A letter to 1415

The four stories of the first experience take place in 1415: the alley's budget, the Zayandeh-rud assembly, the emergency council, the silent city. Ten years is the distance in which a country changes without anyone noticing the moment. From 1385 to 1395 the price of petrol went from a hundred tomans to a thousand, the number of internet users from eleven million to more than fifty, and the population grew by nearly ten million.

This experience does not ask what the future looks like; it asks what you say to it. Three hundred characters, one recipient, one date. A letter that even its sender cannot read for ten years is written differently.

Three doors are open: to yourself in 1415, to someone who is eighteen that day and perhaps eight today, or to your own city. A hope (in the previous experience) asks nothing of anyone; a letter has a recipient and a date, and those two things carry it from wanting to saying.

Write what you are sure of today; ten years on it will have come true or turned funny, and both are worth reading. So is a promise you make yourself.

A letter you seal «for everyone» stays on the site's server: the text, your card number and the moment of sealing, with no name and no address. Until Nowruz 1415 no page shows it and we do not read it; that day this page shows the wall of letters instead of the desk, the newest seal first. Each card has one letter: a new letter takes the previous one's place and the previous one is erased.

A letter you seal «only for me» never leaves your browser, and the same browser opens it at Nowruz 1415; if you clear the browser, the letter goes too. In that case the site records only one thing: that a letter was sealed, and only if you have left the recording of answers on in your record. The count of sealed letters you see on the desk is the real number of public letters, no more.

The first of Farvardin 1415 is the twentieth of March 2036. From that day, anyone who opens this page sees the public letters, and if their own letter is still in their browser, that one first of all. Nobody has to do anything; the date opens the door itself.

If you are curious what that wall looks like, see the «preview»: three sample letters we wrote, in the same arrangement the real letters will have ten years from now.