You’re stupid and I hate you. I haven’t even met you, don’t even know where you are or what else you do, and I hate you.

It’s 7 in the morning. I’ve been doing a lot of not sleeping lately. I’ve been doing a lot of not sleeping for months. I’ve been working on backing up hundreds of gigabytes of data that you decided to delete. I hate you.

Somehow you thought this was a brilliant idea, to go ahead and shut down that GeoCities property because hey, it’s not a money-maker and it’s primarily a free service and someone, maybe Carol Bartz, maybe someone trying to impress Carol Bartz, told someone who wasn’t you that money needed to be saved and businesses needed to be gotten out of, and who the hell cares about Geocities anyway?

Maybe whatever retarded version of an RSS feeder told you that this was a brilliant move, this easy-before-breakfast shotgun death of GeoCities, since everyone made fun of it even being up. “Ha ha,” went the kind of people who are tasked with writing a half-dozen stories a day to keep the ad clicks coming. “Ha ha, Geocities was still up, isn’t that stupid. Good riddance to it.” You probably read some form of that and considered yourself one brilliant little middle manager indeed.

Well, you’re not. I’m at the vortex of a lot of people trying to save the data you flicked away, people who didn’t have to be indoctrinated or convinced or scammed or otherwise thrust into the role of data duplication of GeoCities because the obviousness of it is on its face. This is fifteen years and decades of man-hours of work that you’re destroying, blowing away because it looks better on the bottom line. You could have sold it, but that’s too much work. You could have donated it to archive.org, but I know that makes your reptilian brain hurt and so I understand that one. But you are, by this action, destroying so much.

I’m sure you think this is all going to go down with a silent little bump, like a robin landing on a nest in winter. Oh, you haven’t heard it yet, idiot. Go ahead and do a search on a real-time news engine, like, oh, Google’s. Go ahead and search for “geocities.com” in news and watch all the places that are, even in the last 24 hours, linking to Geocities sites in press releases and notices and what have you. People who are depending on it being there past Monday and apparently you have utterly failed to notify. These people are going to be hella fucking pissed when they find out that you took their stuff down, deleted it, and then hit the hotel bar by 4. They’re going to want their stuff back.

Remember the great Yahoo Geocities Boycott of 1999? Of course you don’t, you’re an idiot. But in that fight, Yahoo dropped new property-grabs on Geocities when they bought it, and declared that all data on it was theirs, and they could do anything they wanted to do with it. People flipped the fuck out and started going after Yahoo then, called for a boycott, and Yahoo backed down. Yahoo had people back then, people with a brain. People who heard other people being angry and thought “wow, people are angry at this action” instead of what you think, which is a sound not dissimilar to a cuckoo clock in a fishtank. The people of Geocities knew they had something very meaningful there, and wanted to protect it, and attempts to do otherwise drove them batshit. And now you’re going to delete it all. I hate you.

So here we are, with me spending way too much of my time working with good people to back up Geocities. We asked Yahoo for a number, some idea, some rough concept of exactly how much data is in the array. We don’t know if we have 10% or 80% or 99% of the data in Geocities. Nobody will tell us because there’s a germ of a concept of some sort of privacy violation in telling us. Which is fine. Except it’s retarded and stupid. We’re asking for a rough idea of all the people you are fucking so we can make them less fucked, but that’s not what you think we’re asking so we’ve just been skullhumping your servers day and night for six months, redundantly grabbing everything we can just to make sure we’re not missing anything. I hate you.

So now in two days you’re going to shut this place down, this collection of genealogy and pages by people who’ve died and collections of writing and art and music and you’re going to turn it into dust because Carol Bartz said Yahoo needed to save a few bucks and the same idiocy that shut down Yahoo Briefcase, Yahoo Briefcase which probably fit on a USB stick by the time it closed down for fuck’s sake, is going to shut down Geocities.  I would say something like “I hope you know what you are doing”, but I’m sure to you it would sound like me going ‘blah blah blah blah non-functioning-capital gains blah blah” and then your eyes would narrow and you’d ask me to stop shouting.

This has to have been one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done, and it’s your fault. Thanks to your level of galactic short-sighted stupid, I just basically got into the hosting business because I’m going to arrange for people to get mirrors of all the stuff we’ve downloaded and we’re going to keep putting it up and you’re going to keep seeing it up there and we’re going to tell people how stupid you are until your suit is a pile of rags in a garage and your car is holding soup in a hundred supermarkets.

I hate you.

Categorised as: computer history | jason his own self

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