ASCII by Jason Scott

Hello Jason,

Hey there, Nathanael.

Well, first, let’s start with Facebook itself.

Facebook is the third of what is probably a quartet (or quintet) of the destruction of the innocence of computing.  First was viruses, second was malware, third is facebook. I suspect fourth will be related to control of networking itself, and fifth will be licensing of high level computer ability. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Facebook is a living computer nightmare.  Just as viruses took the advantages of sharing information on floppies and modems and revealed a devastating undercarriage to the whole process, making every computer transaction suspect… and just as spyware/malware took advantage of beautiful advances in computer strength and horsepower to turn your beloved machine of expression into a gatling gun of misery and assholery… Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World Wide Web and turning it into a miserable IT cube farm of pseudo human interaction, a bastardized form of e-mail, of mailing lists, of photo albums, of friendship. While I can’t really imply that it was going to be any other way, I can not sit by and act like this whole turn of events hasn’t resulted in an epidemic of ruin that will have consequences far-reaching from anything related to archiving.

Each era of computing has had companies that rose above the others, whose stratospheric rise in income and success and mindshare and whatever else marketing fucktards want to call it turned heads. A start-up goes from an eyebrow-raiser to a non-proper noun to a verb. A million asshole salespeople and technological wannabes and pundits and sniffing elites make the word longer, as in “like facebook”. Something is like facebook, does something like facebook, wants to be like facebook, is like facebook but in some way different that somehow will magically propel it in even farther, without realizing that under contemporary situations, facebook is as high up as you want to go.

Microsoft did awful fucking things. I mean, all the time. Really awful things. So did IBM, way back when. Compaq? Assholery. Sony? Doing ten awful fucking things this morning before breakfast. Of course awful things are on the agenda and the lifeblood of any firm so big that it can affect law, affect standards, make millionaires just sucking under its folding metal chair for breadcrumbs. Facebook is just doing it to People.

People aren’t just eating Facebook’s Shit Sherbet of overnight upgrades, of lack of guarantees and standards, of enveloping tendrils of web standard breaking. They are shoveling it down. They’re grabbing two crazy handfuls of Facebook every minute of every day when they’re not forced to walk down a hallway or look up from their phones or ipads or laptops or consoles. They’re grabbing buckets of Facebook and finding ways to shove it down with one hand while pawing around for a second bucket.  People have bought the fuck in.

Remember that week when Facebook decided which of your friends would show up on your what’s new thing? That was great. Remember a week or two ago when they changed the behavior of the Enter key in text boxes? Awesome. How about that nosebleed you got when they changed privacy/information standards six different ways, trying them on like new Malibu Stacy hats, as an audience ranging from barely literate mouthbreathers to computer scientists got to experience One True Rogering Of Personal Information. And there we all were! We wondered if there was some sort of App we could install in Facebook to give us a third bucket and arm to keep that Sherbet coming.

The old saw is that people don’t understand that Facebook doesn’t consider the users their customers – they consider the advertisers their customers. Make no mistake, this is true... but it implies that Facebook takes some sort of benign “let’s keep humming along and use this big herd of moos to our advantage”. But it doesn’t. Facebook actively and constantly changes up the game, makes things more intrusive, couldn’t give less of a shit about your identity, your worth, your culture, your knowledge, your humanity, or even the cohesive maintenance of what makes you you. Facebook couldn’t care less about you than if it was born in your lower intestine and ripped out of you in the middle of the night.

I use Facebook every single day. Because of its disgust and distaste for borders and stratum, I’ve gotten back in touch with some very important folks in my past, and used Facebook to get information about a variety of people and figures that are relevant to my work in history and research. I can do this because Facebook lets you rip through millions of profiles to spearfish just the knowledge you need, out of a blazing torrent of intrusion and exposure, and grab the tailcoat of a person’s life and yank hard, real hard. I use Facebook, in other words, like a search tool on human beings. For that, it is really great.

But the fact that anyone would put anything of any unique nature on there, that matters to them, is beyond insanity – it’s identity suicide. It’s like you are intentionally driving down the road of life, ripping pages of your journal and photo albums, and tossing them out the window. Good luck finding anything again. Good luck knowing in six months, a year, something will even be findable. Try and communicate with anyone using their designed-by-a-second-trimester-fetus “message” system with any of the features from the last 30 years. Go back and try and negotiate it for search and topic control and usefulness. No. Not happening. Everything on Facebook is Now. Nothing, and I mean nothing on Facebook is Then. Or even last month.

So asking me about the archiving-ness or containering or long-term prospect of Facebook for anything, the answer is: none. None. Not a whit or a jot or a tiddle. It is like an ever-burning fire of our memories, gleefully growing as we toss endless amounts of information and self and knowledge into it, only to have it added to columns of advertiser-related facts we do not see and do not control and do not understand.

As we watch this machine, this engine that runs on memories and identity and watch it sell every last bit of us to anyone who will pay, as it mulches under our self and our dreams and our ideas and turns them into a grey miserable paste suitable for a side dish or the full entree of the human online experience, I am sure many of us will say it’s no big deal. It should say something that in the face of this situation, having watched what has happened, what has transpired and likely will transpire, that I am not even trying. I’m not giving one goddamned second of thought to extraction or archiving or longevity or meaning. I can only hope that all the projects and processes and memories and history that I am focusing on will make me happy in the face of the colorless, null-void cloud of pre-collapsed galaxy that is the Facebook Nebula.

Thanks for your question!

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You know those stories where you go “man, when I write out the big long memoir and history, that’s gonna be one fuckin’ funny chapter”? And then you don’t? And then they’re gone? This is one of those, except it’s not going to be gone. I’m putting it here, after reading this excellent analysis of the Playstation logo.  The writer is unsure how to find certain aspects of the history and so he’s sad he can only do a little bit of the work and do massive leaps of logic where he wouldn’t have to if he could talk to the right people, the names of which are gone. That made me sad for him. And it reminded me of a story.

So, this may or may not be that well known, but not only do I fucking hate Sony, I worked for Sony for a year. This was when I was hired as tech support at Psygnosis USA. I loved everything about Psygnosis, past and present, and so I was absolutely delighted to work there, and the only downside was they’d been bought by Sony, and Sony are assholes. In fact, Sony was in the process of wanting to rename Psygnosis, with the distinct logo and brand and all that, to SCEA – “Sony Computer Entertainment of America”. It was like replacing an incredibly unique sculpture with a cinderblock.

One of the side effects was I got to be there just as the Playstation was introduced. I got to see a development console come in, one of the blue ones.  Here’s something I’d forgotten until I just thought of it – when the development kits with the blue playstation went out to the companies, it had 8mb of memory to work with. At some point, Sony decided that the Playstation would not have 8mb of memory – too expensive. So they made it two. So in some cases, various developers were caught flatfooted when the system they were developing on had its total available memory cut to 25%. On that development station, I was able to play a few games before they got squashed, so some games had more parallax backgrounds (Adventures of Lomax, which did not have a lemming for the main character at this time), or additional characters (Dark Stalkers), etc.  I know Psygnosis had to help in the background with some of these companies, to help Sony ensure as many launch titles as well. No, this isn’t the story yet.

Additionally, and this again is probably not too well known, Sony was banking everything on the Playstation – they had to pull back the 8mb RAM to 2 for this reason, as they were losing money on every console (a process that still takes place, if you follow that sort of thing). But what I heard, and this is hearsay, was that if the Playstation had tanked, pulled a 3DO or perhaps a TI-994/a to be exact, it would have SUNK SONY. They’d survive, of course – those monstrous places always do. But they’d be completely wrecked as a force in the world. People would be losing jobs by the boatloads. It would have been a shadow, until outside investment or some other angel force helped them out of the hole. I’m just saying they had a lot riding on the Playstation.

So part of this, I think, explains Sony’s reliance on Sony Europe on how to make the Playstation play to western markets. While Sony would do what it could locally in Japan to bolster this game machine to the populace, the massive audiences of Europe and most specifically North America were the critical battleground to win. I suppose I could launch into some portrayal of which consoles were active and what the lines were, but let’s keep our eyes on the main theme: Sony. Desperate. Lots riding on the Playstation. Willing to Do Anything.

So in this period, when the plans are being drawn to come up with how to market the Playstation, the decision was made: Club Culture. Nightclubs, and dance halls and lounges and whatever the hell else had a blasting beat and dancefloor and tons of bodies was going to be one of the vanguards of the Playstation’s marketing assault.

This helps explain, I hope, Wipeout, the Psygnosis runaway hit. Hey, funny story there. So Sony was in the process of making Psygnosis change its name to SCEA (Sony Computer Entertainment of America, remember) and things looked dim; one of the co-founders of Psygnosis had left some time ago, leaving just one. And just when it started to happen, Wipeout became a huge goddamned hit and sold a bunch of copies (and, ostensibly, Playstations), and Psygnosis’ co-founder basically went “Nah, fuck you, we’re sticking with Psygnosis”, and so the name stuck for another half-decade before he left and Sony finally named it to “SCEA”, as planned. Oh, but that gets even weirder, because for a while, the European branch of SCEA became known as “SCEA Europe”. Oh, you heard right – SONY COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT OF AMERICA OF EUROPE.

Wipeout was a massive hit, one of Psygnosis’ biggest, up there with Lemmings, which is what put Psygnosis (and DMA, later Rockstar) on the map. It was, after all, the thing that made you buy a Playstation. But wait! You probably never knew this, but Psygnosis ported and came out with versions of Wipeout for the Sega Saturn and for PC. Hold up for a moment, and consider that. A wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony, given development money to make a first-class launch title for their new console, then goes ahead and ports it to all of that console’s rivals. Can you fucking IMAGINE what the sound must have been when the Sony people found out? Oh man, it must have been dazzling.

No! I’m still not at the story quite yet!

So, if you take a look at Wipeout, you can see how this whole “Club Culture” idea was being spread through it. For the soundtrack, Sony pulled out all the stops and got all sorts of hot groups like Prodigy, Future Sound of London and Chemical Brothers to be what was blasting on your speakers and your hot flatscreen TV. The game showed up in the Hackers movie, although in that case they used the SGI-developed prototype/animation system instead of the not-as-nice Playstation version. You were in the future, but the soundtrack was perfect contemporary club hits.  Too bad they only had licensed them for Europe – when Wipeout came over to the US, they had to mostly make new soundtrack cuts, which fell to a wonderful musician named Tim Wright, who under the pseudonym Cold Storage wrote all manner of club-ish hits that slipped right in among chart-topping hits. Not bad, Tim.

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I know, lots of things are on my plate and all of us are very busy with whatever has the emotive grip of the world on any moment on twitter, but I suddenly had this weird realization.

Who designed Mr. Do!?

This is what Mr. Do! looks like:

Depending on how rich or poor you think of early 1980s video games, Mr. Do! is either a straight-on Dig Dug ripoff, or a brilliant reworking of some of Dig Dug’s concepts into a basically unique transformative work. It certainly had all sorts of features that its Atari/Namco-designed counterpart did not, and there was absolutely unique artistry in Mr. Do! that was a sufficient character enough to make multiple sequels (Mr. Do!’s Wild Ride, Mr. Do!’s Castle, Do! Run Run, and so on) and each of those were almost brand-new games on their own, so I hope the value of Mr. Do! isn’t called into question.

Now, make no mistake – there is plenty of information about Mr. Do! out there. Here’s some excellent entries on the game itself, maintained by a wide range of folks: The Killer List of Videogames, Exotica, and so on. There’s no question that the concept of Mr. Do and even all sorts of technical knowledge about the game has been preserved.

But seriously. We have no stories of how the game came about, no information about who came up with the concept and why, what made them choose the design elements they did… we don’t know how many people worked on this game, how the team was structured, whether Taito/Universal had a single person slaving away on this project or a pile of folks. We are utterly in the dark.

And don’t think I’m really talking about only Mr. Do! here – it’s not just what this game’s history consists of and whether it has any meaning to you or me specifically. It’s that there’s a whole raft of knowledge and history that we are going to lose about videogames, and that seems a real shame. Who were the guys behind the quick-and-dirty Crazy Kong bootleg? What about Venture by Exidy? There are so many examples of this stuff falling between the cracks.

This is why I got into the whole documentary gig in the first place – tracking down folks who unknowingly (or knowingly) influenced a lot of people but had no spotlight or recording of their side of the story around. It took a hell of a lot of time to find the ANSI artist Ebony Eyes, for example, or to make all the arrangements to interview John Madill, who was FidoNet node #2. I would have hoped that at this point, even with places like Atari hiding who did what for various videogames, to know, ultimately, who these people were. I am very afraid we have not done a good job tracking them down, and we’re going to lose this knowledge forever.

Update: So, after some luck and research, I’ve found the name of the designer: Kazutoshi Ueda. But that’s about it – I don’t have photos, interviews, writings, history, or anything else. I am sure some of this is a language gap, but still – it’s a real shame so little about him has trickled out into the world, and my point stands.

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Obviously other things are starting to come to the forefront with regards to saving digital history, but starting projects and not seeing them to fruition/completion is no way to go about life, even if it’s a business plan for some people.

So, the Geocities Torrent, a 900gb monster compressed to 643gb and spread via the usual channels for such things, turned out to have a slight flaw – it was fucking huge. And for UNIX filesystems only – run it on Windows are you are a sad little torrenting panda. Yet another flaw was that I only occasionally create new torrents, and I almost never create torrents that are any size, and a whole lot of buffoonery occurred, meaning we are now where a handful of folks are sitting at 99.95% downloaded and have been sitting there for a while.

This is all my fault. There was a lot of data, with a lot of time involved, and I should have immediately made a copy of the resulting archives and shipped drives to various locations. That’s what I’d do now. I’d also have made the filenames non-case-sensitive. So yeah, bad on me.

What I will stand with pride on, however, is the whole idea of the torrent in the first place. Released one year after the closure of Geocities, the actual idea of Geocities had already faded to nothing. With the announcement of the torrent, the lights came back on and a lot of press was generated about the loss of Geocities, the cavalier way Yahoo! had treated all this user data. The debate of data retention and web history was rekindled in a big way.

But, until now, it was pretty nigh impossible to get 100% of the torrent.

So, one of the most inspiring use of the available-but-slightly-damaged material was One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, an actual archeological study of the material in the Geocities morass we’d dumped on the world. Run by two professor-artists, Olia and Dragan, the weblog would push out greater and greater forays into the stories behind the works. In some cases, they found the actual people who had made the animated GIFs or who had created the pages, and talked to them. In some cases, they were too late, and the interviews became obituaries. It is VERY worth your time to check them out.

Like others, the happy pair started to become more and more cranky as the torrent failed to complete, as did people who wandered into the Archiveteam IRC channel. Let’s just say I was a tad undiplomatic. But, over time, we traced the problem to a handful of files that had gotten corrupted on the original sets of archives. I must point out: the original data downloaded was never corrupted, just the archives generated from them that were then used to generate the torrent. And, unfortunately, it is not entirely easy to generate drop-in replacements for files in the torrent. The solution became one of generating brand new archives for the corrupted files, and making a “patch” of sorts. And that’s what happened, although it took a good long time because THIS IS A LOT OF GEOCITIES.

As I am now retired from the over-5gb torrent business, Dragan and Olia went ahead, tested the archive, verified it all worked, and have made a new torrent.

HERE IS THE NEW TORRENT. YOU WANT THIS ONE.

If you have been downloading the original torrent, do not despair. The files WILL match up – just go from one to the other, and it will add in what you’ve finished into this new torrent.

Again, the resulting files are not for everyone – they’re definitely not what you want if you just wanted to browse some old Geocities sites for nostalgia – the live sites Reocities and Geocities.WS do that job for you nicely. This is a collection for historians, for researchers, for developers. For those who want to do study on the heritage on something so soon gone and yet so much of part of how we got here.

Enjoy.

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OK, just a few days into my Archiving position at Archive.org, I think we’ve had enough time before I start initiating new projects.

In Archive.org’s realm, you can add “items”, which can be movies or books or software or what have you. You can then put those items into a “collection”, which is where you can declare all these disparate items as being related in some way. You can also put a bunch of collections into a greater, meta-collection. In other words, we have plenty of space, plenty of ways to classify, and there’s lots of items you can put in.

At this point people who know of me from the last ten years or so might not know that I was a co-founder and administrator of a MUSH, a MUD Variant, called TinyTIM. There’s still a site for it, and it’s still up, 21 years after being founded. Longevity, we has it.

While I had a storied and checkered history with MUDs, I do think it was worth the years of my life I spent doing it, and I can personally attest there’s a rich enough tapestry of artifacts, lore, events and people that it is an absolutely valid “thing”. It’s something worth writing books about.  It’s something worth making a documentary about. And it is certainly and completely critical thing to archive.

Wikipedia is quickly showing itself to have an unexpected measurement usage: it is an early-warning system for finding out what knowledge is falling out of favor and has a danger of being forgotten or lost. At one point, they started attacking the demoscene pages, anything with groups or events, and desperate attempts to keep the articles about Demoscene-related subjects revealed obvious things, like how Wikipedia Encourages Bureaucratic Assholes, but also less-obvious things, like how there was at best spotty examples of specific demoscene information in a greater social context. If you knew where to look, you could find these artifacts and stories, but since Wikipedia only wants an ever-shifting set of “legitimate” sources for the viability of a subject, a bunch of stuff was deleted.

Well, they started doing it with MUDs. And MUDs, trust me, are as real and vital a subject to our computing history as many others. MUDs were virtual spaces dealing with the wonder and misery of human nature long before these started showing up in what we currently call social media. They were mass communities that spanned the globe, led to relationships and hatreds, and influenced a generation of computer users in how they would think about these computers as tools and barriers. So, Wikipedia’s assery is history’s gain, because the fire is lit.

It’s time for a MUD archive.

Now, I will happily take on this mantle. I am your go-to guy for collecting MUD history, lore, data, stories, you name it. I want photos. Recordings. Listings. Source Code. Webgrabs. Lectures. Heck, databases and .tar files sitting in the back of your hard drives. I will help you get them on the archive, get them into the collection, ask you the questions you need to answer and do the lifting. I am here for you.

Let’s not let this die. I conducted interviews with MUD’s co-founder Richard Bartle and TinyMUD’s creator Jim Aspnes as part of GET LAMP. I will ensure these get onto the Internet Archive. I will provide any materials I can related to my own MUD life. I will start contacting archives out there and see about copies getting on the Archive.

It’s time. Let’s go. Spread the word. My e-mail address, and aww yeah do I love saying this, is jscott@archive.org.

Let the work begin.

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