Wanish

Introduction

While it's true that I had the opportunity to polish up and launch Wanish (both the website and the supporting backend, which is very much still under development) only between October 2021 and the first half of November 2021 (which for me coincided with a sabbatical during which I wasn't under any contractual obligations with respect to Intellectual Property with my employer), the truth is that the inspiration for the project goes back much longer than that, and Wanish is an idea I had contemplated in my mind many times over the years. In this section I will try, in the interest of historical accuracy, to tell the story of how the various ideas for the project came about.

A Post-Hiking Insight

In the summer of 2018, I hiked Kungsleden, one of the most famous hiking trails in Scandinavia. The trail crosses the Arctic portion of Sweden in a general North-South direction starting from Abisko, a few kilometers away from the border with Norway (and also not far away from the tiple-point border between Norway, Sweden, and Finland), and going all the way down to either Kvikkjökk or Jäkkvik, depending on whether one wishes to do 220km or only 180km.

You can check out my detailed trip plan here. I am also attaching a brief video blog of the trip below.

The hike took me 9 days of almost complete technological withdrawal, during which time I experienced only slow-changing arctic landscapes with barely any trees, let alone wildlife (but with rapidly-, and sometimes also dramatically-changing weather instead), and a lot of time to think through ideas and thoughts that would normally have remained buried in my mind's stack, under the pressure of the daily grind.

After having spent one day in Kvikkjokk to eat, regain some of the weight I had lost on the trail (almost 6 kilos in total), and have a proper shower, I started my journey back to Zürich, and away from the land of the midnight sun. My way back involved a three-leg flight from a small regional airport, with layovers in Stockholm and Amsterdam.

And as I got back closer to Zürich and to the bustling life of temperate Europe, I remember sitting in the terminal in Amsterdam, surrounded by hundreds of fellow passengers, feeling drowned out by all of the noise and movement around me. While trying to calm my mind and retain some of the peace I had earned out in the wilderness of Lapland, I started squinting my eyes and imagining what the terminal might look like without all of the moving people. That was the first time that the idea of Wanish came to me.

Zürich Goes Quiet

Fast-forward almost two years to the spring of 2020, and the world was going through trauma the likes of which it hadn't experienced since 1918. The new Coronavirus, which had been reported in December 2019 in Wuhan, was now rippling like wildfire across West Coast America and Southern Europe. International travel, as well as life as we used to know it, was about to change beyond recognition. I was in California for a business meeting at Google when news broke out of the first cases in Switzerland, and my flight back to Switzerland was among the last ones before the borders shut down for regular travel that February.

Two weeks after I flew back to Europe, mandatory work from home was instilled, and a few weeks later after that the lockdowns started. I remember meeting my good friend Alex from ETH, and walking around the newly-deserted streets of Zürich one evening, experiencing scenes as if from a post-apocalyptic novel. We paused on a bench close to ETH and joked about it in the warm and fragrant spring air. We never thought that two years later, it would still not be over.

A New Reality is Upon Us

The period between the lockdown in early 2020 and late 2021 is still a blur in my mind. I remember working almost continuously without taking any significant holidays throught the period. Part of this was to launch projects that we had been working on for years, and which I finally got to see up and running, and part of it was due to additional accumulated stresses in my social landscape.

One way to cope with the stress in my new socially-distanced reality was to go on long walks around the city, particularly at night. I would grab a cup of coffee (either from a bakery, or home-made when the bakeries closed), and walk along the Sihl river down to the train station and back, or to the lake and back. These walks were a lifeline to me, and they helped me forge a more insightful and intimate relationship with the city around me. When you're the only one in the streets, it's not hard to feel as though the city is your toy lego world in which to play hide-and-seek.

The Difficult Return to Normality

As the fall of 2021 drew nearer, it still didn't look as though we might return to normal any time soon. The new Delta variant was rapidly undoing all of the progress that the vaccination had achieved, and though the city slowly returned to normal, there was a feeling of things being different somehow. The best way that I've heard this explained was by M., my work colleague, who said that in his view, humans have both an individual conscience and a collective conscience, and that the latter had frailed.

Not long after that, I had to take some time off. Late August, I flew to meet my parents and went on a road trip with my father around the Carpathians--the first such trip since I was a child. I returned to Zürich feeling changed, and was taken aback by the contrast between the Zürich of my night-time pandemic-era strolls and the timidly-recovering version of itself.

Now that I was free of commitments and that I still had a fresh mental contrast between the two visual impressions of the city, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work coding Wanish, a one-way visual portal between the two worlds: one alive with motion, and one quietly--and intimately--static and eternal.

Wanish is Born

After making sure that the backend is functional, I brought up the first version of the Website locally on November 7th, 2021. After years of nurturing the ideas on the back-burner of my mind, I felt a rush of excitement to finally see them come alive in a way that other people can witness.

I have a good feeling about Wanish, and I'm excited to see where it will go!

Post Scriptum

I settled on the name "Wanish" as a double word play. On one hand, it's a contraction of "Video Vanish", alluding to the metaphor of pouring detergent on a video, and on the other hand it's an amalgamation of "Want" and "Wish". I thought it was a good name...