Have I ever told you guys about how I’m quietly obsessed with the archeological excavation/preservation of 90s/00s tech culture? If you’ve ever spoken with me in person for more than 5 minutes, probably. Let me show you something. This is a 5th-grade (1989) writing assignment that sort of demonstrates the depth to which this sort of thing is ingrained in my personality. Apologies for the crummy handwriting, but I’ve been desperately trying to forget cursive ever since I learned about both it and the Apple II GS in 3rd grade. Seriously… fuck handwriting forever, you know? Because why bother with teaching the mechanics of it if you can’t put together a coherent sentence in the first place? Bring back rhetoric, that’s what I say. But anyway, here’s an excerpt from the above-linked document for those of you who can’t be bothered to click on it:
If I could ask Santa for anything in the world, it would be… A computer with all the accessories. I want a digitizer, optical disk drive, hard disk drive, color monitor, eight megabytes of RAM, a mouse, a Laserwriter printer, lots of programs, a 3.5 inch disk drive, and artificial intelligence capability.
I’m not sure what the hell I had in mind with that last bit about AI, but I suppose that getting my 9-year-old hands on *any* of that stuff seemed like such a total impossibility that I figured I might as well shoot for the moon. So anyway, my point is that I’ve had this stuff kicking around in the back of my mind for awhile now and moving out to California to work in the game industry has not helped one bit. And then I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius last year too. (AHWOSG being the logorrhoeic tale of one young man’s attempts to “inspire millions to greatness…smash all these misconceptions about us, [and] help us all to throw off the shackles of our supposed obligations, our fruitless career tracks…[to] force, at least urge, millions to live more exponential lives, to do extrordinary things, to travel the world, to help people and start things and end things and build things…” (while also raising his teenage brother) in mid-’90s San Francisco.) And how does he propose to accomplish all this!? By starting a magazine, of course! But he’s sharing space with Wired in a bombed-out South Park warehouse and spends not a few words describing the various other inhabitants of the neighborhood (and I may as well quote at length here):
They have tattoos before everyone has tattoos. They ride motorcycles, and their leather is amazing. They practice (or claim to practice) Wicca. They are the luminous young daughters of Charles Bronson, who interns at Wired, where the ratio of attractive young women to interns and assistants is 1:1, they being one and the same. There are bike messengers who also write socialist tracts, and bike messengers who are 200 lb transvestites, and writers who prefer to surf, and raves are still attracting crowds, and the young creative elite of San Francisco are here and only here, do not want to be elsewhere, because technology-wise, New York is ten or twelve years behind—you can’t even e-mail anyone there yet—and style-wise L.A. is so ’80s, because here, in stark contrast, there is no money, no one is allowed to make money, or spend money, or look like you’ve spent money, money is suspect, the making of money and caring about money—at least insofar as having more than, say, $17,000 a year—is archaic, is high school, is completely beside the point…and in San Francisco, for better or for worse, there are no ideas dumb enough to be squashed, or people aren’t honest enough to tell people the truth about their dumb ideas, and so half of us are doing dumb, doomed things…
Well, some things never change, anyway… But so we’re getting somewhere near my point I think, which is that when I walk down Hampshire Street to my friends’ apartment and I see this faded ZDTV logo painted on a warehouse door, or when I look for a WiFi signal at Coffee Bar and kind of indirectly realize that I’m in the same building as soma.fm, it just makes me stop and think about all those “dumb, doomed things” that so many of us are doing, have done, will continue to do, etc. And depending on the light & the time of day & how many cups of coffee I’ve had I may engage in some further speculation about the Wikipedian concept of notability (“Notability is distinct from ‘fame’, ‘importance’, or ‘popularity’, although these may positively correlate with it”) and how that’s just such a pathetically limited way to frame something that moves so quickly that I can read a really well-researched book from 2001 (Emergence, by Steven Johnson; seriously… check it out!) which includes such fundamentally outdated statements as, “Ironically, it is precisely this feedback that the Web lacks, because HTML-based links are one-directional. You can point to ten other sites from your home page, but there’s no way for those pages to know that you’re pointing at them.” (A quick bit of fact-checking: the “HTTP referer” is part of the HTTP 1.1 spec from 1999, but still!) And so I’m getting dangerously close to some kind of conclusion here, which makes me kind of sad because I’ll have to stop rambling on about it then, but I think maybe it’s, “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let the hundred schools of thought contend,” or words to that effect. And maybe 96 or 97 of those flowers don’t make it, but I just hope somebody can take some pictures while they’re in bloom.
Further Reading:
- Gurus of Multimedia Gulch
- Emergence
- AHWOSG (also, McSweeney’s)
- Wired Archives Online
- My hardcopy collection of Wired from ’93-2000 (Available upon request [and putting up with more of my ranting]. Worth it for the old ads alone!)
Got here via b3ta, and then via Dork Yearbook. I am glad I am not the only one with an urge to conserve the early days of the ‘net. I’m an academic librarian, and had to discard a bunch of Wired magazines we had with the Computer Science periodicals. Rather than pulping them, they (and Yahoo! Internet Life) are sitting happily under my desk, and will one day make it home with me. So you are not the only one with a hardcopy collection of Wired. Despite what people in my field are saying, I think there is still a place for print media. I couldn’t bear to chuck them out, because this is history in the making. I firmly believe the next generation will show a huge curiosity to see what life was like before the digital revolution, just like we often wonder what people did before they had a TV.
I’m now following your blog. And, hopefully, can get away with reading at at work under the guise of current awareness.