Digital Archaeology: Toys of the 80s (Website)
Way back in 2004 when I was a poor graduate student studying philosophy at UC Santa Cruz, and when the concept of affiliate marketing was still relatively new, I developed and ran a website called “Toys of the 80s.” In the early 2000s people my age were already beginning to feel nostalgic for the 1980s, which, in retrospect was a relatively peaceful and idyllic time in the history of the world—following the Vietnam War with the Cold War with the Soviet Union coming to a close, and with the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent change in American culture, from optimism to pessimism, still far in the future.
The idea behind Toys of the 80s was that I would create an online storefront, except, instead of housing inventory myself or doing my own shipping, I would rely solely on affiliate links to get commissions from the things purchased from other Ebay sellers or from Amazon after a user clicked on the affiliate links on my site.
Thanks to the Internet Archive, I was able to retrieve a 2007 snapshot of Toys of the 80s, which you can see at the following link:
And here are some screen captures of the Internet Archive version of Toys of the 80s, in which you can see my budding web-design skills, circa 2004:
Although it’s not philosophically important in any way, I feel it’s important to resurrect these little slices of internet history that are in danger of being lost, even though they are buried deep within the servers of the Internet Archive.
The fact that I even attempted a website like this is rather revealing of my life as a struggling graduate student in the early 2000s. I was trying to make ends meet as a philosophy graduate student in Santa Cruz, one of the most expensive areas of the country, made worse by the steady flow of student loan money flowing into Santa Cruz from a fresh crop of freshmen and first-year graduate students at UC Santa Cruz every year. Even then I realized that the student loan industry was a racket and out of control, judging by the resulting rent prices in Santa Cruz, both then and now!
It’s also possible to infer from this archived version of Toys of the 80s the cultural change that was taking place from the innocence of childhood in the 1980s and the optimism and digital utopianism of the late 1990s (see From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Fred Turner) to the tumultuousness and cultural pessimism of the post-9/11 era, naturally resulting in heightened nostalgia for the innocence of our youth, the same phenomenon as children of the 1950s experienced in response to the tumultuousness of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Toys of the 80s was also a creature of its time, when those of us who had been using the internet in the late 1990s began to explore the internet’s earning potential and its potential for entrepreneurship in the early 2000s, an ongoing exploration, which, perhaps, I’m still on today, a trend in my personality either complimentary to or in opposition to my instincts as a philosopher, a fact not lost on Socrates in his criticism of the Greek Sophists—traveling teachers of rhetoric who were paid quite well by their students to teach them how to be rhetorically persuasive but without regard for the truth or for the validity of one’s arguments.
Oddly enough, it was experimenting with making websites, such as my original Geocities website, about which I wrote in a previous blog post, and this foray into creating Toys of the 80s that give me the hands-on experience with HTML that primed me for the work I would do at Aplia writing and programming online learning materials for college-level logic courses in an XML-based authoring environment (a customized version of Arbortext). The mere fact that I already knew HTML in addition to my subject matter expertise put me at the top of the pile for the kind of educational content development I would spend nearly eight years doing at Aplia.
So although Toys of the 80s barely broke even from a business standpoint, the return on the investment of time and money was huge, as it allowed me to transition from being a low-paid graduate student and community college philosophy instructor to a well-paid senior content developer and senior learning design author, with proceeds totaling almost $700,000 across my years at Aplia—not a bad return on investment, I’d say!
The lesson from Toys of the 80s as it relates to my career path as a philosopher, educational content developer, and now instructional designer is clear: you don’t know beforehand what the direct and indirect rewards of any given project will be, but if you take the time to develop new skills and become an expert in something, even if you have a few failed projects along the way, you are making yourself far more desirable to potential employers than you would be otherwise, and you may just get the chance to do the kind of work you love doing, because you and you alone have taken the time to develop the relevant skills and get the right kind experience on your own initiative.
I hope you enjoyed this little foray into digital archaeology and internet history. While Toys of the 80s may have been laughable from a business standpoint, and perhaps even a web-development standpoint, I have fond memories of sitting at my tiny desk in Santa Cruz cranking out HTML by hand like a late-night wizard conjuring something out of nothing in the darkness. And besides, who doesn’t love toys from the 1980s? Toys of the 80s rocked!—the fact of which simply cannot be denied by any logic or sophistry known to humankind!
