The Virtual Ouroboros.

The Virtual Ouroboros is the lineage's most embarrassing entry. The brochure dates it to 1985 and describes it as 'the first networked iteration,' in which 'physical and digital workspaces converged into a single interface in which work and leisure became indistinguishable.' Every word of this is wrong for 1985. What did exist in 1985 was the personal computer in early domestic distribution: the IBM PC AT (August 1984), the Commodore Amiga (June 1985), the Apple Macintosh (January 1984). None were networked in any meaningful consumer sense. None were configured for the convergence the brochure describes. The 1985 personal computer was, for most domestic users, a sophisticated typewriter with an attached spreadsheet program.

The iteration the brochure is straining toward is real, and it belongs to the 1995–2005 window. Tim Berners-Lee's WWW specification was published in 1989. The first publicly-available web browser (Mosaic) was released in 1993. The first commercial broadband in the United States was 1996. The brochure has, on this iteration, dated its claim approximately twenty years too early. I have thought about why. The backdating could be a marketing error: the writer reached for 'computers' and conflated the early PC era with the later networked era. It could also be deliberate. The brochure wants the lineage to feel deep, and the personal computer reads, to the contemporary reader, as ancient. The 1985 date borrows the personal computer's antiquity without the personal computer's actual functional limits. I am inclined toward the second reading.

The actually-existing convergence the brochure is gesturing toward — physical and digital workspaces fused, work and leisure indistinguishable — was a product of the 2003–2010 period, in which broadband, the smartphone (iPhone 2007), social media (Facebook 2004; Twitter 2006), and the cloud-based productivity suite (Google Docs 2006) progressively dissolved the office-home distinction that had organized the American working day since the 1880s. The Virtual Ouroboros, in any meaningful sense, was operational by 2010. By 2015 it was the default condition of professional-class American life. The 2003–2010 period is the period in which the apparatus's contemporary form emerged. The OLS is a 2024 physical concretization of what the platform economy made operational fifteen years earlier. The brochure's backdating of this iteration to 1985 is, in effect, the brochure trying to make the chair look older than the platform that produced it.

What survives, regardless of dates, is that by the time the OLS launches in 2024 the convergence the brochure attributes to 1985 has been operationally complete for at least a decade. The chair arrives late to a convergence already finished, and concretizes it. The Virtual Ouroboros is, in some ways, the lineage's most interesting iteration. It is the iteration the brochure most clearly invented — and yet the underlying phenomenon is the phenomenon that most clearly produced the chair. The brochure's chronology is wrong; the brochure's intuition is right. I find this combination very characteristic of the apparatus's self-narration.