Earlier this year I dived through the Facebook market when I came across a “fire piano” for sale. I clicked on the list and expected that 'fire' 'cool' meant, but found something literal: a pyrotechnic piano, Macgyver to spit flames from the top when a player tickled the keys.
In the short description that the mail accompanied, the seller established in California told how he had built the piece by hand until “an injury took him out of the store.” He now asked $ 2,000 for the piano, which he found as 90 percent completed. That this artist was thwarted by the realization of his freaky vision, let me be both surprised and strange melancholic. I spent the rest of that night asking if he grew up on pianos, and whether he missed the process to make them. For a moment I even considered asking him what this remarkable piece would look like if he had gone through it.
I parried the wares of other people since the Facebook Marketplace made his debut in 2016. I often venture to Los Angeles Flea markets, thrift stores and Swap meets tucked away at parking places in high school, drive-in cinemas and enigmatic store fronts. During the weekend I will stop combing estate to comb things like chess parties Kits from the 1970s and miniature cocktail shakers. I feel more attracted to the appearance around these objects, and the stories that I propose, then I can be the objects themselves. An afternoon spent with an estate sale feeds my curiosity about the items that make a life, which retains meaning as time flickers past and what people choose to let go when their environment changes and they do that too.
A similar boost brought me to Facebook marketplace, but to call it a digital second -hand store, endorses how unique and bizarre the platform is. Facebook – Actual is not the best prism to consider someone's existence, but the market application still results in surprises instead of serving – or at least, only Serving up – algorithmic slop. It offers me the stories that I can only imagine if I browse through stores. Marketplace distinguishes itself that these peculiarities are not usually separated from their contexts: the descriptions of the sellers can vary from explaining what brought 68 pairs of salt and pepper shadows into their lives, or why they said goodbye to an action figure of any Jacked Man (the seller apparently thought the toy was Dwayne [the Rock] Johnson when he bought it).
The Ephemera Populating Facebook Marketplace has transformed a corner of the network into a locus of awe, perhaps even pleasure. In this way my habit is to scroll through Facebook market, not just an improvement in the personal thrifting experience. Looking at his fundamental craziness is almost a form of time travel, a callback to the obstinacy that defined the web 1.0 -era. These quirky offers are the kind of things that you would expect from a place like Stumbleupon – a bygone site of the internet from the former with a button that brought you to any website when clicked. The items on Facebook market have been thrown together so randomly that they think of the lawless tumbling of images that adorned the pages of Geocities.
If a millennial who remembers how nice the emerging internet could be, it is a relief to find something that is reminiscent of that time. It serves me such a strange juxtap positions as a beautiful “SWAG lamp” from the middle of the century to immediately follow a “unique wallet” with pleather wrinkles that form a frightening face. This anarchist display is rammed as a stars in someone's gait cupboard with Tchotchkes for which they could not find any other place. It is exactly where strips of humanity arise.
In one offer, a seller was finished from chic lamps, benches, lounge chairs and a dining table in the midst of a continuous separation. In the caption he explained to 'sell everything and to split the proceeds'. “All items are in excellent condition and are well cared for,” he continued. “Be friendly, it's hard.” Another offer, with a baseball cap, decorated with the words “Shit Show Supervisor”, was described as a gift from the Seller's son: “Single parenting at its best.” (If to dismiss depressing implications, he assured potential buyers that the hat was a nice one.) Lists such as these have let me consider how items can be accused of memories we cherish, no matter how difficult they were when we experienced them; And how giving up these objects can feel like mourning ourselves that we have to dilute or leave behind.
By staring at this box of chaos, I learned about the bizarre objects that form a life. I broke the rabbit hole of outdated furniture, such as gossip chairs. But these dives have usually left me with the reality that, due to limited money or space, or personal disagreements, we sometimes have to give up things that we cherish – but the meaning of those items can at least be passed on to someone else.
In the end I only bought two items from Facebook Marketplace: a marble coffee table and a plush lounger. But buying items there is almost next to the point. It turns out that I don't really want to buy a cheeseburger-shaped lamp. However, I want to know about the life of the person who could not live without that lamp at some point.
