Few things have emerged unscathed from this era of relentless #disruption, but one thing on which we can all agree is how to tie our shoelaces. Right?
WRONG. It turns out that the plain old over-under-and-around knot that most of us have been tying for decades is scoffed at by knot enthusiasts. According to Boing Boing, the knot that’s all the rage amongst knot nerds is the Berlutti knot, which is similar to the basic shoelace knot but has the advantage of being far less likely to come undone on its own.
But the Berlutti knot isn’t the only game in town. There are also advocates of the knot known as Ian’s Secure Shoelace Knot, or simply “Ian’s knot”. It’s the creation of Ian “Professor Shoelace” Fieggen, a self-described “friendly Aussie guy trying to contribute to the internet” who has run the wonderfully Web 1.0-esque Ian’s Shoelace Site for over two decades.
Aftermath spoke to Fieggen last week, discussing how Ian’s Shoelace Site feels like a throwback to the days when the internet was primarily a place for people to discuss and share niche interests, instead of a hideous virtual Rube Goldberg machine that consumes terawatts of energy and our collective sanity in the relentless pursuit of engagement. This was the great promise of the internet: that it would act as a repository for the sum total of human knowledge, that it would provide information on any subject imaginable at our fingertips.
And that includes fingertips struggling with the art of shoelace-tying. As someone who was the very last in my first-grade class to master tying my shoes, and whose brain seems hard-wired to discard any knot-tying knowledge before it can even vaguely threaten my long-term memory, I would have loved to have Ian’s Shoelace Site at my disposal. If I’d managed to internalize Ian’s knot instead of the common shoelace knot, who’s to say how different my life might have been? (If nothing else, I’d certainly have had fewer concerned strangers stopping me on the subway to tell me that my “shoestrings” were undone.)
But sadly, it seems today’s bewildered five-year-olds may not be able to turn to Professor Shoelace for much longer, because Fieggen says the modern internet is making it harder and harder for him to maintain Ian’s Shoelace Site. He cites the increasing difficulty of surviving on ad revenue, the rampant plagiarism of his content, and—inevitably—the rise of AI as reasons for this. “For Ian,” wrote Aftermath, “the cumulative effect of all of these factors is a deep sadness, a sinking feeling of exhaustion and futility.” Ian is not alone.
But hey, even if the entire internet comes crashing down along with the rest of society, leaving us in a blasted post-truth hellscape where we all die of the measles while the Nazis burn the Smithsonian, at least we’ll be able to die with our boots on—their laces in a knot that’s going to stay tied.
English (US) ·