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Fridges: Where The Internet Ends.
Some squat under a table or a counter, utilitarian, ignored beyond opening a closing. Others loom like a shiny rectangular robot, no arms, but baleful bright LED lit blue eyes, ready to regurgitate frozen cubes or a stream of cold water to its owners. Their universal language a persistent, low hum. We listen to it in our unconscious to know it is healthy, our food safe.
The earliest of consumer fridges were a bit more elegant. Boxes for an ice cube in the top or bottom. We didn’t have magnetic words to make silly sentences and poems to stick on them yet.
The fridge is everywhere in homes around the world, both visible and invisible. In the Philippines and some other Asian countries, perennially wrapped in plastic, venerated, almost worshipped, it must be kept clean. In many Western countries they are covered in little travel magnets, post-it notes, children’s scrawls proudly displaced. Pictures of family events, the desiderata of modern life. they are social fridges.
Today, these social fridges resemble a trend in our digital lives, towards more intimate groups, less life bragging and virtue signalling to the world. The fridge has, for many decades, been a social signal in and of itself, as some technologies are.
A large fridge tells a narrative, it weaves together stories old and new, telling families their…
