Interesting Links for 26-07-2019

[andrewducker]

The Internet golden age that wasn't.

(tags:internet history myths viaFanf )

I thought I was being 'blacklisted' by my PhD supervisor, so I demanded to see colleagues' emails

(tags:academia data law transparency email )

This makes sense as Johnson's plan

(tags:BorisJohnson politics UK Europe doom )

Towels ready: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will be a Hulu TV series

(tags:TV HHG2G )

A woman's greatest enemy? A lack of time to herself

(tags:gender time society )

Comments

[altamira16]

The transparency rules that this second person is using are the transparency rules that are used to harass scientists in the US working on climate research and on GMOs.

The "golden age"

[jducoeur]

I think that article kind of buries the lede -- I read most of it thinking they'd missed the point. But the final conclusions largely agree with my recollection of where the myth came from in the first place (I date to 1987, so I was involved with a good deal of the "golden age"):

-- We were *idealists*. When Barlow wrote his manifesto, we actually thought it made sense, and even that it was a good thing. Sure, there were problems, but a large fraction of us were fairly naive programmers, who sincerely believed that we could simply *debug* those. (After all, any problem that isn't NP-complete is solveable, right?)

-- We were a *community*, and I do mean the singular there. Yeah, we were broken down into lots of sub-groups, and there was fighting between those groups from the beginning, but there was still an over-arching sense of "us vs. the world", and a *tendency* to keep things in perspective.

(For example, I was involved in talk.bizarre, which in retrospect was a forerunner of 4chan and all its evils -- but at the time, we just treated flaming as an artform, something you did for entertainment, but not to actually *hurt* anybody. At least, that's what we told ourselves.)

Again, naive in retrospect, but it's easy to remember the emotional basis, and fail to do the analysis. Looking back at it coolly, the dysfunction of the Net was there from the outset, but it *felt* a lot friendlier as a participant, and that makes a big difference...