Notes on Genocidal Interchronological Incursion 57.7.3 (f.k.a. "Friends")

First rule of forgery detection: time is the best investigator. Distance lets us see clearly the patterns we missed up close. Forgers exploit the ignorance of their audience, and optimize their frauds to the biases and misunderstandings of the moment. Look at what passed for a Ming Dynasty vase in the 19th century New York art market and you'll laugh out loud. 

To say nothing of new technologies. Carbon dating, X-ray fluorescence, gas chromatography mass spectrometry...they all pull away the wool that covered the eyes of previous generations.  

So what seems obvious to us now, knowing what we do, was completely missed by our antecedents and ancestors. 

We must forgive them. How could they have known? Their imagination and their capacity for meaningful action were dramatically smaller than they believed them to be. As are our own.

Late 20th-century American audiences for serialized narratives physically broadcast through terrestrial signal transmission (fka "television") had no reason to suspect that the stories they consumed came from anywhere other than their own time and space; between corporate control of telecommunications channels and historic legacies of exploitation and oppression there was more than enough evil to explain away any toxic agenda detected inside the content of their beloved "shows." 

Because in the 1990s, the development of interchronological data transmission technologies was still seventy years away. The ability to send signals back in time was the stuff of science fiction...and in our ancestors’ fantasies, the future usually sent back killer robots instead of banal packets of data in the form of emails and text messages with instructions to human agents to set up shell companies, invest in specific stocks, accrue capital, carry out insidious schemes.

These schemes were blunt instruments. Their vast impacts far exceeded their intended outcomes, eagerly burning down entire forest to kill  small specific trees. And there were so many forest fires. Every day, it seems, interchronological forensics unmasks a new inferno. 

Today, in this dossier, we are revealing one such scheme, concerning real estate market manipulation in Node Nine of the Circumatlantic Urban Agglomeration (f.k.a. "The Elbow;" f.f.k.a. "New York City"). 

In the 1980s, government action in the release of freebased cocaine hydrochloride ("crack") and inaction in the spread of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus caused Node Nine to become economically unstable. Property values plummeted. The wealthy fled en masse. Its perception in the popular imagination was of a dangerous collapsing crime-ridden hellhole. A prison to be escaped from.

Other forensics experts have exposed many of the ugly interchronological interventions that Node Nine slumlords in our own time have deployed with the intent of changing the past and shifting that perception in order to increase the value of their assets and holdings. Foremost among these are the transformation of "Times Square" from sex worker safe space to expensive Disney World satellite, and the “Broken Windows” theory of policing—advanced by an insidious think tank long since proven to be exclusively a mouthpiece for toxic fascists from the future—which held that aggressive widespread police abuse of low-income communities of color would boost tourism.  

What has gone undocumented—until this document—is recognition of the "television" "show" Friends as an additional interchronological incursion, one intended to overwrite the city's chaotic colorful reality with one scrubbed clean of all the things that made life there special, and markets unpredictable. 

Seeing the show now, it's hard to appreciate the transformation it achieved. How little it looked like the place it was purporting to represent. 

Racial diversity, seen as economically undesirable, was erased. So was class struggle and street art and the dire magnificent pluropotentiality of sex and violence and love and creativity that throbbed inside of every fraught random interaction on the sidewalks and subways and piers and clubs and playgrounds. 

New York viewers of the 1990s and 2000s laughed at the ridiculousness of the program's representation of their city, but they were not the show's intended audience. Nor were the contemporary suburbanites who made up its main viewership in the era of its airing.  

No, the show was meant for their children. The ones who saw it out of the corner of their eyes as they grew up, and for whom it formed the primary image of what New York City was. The ones who saw not a crime-ridden hellhole, but a safe bland warm-and-fuzzy place where they could hang out with other people who looked just like them. The ones who would soon grow up, and start moving to New York en masse. Driving up prices. Pushing people out. Replacing grubby bodegas with airy monochromatic coffee shops, their names nowhere near as clever as they imagined. 

Only in the coming decades, as this nightmare vision of a sanitized soulless New York City came to become the reality, did the pattern become clear. The forgery became apparent. By the late 2010s, it was often impossible to tell the difference. Stand on certain street corners in certain neighborhoods—once overwhelmingly working-class—and you’d see nothing but an unending stream of soullessly attractive gentrifiers. The grotesque proliferation of Friends merchandise in the 2020s was an added insult from the future, a slap in the face to say: Look. Look around you. Look what we've done. You laughed at this show, and now this show laughs at you. 

Attached, you'll find full forensics. The communiques from known transchronological front companies, instructing terrestrial transmission content creation mills in what to write, who to cast, how to market. The fingerprints are clear. 

You may well ask, like my mother, like many of my peers: what does it matter? The show has vanished into the void of history. Neither the city nor the nation that Node Nine once belonged to still exists. The damage is done; the tree is burned down. Why bother to figure out how? 

And I'd have had an answer for you years ago, when I first started my studies in interchronological forensics. I'd have had a prepared rant ready to roll, about how understanding the atrocities of the past allows us to prevent future nefariousnesses. I'd have delivered it with a straight face. I'd have believed it. 

But here’s the thing. Time is the best investigator, but time is also every criminal’s accomplice. While it does its slow work, the guilty live good lives, grow old, die, bequeath their bloody spoils to innocent children. 

And so the ancient adage turns out to be true: we who remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

© 2024 Sam J. Miller

About the Author

Sam J. Miller's books have been called "must reads" and "bests of the year" by USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, and O: The Oprah Magazine, among others. He is the Nebula Award-winning author of Blackfish City, which has been translated into six languages and won the hopefully-soon-to-be-renamed John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Sam’s short stories have been published in the Kenyon Review, Asimov’s, Vogue Italia, and many others, and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. He's also the last in a long line of butchers. He lives in New York City, and at samjmiller.com.