Ideas for Future Museums

Photograph from View Pictures / Getty

The Museum of Memory-Foam Fossils

Visitors to momff will gather around glass vitrines containing foam fragments that bear the physical traces of personal massagers, unfinished novels, wine glasses (from nasa-endorsed spill tests), and, most often, impressions of human butt cheeks.

Center for the Translation of Vague Posts

At this research center, linguists will work to interpret vague social-media posts, past and present, interrogating concepts such as “Who is this subtweet about?”; “What does this away message with unsubtle emo lyrics indicate about its author’s life?”; and “What does the Facebook status ‘don’t ask!!!’ actually suggest?” People will flock to the center to view its coveted Rosetta Stone: an emoji tableau.

The Collection of Non-Returnable Online Orders

Swimsuits, makeup, and intimates without their hygienic linings will constitute the atrium’s massive installation, displayed alongside an array of other purchases people forgot to put in the mail within the thirty-day return window. The collection’s inaugural special exhibition, “final sale,” will showcase ill-fitting garments impulse-purchased during a forty-per-cent-off clearance promotion.

The Amateur-Critics-Wax-Poetic Museum

Widespread Internet access has opened up infinite channels for the dissemination of opinion, but sociologists agree that the least authoritative artifacts of how humans communicate online will be their semi-articulate reviews of restaurants and other businesses. This 4.2-star museum of overly verbose Yelp reviews aims to shed more insight on users’ own personality flaws than on the latest street-food-inspired pop-up cafe.

The Museum of Contemporaries Who’ve Surpassed You in Their Careers and Personal Lives

Organized by birth year and region, this museum will archive the employment and marriage records of people all around the world. Visitors can look up anyone, with helpful search subcategories such as “your ex,” “your graduate-school cohort,” and “a person from high school who kind of looked like you and with whom you therefore felt weirdly competitive.” Also listed: their awards, achievements, clean bills of mental health, and the report cards of their gifted children.

The Polluted-Air-and-Physical-Space Museum

The Department of Sanitation purchased the lot that will house paps—once the proposed site of a science museum—in 2015 and has used it as a waste facility ever since. So impressive was the heap of toxic-smelling trash it compiled that the department heads decided to charge amazed passersby admission and now have plans to transform the dump into a cultural hub. Inside paps’s immersive exhibitions, viewers will wear air-filtering masks while gazing upon what their own consumption hath wrought.

The Museum of Natural Browser History

The M.N.B.H.’s staff will carefully compile the complete cache of all Web sites, with all frantic deletions restored. The resulting snapshot of twenty-first-century daily life will examine the intersections between erotic preference and the propensity to open forty-six tabs of “easy vegetarian dinners,” never to be made.