Why Real Life is better than IRC (2000)
everything2.com
Also: Why IRC is better than Real Life – https://everything2.com/node/e2node/Why%20Real%20Life%20is%2...
everything2.com
Just the act of getting online to seek out others was super niche, so I feel like it was a bit of a "finding your own tribe" experience for me.
I think it is more a problem of not caring (especially when not caring will result in social and/or economic reward) rather than not anticipating.
For any technology that is created you can and should anticipate that it will be, literally, weaponized since there are hundreds of thousands of years of precedent for this happening.
A lot of programmers were very critical how in particular since the release of the iPhone people suddenly accepted the golden cage against which programmers before very aggressively fought.
So the issue is rather that people did not listen to these old-school programmers, (as usual) mocked these as nerds, and instead listened to "hipsters" and marketers.
One can discuss a lot how useful humanities are, but what brought us in the current situation is rather that the masses did not listen to the old-school programmers.
How so? Because we could send mail instantly instead of using a stamp and envelope?
Because we could buy stuff without leaving the house?
Because we could read/listen to/watch stuff without paying the people who created it?
That's not to say that the internet in 2000 was without flaws, but I do think on net it was beneficial to humanity.
I can tell you I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am without this, yes.
First because I (/my parents) didn’t have the money, second because of pure geographical access.
I saw movies and shows from countries that would never sell near me, read books that would never be in my country’s libraries, took courses straight from scientists and engineers rather than a thrice translated work…
The barrier of entry was also useful, curiosity is much better fed when you can download a medicine textbook just to check rather than venturing into the library of a university you’re not part of.
That is the one thing the internet did right, spreading culture. It was over when they took boredom from us, that was the big evil.
My public TV already paid the US TV producer with money from our taxes, so in the end it's a draw.
Programming books? Your elder brother/sister it's doing CS at some uni, right? Then, good luck paying $50 on big book stores from malls. Entry courses you mean? Pay ~$50 a month for a private school and try enjoying Visual C++ 98. Linux? That's was for CS engineers and PC freaks right?
Nowadays you can learn damn Calculus on your own and install Maxima from any distro with online guides and tutorials. I had to learn Calculus from my own (I was some HS dropout) early Debian DVD's which had a PDF on Mathematics and from that I tried to understand every exercise and equation under Maxima. No upgrades, no updates, no tutoring. Hard mode my default for everything. Your TV tuner didn't work? Messing with Linux kernel modules like crazy and even editing the source code to fake the tuner and PLL and watch something in XawTV.
I'm guessing you were still pretty young/not yet born at the time?
Online shopping didn't just mean "I don't have to leave the house", it opened up a whole world of what was even possible.
Prior to the web if you didn't live in a big city (and less people did then) then your access to books, music, movies was insanely restricted.
I deeply recall how painfully limited my local Sam Goody was, even major "alternative" bands only had partial discographies available. I remember visiting my father's college campus as an early teen and being beyond excited to find a copy of NIN's "halo 1" in a college town record store. True indie music was reserved for kids with cool older siblings that both knew where the stores were and could drive there. In order to watch Dragon Ball Z I had to rely on a friend whose dad was a plumber in NYC and knew where the bootleg stores in China-town were. I got to tag along once and picked up a single random episode of a Gundam series, never to be finished because I could never find another.
Sure it was sort of fun to figure all this stuff out, but at the same time my bookshelf is filled with books that changed my life in various ways I would simply never had been able to find (or even be aware of) in the pre-web days. If you wanted to learn programming in the 90s you had to hope your local Walden books had some good options, and you certainly weren't going to learn Haskell or Lisp. Mine only had books on Excel, so I didn't learn to program until I was older.
Now the fact that American suburbs where a complete cultural wasteland in the 90s might be the bigger issue than the cure which was the web, but nonetheless the early web did make the world of information much bigger.
I grant that it made hard-to-find stuff easier to get. But any bookstore I ever dealt with in those days would be happy to special order anything they didn't stock.
But for the music, the crappy pop was on every radio and TV, altough it was far more variety than today where's 90% reaggeton (even faking Latin American accents from Spaniards) and mediocre pop singers. When I got some discount CD's - Def con Dos, similar to Public Enemy- and the like, it was like crossing to a different universe being myself a son of a blue collar worker.
Oh, and thanks again for the regional TV's in Spain (from autonomous regions), as they reran The Outer Limits in mid 90's instead the usual shitty sitcoms. That drove me into scifi, among getting 1984, Brave New World and the like from dollar stores at very cheap prices in early 2000's. Yes, once they sold classic in "Spanish Dollar Stores" (under a different name), it was glorious to find pulp fiction books, staunch joke books and often an Asimov or Bradbury book. That under ~$1 back in the day, almost the price of a bread baguette or your daily newspaper. A damn bargain compared to the $10 pocket cardboard cover book or worse the normal, thick volume $20 book. Comics from Tintin and Astérix were expensive too. But the English edition of these were also available in these stores, so often I bought them understanding maybe a 30% of it, 80% with a dictionary.
Video games? A single one per year and that's it. Choose wisely. An RPG? Great, tons of replaying. In order to save money, the next year I could get a Chinese pirate 21 in 1 cartridge with platformers and games like Batman, Goal, Metroid II... in order to disconnect from the RPG.
But when I could get scifi games, text adventures and the like from cybercafés 2000-2002 the 1990's felt rancid, outdated and tacky compared to Emule, Soulseek, Deus Ex, the first Linux distros...
Feels of 2025: "The device in your pocket is a way for companies to make you see the things they want you to see and nothing else you dirty criminal. You can talk to your friends but if your GPS trace is interrupted your account will be suspended. If you don't like it, sucks to be you."
Or, I can think of something, and find the answer quickly. I can make friends with people (or argue with them) across continents.
Still, there are things that I do miss that were objectively "worse." Like there only being a few dozen channels, and cable TV being less important, so you knew everyone was watching the same thing. There seemed to be more of a shared culture.
I really feel that internet socialization has gone from a means to make friends to a means to make enemies. Often to reinforce an ingroup, but that's not the same as friendship.
I've seen, though rare, other people with dumbphones, for example. And more people who would like to have one.
Its even easier with dropping social media because the cost is actually so low and yet people still dont even attempt to.
You mean innumerate and STEM ignorant politicians manipulated by tech bros high on their own supply financially engineered into existence?
Poverty wages everywhere except tech jobs was intentional. Ignoring the externalities like reliance on sweatshop labor and sacrificing diverse skills development was intentional. Little different than what they are doing with the ICE hiring bonus.
They got employees to go where they wanted; not operating from a diverse playbook: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...
Offshoring the late 90s and 00s was 100% meant to protect Intel, copyright; this isn't anything we did. Broad strokes were gamed out 2 decades ago.
The elder politicians don't want Americans in a position to win. They didn't want the risk of open compute production thriving in America; back in the 00s Napster made the threat to their IP and copyright schemes obvious.
They want political serfdom, fealty to elders delusion about themselves. We did little but follow orders because what choice did we have?
I am not owning this circus.
If you imagine we just got unlucky with the _wrong_ people in power, you haven't yet learned the real lesson, and are doomed to support the entire thing continuing, or being reborn in new form.
Am almost 50. Was in the room being told I had to help offshore others jobs. That's why I claim this was no accident.
I like how you make it a character problem of the masses! How dare they not know things intentionally kept from them! How dare they select the subset of dumb options.
Media intentionally kept people like Chomsky and others off the airwaves to keep control of the narrative, but damn gen pop! They should have known!
You going to sell me on Intelligent Design next?
"Us"? Don't lump me into this. I’ve been mocking tech bros and software startups the whole time. Low skilled, know nothing work. I started in EE. I look forward to AI that organizes machine states without software engineer middle men inserting their preferences on me.
We need to look at ourselves, and the dream we've swallowed. It's not going to get better by voting out the current crop of criminals. There is a never-ending line of equally corrupt applicants, right behind them. The entire system has been subverted. There's no fixing it.
I'm not hopeful we will actually break out of the spell of modern big-government before we're surrounded by famine and rubble; but the seed needs to be planted now. Trump (and worse) is the logical and inevitable outcome of delusional self-indulgence, treating the state as an endless piggy bank, and knight in shining armour. It's just handing our fate over to the psychopaths, on a silver platter.
For whatever it's worth, working together in small groups ("prepping") is probably the best practical option we have as individuals and families. Building skills and local communities.
I think a lot of people would be tempted by the nostalgia, but would quickly realize how much they'd be giving up.
By most aspects the world of 1990 didn't change that much from today's world, with the exception of having computers in our pockets and some advances in medicine.
I used to work with a guy who would tell me that, except email, life didn’t really change since the 80s. All we did was stick a screen onto everything, whether we needed to or not.
I was only born in the 90s but I mostly agree that far back.
Reminds me of a line by John Maynard Keynes from 1919 about life before WW1 —
“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep”
But the internet and technology in general was so much more fun and exciting back then than it is now, IMHO. I'm sure some of my feelings there is nostalgia and youth or lack thereof, but a circa 1995 Socket 7 desktop motherboard could take cpus from Intel, AMD, Cyrix, IDT, and some others, and then there were all the non-pc options; that's a lot of competition and fun. Video game consoles were meaningfully different than each other, instead of the massively consolidated situation we have now. Arcade machines were more capable beyond just having large screens and specialized input devices.
I didn't get on the Internet until ~ 95, but at least for several years after that, it was a community of choice, rather than a place everyone had to assemble. That made interaction special in a lot of ways that are hard to reproduce now. There's some communities of choice on the internet, but they don't have the same kind of broad reach where you got all sorts of people where they would appear because computing was fun or helpful but they often had other things going on too, but most people didn't appear because they could avoid computing. The mixing function was pretty cool, but it's hard to replicate when forums tend to be all encompassing and there's too many people to really converse or are so narrow that everyone is too much alike.
I could certainly live with larger bid/ask spreads and fractional rather than decimal stock pricing as well as no odd lots and T+3? settlement. Current situation is better, but it's really not a huge deal. I can wait for slow shipping, and call people on the phone to make special orders...
1990 probably a bit too early. Right at the end of the Cold War. Deindustrialization still a big, ugly scar across many cities. The Troubles still ongoing; few residents of Northern Ireland would set the time machine back before 1998, I think.
That said, the later generations probably are going to have a more shitty life, because of economic downturn since 2008. I can't even imagine what kind of life my son (5Y) is going to live through whence the cyberpunk world falls.
We use to talk a lot, now we talk to the young ones and each of their sentences seems designed to end the conversation. When they are older the next generation will be glad they don't know how to talk either.
Not so long ago everyone also knew how to sing and make music. Each porch its own songs. Then came screaming radio boxes which was wonderful and everyone sang along.. for a while. They gradually turned into door to door sales men only you couldn't slap the door in their face anymore.
Rather: programmers did warn very vehemently of the situation (and were particularly worried that with the release of the iPhone people accepted the golden cage). The problem was rather that people did not listen to these "nerds" (or at least did not act on their strong recommendations), but rather listened to "hipsters" and marketers.
Warning people is the domain of influences, hipsters, propagandists and marketeers. Programmers cant really compete there but money does talk in the domain. Our world is such that if we want something we have to pay for it.
What we can do however is write code. Solving it in code makes the problem orders of magnitude more complicated to solve but [say] an Iphone is now merely a decent camera with great software enhancement. When I switched to Android, transferring the apps and data worked gloriously. While it might not be real progress the new HarmonyOS is still running most android apps.
Every year or so I realize I was conditioned to accept something obviously absurd if only superficially examined. (which I didn't do up to that point)
The warnings might not have the desired effect, it is hard to unsee the obvious so they do contribute.
Keep fighting!
I know I learned more from having ops in #unixhelp than stack overflow.
But the 90s were different, and it really depended on the channels.
I remember going into #nanog to finally get uunet to pull bgp routes once.
Sure there were bad parts, but at least you still had agency unlike with modern social media.
Why IRC is better than Real Life (2000)
https://everything2.com/node/e2node/Why%20IRC%20is%20better%...
Not in IRC, but I'm pretty sure avatar choice has a nontrivial effect how someone is perceived online (at least as long as you don't know anything else about them - like in real life)
Everything2 is still around? whoooa, totally forgot about that. Gotta definitely get back into that. That seems like one of those great anti-modern-social-media ideas that the kids might like to learn about.
>If you do phone a friend at 4am to say "I'm down" they take it seriously.
Well, I mean I've never had friends so I can't really say too much about that. But I never really had anyone in my life that would do that so... eh?
> In RL, you can be alone on purpose without seeming antisocial.
>People try to get you to stay "just a little longer" and make you feel wanted.
No one's ever done that for me. Quite the opposite actually. I'm rather repulsive in real life so most people would prefer me away in real life.
> A hug is always nice, but a real, close, body-touching real life hug is … nicer :)
Is it? The two times I've been hugged in my life have been more just uncomfortable.
> You can know for sure that people who are being nice to your face aren't simultaneously bitching behind your back
... my father was praised as being a good man. He was also the same man that grabbed by my hair and violently introduced my face to the kitchen floor. Broke my nose and lip, then made me clean the blood up with my tongue as apology to him for forcing him to hit me. He's flung coins into my face hard enough to cut the skin. Broken coffee mugs over my head.
I don't blame him for doing what he did; I was difficult as a child. But it never really made any sense to me why his peers would praise him for being good when there was so much controversy over just spanking a child vs what happened to me when it seemed perfectly normal to me to get hit with a stick hard enough to bruise for a month afterwards.
Always made me wonder what else someone would hide from strangers.
> You can hear the warmth in the voice that says 'I love you' and see the look in the person's eyes
... This is something I've kind of wanted to rant about for a while. But no. I don't want love in my life. 25 years of my life were spent receiving bruises, cuts, and humiliation because my parents loved me. And I spent 25 years enduring it in silence because I loved them. Because that's what you're supposed to do when you love someone.
They're gone now. And I've had more then enough love in my life to say that I want no part of it anymore.
No, I think the quiet of an IRC screen is quite a quite a bit more preferable to outside.
I've never had to go through anything remotely similar.
I'd just want to point out what you've experienced is not love. There may have been some form of love from those people towards you, but the things you've described are not manifestations of that love, they're manifestations of something else.
I hope you can believe me. Sorry if I'm intruding.
My email is on my bio if you ever want to chat in a non-public setting.