the election has put me in a strange mood and that combined with the nostalgia (good and bad) of the past from things like that poster on the wall is so hitting very hard rn; jfc this is going to be stuck in my head all day today. thank you for sharing.
techno utopianism, the synthesis of defence lab hacker culture and the new left has inherited the flaws of both. the disillusion of the children raised on this heady mix was inevitable. nostalgia beckons, the punch card and mainframe once a symbol of dehumanization is now a quaint museum piece, sublime objects of engineering prowess. i could spend my whole life exploring the intricacies of these old systems. the dream of connecting people through computers is perverted into the goal of connecting to computers. "ah, but it could have been different, if only my preferred programming language or paradigm had won out!" so we tell ourselves, nursing our pet projects. ahhh i'm feeling depressed now
I've recently been watching a recreation of a old .nsv IPTV channel called RantTV. Most of the stuff on there is like from 1999-2005. Very old, even before YouTube. Most of the content revolves around this man called Sean Kennedy. Very fun to watch him yell and rant comedically into the mic. Mostly talks about government control, coperations, how great hackers and internet pirates are for society, "our current culture/society", paranoid-esque shit, etc. (And it has a Bad Religion song at the end of one of the shows, which I love)
Can't help but see how the landscape has changed in 20 years. How newspapers and TV and entertainment used to be so centrally controlled and limited, but now it has become so decentralized, you can literally find anything on the internet. How bunk conspiracies theories are now so prevelant, that QAnon has worked its way into office. How anti-vax rhetoric is so prevelant now that the U.S. government used it as a psy-op against foreign nations.
Anyway, I can't help but think of RantTV when I read this quote. Hits real hard.
COME JOIN US!Happy to see this mentioned here. RantMedia basically invented the whole idea of podcasts before the term even existed and they played a major role in establishing the hacker sub-culture. AFAIK their online radio ran basically non-stop for 20 years until 2019.
Patrolling with Sean Kennedy (both seasons) is on archive.org and still worth a watch today. Some of his tips are still applicable, (to this day I still go by his sanitize your products, you're not getting paid to promote a brand) and the rest just makes you sad, seeing how things changed over the decades.
Sometimes I wonder where
the fucking manended up. I know he wrote a few books but basically disappeared from the internet in the 2010s.
