Reddit — the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet”– is a bottomless pit of interesting content. On any given day, users submit thousands upon thousands of news stories, animated gifs, and more — but can you imagine what the site will look like in the next thousand years? One man can.
Artist/Redditor Blair Erickson spent the last four years of his life imagining what the community-curated website might look like 1,000 years from now. In his latest project, dubbed Reddit 3016, Erickson takes us into a long, futuristic comedy show inspired by current Reddit trends. Just about everything in the site gets an update, from the popular subreddits to the advertisements, which makes it super entertaining to click through.
“There’s a ton of amazing cool shit in the site that nobody has found yet. Secret stuff that might blow a few minds,” said the 37-year-old CEO of Jamwix to Gizmodo. With the help of his partners at Jamwix, a San Francisco-based software and VFX company, Erickson was able to build the website from the ground up — although Erickson photo-shopped all of the images, curated fake articles for “The Huffington Planet,” and edited the short films.
“If you read graffiti in Roman bath houses you see human beings make… the same silly things even thousands of years in the past. Who’s sleeping with who. What kind of foreigners disturb their xenophobic feelings. Who’s a badass. What they like, what they hate. Who is a liar in politics, etc. So I wanted to play it out in a fun futuristic way,” said Erickson.
Reddit 3016 launched last week and was ironically debuted on Reddit. “For a brief moment it reached #1 before it was deleted. Then they started zapping it everywhere. It’s definitely a satire of modern online culture.”
If you’re looking to waste some time, head over to Reddit 3016.
