Why The Internet Loves The Vanity Plate
DRIVING US WILD
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Just about every time I leave my apartment, I like to play a game with myself. As I walk to wherever it is I need to be going, I scan the rows of parked cars, inspecting each and every one of the license plates.

This game — although to be honest by now it's more of a mission — is simple: Find a license plate with the number "1738." Here in New York, there are, excluding trailers, nearly 11 million motor vehicles registered as of 2017. While a reverse plate lookup requires the full plate number, it seems very possible that somewhere in New York state there is a car driving around with "1738" in the license plate. It's a mathematical improbability that one might be sitting on the handful blocks I trudge on a daily basis, but I leave my apartment with a renewed sense of hope that I will see one.

"Today is the day," I tell myself as I lock the front door to my place, on the way to, like, pick up a bag of almonds. "Today, I will finally find The Plate."

Why am I searching? Why do I spend my precious moments on this Earth not taking in the sheer magnificence and cruelty of human existence, but instead staring at 6-by-12-inch pieces of stamped metal, hoping to find one with a specific arrangement of four digits?

To take a picture of it and post it to my Instagram story, of course.

If you have spent any amount of time on either the information superhighway or the US Interstate Highway System, you have seen a vanity plate. If you have not, I am very sorry for you; they are license plates that drivers pay their state Department of Motor Vehicles to say almost1 anything they want.

Here in the United States, the idea for a customizable license plate was introduced in 1931 by the state of Pennsylvania, where drivers could elect to include their initials in the plate number. Eventually, by some counts as early as 1965 after plate size was standardized in the '50s, this morphed into the the modern-day vanity plate. 

The last comprehensive survey of vanity license plates, conducted by author Stefan Lonce (the guy literally wrote the book on vanity plates) in partnership with the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, found that there were 9.3 million vehicles in America with vanity plates. Given that the average annual renewal fee for a vanity plate here in the US is $40, and assuming that vanity plates haven't grown in the 12 years since the survey was conducted, state governments are collectively raking in an estimated $485 million in vanity plate revenue. This is to say nothing of specialty plate collections.

But of course vanity plates are growing, right? You see them everywhere. And more importantly, you've likely seen them on the internet. They're retweeted into your feed and pop up multiple times in the smattering of Instagram stories you thumb through to pass the idle and awkward moments of life.

One man who has noticed is Jon Wurster, comedian and drummer for indie rock legends Superchunk and The Mountain Goats. For a brief time in 2017, Wurster, seemingly feeling the acute effects of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, was crossing paths with a volume of vanity license plates so great that he had no choice but to post through it.

"At first I thought a few of them were funny and clever and interesting. And then I just kept seeing them so much. I was actually getting kind of angry, because I just couldn't drive a mile without seeing five of them," says Wurster. "I felt this need to document them, almost in a way where it read like, 'You guys think you're so clever but look how many of you there are out there.'"

Last year, BuzzFeed's Dayna Evans likened the act of spotting and posting vanity plates to the internet as a kind of modern, urban birdwatching. "Vanity plate hunting makes you forget your phone was even in your pocket, at least until it's time to take the pic," she writes. "You're on a worldwide treasure hunt that will literally never end."

The vanity plate is not the stuff of viral fame, but rather a reliable gag to share among friends.

The introduction of pocket-sized devices that can take pictures and maintain an always-on connection to the internet has, to put it mildly, changed a lot of things. One of those things is the vanity plate.

At one time it was the cherry on top of a uniquely American mode of expression and status: the car. Picture a big Cadillac rolling into frame, the camera fixating on the longhorns strapped to the grille just before it pans down to the license plate: MNYLOVR. Then the '90s came and went and now anyone who was willing to part with a few hours' pay every year could turn their non-statement late model car into a statement. This hasn't changed in 2019, but now instead of chuckling to yourself because you saw a Chevrolet Impala with a license plate that reads "VLADTHE" you can take a picture of it and share it online — to the mild amusement of dozens.

The vanity plate is not the stuff of viral fame, but rather a reliable gag to share among friends. It's funny enough to get people to comment "omg lol" on your Instagram story, to cement a brand new mutual follower. And the people who opt to pony up to put their government-sanctioned mix of letters and numbers on their car surely know this. The vanity plate haver knows that the vanity plate poster is out there. And it's, in Wurster's estimation, turned hubris into boilerplate humor.

"People are thinking about it a lot more," he says. "It's gotten to the point where people think about it so much that it's kinda not as interesting or not as funny anymore. It's over-saturation."

After a few weeks of divulging this nascent fascination with our nation's collective ego, Wurster had to stop. In October of 2017, BuzzFeed's Matthew Perpetua collected Wurster's license plate Instagram humor into a single post, triggering a wave of submissions from fellow vanity plate spotters. "For like a week or two, I was just inundated, and I think that was the nail in the coffin," he says. "I just thought, 'This is a sickness now, and I feel sick and I have to stop.'"

That's the thing about license plates. While they contain near-infinite combinations of letters and numbers, the comedic potential for a plate of letters and numbers bolted onto a motor vehicle is only so great. The plates are all unique, but the jokes are all the same.

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I say "almost" because vanity license plates, and their ilk, speciality license plates, occupy a fun intersection of First Amendment protections and private citizens' use of government property that is still being waged in courts today.

<p>Steve Rousseau is the Features Editor at Digg.&nbsp;</p>

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