Has the community of people who wrote documents like this just dried up and vanished? Or have they all moved somewhere underground I can't find?
Back in those days a place like textiles would be an aggregator on a fairly small internet. Most of those content types can be found with their own larger more focused niche sites.
Like ahlzeimers? It doesn't make sense that the graphics heavy world would have less personality than the constrained world of text.
It's a lot harder to explain the whole "anarchy" obsession that shows up in the files, though. Maybe that kind of loser attitude would make you "cool" and "a tough guy" back in the 1980s and the 1990s. Or at least that's what the file authors thought.
That attitude was indeed cool and definitely not loser back then. It was “anti-The-Man”, much like the Anonymous movement whenever that was... 10 years ago?
The world was a different place back then. I was 7 in August of 91, too young to remember or have experienced much of the world but I do remember the culture of pre-9/11 internet being starkly different from that of today.
That would explain some things, then. Indeed, those writings have a lot more in common with the pre-Soviet "nihilist" movement than anything relating to anarchism as it would be understood today.
The new web is commercial, monitored, controlled.
There is a version of communism that says that people should live in a local community that helps people who need it. As long as someone who doesn't want to live that way has the reasonable option to leave, this is actually pretty hard to object to.
There is a version of anarchy that says that all laws and taxes should be at the local level and furthermore that some localities might then choose not to have any, or only the most basic ones like a prohibition on violence. It's almost the same thing -- pretty hard to object to when people have the option to exit.
What they have in common is that they can't exist when you have a central government de facto prohibiting them. There might be some real efficiencies in a commune that has its own doctors, but that doesn't really work if everybody there still has to pay twice the cost of their own community's doctors in Medicare taxes. You can't have much of an anarchist collective if the feds are still arresting anybody who tries to sell pot brownies or break DRM so they can repair their own tractor.
So people have been looking for ways to shed the yoke of central power for a long time. The US was practically founded on it, both in terms of why the revolution was fought and how the constitution was laid out, but the forces of centralization have been hacking away at those foundations and doing what they can to destroy the "laboratories of democracy" of Brandeis for a long time now.
Is it really that surprising that people were excited about a then-emerging opportunity to potentially take some of it back?
It's a sign of the times. The mid-to-late 1980s saw a very conservative shift in politics that continued into the 90s-00s.
Once the whole "anarchy" thing started manifesting in real ways (numerous domestic shootings/bombings) by the mid-90s it was pretty dangerous to be associated with.
Can you expand on this? I used to be active in the demoscene 2 decades ago, but haven't really kept up lately, how have they changed?
It feels like a bait and switch to me because search used to yield more interesting results, and social networks did relatively little to get you to buy something, but as their precision in achieving their commercial goals have increased that is no longer true.
As someone who grew up in the BBS era I am often nostalgic for it because everything felt a lot easier to grasp and much more simple, but in truth the amount of information out there and easy to access is many orders of magnitude higher these days.
If you are on Windows, I have written a nice modern gopher client: http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-wind...
That said, Cameron Kaiser has done so much to promote gopher, I don't feel it's fair to redirect people away from his site though.
http://telehack.com/
"You can telnet directly to Telehack on the regular telnet port of 23.
"Open a command shell and type
telnet telehack.com
"See http://telehack.com/telehack.html for more information."
Poking through the posted site... I still remember when I discovered this[1] circa 1993-ish. It was the funniest thing ever back then.
Somewhere along the road the medium changed partly from text to video, this was initially surprising to me, but on the whole isn't particularly important.
Then Reddit ate the forums, and I'm not sure what happened to the blogs, but they don't feel the same either.
So they got spread out, got sold out, and overshadowed by louder people doing the same except with ads and for money.
I totally skipped over some bits of Internet history, but the point is, it used to be more open. Maybe harder to use and smaller. But it wasn't all being funded by gigantic ad corporations. Because the platforms they provide may technically seem capable of providing the same ground as for textfiles, they're also continuously pushing on their users to behave in certain ways to optimize advertising profits. And that kind of sucks the life out of everything, it seems.
Some of the larger zines (like Phrack) still exist, but only release new ones every few years. Back in the day (90's) it was every month!
On the discussions side of things, there are actually decent independent forums still hanging around. They are usually hobby-oriented or for cars (shoutout to any fitfreaks) but they are pretty good quality.