{"id":974,"date":"2007-02-22T07:00:56","date_gmt":"2007-02-22T12:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=974"},"modified":"2007-02-22T07:45:10","modified_gmt":"2007-02-22T12:45:10","slug":"paving-eden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=974","title":{"rendered":"Paving Eden"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Tuesday’s post about the dot-com spectacle, there were a few comments on “paving eden”, the time when the internet stopped being the domain of academics and became the spawning pool of e-business. I also learned about the Eternal September<\/a>, which is an interesting bit of net-lore that I missed. Then Pixy<\/a> said<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I was on Usenet as early as \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc85, and for me, the paving of Eden was one of the best things that ever happened.<\/div>\n

Since I’ve earned my living working for a .com company for the last 13 years or so, I can’t argue with that at all. Although, I know almost nothing of what the ‘net was like before 1994. <\/p>\n

But his comment does bring to mind the following:<\/p>\n

In 1992 I had a friend who belonged to a Trek mailing list. He attended college<\/a> and through whatever clanking machinery they used at the time he was able to access the internet. He would bring me the entire weekly summary of the list traffic as a hardcopy. I LOVED reading it. The people were articulate, thoughtful, and polite. I wanted to join, but I didn’t even know how to get ‘net access at the time. (I’m sure I wouldn’t have called it “net” access, either.) Reading the list was like listening to a group of friends discuss a common interest. It wasn’t even that I was that<\/em> thrilled about Trek. It’s just that these were smart people and I enjoyed reading what they had to say.<\/p>\n

In 1996 or so I remembered the list and decided to see if I could find such a group and join in the discussion. I’m sure you can imagine the results. I was mystified: Every list I joined was filled with condescending idiots, trolls, flamers, and endless armies of professional nitpickers. Unlike the 1992 list, almost everyone was anonymous and wrote under various childish nicknames. I think about half of them were named “admiral something”. I wondered why I couldn’t find that one, original list. Eventually I realized that it was gone<\/em>. Not just that the list itself was no longer active, but that the environment in which it had thrived had long since ceased to exist. The internet had grown from a small town where everyone knew everyone else into a big city full of angry denizens giving each other the finger. <\/p>\n

I actually think the net is much more civilized today than it was a decade ago. For a while the net was ugly, mean, brimming with scams, populated by frightening lunatics, and even the most innocent link could lead to a porn storm of popups. All of that stuff still exists, but it’s been ages since I had to worry about any of it. It’s not that there are less idiots, it’s just that we have better ways of filtering the idiots. In a lot of ways I’ve finally recaptured that “small town” dynamic in that 1992 Trek list via a few favorite blogs and the comments here on Twenty Sided. Things were raw for eight years or so, but eventually everyone got better tools for dealing with the larger population. <\/p>\n

So paving Eden seems like a good move to me, it just took a while to learn to drive on it afterwards. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Tuesday’s post about the dot-com spectacle, there were a few comments on “paving eden”, the time when the internet stopped being the domain of academics and became the spawning pool of e-business. I also learned about the Eternal September, which is an interesting bit of net-lore that I missed. Then Pixy said: I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nerd-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}