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Friday October 10, 2014

One of the things that intrigued me about Tilde Club was the concept of going back. Going back in time, to a simpler web, a simpler Internet. True Nerd. Some of that is probably a reaction to how awful a lot of what we’ve created has become.

I bought into the hype. I bought into the 90s. I was in college and dumb and full of optimism and a certain zealotry that I no longer really subscribe to. This Internet thing is world changing. It’s going to connect us all and bring down governments and make for a more equitable, educated, society. It was going to end all wars.

Instead, we got Reddit. And really good/bad at trolling. And perpetual war. War bloggers. Lol. War bloggers. Everything is disappointing.

But who knows, who knows. We’re just getting started. We are, as I heard Stewart Butterfield say recently, just a decade to two in to a 100 year transformation. France in 1803.

So Tilde made me nostalgic, and I went looking for the first things I did on the Web. When I was young and dumb and full of optimism and a certain zealotry. But it’s all gone. It’s not even on the Internet archive. It just vanished, in a way that nothing you publish to the Web does anymore.

There’s this whole ephemeral thing going on now. That’s been going on. But it’s been applied for the most part to apps. Messages and photos and videos. Wut, wut.

What if you applied that thinking to the Web?

Anyway. I wanted to do something special on Tilde. Because for whatever reason, it feels like it deserves something special. Even if the audience is tiny. (Especially because the audience is tiny). I didn’t just want to make another retro Web page. Not that retro Web pages aren’t fun. I mean, look at my tables!

But what if you could use Tilde’s old-fashioned Unix sensibility to do something totally new? Or at least, original. Something you couldn’t get elsewhere. Something ephemeral that only exists for a few minutes, and then is gone forever. A static page that’s here and then gone, forever, faster than Google can get to it. That might be special. That might be a fun thing to do this weekend.

Assorted Junk

Stuff with more links:
Obscure Store
Fury.com
Memepool
Cardhouse
Pigdog
Rebel Alliance

Stuff for Reading:
The Baffler
Granta
Adbusters
The Journal of Mundane Behavior
Cool Beans
Gearhead
Juxtapoz
Hermenaut