the old internet as psyche

[0bleak]

just remembering how much the internet used to be like a ghost town around this time of year (and christmas/new year holidays) since its population was like 90% college/uni students that only had internet (and perhaps even computer) access while at college/uni
now back to being a ghost myself until I sort out the chaos of my recent move...

 

[0bleak]

Webrings?

It's a cock ring that's connected to the web. You can set it to vibrate every time you get a message, email, etc.

 

[0bleak]

80s hacker stories are fun. Sounds like an absolute free-for-all. Bunch of teens turning phone networks inside out, warring with each other and getting raided by the secret service.

Operation Sundevil - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Legion of Doom (hacker group) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Great Hacker War - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

My brother had to spend a summer shoveling elephant shit at the zoo to pay back the phone company for using codes to bypass paying for long-distance calling when he and his friends were dialing in to all sorts of bbses.

 

[sufi]

My brother had to spend a summer shoveling elephant shit at the zoo to pay back the phone company for using codes to bypass paying for long-distance calling when he and his friends were dialing in to all sorts of bbses.

o yea my friend in NY got a knock on the door from the feds after we thoroughly rinsed some US military code for free calls, 1995ish iirc,

 

[version]

a) the old internet contained implicitly within it this idea of the psyche
b) web 2.0 bleached it away
c) a certain nostalgia for that tempered by the realisation that it certainly still exists in some forms (and trying to figure out what they are)

I'm intrigued by this as the psyche tends to imply something personal yet the web had this utopian, collectivist sentiment around it. It was going to connect people, democratise information, knock down the old walls.

The current iteration may in fact be the closest to the individual psyche as people's feeds increasingly mirror their lives and internal worlds. The Leary-esque 'mind-as-computer' model seems stronger than ever too, what with the rise of 'maxxing' techniques, therapy templates and 'life hacks'. The sense that there are hard, fast commands you can punch into your brain like updating from a terminal.

What does seem to have been lost is a certain looseness, a certain expansiveness and optimism, as the psychedelia of earlier years has been shorn from the bone and replaced with, or simply revealing, something harsher, more mechanical, more 'rational'.

 

[version]

I suppose the earlier web was closer to the psyche in the sense of webpages being more personal, more reflective of the tastes of the person behind them. Quite individualistic in some respects, despite some of the rhetoric. Individuals stepping out into the frontier, planting their flags.

Nowadays there's more of a push to make the internet into a mirror than a portal. A desire for validation rather than exploration.

 

[version]

EVE is incredible though. They do studies on the virtual economy, it's so sophisticated/complex a simulation. The strategy and coordination games are amazing. I'd love to print an anthology of battle & guild histories on the press at some point.

I was reading about 2b2t the other night, the oldest of the Minecraft anarchy servers and another of these sprawling virtual worlds with its own player-generated lore and histories.

Ridealong: The Ruin Of Minecraft's Most Obscene Server

Ridealong is our monthly feature where Brendan travels deep into game worlds to meet, question and journey with the inh…

www.rockpapershotgun.com

Kotaku | Gaming Reviews, News, Tips and More.

Gaming Reviews, News, Tips and More.

www.kotaku.com.au

There are these aerial renders of it on the Wiki page that are just mindboggling.

 

[version]

Ridealong: The Ruin Of Minecraft's Most Obscene Server

Ridealong is our monthly feature where Brendan travels deep into game worlds to meet, question and journey with the inh…

www.rockpapershotgun.com

Strange reading this bloke recounting being led through a PC game like he's being escorted through Tarkovsky's zone by a stalker. It's all so vivid.

"There's a tunnel here somewhere we have to take and for the life of me I can't figure out where."

He peers around at the wall, he looks at the ISIS banner.

"Oh," he says, "it's behind the flag."

We burrow our way into the hidden tunnel with our bare hands. The tunnel is claustrophobic and jagged. It starts to move diagonally. Holes appear at our feet, with lava far below, and we have to plug the gaps with stone. Eventually we find another portal, leading back to the Overworld.

"All right," says James, stepping into the purple light. "We are either going to come out and see a base. Or we're going to come out and someone has put lava all over the portal."

He disappears. I wait to see what he says.

"No, it's good," he reports. "No death today."

I pop out at the other side and hear myself exclaim: "Trees!" We walk for a while and see a huge castle looming in the background, on the shore of a lake. Watermelon and pumpkin is growing in fields next to some buildings. Compared to where we have been, this place is paradise.

 

[version]

In the summer of last year, James says, he was part of a team who heard a legend about a gargantuan base somewhere far from spawn. They went hunting for it. They dug to 3 million blocks and emerged to find that the legends were true. The huge base housed castles, underground spas, log cabins, floating islands, coliseums, monuments to fallen players and a huge replica of Christ the Redeemer.

 

[version]

James tells me about a hacker called 'popbob', famous among the server's regulars, who is responsible for much of the wackiness perpetrated in the land. He is the one who comes up with the exploits, scouring Minecraft's code for oddities. Some of these exploits are bizarre.

"There's a way to find people in Minecraft based on the sound of thunder," says James. "Because thunder is only played near a player. So if you can determine by 'listening' to the server where thunder is being played, you know where people are. He [popbob] devised a way to actually capture these packets of information coming from a server... so if you can decipher this information, you'll be able to know where everyone is.

 

[version]

Mondo 2000 have been digitising a bunch of old posters, magazines and the like. It looks as though the project's stalled, but they managed to get some stuff up.

Mondo 2000 History Project​

 

[william_kent]

http://phrack.org/issues/71/1.html

 

[gremino]

http://phrack.org/issues/71/1.html
View attachment 19901

Hacking is both a coping mechanism and a survival skill.

^ That's so cyberpunk

If monopoly companies get more hold of internet, it might push some people back to 90s: better balance between IRL and online, personal websites, smaller web communities and relying on books/libraries for information, not just online info. Books will keep their stand as information mediums for a while.

 

[william_kent]

I like this paragraph in particular:

After the past several decades of humanity putting all of its collective
knowledge online, we are seeing more ways to prevent us from accessing it.
Not only is good information harder to find, bad information is drowning
it out. There are increasing incentives to gatekeep and collect rent on
important resources, and to disseminate junk that is useless at best, and
harmful at worst. In all of this chaos, the real threat is the loss of
useful, verified, and trusted information, for the sake of monetizing
the opposite.

 

[sufi]

^ That's so cyberpunk

If monopoly companies get more hold of internet, it might push some people back to 90s: better balance between IRL and online, personal websites, smaller web communities and relying on books/libraries for information, not just online info. Books will keep their stand as information mediums for a while.

If?

 

[gremino]

If?

Maybe "If monopoly companies make internet even worse" would had been better put.

 

[Clinamenic]

I mean, I definitely see that happening in the circles I'm in, a trend back toward "cozy web" and "Dunbar groups" and IRL meetups, as opposed to enshittified massive online social experiences like Twitter (which definitely still have a certain value).

 

[gremino]

IRL meetups

Sounds healthy.

 

[Clinamenic]

Healthy, stealthy, beautiful: solarpunk

 

[Clinamenic]

ascend Corona heights

and maybe the Illuminati ( i.e. Luka & woops ) willl "let you in"

If they're the illuminati, I most certainly do not want to be "let in" judging by Gus' and Linebaugh's experiences