Apotheosis

This is an expanded, written monologue of the Apotheosis podcast episode of the same name. Podcast music by Nullsleep.

You can blame Ben Brown for this one.

I mentioned Ben in the previous Apotheosis post. He's a current Microsoft engineer that works on the Bot Framework Composer, but made a name for himself in technology and the Austin tech scene for a variety of applications and companies, but most notably, his work on Botkit, which Microsoft subsequently purchased (I suspect this was an acqui-hire to gain Ben's services) and made a part of the Bot Framework. Ben and I are only a year apart in age. We both grew up with similar interests and managed to connect late in life over our work with chatbots (I'm still a Microsoft AI MVP for Bot Framework community contributions) and a love for Max Headroom.

While I was busy putting the research together for a discussion on Gopher and Gemini, Ben was busy building out a version of the Finger protocol that limited the security risk and added a web interface for updating the text that would traditionally be in your .plan or .project file in a Linux/Unix home directory. Welcome to HappyNetBox!

We'll return to HappyNetBox in a bit because it's a good lesson in the history of social software, but if you weren't jacking into Unix machines in the 80's, you might be wondering what the Finger protocol is, or maybe you just need a quick refresher.

On Unix-based systems, prior to the advent of the finger command, information on logged in users was pretty much relegated to using the who command. On my current Linux laptop, this is the result:

This doesn't really provide us with much other than who is logged into the system. In 1971, Les Earnest wrote the finger program to provide more relevant information. If I run the finger program on my computer, I get the following:

If I finger the user directly, I get:

If I actually had information in a .plan file in my home directory, it would look like this:

The finger program is distinct—but related to—the finger protocol. The finger protocol is a daemon exposed to the network that typically runs on port 79. The finger program is a client for this protocol. When a finger request is made, it contacts the corresponding server or network device, which receives the request, processes the query, and responds. The connection between the client and protocol is then closed. This protocol and process was used to provide identifying information like with the examples I've shown. Typically it was meant for co-worker communication and information, hence the office phone. It can include other information like email address, name, logged on time, and through the .plan file could contain more verbose exposition on just about anything. Typically it was used for humor, but don't discount the fact that it was often used for regular status updates in the same manner as micro-blogging today.

The problem with finger was that as networks and the Internet grew the information supplied by the command could conceivably be used in social engineering attacks during the early days of hacking. As a result, it was soon decided to be a security risk.

Of course, finger—or more accurately the finger daemon—had a starring role in the drama surrounding the infamous Morris Worm in 1988.

Robert Tappan Morris—whose father Robert Morris was a well-known cryptography who worked for Bell Labs and later the National Security Agency—began working on a computer worm while a graduate student at Cornell University. Morris claimed that his original intention was to bring attention to security weaknesses in computers and computer networks. The eventually named Morris Worm exploited multiple vulnerabilities in Unix-based machines, specifically the DEC VAX running BSD, and one of the targeted components was a weakness in the finger daemon (fingerd) causing a buffer overflow.

Once on a machine, the virus would check if a copy of it already existed, and if so, it wouldn't replicate; however, trying to potentially outsmart system administrators who may attempt to fake the presence check, Morris had the virus replicate 14% of the time regardless of if an infection was present. This created a runaway replication process with multiple infections on a single machine slowing the processing power to a crawl—not unsimilar to a denial of service attack, crashing many machines1.

As computer experts worked feverishly on a fix, the question of who was responsible became more urgent. Shortly after the attack, a dismayed programmer contacted two friends, admitting he’d launched the worm and despairing that it had spiraled dangerously out of control. He asked one friend to relay an anonymous message across the Internet on his behalf, with a brief apology and guidance for removing the program. Ironically, few received the message in time because the network had been so damaged by the worm.

Independently, the other friend made an anonymous call to The New York Times, which would soon splash news of the attack across its front pages. The friend told a reporter that he knew who built the program, saying it was meant as a harmless experiment and that its spread was the result of a programming error. In follow-up conversations with the reporter, the friend inadvertently referred to the worm’s author by his initials, RTM. Using that information, The Times soon confirmed and publicly reported that the culprit was a 23-year-old Cornell University graduate student named Robert Tappan Morris.

The aftermath of the Morris Worm suggested anywhere from a few thousand to 60,000 computers were infected but the damages were vague2.

The worm did not damage or destroy files, but it still packed a punch. Vital military and university functions slowed to a crawl. Emails were delayed for days. The network community labored to figure out how the worm worked and how to remove it. Some institutions wiped their systems; others disconnected their computers from the network for as long as a week. The exact damages were difficult to quantify, but estimates started at $100,000 and soared into the millions.

Morris became the first person ever convicted under the draconian Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He was sentences to three years probation and was fined several thousand dollars.

I'm no fan of Clifford Stoll, but in writing about the Morris Worm, he was correct in his assessment that:

If all the systems on the Arpanet ran Berkeley Unix, the virus would have disabled all fifty thousand of them

Stoll was talking about the dangers of monoculture and how reliance on one specific technology or way of doing things could result in long-term and devasting damages when a major event occurs. Monoculture is often seen as a danger in agriculture where monoculture farming has resulted in reduce varieties in produce. Then a blight hits and wipes out the entire crop because it targets that particular variety. Bananas in particular are currently experiencing this issue.

In technology—and as discussed previously—monoculture has emerged in the browser wars, in desktop software, and in Internet protocols. I mentioned before:

[…] as e-commerce became the fundamental rallying cry of the Dot Com Boom, those attempting to make money off the Internet, didn't have time for competing protocols. The web served the need for design-oriented marketing, so all the investment went there. We lost the other protocols to the junk piles of academic experimentation and with that loss, prostrated ourselves at the feet of advertising and marketing.

Those that work in open source "reinventing the wheel" so to speak, are doing so out of rejection of the monoculture that surrounds us.

With HappyNetBox, Ben Brown has essentially reintroduced us to the original status message. We often forget that most things around us aren't new. They are just modern interpretations of older ideas, usually twisted so that marketing and advertising can get a dollar out of it. Don't believe me? First we had the finger protocol, but tell me, how different are status updates from the away messages of AOL Instant Messenger? AOL's Instant Messenger let you create custom away messages that could even include rich text, color, and formatting. During the early to mid-00's teenagers were using away messages to give status updates, detail drama, tell jokes, and over-communicate. But at this time Friendster was crattering, while MySpace was surging, and every advertising company around was trying to figure out how to turn these emerging "social networks" into revenue generating businesses.

And they did.

So maybe now, we should take a look at that monoculture again, and do something about it.

This is an expanded, written monologue of the Apotheosis podcast episode of the same name. Podcast music by Nullsleep.

I miss the Gopher protocol.

That's an odd statement to make because the Gopher protocol wasn't successful long-term and it had quite a few drawbacks, but the Gopher protocol was an Internet protocol built on the idea of sharing information in a search and hierarchical manner. Although it shared some of the horizontal nature of web surfing, it certainly adhered (at least on individual Gopher sites) to the horizontal nature of file systems.

The demise of Gopher was a crash-and-burn process of the University of Minnesota trying to lock down the intellectual property of Gopher at a time when the World Wide Web (over the HTTP protocol) wasn't just hitting its stride, but was capturing the attention of Internet adopters as an avenue for a more powerful presentation layer. Even if Gopher had remained open, it would have likely stood no chance against the combination of Internet technologies that allowed markup to be interpreted by web browsers as structured and beautified text and images.

On March 18 [1992], in a conference room of the hotel [in San Diego], [Tim] Berners-Lee presented one possible breakthrough: the World Wide Web. It was evening. Many of the 530 conference attendees had already gone to the bar or to dinner. To the curious who stayed behind, Berners-Lee explained that the Web could be used to connect all the information on the internet through hyperlinks. You could click on a word or a phrase in a document and immediately retrieve a related document, click again on a phrase in that document, and so on. It acted like a web laid over the internet, so you could spider from one source of information to another on nearly invisible threads.

Two other programs with the potential to expand access to the internet — WAIS and Prospero — were discussed in the same session. In the reports of people who saw the presentation, the Web did not come across as the best of them, or even as particularly promising.

The next day, in the light of the afternoon, McCahill and Anklesaria presented the Internet Gopher. It was simple enough to explain: With minimal computer knowledge, you could download an interface — the Gopher — and begin searching the internet, retrieving information linked to it from anywhere in the world. It was like the Web but more straightforward, and it was already working.

At this time, Gopher was already in use by many universities, institutions, and experimenters. The straight-forward protocol and simple interface required little introduction, and Gopher began growing and expanding at an exponential rate.

The number of Gopher users expanded at orders of magnitude more than the World Wide Web. Gopher developers held gatherings around the country, called GopherCons, and issued a Gopher T-shirt — worn by MTV veejay Adam Curry when he announced the network’s Gopher site. The White House revealed its Gopher site on Good Morning America.

As the popularity and install based on Gopher grew, so did the expectations of the University of Minnesota, and less than a year later the Gopher protocol and its enthusiasts experienced a deflating event.

At GopherCon '93, Yen announced that for-profit Gopher users would need to pay the U a licensing fee: hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on the size and nature of their business. Many users felt betrayed. In the open-source computing spirit of the day, they had contributed code to Gopher, helping the team keep up with the times. Now they were being asked to pony up.

Gopher was maintained by six individuals and never received additional funding beyond that. The team itself abhorred the decision and was dismayed by the reaction from the community. The University of Minnesota, meanwhile, was contemplating eliminating the team and outsourcing their computer operations. Although this incident didn't end Gopher's reach or growth, it certainly slowed it enough at a time when the World Wide Web was making increasing in-roads. When the World Wide Web (and browsers) began supporting images and modem speeds increased, it put Berners-Lee's protocol on an increasing trajectory.

Let's also not dismiss the role that easily available (and downloadable) pornography played in pushing the Web even further.

Gopher's reign was short (3-4 years at most) and by 1994 traffic on the World Wide Web surpassed the text-only Gopher protocol and never looked back.

Today, Non-Internet nerds know what the web is and they know what email is. They certainly know what the Internet is. But those my age who were into computers will likely remember Gopher, Usenet newsgroups, Finger, and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). There were multiple protocols racing throughout the Internet creating unique experiences for disseminating information. How many of you are still scouring through newsgroups?

The web (and HTTP) took control and as e-commerce became the fundamental rallying cry of the Dot Com Boom, those attempting to make money off the Internet, didn't have time for competing protocols. The web served the need for design-oriented marketing, so all the investment went there. We lost the other protocols to the junk piles of academic experimentation and with that loss, prostrated ourselves at the feet of advertising and marketing.

This consolidated web experience also drove us to consolidated communication—birthing multiple "social networks" that eventually re-branded themselves as social media in order to sell the network to the advertisers. Now, a handful of companies own most of the communication on the Internet—selling your every move—when the Internet was intended as a communication revolution long before it was an information revolution. Information is only important when it is shared between people. The instant and easy communication across the globe on a network of packets was the true revolution of the Internet age.

You can still spin up a Gopher server today. In fact, the legion of veteran Internet geeks have been busy creating toy technologies to revisit or reinvent their favorite early Internet technologies.

Gopher's popularity at the time—and the reason why so many Gopher servers exist on so many different technologies—lies in the ease of the protocol. You can write a simply Gopher server with very little effort:

Mostly, the Gopher protocol relies on ASCII text, tabs, line breaks, and numerical bullets. Creating a working server based on these minimal requirements requires little effort.

Still, despite the modern love for Gopher (and how it's reminiscent of a simpler time), there are several drawbacks, mostly dealing with security around the protocol.

This has led to the creation of another protocol—Gemini—that has been growing in popularity as a modern Gopher alternative. Gemini is meant to solve multiple issues:

Gemini describes itself as:

Gemini is intended to be simple, but not necessarily as simple as possible. Instead, the design strives to maximise its "power to weight ratio", while keeping its weight within acceptable limits. Gemini is also intended to be very privacy conscious, to be difficult to extend in the future (so that it will stay simple and privacy conscious), and to be compatible with a "do it yourself" computing ethos. For this last reason, Gemini is technically very familiar and conservative: it's a protocol in the traditional client-server request-response paradigm, and is built on mature, standardised technology like URIs, MIME media types, and TLS.

There's push back against the Gemini protocol (and not just because it requires a long name before the :// of a URL). Many see it as an unnecessary attempt at a protocol that tosses HTML and HTTP elements in the direction of Gopher. Sure it improves security over the traditional Gopher server, but rendering rich content delivers reduced-value HTML-lite pages. The Gemtext markup, meanwhile, is criticized for being a Markdown clone with less efficient anchor tags.

This is the point where a traditional business analyst living in a financially extractive economy would review Gemini and declare it dead in the water. Where is the money to be made?

But from a technological and cultural perspective, burgeoning and amateur protocols represent the same philosophy as open source browsers. Mozilla warned long ago that Firefox was essentially the last browser not corporate controlled. Microsoft gave up on their EdgeHTML rendering engine and adopted Chromium in their Edge browser. This reduces the competition in the browser market, while putting control of how you view the Internet (the rendering of web pages) in the hands of the few. And these few create value and acquire revenue through tracking, advertising, and data collection. Is it appropriate for HTTP and the World Wide Web to be the dominate Internet protocol where web page rendering is controlled mostly by Chromium, which is shepherded by a company that controls the majority of Internet search traffic and makes 90+% of their revenue off of advertising? Who is the product in this situation? I think you can guess.

"If one product like Chromium has enough market share, then it becomes easier for web developers and businesses to decide not to worry if their services and sites work with anything other than Chromium," wrote [Mozilla CEO Chris] Beard.

"That's what happened when Microsoft had a monopoly on browsers in the early 2000s before Firefox was released. And it could happen again."

Consolidation in corporate America (and the global economic world in general) leads to monopolies. On the Internet, consolidation leads to limited choice and a controlled experience. Experimental protocols like Gemini (regardless of whether you care for Gemini) are good because these are coming from people still fighting the good fight of networked experimentation, Internet freedom, and technological exploration. In many ways, these emergent protocol experiments align with retro-computing initiatives like the Tildeverse, where elder states-people of the Interwebz have been rebuilding the age of home directories on a shared server with some Tildeverse offerings including Gopher and Finger protocols, early text-based blogging, and even web rings.

Chatbot engineer Ben Brown recently launched his own Finger server at HappyNetBox, announced it on Twitter, and immediately acquired several hundred users.

As we contemplated previously, this could just be a bunch of middle-aged programmers having a collective midlife crisis and yearning for the "better years" of our youth, but I would be willing to hypothesize that it's more an awakening and realization that the promise of the Internet of our youth has been seized by a handful of modern aristocrats, and we've lost the "freedom" that those early years of exploration exposed to us. This nostalgia that we feel is now being acted upon by those of us who exist in positions to make choices that shape the future of technology and regain that collective, collaborative space.

This is an expanded, written monologue of the Apotheosis podcast episode of the same name. Podcast music by Nullsleep.

Codepunk uses the tagline "life in the new cyberia." And although he didn't invent the term, Douglas Rushkoff used the word "cyberia" as the title of the book that really cemented him in early cyberculture. Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace.

Note: In the podcast episode for this post, I mistakenly referred to the book's subtitle as "Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace."

I picked up a new copy of Cyberia recently. For one, I wanted to see how well the book held up in our modern era, but at the same time, I've become a bit nostalgic for the early years of the Internet and Internet culture in particular.

Every generation—once they reach around 40 years of age—starts to think about how things were when they grew up, and we all come to the same conclusion about how our childhood was better. The music was better when we were younger. The culture was better… The technology—although not the best—seemed more authentic—more visceral. This is, of course, nostalgia, and I know that even as I buy up old 80's and 90's books on cyberspace. Some of these books aren't even good, but they feel right.

And yes, I even have a copy of the Mondo 2000 "be a cyberpunk" riff. Mondo 2000, of course, being the cyberculture magazine du jour that predated the commercialization of cyberspace—something, instead, that Wired Magazine did. Mondo 2000 (from the brain of R.U. Sirius) was a West coast indulgence in rave culture, computers, new drugs, and postmodern philosophical exploration—all with plenty of tongue-in-cheek jokes. Despite its short shelf life, it featured people like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Robert Anton Wilson, and of course Douglas Ruskoff himself.

I do think—with a bit of bias, of course—that nostalgia for early computer culture isn't just nostalgia due to aging out. Computers, technology, the Internet—all of these things were fundamentally different in the earlier years, and as they began to emerge from military and academic usage, many early pioneers saw the transformational value of computation—the authenticity that allowed for maximum exploration, collaboration, and creativity.

I gave a presentation for the Cyberpunk Culture Conference about Max Headroom, and it encompassed the early 80's, MTV, and how the era of Reaganomics reduced the value of authentic culture for the purposes of financial extraction. In fact, I recently took this presentation, expanded it a bit, and put it down on paper—fleshing out the thesis.

Once again, we come back to this idea of authenticity. But is it authenticity or is it just nostalgia?

Douglas Rushkoff began his long journey towards Team Human shortly after college in the San Francisco rave scene where the early mixture of computers, raves, and open culture led to encounters and friendships with the likes of Timothy Leary, Genesis P-Orridge, and Mondo publishing R.U. Sirius, among many others who were prominent in that early scene. Rushkoff even played keyboard in one of P-Orridge's Psychic TV iterations. Cyberia being his first book, Rushkoff began exploring the intersection between emergent culture and media studies, producing books like Media Virus and Coercion that propelled him into the main stream as a media theorist and won him the Marshall McLuhan Award.

From his web site:

Rushkoff's work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. He coined such concepts as “viral media,” “screenagers,” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice.

I was always a big fan of Rushkoff in his early years, and when I ran a counterculture web site called Key23, I had the opportunity to interview him. In fact, I once participated in one of Rushkoff's university classes where he signed my original (now lost) copy of Cyberia. After reviewing Get Back in the Box on Key23, Rushkoff sent me an early PDF copy of Life, Inc., which, honestly, as much as he might view the Team Human project as his manifesto, Life, Inc. was really the book that set the stage for everything that came after. It was a detailed history of money, economics, and the evolution of corporatism in America and globally. Life, Inc. explains to us the ailment, and to Rushkoff, Team Human is, perhaps, the treatment—if not the cure.

I certainly have many disagreements with Rushkoff's current Team Human take on technology and culture, but I do believe the podcast is worth a listen and book is worth a read.

I don't think it's just nostalgia that's powering our current yearning for the past. Nobody wants a computer from the 80's. Nobody wants the dial-up speed from the 90's. What people of my generation most often want is the feeling of freedom, yet mutualism, that the early Internet provided. It wasn't a utopia. There were problems. But we accepted the flaws with the machines because it was a new frontier where we all thought we could start over. We could build the democracy inside of cyberspace that was slipping away from us in the real world.

Most of this "slipping away" is the result of regressive taxation, culture wars, financial extraction, and corporatism. Deregulation combined with regressive taxation continues to increase the wealth gap while putting power in the hands of a few corporations: This is the essence of world-building in the cyberpunk genre—runaway mega-corporations.

What we see today when we look fondly back on the past is the difference between the Internet as a collaborative tool of exploration versus the Internet as a venue for serving advertising, collecting private data, and selling "stuff." Those are two completely different Internets in my opinion.

So it is nostalgia. Sure. But it's nostalgia for a better way that many of us feel has been lost. People like Doug Rushkoff. People like myself and Bill. We want to see that Internet back because what we see right now with the Internet is really just the precursor to all future innovations. If unlimited growth and financial extraction remain the primary goals of corporations and wealthy politicians, the loss of the Internet is just a single niche step and quite small in comparison to what the financial extraction will do to education or the climate. More so than the impact that we've already seen.

And I get that this is a universal, collaborative issue since nothing exists within a vacuum. You cannot disconnect technology from politics. You cannot disconnect technology from climate change. Reagan's 80's birthed consumerism as a primary driving force in America today and in order to increase profits while decreasing costs, we lose originality. We lose authenticity. We sell our souls to the shopping malls and neon lights, but live long enough to tell jokes about it and see it on an episode of Stranger Things.

We're seeing a resurgence in many cyberpunk ideas today. and the nostalgia or the yearn for authenticity—whatever you want to call it—is emerging because those of us who grew up cyberpunk are the writers and managers and storytellers of today. Many of us are in management positions or have founded (and sold) companies. We've reach our collective midlife crises and looked back on what the world has wrought (possibly wrought with a little of our own help), and we no longer find it desirable. We want to progress forward to envision and experience cyberspace as it should have been instead of a mega-corporation's interpretation of cyberspace—filled with trademarks and advertising.

We look at the Internet today and wonder what went wrong. But at the same time, we're the ones most in a position to actually do something about it. First we need to wake up.