Title: Give me Net or give me death
Music du jour: Dixie Chicks, Fly (it's Cynthia's fault)
Random link o' the day: Me and my Fisher Price Speak & Spell bathtub floaty waffle iron <g>
I want to contemplate my navel today. This started out as a rambling about cool companies like ThinkGeek and Copyleft that cater to the Open Source and Linux sub-cultures, but it evolved into, basically, "why I get so pissy about people who don't respect the sanctity of the Internet". Bear with me here; it's somewhat incoherent, as I have a tendency to be when I'm trying to talk about something that's important to me.
Geek culture is interesting to me. It's not easily defined, though. Most of today's geeks are online, unlike when I was in junior high and high school. If you were a 13-year-old kid interested in computers in 1985, you more than likely spent your 'puter hours in front of a DOS box or an Apple //, hacking away at BASIC and saving your programs on cassette tape or 8 inch floppies or some such. Those of us who were the "brains" of the class in high school formed our own sub-culture. Most of the time this involved computers, but we were just as likely to talk about Dungeons & Dragons, drum corps, interesting math problems, books, or anything that struck us as interesting and nifty. I understand that most kids have e-mail now as soon as they can read, so I don't know what that's done for their social lives. Maybe they talk about Heinlein in a chat room now instead of clustering in the corner of the courtyard on lunch break.
Some of these same 80's geeks (and their 70's predecessors) are the ones who settled the wild frontier of the Internet, so it's not surprising that off-line and on-line culture have merged and are becoming indistinguishable from one another. Internet culture has a long, rich, storied history, with its own folk heroes and legends. (Ask anyone who's been on UseNet for a while about Kibo, the Oracle, or the Endless September.) It has its own rules, both written and unwritten, and its own mores and taboos. The Internet has been described as the world's first functioning anarchy. And this is true. The culture of the 'Net is much like that of high school geeks: clusters of people with at least one thing in common (computer literacy -- although this isn't as common as it used to be, unfortunately) who share resources to get things done.
The biggest example of this open, sharing model is UseNet. System administrators worldwide devote their time and resources to carrying newsfeeds for us to access, trusting us in return not to take advantage of their generosity and bring down their bandwidth or machines with excessive traffic, by which I mean spam. If you've been on UseNet lately, you know this delicate balance has been ruined by floods of unsolicited e-mail from Sanford Wallace and his ilk. UseNet was barely able to handle the alt.binaries.* groups when spam started pouring in from all over the world a few years back. Now, UseNet is collapsing under its own weight. Why did this happen? Because a few unscrupulous individuals barged in, ignoring pleas to follow the few rules of the Net -- in this case, "Thou shalt not send unsolicited e-mail" and "Thou shalt not cross-post to more than a couple of newsgroups, and only then if it's relevant to the newsgroup's purpose". And they are destroying an entire section of the on-line world. All because they didn't pay attention to the culture. Down South they would be called "carpetbaggers".
This aspect of the 'Net -- the underground culture that has grown up around band width and servers -- is almost always overlooked when the media gets all revved up about the Internet, by which they mean the World Wide Web. The Web is merely the newest incarnation of networked computing. The only reason it's a big deal i s because it's pretty. I mean it. I was a Web designer for a while back in 1996 and 1997, and you wouldn't believe how many people we had call us who didn't even know what the Web was; all they knew was that they needed to "get on the Web. Help me get on the Web!" The Web is the Internet's graphical interface, and we all know what happens when you put a graphical interface on something: the level of clue among the users goes way, way down. That's another rant, though. The Web is hyped as the Next Big Thing(tm), and it is, because of e-commerce. But it's not all there is to the Internet itself. There's very little personality to the Web, in my opinion, maybe because it's so new and hasn't had time to develop one. But with the exception of Web-based bulletin boards and chat rooms, none of which work very well over a standard modem connection, there's little human interaction on the Web. It's becoming one giant sales brochure for companies salivating over yet another revenue stream.
I dislike this trend. We are losing something very precious that may never be regained. With the incredible influx of newbies onto the Internet because of AOL, the Web and the media hype of the last few years, they're invading faster than we can educate them. The level of sheer idiocy has risen exponentially (thank you AOL) since just three years ago. It's even infiltrated the mailing lists. Mailing lists used to be a place where you could find coherent, clued people capable of intelligent discussion who could spell and punctuate a sentence. This is ceasing to be. I'm very disappointed.
I've been on-line in some form or another since 1991, starting with my BITNET ac count at USM. I've seen the newbies come and go. Some broke every rule of Netiqu ette that exists and were sufficiently flamed for it. A few learned and adapted; some didn't, and left. Those who stayed settled into the realm of the 'Net geek s and each one brought something different to their community. We have every conceivable type of person on the 'Net, with every conceivable belief, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, level of intelligence, language, color and creed. Yet somehow we make it work, even when we're screaming at each other. I don't want the Net to lose that to the masses invading our turf. The Net isn't about four-color sales pamphlets masquerading as Web sites, or the latest, coolest technology advertised on ZDNet. It's about people talking to each other, dammit. It's about people getting together and finding out that, when you get down to it, we're really not so different. It's about getting outside your own head and realizing there are people out there with beliefs and viewpoints diametrically opposed to yours, and finding out they're pretty okay despite that. It's about people connecting, getting to know each other, making friends, making enemies, falling in love, breaking up, hanging out. It's about us.
There aren't very many things I get seriously passionate about, but this is one of them. That's why I hand out shell accounts to people that look like they can handle them, why I help run an IRC server, why I give e-mail and Web access to my friends, why I run servers on a T-1 out of my own house and pay for it all out of my own pocket, and I don't make a dime to recoup my losses. Because it's important to me that we not lose what made the Net great. The Net is my home. Eagle's Nest BBS -- yes, that antiquity, a BBS -- is my home. The Plaid mailing list is my home. And I will not allow that community, that great gathering of minds, to go by the wayside. I went through some of the best and worst times in my life on the Net. I grew up here. I've argued, laughed, cried, goofed off, fallen in love and formed some of my deepest friendships here. This is MY Net, and you can't take it away from me.
Links to check out on this subject:
-- marcie.
