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Then along came Bulletin Board Systems and then the Internet, and all that changed. No BBS ever changed diddly squat. Even the internet had minimal impact on p

Then along came Bulletin Board Systems and then the Internet, and all that changed. No BBS ever changed diddly squat. Even the internet had minimal impact on politics until the 2000's. The entire comment just sounds like speculation about a time that is, in fact, fairly recent history. We had a society in which all media was controlled by a handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and thought. That only makes sense if you ignore all sorts of pivotal historical events (eg: uprisings and revolutions). Not that I disagree that populist internet media are really contributing to the betterment of mankind /s

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
TrispusAttucks 5y ago
To the people that participated in the BBS's it meant a lot and changed everything, for them. I imagine they went on to affect change in the lives of those around them even if in a small way. Grass roots, even small, is still an important catalyst for change.
__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
I got suspended in 1999 for distributing a copy of the anarchist's cookbook to other middle schoolers. I got it from my brother who got it from a BBS. I don't know what I was playing at, I have no need for making bombs, but at the time it was the coolest thing--media outside of the machine. I can't remember what the rest of my media experience was like (aside from text adventure games over telnet) but I'm pretty sure that the BBS-sourced material stood out to us for a reason.
- kragen 5y ago
  That's definitely an abridgment of your rights to free speech. The Anarchist Cookbook is an interesting study: prior restraint was never exercised against it because Hoover's FBI decided it was protected by the First Amendment, and it was published by the same (commercial) publisher as Charles Bukowski, The Sensuous Woman, and The Turner Diaries, selling some two million copies in all. But it's so famously terrible that many actual anarchists have questioned whether it was really a false-flag effort aimed at getting would-be terrorists to blow themselves up, and its author was admittedly never an anarchist! In 01999 many people in the US could read The Anarchist Cookbook entirely without leaving a government record simply by walking into an open-stacks public library and reading it off the shelf. Even if you checked the book out from a library branch, librarians did not enter that fact into a centralized database, and were famously reluctant to cooperate with the thoughtcrime-surveillance aspects of the PATRIOT act after 9/11. Today this level of freedom from surveillance is much rarer: you can probably get a copy of the book in 45 seconds, as well as far more reliable and trustworthy information on how to do many terrible things, but there's an excellent chance that the NSA will store a permanent record that you did so in the Utah Data Center. (Even if you use TLS they will probably decrypt that once their quantum computing effort succeeds.) If you walk to the library, Verizon probably stores that fact permanently, unless you leave your cellphone at home; if you drive there, license-plate cameras, wireless toll systems, and possibly OnStar and Tesla record that fact. We saw both of these futures in 01992, but so did the FBI and the NSA. In many countries outside the US, BBSes were in many cases a bigger hole in official censorship regimes than they were in the US.
  - callalex 5y ago
    Why are you writing years as if they are C octals? Standards in communication are important.
    - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
      Perhaps he's from the future and still has nightmares about the crisis of 9999.
      - pyuser583 5y ago
        Dear lord … a while ago I had to integrate with a client database that had a required “end date” for indefinite events. They filled the value with the maximum year - December 31, 9999. Our systems initially supported this. But we found an extremely popular and widely used date parsing library has terrible bug. For some reason (if forgot what) as part of its logic it checks something about the date after the date it’s parsing. So for users of this extremely popular library the 9999 crisis will actually happen a day early. I kept trying to alter the non responsive maintainers that there was going to be a major crisis with their product in about 7000. They never got back to me.
    - r2_pilot 5y ago
      He's representing the year numeral as YYYYY to avoid a Year 9999 problem and make it into a Year 99999 problem instead. (see The Long Now and other long-term thinking projects)
      - j16sdiz 5y ago
        Wikipedia say Roman empire falls at 395AD, not 0395AD. Text comments are not COBOL, we don't need zero-padding in daily communication.
        School-Cotton 5y ago
        Good point. So he has actually created a year 99999 format where there wasn’t one before by changing an arbitrary-sized format into a fixed-width one.
EarlKing 5y ago
If you genuinely believe that people being able to engage in a frank exchange of views hasn't changed anything... how did Orange Man get elected? :D
- kragen 5y ago
  BBSes weren't powerful enough to elect him.
  - iopq 5y ago
    4chan/Reddit pretty much propelled his primary campaign. He was just one of the candidates before the memes

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

TrispusAttucks 5y ago

To the people that participated in the BBS's it meant a lot and changed everything, for them. I imagine they went on to affect change in the lives of those around them even if in a small way. Grass roots, even small, is still an important catalyst for change.

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago

I got suspended in 1999 for distributing a copy of the anarchist's cookbook to other middle schoolers. I got it from my brother who got it from a BBS. I don't know what I was playing at, I have no need for making bombs, but at the time it was the coolest thing--media outside of the machine. I can't remember what the rest of my media experience was like (aside from text adventure games over telnet) but I'm pretty sure that the BBS-sourced material stood out to us for a reason.

kragen 5y ago
That's definitely an abridgment of your rights to free speech. The Anarchist Cookbook is an interesting study: prior restraint was never exercised against it because Hoover's FBI decided it was protected by the First Amendment, and it was published by the same (commercial) publisher as Charles Bukowski, The Sensuous Woman, and The Turner Diaries, selling some two million copies in all. But it's so famously terrible that many actual anarchists have questioned whether it was really a false-flag effort aimed at getting would-be terrorists to blow themselves up, and its author was admittedly never an anarchist! In 01999 many people in the US could read The Anarchist Cookbook entirely without leaving a government record simply by walking into an open-stacks public library and reading it off the shelf. Even if you checked the book out from a library branch, librarians did not enter that fact into a centralized database, and were famously reluctant to cooperate with the thoughtcrime-surveillance aspects of the PATRIOT act after 9/11. Today this level of freedom from surveillance is much rarer: you can probably get a copy of the book in 45 seconds, as well as far more reliable and trustworthy information on how to do many terrible things, but there's an excellent chance that the NSA will store a permanent record that you did so in the Utah Data Center. (Even if you use TLS they will probably decrypt that once their quantum computing effort succeeds.) If you walk to the library, Verizon probably stores that fact permanently, unless you leave your cellphone at home; if you drive there, license-plate cameras, wireless toll systems, and possibly OnStar and Tesla record that fact. We saw both of these futures in 01992, but so did the FBI and the NSA. In many countries outside the US, BBSes were in many cases a bigger hole in official censorship regimes than they were in the US.
- callalex 5y ago
  Why are you writing years as if they are C octals? Standards in communication are important.
  - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
    Perhaps he's from the future and still has nightmares about the crisis of 9999.
    - pyuser583 5y ago
      Dear lord … a while ago I had to integrate with a client database that had a required “end date” for indefinite events. They filled the value with the maximum year - December 31, 9999. Our systems initially supported this. But we found an extremely popular and widely used date parsing library has terrible bug. For some reason (if forgot what) as part of its logic it checks something about the date after the date it’s parsing. So for users of this extremely popular library the 9999 crisis will actually happen a day early. I kept trying to alter the non responsive maintainers that there was going to be a major crisis with their product in about 7000. They never got back to me.
  - r2_pilot 5y ago
    He's representing the year numeral as YYYYY to avoid a Year 9999 problem and make it into a Year 99999 problem instead. (see The Long Now and other long-term thinking projects)
    - j16sdiz 5y ago
      Wikipedia say Roman empire falls at 395AD, not 0395AD. Text comments are not COBOL, we don't need zero-padding in daily communication.
      - School-Cotton 5y ago
        Good point. So he has actually created a year 99999 format where there wasn’t one before by changing an arbitrary-sized format into a fixed-width one.

EarlKing 5y ago

If you genuinely believe that people being able to engage in a frank exchange of views hasn't changed anything... how did Orange Man get elected? :D

kragen 5y ago
BBSes weren't powerful enough to elect him.
- iopq 5y ago
  4chan/Reddit pretty much propelled his primary campaign. He was just one of the candidates before the memes