Workmanlike book about the early Usenet message boards that made up much of the internet's landscape in the early- to mid-1990s. While it offers helpful analogies for certain internet controversies today, I'd only recommend it to serious internet history geeks. It's not interesting enough of a read for the casual reader.
However, books on technology (and investing) from past periods can offer surprisingly useful insights for current-day readers. The flame wars of the early days of Usenet rhyme with today's malevolently sarcastic social media arguments. Censorship battles of the 1990s give us a tiny hint of what they look like now. Spam, surveillance--we are grappling with the same problems today, just in far more extensive forms.
And then again, there are some issues that seemed like a really big deal to everyone back then that, once enough time passes, end up hardly mattering at all. I wonder what things we think matter today that don't, and what things we think don't matter that do?
Finally, in most tech domains we usually have a media--and a government--that tries its best to follow along, but is almost always too slow, too out of its depth, and too ignorant to do so. We see precisely this in cryptocurrency regulation and reporting today; we saw it in the early reporting and regulation on encryption and privacy in the 1990s. The domains move too fast and shift paradigms too quickly for journalists or governments to keep up. The result is usually confident yet ill-formed regulation and confident yet ill-reported information.
NOTE TO READERS: The author include a really good reading list at the end of the book (see photo below). This is the book's single most useful page.
Notes:
1) "I'm not sure how objective any journalist is about the Net. Journalists who don't use the Net themselves routinely make such egregious technological and cultural errors that you can only compare the results to what would happen if they were assigned to write about the interstate highway system based on their experiences at sea." Substitute "crypto" here for "the Net" and you have today's precise problem with the media's complete lack of understanding of cryptocurrency.Ch 1: The Year September Never Ended
2) Floods of new users joining the internet all the time, none of whom know proper internet etiquette. Also see the condescension towards people posting with aol.com suffixes, assumed to be morons by the farrrr more sophisticated Usenet and message board users. "Endless September" is a reference to how every academic year you have to socialize a new crop of university freshmen into your school--except on the internet, however, it is September forever.
3) There's a reference here to the WELL, no context given, and then three pages later the author explains what it is. This book could have been better organized and edited.
4) Grateful Dead lyricist John Barlow (!) played a role in privacy/anti-censorship, writing articles codifying many of the important issues and problems facing the internet in the early 1990s; cryptography/PGP, even suggesting the idea that the internet was by nature its own sovereign state.
5) Some of the anti-censorship stuff discussed here (see for example John Gilmore of the Electronic Frontier Foundation famously saying "the Net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it") seems incredibly naive from the persepective today of the highly effective censorship and information control devices available to governments today: see China's internet great wall, see the systematic deplatforming and censoring of dissident doctors advocating the COVID early treatment as two object examples of how easy it is to silence dissent and control what people say.
6) "The internet changes the economies of scale in favor of the little guy." A quote from Esther Dyson of the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 1996, and we all believed this lie... until we see today that five or six gigantic companies control everything. And we'll probably learn it yet again, now that we're in the early days of web 3.0.
Ch 2: Make.Money.Fast
7) The story of the law firm that broke early internet etiquette by spamming all CompuServe newsgroups with an ad for immigration law services. These stories seem incredibly innocent in retrospect; I remember when this story first broke, it was a real scandal for people, but today there's so much spam that nobody would even bat an eyelash at it.
8) 1996 brought the arrival of junk email. See also the lawsuit between Cyber Promotions and AOL when AOL began blocking all email from any of its known domains.
9) So much of the stuff discussed here is totally irrelevant and pointless to even know right now, it makes you wonder how much of the cryptocurrency world and the decentralized/web 3.0 world will turn out the same: how much of what I'm learning now as I try to keep up with these domains will ultimately end up as ersatz information? Look at AOL: it went from being a legit growth company to a company so derided and reviled that if you had an aol address it was taken as proof that you were loser of a web user. What are we doing today that in the future will look like this in retrospect? Owning ethereum? Using gmail?
Ch 3: The Making of an Underclass: AOL
10) This chapter is a good example of two things: a) all the silly posturing internet users used as they jockeyed for position in the early internet's status hierarchy, and b) the types of forgettable articles written up in forgotten publications like Wired Magazine.
11) Early internet noobs all came from AOL, breaching all etiquette all the time, there were millions of them, and the "experienced" internet users hated them for it.
Ch 4: Guerrilla Cryptographers
12) Diffie-Hellman as well as RSA (Rivets/Shamir/Adleman) public key cryptography, later followed by Phil Zimmerman's invention of PGP.
13) Interesting to consider the battle over cryptography between these early internet pioneers and the US government/DOD as a metaphor for today's battle over cryptography-derived currencies.
Ch 5: Stuffing the Genie Back in the Can of Worms
14) Discussion of the pathetically ill-fated Clipper Chip and other failed attempts of the US government to stifle public cryptography. Note that this and the prior chapter are far better told in Steven Levy's much more readable book Crypto.
15) Depressingly prescient quote from PGP inventor Phil Zimmerman here: "If you're looking at technology policy, you should ask yourself what kind of technological infrastructure would strengthen the hand of a police state, and then don't deploy that technology. That's a matter of good civic hygiene." I wonder what Zimmerman thinks of the modern politico-medical police state that we have in most of the world today.
16) Government attempts to control the spread of cryptography in the 1990s is strikingly similar to attempts to control cryptocurrencies in the 2020s. Slow, incompetent, ignorant--and worst of all: regulators are ignorant of their own ignorance. Thus the domain moves far faster than any government trying to control it.
Ch 6: Copyright Terrorists
17) The Church of Scientology: how it (along with usenet groups extremely critical of the CoS), became a focal point of early debates on internet censorship, anonymity and privacy. Note the CoS's aggressive legal tactics which caught a Finnish anonymous remailer in its web, ultimately causing it to shut down. This book offers a good rundown of this singular chapter in early internet history.
18) Note that authorities will always go after any "choke point" regardless of who it is where it is and what it does. See Julf Helsingius and anon.penet.fi, his anonymous remailer service in Finland, which shut down due to the lack of legal clarity around various privacy issues.
19) One person involved in some of the legal suits with the Church of Scientology had his house raided by police, many of his papers discs and books were seized, files were deleted from his hard drive, and "his house was comprehensively searched and photographed." Remember that this can happen to you even if you haven't done anything wrong. This really puts things like encryption and monetary sovereignty at the front of one's mind, doesn't it?
20) This chapter is quite sobering, the most valuable in this book by far. Themes on how slowly the government moves in regulating fast-moving technology markets, but then how it can also decide retrospectively what is legal, what is permitted and what is not permitted; second, on how glacial the court system works: see for example the controversy over whether ISPs are liable or not for the actions people conduct or their network. This should have been obvious to the courts years before it was finally sorted out, leaving many companies and people totally in the dark about their legal (and in some cases criminal) liability.
21) These same types of problems are happening all over again in the world of cryptocurrency right now.
Ch 7: Exporting the First Amendment
22) The idea of the First Amendment as a local ordinance (John Perry Barlow), and the idea of censoring the internet as like making a rule that you can only piss in the shallow end of the pool.
23) More on thinking about where the chokepoints are that regulators or governments can attack: in this case ISPs, site administrators. The idea of identifying chokepoints in your life (wherever there's a chokepoint that is where authorities will go) thus where might there be a fragility or an attack vector in your life (online or offline) that may act as a chokepoint?
24) Content and First Amendment-related laws very quickly unified across national borders, I wonder if the same will happen with cryptocurrency. "Regulatory arbitrage."
25) Any list of blocked news groups in countries that tried to ban (things like pornography)--those lists typically became popular guides for those seeking the material online. !!
26) "Anonymity on the net is one area where the standards that apply in the everyday physical world life are not extended rationally--people panic about the potential for abuse of anonymous remailers while simultaneously not questioning the existence on every street corner of devices to support anonymous interactions: mailboxes and telephone booths." Great quote.
Ch 8: Never Wrestle a Pig
27) On discrimination against women on the early internet. "If women feel the net is hostile, the answer is to build [places they want] rather than waiting for someone else, probably a male-dominated technology company, to create 'women friendly' spaces and sell access to them."
28) This unfortunate chapter is boring, it breaks no new ground. In fact I'm thinking a millennial reader might be easily offended by the author's views on online safety as she argues online sexual harassment is "a huge red herring" and "women are immeasurably safer working online than they are traveling across a campus or city."
Ch 9: Unsafe Sex in the Red Page District
29) Paraphrasing the author: There's much less pornography on the internet that people seem to think, than the media seems to imply, it's not that easy to find, and it's not that good anyway. The author wishes internet pornography were better!
30) "Things may change when there's a digital camera and a high-speed internet link and every bedroom, but for now most of the available material is fairly poor quality, mostly scanned-in photography from magazines... and remarkably repetitive amateur (text) sexual fantasies that go to show how bad the teaching of sex education and anatomy in our schools really is." I wonder what the author would make of Chaturbate.
31) True browsers enabled the ability to directly look at images (browsers contained decoding capability) rather than having to decode them from text or binary files.
32) Another interesting aspect of this chapter is how--25 years later--so few of these issues about censorship, pornography, indecency, etc., have been solved on even the most basic level. We're still arguing about this stuff.
Ch 10: The Wrong Side of the Passwords
33) On the scariness of the word hacker.
34) The 2600Hz tone used for phone phreaking: "curiously (and famously), for a time whistles tuned to exactly that tone were distributed as prizes in boxes of the cereal Cap'n Crunch; the early phreaker who discovered this, John Draper, was for a long time known by that name."
35) Interesting hearing the author's description of some of the hackers she interviews and spends time with: the word "neckbeard" didn't exist when this book was written, but this female author uses some of the same kind of condescension towards these (admittedly unusual) dudes.
36) Julf Helsingius (see above) turns out to be a real hero on many levels in this book.
Ch 11: Beyond the Borderline
37) This chapter is basically about trolls, but the word didn't exist back then to label the concept. It's kind of quaint to think about 1990s-era Usenet trolls in the context of today, when you can literally lose your intellectual virginity in seconds just from scrolling through a random Youtube comment thread.
Ch 12: Garbage In, Garbage Out
38) Early efforts at commercializing the internet. Yahoo runs a single banner ad.
39) Early and wildly varying efforts at estimating how many internet users there were, who they were, what their user metrics were, etc., and then conflict with privacy advocates on gathering this information. Obviously you need metrics if you want advertisers to understand what value they're getting from advertising. Interesting to compare these early, pitiful efforts at info-gathering to the total panopticon we have today.
Ch 13: Grass Roots
40) "Great Democratic advances were predicted for radio, too, and yet in the United States it became a commercially dominated medium largely controlled by a few corporate interests. This could also happen to the Net." Holy cow this was the understatement of the year...
41) This chapter is about making the internet available for everyone, with standard handwringing about people "left behind."
42) Also notable to think about this author's dystopian horror at the idea of employers checking out prospective employees by looking at their Usenet and mailing list posts, when today every aspect of your online identity is likely thoroughly checked/followed by your company's HR department...
Ch 14: The Net is Dead
43) Many of the network configuration errors that happened in the 1990s (like with AOL for example) were ultimately easily solved and now don't present a problem, even though the internet operates at orders of magnitude more capacity and complexity and usage. See for example Bob Metcalf, founder of 3Com, and his warning that the internet would start collapsing by 1996. Just goes to show that the problems you think you have... usually aren't the real problems you're gonna have.
44) Even the big phone companies that used to complain about all the flat rate access people used to dial into their ISPs, telco service providers like PacTel for example, most of these once-huge telecom firms hardly exist any more.
45) This book really is one long proof of the dual truism that: 1) the things you think are problems aren't the problems you think they are, and 2) the things you think aren't problems often turn out to be your worst problems. Predictions are hard, especially about the future.
46) That said, one key future "problem" that was visible even to this author was the gradual centralization and consolidation of various internet backbone/infrastructure companies. Of course what eventually happened was total centralization of nearly everything: internet content, backbone, service providers/ISPs, social media. Everything centralized and oligopolized.
47) Much of this chapter is totally obsolete; most of the companies don't exist anymore (companies like NYNEX or PacTel, etc); most of the technical details the author discusses don't matter anymore (like the fact that telephone voice services are circuit switched as opposed to packet switched like internet services--now all of this stuff is packet based). It just goes to show how, in any given era, most contemporaneous information is just not worth knowing. If someone could just have told me that at the time!
Ch 15: Networks of Trust
48) Back in 1996 when this book was conceived and written, the internet was still young, and it looks back onto a period that to a modern reader would be the really old days, like back when you could read all of Usenet in a single day, or when you could email Bill Gates as a random and he'd actually answer you at 2am that night.
49) An interesting comment from the author about trust: "In a small community, online or real, you assume that everyone you meet is trustworthy unless proven otherwise, in a large one, you assume the reverse."
Ch 16: Dumping Tea in the Virtual Harbor
50) John Perry Barlow's Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace. I don't know if Barlow is still alive or not but he should be spinning in his grave based on what's going on these days online.
51) This is a weirdly placed chapter on weirdly chosen subjects: essentially, it's first a screed against libertarianism (the author thinks libertarians are overrepresented among internet users), and then it's a screed about over-regulation. It's not clear in this chapter of word salad what precisely the author is trying to say; worse, it's uninteresting.
To Read:
David Kahn: The Codebreakers (1200p!)
John Bamford: The Puzzle Palace (comprehensive history of the NSA)
Niels Ferguson: Cryptography Engineering: Design Principles and Practical Applications
Dee Brown: Wondrous Times on the Frontier
Katie Hafner and John Markoff: Cyberpunk
Jonathan Littman: The Fugitive Game: Online with Kevin Mitnick (Mitnick was a famous hacker)
Ivars Peterson: Fatal Defect
