The Internet's Old Guard
reading.supply
reading.supply
Putting your personal information online was unthinkable for most until Myspace gained popularity. Then once Facebook took hold, no one seemed to care about online privacy anymore.
The change in this perception was drastic and precipitous. Though it was younger folks who started it, and the older generations followed out of ignorance.
I personally blame gasified social media that linked (over)sharing little dopamine hits. We basically used a Skinner box to retrain people to like having their privacy invaded and willingly participate.
I don't rule out the possibility that this was intentional and designed, but it seems more likely that we just hit upon it in the great search for a workable business model for the Internet after the dot.com crash. People forget that until surveillance capitalism nobody knew how to make the net into a sustainable business. Unfortunately the answer ended up being a more dystopian retread of the ad-driven business model of the old media we were trying to get away from.
Pretty much this. We turned the Internet into a videogame about self gratification. It turns out people would rather be famous than anonymous.
I've noticed the exact same pattern. Fame (or infamy in some cases) at all costs, everyone wants to be Internet- or Fandom-famous. "Popufur" is the pejorative term for it.
For some it's a vehicle for their "fame". They don't give a rat's ass about the rules -- they want their ten thousand retweets, everyone knows their name -- and they'll step on, burn out and push aside anyone to get there. The rules are for everyone else.
The internet was our vehicle to find each other, but now unfortunately it's become the petard by which we are hoist.
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks
https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-im...
Not sure why it's being downvoted because this conversation is always going to be relevant to Facebook.
It's amazing what people will do and throw away to save a few pounds.
Do you have a backup of your photos? videos? What about emails or text messages? game chats?
Have people or companies taken advantage of you? How about people you know and love?
(See https://dwebcamp.org/ )
It was mostly about trust back then. Windows explorer could not keep you safe from exploits, so an average user saw the internet as a somewhat dangerous public place.
Archiving was easy, because we didn't have any of this evil bad awful endless scrolling that I strongly suspects creates low grade anxiety regardless of content.
We had real pages with a URL that you could download. even forums(Which were so much better than social media) were paginated, not scrolled.
Now archiving, decentralization, cryptocurrency, and anonymity are often baked into the same layer.
I'm not going to bother with anything that uses Blockchains and five times the bandwidth, and most privacy centric projects aren't high performance or easy to use.
They often expect you to make some real sacrifices for privacy, without any "compromise modes".
Everyone is really focused on the tech, but most of it's already there. There's tons of anonymity networks out there.
What we really should ask, is why the sites used by the majority of people including tech pros are designed seemingly to encourage anxiety, comparing self to others,and throwaway content?
Not even RMS would attribute the creation of Unix to himself, although I guess maybe this confusion is one of the fruits of his tireless "GNU/Linux" nagging.
[1] (The ITS concept of detaching jobs is basically similar to tmux or screen on modern systems, in that you can create a job tree, detach it, log out, and then log back in and reattach it and everything will continue as if nothing happened... assuming nobody killed your jobs. ITS didn't really have a security model.)
Even the PDP-11 was underpowered compared to the PDP-10... but the PDP-10 was a dead-end. It was discontinued in favor of the VAX (a PDP-11 extension, hence the name) and attempts to resurrect/continue it (Foonly, for example) came to nothing. RMS got kicked out of his world, his colleagues got swallowed up by the proprietary software world, and he settled on making GNU an extended and improved Unix instead of attempting to port ITS to a workstation with a 68000 CPU and maybe a megabyte of RAM. To RMS, Unix was a good-enough system with a pre-existing userbase, not his ideal platform; the biggest concession to his roots he got was sneaking a real Lisp system (not mocklisp) inside of Emacs. ;)
(And he wasn't even the first to write a Lisp Emacs. Greenberg wrote one for Multics.)
There's also the info command, which appears to be a re-implementation of the online docs system from ITS. It's also an abomination... I have vague memories of a time around 2000 where it seemed like half the man pages for basic utilities were just stubs saying "refer to info" which drove me insane.
Furthermore RMS failed to create a kernel because he believed the micro-kernel hype. But micro-kernels are hard to debug for all of the reasons that micro-services are challenging to scale and debug today if you have failed to create a good toolchain around them. And the result is that by the time that the GNU Hurd was available, most were using Linux and most of the rest were using Free BSD.
(One does wonder, however, what would have happened had RMS himself not been crippled by tendonitis. Could he have finished in time for his kernel to be relevant?)
Hurd is even more of a gag. (hurd/hird)
> organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. — M. Conway
With that, I can honestly say that this forum from my perspective of the early days epitomises that early ethos and the keenness to share and a penchant towards positivity. Sure even good people have bad days, but good people are always learning.
Though the internet grew and gradually usurped the group meets and people shared there, new friends made, the churn of time and things change, evolve. Not always for the better, but then perspective is anchored in time, so the older you get the more you learn about melancholy.
It's creepy.
Its too easy to wind up pontificating round the fire to the young 'uns .. At IETF we have a greybeard problem, and its sometimes hard to decide which side of things to be, on "older is better" and "newer is better" and "older is not newer but they are both interesting" debates.
I'd say pontificating is inevitable. If you are part of the roots, and then you see that the internet didn't go where you wanted, then I guess, your best solution is to maintain your ideal and say "we tried, we failed" with a subtle corollary : since it failed, it means our goal was the right one".
Plus I'm sure it's very comforting and satisfying to talk about the past to people who somehow admire you (else they wouldn't be there listening)
Staying off those feelings to be able to think properly is really tough and requires some special kind of personality which is, I guess, as rare as technological savvy.
It would be nice if there was at least once a year where something as good as this happens in one of the cities.
I know there's very-small local groups scattered around the country, but those are mostly populated by old men[1] who just want to get out of the house once a week (well, my local group definitely is...)
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[1] I'm almost 50, so I'm hardly 'young'.
So my experience has been that it's very common for people over here to form clubs and societies for all their little nerdy, or not necessarily so nerdy, passtimes. Which is great, really. I can't think of a better way to get to meet people who won't fall asleep while you discuss the most minute details of your hobbyist obsession.
Not that I have any of those, oh no :)
Not that I have anything against younglings, it's just that my experience is very different from theirs.
Tangential, but why do people so often get away with this particular case of sloppy thinking?
There have been plenty of wars and famines and civilisational calamities and bottlenecks and successes and migrations and radical changes in conditions over the last 10000 years. Evolution is known to act fast in a changing environment. There is no way "we" could have avoided significant change - and over much shorter timespans then ten millennia at that.
That is amazing.
Funny one was when a friend of mine interrupted the typist punching my coding sheet onto punched cards. He kept putting a typed page back into the untypes pile of what was 5 pages. Got the deck and was mildly flummoxed what was wrong as had a chunk of code repeated 3 times (the number of times he did it without the typist noticing).
But one perk of punched cards - removing lines of code is as easy as removing the associated card. Also be mindful of prankster who would stick random cards into your deck if you left it unattended, added a real new meaning to joker in the deck. Today, they would just call it a code injection exploit. Which is why I and others would often sign the deck along the edge of the cards and do some lines at various angles on the other long end so you instantly see if something is amiss. Today they would call that signed code.