Where The Link Goes Therefore I Go (beyond)

The humble hyperlink, ever it be so unassuming humble. Click here! It’s an invention, a pending adventure, for me, a potential distraction of the better than the machinery of social media attention sucking.

When you spot an interesting link in your info streams, do you quickly share, repost? Click that all so valuable and powerful Like button?

Me, after scanning or actually reading a linked web thingie, I admit often I look for the best summary to grab and zap to my pinboard hoard with tags for later use. Quite often the links from the links yield more. And then… many times I get curious of it;s from a site I have never seen before — I try to avoid saving/sharing links that are merely a summary on some what passes for news these days sites. I learned well, Mike Caulfield, to always swim upstream towards the source.

And if the site I am visiting appears to be e work of a person, not just some agency or entity aiming truly to have you click more ads than real links, then, there is he curiosity o know more about the writer. If they have written one thing that I get value from, surely there is more.

So on to the show…

Yeah, this journey launchs from my inbox, the writings that plop in there via the Substack machine. I’m pretty vocal on my dismay that many writers are abandoning the blog for the newsletter. But if the writing is good, I don’t care how I get it– it’s always about the words, the ideas, more than the paper/ink/whatever is the modern web metaphor.

The reading is “Your Fake Online Friends Have a 2,000-Year-Old History” from TNL.net aka Tristan Louis. Right away a good title is something that sparks me. I cringe at how little attention some people give to titles- clever ones, not click-bait listicle fodder. But in this case, previous positive familiarity with a writer helps and I have been reading Tristan’s words, likely first from his blog, since well before 2000. I can’t recall exactly (on poking around his site I find that his writing started in 1997 as an email newsletter on internet tech, so he was way ahead of the current common practice). I am deeply respectful of his annual posts on living in NYC and commeraring/reflecing every September 11- this year was a 23rd year. I recall one time when I was in The City for a conference, I reached out, and he graciously invited me for a visit.

Back to his post, which wends a wonderful history of how long ago people found a reason to create fake personas, long before internet sock puppets. Hence the delight of learning about the kid who struggling to get his writings seen assumed the persona of “Silence Dogood”.

Louis writes about the earliest days of ancient internet culture, when all was text-based, and the first utopian ideals of early net-communities. I had known in passing of the tale he outlines:

One of those environments was LambdaMoo, a server set up in California, where people would mingle 24 hours per day, logging in from anywhere around the world to occupy a world both fantastical and welcoming. A place built on words and imagination, where community norms dictated evil things being kept in private spaces while communal spaces remained welcoming. 

On an evening in early 1993, one of the most shocking events on the internet to date, akin to virtual rape, would disturb the peace and lay groundwork for our future.

From Your Fake Online Friends…(and cough, see the trick I did there on the link? the humble link? I share the sorcery. With a link.

And here is where the door to the rabbit hole slides open. It’s a link to the web version of the article that published this story of “one of the most shocking events on the internet to date” published in The Village Voice, December 23, 1993. How can this bit of long writing be on the web and not covered in advetrisements and pop up call to sign up for crap?

Take in for a moment “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society” by it’s author, Julian Dibble.

It’s far from wowing you in 2025 web design. When I read it first on my mobile, the non-responsive web text on a site named “Scribble, Scribble, Scribble” was tiny, filling 1/3 of the screen width. I had to zoom to see words. It looks web old.

Visually not web pretty, but come here for the writing. The first paragraphs indicate the works of a writer, not a blog hack like me.

Call me Dr. Bombay. Some months ago — let’s say about halfway between the first time you heard the words information superhighway and the first time you wished you never had — I found myself tripping now and then down the well-traveled information lane that leads to LambdaMOO, a very large and very busy rustic mansion built entirely of words. In the odd free moment I would type the commands that called those words onto my computer screen, dropping me with what seemed a warm electric thud inside the house’s darkened coat closet, where I checked my quotidian identity, stepped into the persona and appearance of a minor character from a long-gone television sitcom, and stepped out into the glaring chatter of the crowded living room. Sometimes, when the mood struck me, I emerged as a dolphin instead. 

I won’t say why I chose to masquerade as Samantha Stevens’s outlandish cousin, or as the dolphin, or what exactly led to my mild addiction to the semifictional digital otherworlds known around the Internet as multi-user dimensions, or MUDs. This isn’t my story, after all. It’s the story of a man named Mr. Bungle, and of the ghostly sexual violence he committed in the halls of LambdaMOO, and most importantly of the ways his violence and his victims challenged the 1000 and more residents of that surreal, magic-infested mansion to become, finally, the community so many of them already believed they were. 

That I was myself one of those residents has little direct bearing on the story’s events. I mention it only as a warning that my own perspective is perhaps too steeped in the surreality and magic of the place to serve as an entirely appropriate guide. 

Indeed, because this was written in an era where newspapers, magazines turned out good writing, not words for ad click bait

I wander around Julian’s site. I am curious. The blog link reveals the last post was in 2004. That my non subtraction-eager friends, was 21 years ago, yet here it is still on the internet. How is that possible? Elsewhere under Latest I find the newest news was 2009.

The gem is Julian’s lovingly not overly verbose but link enabled bio. He was born but 2 months before me. I leave it for you, blog reader, if you are more than a bot of AI scraper, to read what Julian describes as “the best part”. I have a feeling his life and words stay true to that hope.

My web detective work suggests this was originally written on Blogger.com and has been exported. The site icon in the browser suggests it might be WordPress, but there is no shred of the usual WordPress tracks in the source. It’s just classic self contained HTML, the stuff of the web that will last the longest.

But it’s the words I value having spent time here, the words of a genuine person. Someone who has taken on themselves to keep the words alive on the internet. This is what individuals do- organizations and companies just build pre-fab web sites and later demolish them.

One more stop as the usual exploring work is to see what Wikipedia reveals. Dibble’s bio links to the Wikipedia article on A Rape in Cyberspace. This is Wikipedia richness in detail and citation, but I find this bit from the intro most assuring on what good writing can instigate.

Lawrence Lessig has said that his chance reading of Dibbell’s article was a key influence on his interest in the field.^[1] Sociologist David Trend called it “one of the most frequently cited essays about cloaked identity in cyberspace”.^[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_in_Cyberspace

I leave it to you to continue the path from footnote 1. It may go on from there.

Links. One is useful. But if you put some oomph ino it, so much more awaits.

We click ’em like Pavlovian pellet seekers. But the more you click on your own, the deeper you can go and return.

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Featured Image: Mine, 2013/365/13 Drive Train flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license