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Did _why take them offline because he didn’t want anyone to read them? I thought it was more like a book going out of publication—there’s no desire from the au

Did _why take them offline because he didn’t want anyone to read them? I thought it was more like a book going out of publication—there’s no desire from the author that people should stop reading it, just that it’s out of the author’s hands. I don’t know if _why ever expressed a desire that people shouldn’t go back and read his writing.

WorldMaker 4y ago
It is assumed but not proven that _why's final thoughts about killing that pseudonym are captured in CLOSURE [1]. There's a lot of different takeaways from that and other contemporary writings of _why. Some of them are that _why wished to pursue the Right to Be Forgotten, not just in the GDPR terminology sense, but in a "Last Chance to See" existential way. Those impressions yield that _why watched the internet transition from "pseudonyms are fine and ephemeral" to "everyone knows your real name and pseudonyms are permanent fixtures in the modern internet" and tried as hard as possible to kill everything about that pseudonym as Performance Art. As a reminder of an internet long gone. As a reminder of a Right to be Forgotten. From that perspective, this archive is maybe a bit of putting a Banksy into the Louvre. It's out of context, it's maybe against the artist's wishes, it's kind of weird and over-pedestalizing a legendary figure. (Arguably _why's last stand failed to account for that little last bit, that human tendency even older than the internet of myth making and legend building. As this shows, as the history of mentions of _why on HN alone every few months shows, legends loom large in culture and _why was already a part of the programming legendarium before he tried to murder that pseudonym.) [1] https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE/raw/master/CLOSURE.pdf https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE/raw/master/CLOSURE.p...
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LukeShu 4y ago
> there’s no desire from the author that people should stop reading it, just that it’s out of the author’s hands If it were just his own servers that lapsed, sure. But he actively deleted his GitHub repos.

WorldMaker 4y ago

It is assumed but not proven that _why's final thoughts about killing that pseudonym are captured in CLOSURE [1]. There's a lot of different takeaways from that and other contemporary writings of _why. Some of them are that _why wished to pursue the Right to Be Forgotten, not just in the GDPR terminology sense, but in a "Last Chance to See" existential way. Those impressions yield that _why watched the internet transition from "pseudonyms are fine and ephemeral" to "everyone knows your real name and pseudonyms are permanent fixtures in the modern internet" and tried as hard as possible to kill everything about that pseudonym as Performance Art. As a reminder of an internet long gone. As a reminder of a Right to be Forgotten. From that perspective, this archive is maybe a bit of putting a Banksy into the Louvre. It's out of context, it's maybe against the artist's wishes, it's kind of weird and over-pedestalizing a legendary figure. (Arguably _why's last stand failed to account for that little last bit, that human tendency even older than the internet of myth making and legend building. As this shows, as the history of mentions of _why on HN alone every few months shows, legends loom large in culture and _why was already a part of the programming legendarium before he tried to murder that pseudonym.) [1] https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE/raw/master/CLOSURE.pdf https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE/raw/master/CLOSURE.p...

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LukeShu 4y ago

> there’s no desire from the author that people should stop reading it, just that it’s out of the author’s hands If it were just his own servers that lapsed, sure. But he actively deleted his GitHub repos.