westid

when i was little, i had a commodore 64. during that time at some point an amiga 1200 also. it wasn’t until i was ten years old that i was able to (occasionally) use a PC with an hard disk. the general frustration people have about computers was as bad then as it is now

that year, in 1998; there was this mad program called comic chat and it came bundled in to the retailer’s OEM version of windows. everyone communicated in plain text because TLS wasn’t properly “invented” yet, there were no mobile phones, the word app didn’t exist. and these people were brought together by this massive network of microsoft’s own exchange 5.5 servers. there’s ancience, but in the case of computers the online world back then was absolutely archaic. i can still remember the IP address you had to connect to in order to enter this weird, frivolously lawless world: 207.46.216.26

i got to meet all sorts of people, from all over the world. you didn’t have to wait for everyone to approve of you before you’re allowed to be in on what they were talking about, or for the privilege of being in their presence as they talked to begin with. i learned a lot about people, from probably an angle that was certainly not lined up nicely with everyone else’s

there were some horrible people too. the worst kind of people, and you may think that being a thirteen year old boy i wouldn’t have any problems in that regard. not nearly as much as girls do, but it weren’t something i didn’t notice. at the same time, i formed an ad-hoc alliance with a bunch of other people. they taught me how to work a computer, configuration, i had already learned about writing code by then. we would go and wage war against those people – crashing their computers, 450 “preteen” sick cunts thinking they were going to get a file full of pictures of me, but instead finding out that their bank accounts had been emptied and they can’t stop the display on their monitor from turning upside down. i made the CD tray start moving in and out, just made it that little bit more childish. distributed denial of service attack; thousands of compromised machines that were turned into some kind of giant death ray that would just fuck your home or office PC’s internet right off until i would get bored or it was time to move on somewhere else

after the MSN irc network shut down in february 2001, i had come to realise that a computer is more like a car. if you have the patience to go in and sort out the moving parts you can get it running pretty good – you also might fuck the car up and make it undriveable. the real excitement for me was that i was learning so much more than i probably did in the entire of my time in compulsory education, and there was still so much to learn, no matter how much i figured out. when you have a real passion about something, it’s never over. in the plaintext days everyone’s internet connection, let alone their machine, were always fair game. including my own… i gave as good as i got. but on a 56k dial-up, i literally never stood a chance

the internet was so much different then. we didn’t even have firewalls on our home PCs yet. the only firewall you could get was a machine mounted wherever you keep your server rack. my considered opinion: the context in which we use the internet is exactly the same, the paradigm has shifted. behavioural scientists were really onto something, that giving endpoint users a dopamine burst of self-actualisation was finally within their grasp. all they had to do was change the paradigm to one that suited their own interests as a corporation. then in came the brain-child of that philosophy: MSN messenger. it was all down hill from there

back then it was just for fun. like a bar [a lot of channels were gloriously called a bar] – now it’s mostly for convenience. i have always thought that it is the only decent way to communicate, and developed / tested my own client server software. but i never pushed myself further than that. not for a long time, anyway

since IRC was moved out of the mainstream of the computer world for good [especially in the year 2009 for some reason] there have been so many technical developments that can work for it. we have regular expressions now, which ascended us from being under attack to greatness. there are real advances in RSA elliptic curve digital signatures, the list that goes on and on and on

i’ve always kept and maintained a network ever since. i don’t know why – but one thing i can be sure of is that somehow this has enabled me to keep up to date with the process of how computing right across the board has leapt forward, but only noticed by the advancements in loading emails and web pages. IRC was invented in 1988 the same time my creators brought me to term. i don’t see any deeper meaning into that, it’s just a simple fact that i didn’t learn until years and years later on in my life

interesting to notice that, unless you’re on a company’s domain / private network where the administrator had had the task of manually setting up every new machine themselves, you get all sorts of security warnings and errors if your computer doesn’t come bundled with the security certificate that is handed down as a ‘chain of trust;’ beginning only in the place of an handful of massive multi-national companies, most of whom arrogantly certify themselves

privacy used to matter to people. now it’s gone the opposite way. if there is something on your mind, who gives a fuck? except you – and the negligible teeny tiny little people you consider are worthy enough to even know you – living ma best lyf !!1 nobody gives a fuck what i say [except you, my unwaveringly faithful fans who have tuned in to read of my nostalgia and woe :] so i decided to put my opinions somewhere else instead

social media is more like anti-social media. i deleted my accounts because it was all a bunch of shit. i made my own platform in that regard. capable of running thousands of users, all at the same time. nobody gives a fook about communicating in text, or having text colour. now emotional images [emojis] are actually pre-colourised for you, so you don’t have to decide whether you want a green person to shrug their shoulders, a red person to paint their nails on, or a blue person to give you a fist bump

only a handful of people use my platform but it’s not really something i care about because – except for the thousands of compromised PCs that scan the shit out of it round the clock, looking for a place to let their botnet command and control interface to dock – the people who do bother are people i would hope to see in any crowd in the first place

a network, ancillary in comparison to the other things for which i use my computer, cloud services, or servers; it’s more like a train set to me personally. not speaking for anyone else. but with every frustrating error, or spontaneous random attack of thousands of bots, i learn a little bit more every day. not just about the abstract [or architecture] of the machine we all rely on in every single little part of our lives, but the people who use them, and what my priorities are

save for connecting via the dark net with tor exit nodes [most of these exit nodes are based in north america … hmmmm ….] i reside in the only place online today where the things you say or do are ephemeral by default, you don’t have to add people or wait for them to come to you. once you have said your piece – whether or not you think they may or may not be listening to you – said piece gives you peace. because once you log off and/or shut down your machine [on such rare occasion] then the only place where that could possibly have ever been kept is right there in your memories; random access memories [daft punk got it so right] in your thoughts … in your mind

how would you deal with the fact that every little picture or character of text that you send, serves to rubber stamp or “cancel” you without any kind of way back from that? you can so easily be nonchalant about this because you have “nothing to hide” until one day you will discover someone has been using everything that you say against you. that’s when it’s time to switch yourself off and then back on again

at the moment, in the real power struggle of the world around us, has come to the point where people are actually needing to protest and campaign their right to be forgotten

it works for a computer, right?