Unusual trackables

The realisation

The design of a trackable contains a loophole that took people a while to notice.

The trackable is not the object. It is the code. The metal tag everyone pictures is just a convenient way to carry a number around, and nothing in the system requires it to be a tag, or metal, or small, or even movable.

Once that is clear, the interesting question stops being “what should I attach this to” and becomes “what happens if I attach it to something nobody has tried”.

The categories people found

Objects with a job. Tools, cooking equipment, items of clothing — things that go on doing what they were made for while accumulating a travel history. The record becomes a diary of a working object rather than of a souvenir.

Things that are not portable. Vehicles, boats, fixed landmarks. Here the movement is either the object’s own (a van that travels for work) or it is the finders who move, logging that they came to it rather than that they carried it. A different shape of record entirely.

Objects deliberately absurd. Large, awkward, comical items released precisely because moving them is difficult. The comedy is the point and the logs are usually better than the journey.

Things attached to people. Which is where the line gets interesting.

The implant

The example that reliably comes up is a tracking code associated with a subdermal implant, a chip in somebody’s hand, described at the time as the first implanted travel bug.

It got attention outside the hobby, which is unusual. General technology publications covered it as a curiosity about implants and used the geocaching angle as the hook, which is how it ended up better known than most things in this corner of the hobby.

It is worth being precise about what it was: an ordinary tracking code, doing what tracking codes do, attached to an unusual host. Nothing technical was invented. What made it notable was that somebody noticed the rule “the trackable is the code” applies to codes on people too.

Why the unusual ones do not necessarily travel

There is an appealing theory that a remarkable trackable inspires people to carry it further. The evidence does not support it.

Novelty produces discover logs (people recording that they saw it) more than it produces movement. And several of the unusual forms are actively harder to move: too large for most containers, too valuable to leave, too strange to explain if someone asks what is in your bag.

The trackables that cross continents are overwhelmingly the boring ones: a tag on a keyring, with a goal an ordinary person can advance on an ordinary weekend.

Which is a fairly good summary of the hobby generally.

The constraint that shapes all of it

There is one requirement everything on this page has to satisfy: a stranger must be able to read the code and log it.

That single condition rules out more ideas than it first appears. The code has to be durable enough to survive weather and handling, legible enough to transcribe correctly, and attached firmly enough that it does not separate from the object.

Most failed novelty trackables failed there rather than in the concept. A beautifully made item whose code wore illegible within a year is, for every practical purpose, gone. The object may still be travelling, but nothing it does can be recorded.

That is also why the plain metal tag persists despite being the least imaginative option available. It is stamped rather than printed, it survives, and it can be read in the rain.

Why the strange ones are documented at all

An unusual trackable is interesting for a reason that has little to do with the object: it is one of the few parts of the hobby that reliably reaches people outside it.

A tag on a keyring is unreportable. An object that makes somebody ask they attached a tracking code to what? gets written up, and the write-ups are where a good deal of the public record of this corner of the hobby actually lives. Several of the items in this page are known now because a magazine or a news outlet found them odd enough to describe at the time.

That has a side effect worth flagging. The unusual trackables are over-represented in what survives, because ordinary ones generated no coverage. Anyone reading back through the record will get an impression of this part of the hobby that is considerably more eccentric than the reality, which is overwhelmingly small metal tags moving slowly between damp boxes.

What people attach a code to now

The impulse has not gone away, and it has moved with the technology available.

The durable pattern is unchanged: something that survives being handled, carried and left in a container, with the code physically attached rather than printed on it, the same durability argument the containers page makes about the boxes themselves. Metal outlasts everything else, and the items still moving after a decade are almost all tags, coins or small robust objects with a stamped code.

What has changed is the ambition. The early unusual trackables were experiments in what could carry a code at all. The current ones tend to be experiments in what a goal can be, items released to visit a category of place, to be photographed doing a specific thing, or to be passed only in person at events. The object is ordinary and the interesting part has moved into the instructions, which is a fair description of where this whole idea started.