Is there any work of literature that attempts to capture the spirit of the mid-to-late 2000s Internet, i.e. the milieu from which Yea Forums emerged? Weebs, anime, mall ninjas, trolls, furries, basement-dwelling autists, Wikipedia power struggles, forum drama, fandoms and metafandoms... It feels like nothing of this world has been depicted in literature, Encyclopedia Dramatica aside. And it's not like there's a shortage of interest: Chris Chan, who is situated perfectly at the intersection of all these subcultures, now attracts mainstream fascination.
Internet lit
Dominic Collins
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m.youtube.com
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eff.org
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wiki.bibanon.org
wiki.bibanon.org
wiki.bibanon.org
wiki.bibanon.org
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hardcoregaming101.net
cambus.net
youtu.be
twitter.com
Anthony Foster
Who wants to read a story about a bunch of autistic keyboard warriors? It would have no artistic merit, besides being a semi-entertaining read for people familiar with internet culture.
Sebastian Taylor
I'm sure that in 10/20 years a nostalgiafag will write another Ready Player One-like book about the 2000s. Either way nothig worth reading.
Jose James
My diary desu
Jackson Rogers
The emergence of the digital public sphere is an interesting historical period, especially before social media and smartphones. Things back then were more decentralized, less corporatised, and less about making money. It was a weird world that weird people escaped into.
I think it is possible it could be revived for a literary purpose, but agree that it is far more likely we will more likely see some 1990s/2000s nostalgia stories than a proper literary treatment of the times.
Aiden Peterson
it would either have to be based just on what's been archived or be written by an autist who was there
both sound like cruise control for cringe
Jeremiah Peterson
That is tears in the rain my friend.
Colton Gray
This but unironically
Julian Thomas
pic related.
John Peterson
Nathan Barley: Chris Morris' grand balzacian portrait of c. 2005 london new media shitheads i like it when the threads come together ie. early vice magazine and the much maligned hipster, flash animations. Maybe Sam Hyde is just an older angrier nathan barley.
m.youtube.com
On a more serious note: read Fred Turners from Counterculture to Cyberculture. If you are interested in the prehistory of the internet. The WELL ( Whole earth 'lectronic link) the acid cool aid test, milindustrial hippie collaboration, deadheads, John Perry Barlow, hackers who call themselves names like Phyber Optick and acid phreak, were TED talks come from, What Nick Land got from reading early WIRED magazine...
Barlow's cyberlibertarian manifestos are a bizarre combination of grateful dead lyrics affected cowboy talk and acid transhumanism. But the culture is recognizable middle class narcissists post counterculture types sci fi geeks, we ve all become a little like them.
Dominic Lewis
Ready Player One. Just autistic reference humor and longing for the good old days, as well as over gorging on pop media as well as "obscure" pop media.
Jose Smith
>12:57
>books 'n shit
is that where she got it from?
Jayden Mitchell
New times need new mediums, books can't compete. Q-GIF Montage is the most Yea Forums account of the Internet back in the days.
I swear to god: if you watch it on Youtube instead of in original Flash form, I will find you and mince your bodies into meat lasagna while you are sleeping.
Luke Roberts
Love to read about the 1990s Internet before social media etc
Jacob Roberts
Heres a big list
goodreads.com
Connor Kelly
looking forward to it
Cameron Bennett
It would be a nice concept if it wasnt the only major theme in the work and if it was handled with nuance
Joseph Walker
Alexander Reed
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
Jose Lopez
I had forgotten about that. Love it.
NobodyTM strikes a similar note.
Luis Thompson
bleeding edge
Grayson Hughes
Among others, John Rafman's video art shows this era can be ''aestheticised', thats certainly an important task, for something to be understood it has to go throught the imagination. I don't think the internet can be understood linearly, being essentially trauma, the shattering of all presence and aura into pornographic immediacy, the unworlding of the world. a diseased biomechanical assemblage. conceptualize the internet is as a massive Boschian hell. this is what the medieval images of hell were warning us about. 16th century neterlandish painting somehow felt this furryweeb potentiality lurking deep below the surface of the human. What is the relation of 'Cringe' to the Sacred?
vimeo.com
From Virginia Heffernan'sMagic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet(2016), nauseantingly twee sub-feuilletonistic drivel, but illustrative precisely because of how completely oblivious it is. This is where an Ivy League education gets you.
“As any American with children knows, our children have at least one bright, clear reason for being: to furnish subjects for digital photographs that can be corrected, cropped, captioned, organized, categorized, albumized, broadcast, turned into screen savers, and brandished on online social networks.For a parent this time-consuming vocation has twin payoffs: it wins you a break from your actual children while bringing you closer to their images. Pictures of kids, like idealized Victorian boys and girls, can be seen but not heard.”
“There’s no place to get a breath in the Twitter interface; all our thoughts live in stacked capsules, crunched up to stay small, as in some dystopic hive of the future. Or maybe not the future. Maybe now.Tweets are not diseased rings of glitchy minds. They’re epigrams, aphorisms, maxims, dictums, taglines, captions, slogans, and adages. Some are art, some are commercial; these are forms with integrity.”
Isaac Gomez
even though it was only the first 20 minutes, and 10 years before that period, matrix is the best artwork ive seen cover that 'life'
Lucas Thompson
Owen Ramirez
write more pls
Samuel White
There's what it was like to use America Online from a poor sap who decided to put his time into extract the most out of it.
There's what life was like when an MMORPG was so engrossing, it became a full time job in a corporation founded to earn virtual currency to compete and increase shareholder value in a virtual economy.
wiki.bibanon.org
There's also what life was life in the soul crushing cubicles where many internet posters whittled away their time on Something Awful from:
wiki.bibanon.org
And there's the stories posted to Yea Forums itself on 2007-2008, which double as a powerful snapshot of what the website, it's memes, and it's reputation was like at the time. So much has changed since.
wiki.bibanon.org
wiki.bibanon.org
Bonus game about English language BBS systems: hardcoregaming101.net
One of the last major dial up telnet BBS systems survived as a course management system in National Taiwan University, and remains a major discussion platform today. If you thought Shift_JIS art was cool, how about ANSI art?
Ian Adams
Who is the Aristotle of the 2010s?
Christopher Cox
Masters of doom by david kushner
Zachary Torres
please for the love of god, post. drench me in your sweet early 2ks cum I swear fuck
Ethan White
Encyclopedia Dramatica basically
Gabriel Foster
Welcom to the nhk...end thread
Sebastian Garcia
no
Asher Peterson
Hakan
Connor Garcia
The early 2000's was basically the late 90's but with flip phones.
Smart phones, streaming, and social media werent an all encompassing thing.
The internet was still for fucking weridos and nerds. Mostly white and asian guys arguing about star trek.
There wasnt any click bait. No one got offended if you did something funny. No one demanded you be censored or blocked.
I would describe the time period as sort of techno libertine.
Even capitalists would say some stupid shit like the internet was "the market place of ideas".
The internet and reality where separate worlds. If you talked about meme's or used internet lingo in real life people would not know what you were talking about, or if they did they would cringe.
The idea of women being on the internet was like some sort of myth.
I would say covering the time period from 2000-2006 would be that era.
2007 is when steve jobs ruins the world forever with the smart phone.
William Jenkins
The early internet age of history is so fascinating to me but as OP said very few people have written didley all about it. To most normies both Boomer and Zoomer the internet technically started after social media, post-Facebook, Reddit, Twitter to them but there was a ton of stuff before. That's one thing I got mad at The Social Network for. Other than glorifying Zuckerberg it completely glossed over WHAT the internet was like before Facebook.
Alexander Barnes
I have so many fond memories of this period. That picture makes me feel very nostalgic.
Michael Turner
Good point about streaming. It was incredibly hard to post videos on the internet at all before YouTube and Google Video came along in 2005. You had to find someone with enough webhosting space and bandwidth (preferably a private server) to withstand the traffic, and a lot of people were still on 56k dialup. I was in the speedrunning community in the early 2000s and shit was rough. We were still sending VHS tapes back and forth until like 2006
Carson Gutierrez
The weirdest thing is that part of me is still living in those times. I'm 24 and I see the internet so differently to someone who is only four years younger than me.
Social media and the popularization and corporatization of the internet have fundamentally damaged our society.
Jonathan Phillips
The early internet age of history belongs to Gen X. The history of this period is best documented in transgressive Gen X writings. It lasted 1990-2002 and finally killed off by MySpace.
Eli Ramirez
If you post your actual address I'll send my copy to you. Annotated and dog eared. I printed out some relevant posts from Yea Forums archives and 8ch nonsense as well.
Ayden Flores
>Social media and the popularization and corporatization of the internet have fundamentally damaged our society.
this is some peak zoom
Jordan Diaz
What are you talking about
Brayden Young
Why don't you just read old internet forum/bbs archives?
Gavin Perry
copy of what?
John Richardson
pic related
Liam Parker
y
Elijah Nguyen
you have my permission to kill yourself