’s. Too many fast food jobs, too many fast food workers, making minimum wage. Too many sodas, too many cars, too many gaming PC’s.
And then we didn’t. We didn’t have enough of any of those things, and it was supposed to be a big temporary blip, and here we are 3.5 years later and an apartment in any random town costs $2000 and in New York they can get you for $5000 or maybe even more than that if you have bad credit or they just don’t like you or Mercury is in retrograde.
The car shortage is just a permanent thing. We don’t even make cars anymore, the market isn’t there, the regulations are wrong, everybody wants an SUV, everybody wants them so bad they want to get hit by SUV’s in traffic, and you can’t even haul any of the lumber Home Depot doesn’t have out of the bigass Home Depot parking lot in a Honda Civic. Plus, those little cars are insecure. Roving bands of Tiktok kids can just steal those little cars, because of hackers? Hackers. No hacker shortage. Steal a catalytic converter and sell it on Facebook Marketplace to go buy a self-driving Tesla like a big kid. When the Tesla drives into a construction zone you can blame TikTok videos of other people driving with no hands doing their 3 gig economy jobs. Doordash ice cream so good!
The shelves are full, the shelves are empty, the toothpaste is behind locked glass. You can go out to eat instead, it’s a little bit of a wait, you can only have this table for an hour, is that okay? We do things a little bit different here. It’s small plates. Seven dollar service charge, 50 dollar resort fee for a hotel with no towels.
I don’t know, it’s a pilot shortage. It’s an air traffic controller shortage. School is back, but there’s a teacher shortage.
Where can you go? There’s no escape. The National Parks want reservations now and you have to get in line to park before anybody wants to be awake. You can’t just sit in the wilderness and do nothing. There’s a shortage of everything to the point where there’s a shortage of nothing.
For a while there was an egg shortage. Which came first, the chicken shortage or the egg shortage? Who knows.
Maybe the reason I never brought the covid shortages map over to Brickstackr was that I thought all of these problems would go away. We’d get vaccinated and we’d be over them. It was all just temporary, and someday we would be free to sit in our McMansions on too large of minimum lot sizes and mandatory parking spaces with our hoard of computer chips and streaming apps delivering just nonstop dopamine hits.
Or maybe it’s a 5-over-1 now, we’re all sitting in 5-over-1 apartments with too many stairwells and too many cupcake shops and too many $25 hamburgers and too many axe-throwing gyms. Did that happen? Am I missing out on it? Did I miss my alarm and sleep through the part where I got a goldendoodle to take to the pet groomer downstairs? Is there a dentist in the building that doesn’t have a year-long waitlist?
No at this point I’m beyond the bargaining and the denial and I’ve moved onto acceptance: none of that is ever happening again for most people, if it ever did.
These shortages are just kind of a permanent fixture of the 2020’s era economic landscape, the same way before covid everybody wore unflattering skinny jeans and parted their hair down the side. It’s reality and you can only fight it for so long before you just have to deal with it the way it is. In the meantime, I’m canceling Netflix and HBO (max?) - I don’t know if the TV I got after the one I wanted sold out will let me cancel Prime Video.
The original covid shortages map, if you really must see it.
