Delay Line issue 001 Edward Vielmetti, Ann Arbor, MI 48104 In this issue: * Welcome and what this is about * Nostalgia for the past of the Internet * The history of the future of news * The demise of distributed systems * Re-establishing old connections * References == Welcome == Welcome to Delay Line. This is a new newsletter which never talks about anything new; rather, it quotes selectively from the unremembered past. It is written by Edward Vielmetti with the help of a cast of thousands, always credited to the best of my ability, but not always remembered. The premise of Delay Line is that we are bombarded in the Internet with the promise that everything we are looking at is always brand new, and that this is enough of a systematic myth that it bears countering with tales of 'borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s'. As such it is one part historical journal, one part sets of tales of past futures that never came to be, and a third part an excuse to ignore tonight's instant messages and instead read ten year old instant messages. == Retrofuturism == The study of the futures of the past is referred to as 'retrofuturism' by Lloyd Dunn, a 90s zine pioneer. This discipline looks at previous worlds and how their futures were depicted, in order to better understand what has and has not come about in its place. Every history has its future; my future of choice is the world circa about 1993, back in the day when the World Wide Web was just forming, before the BLINK tag, and when Gopher was still viable. You could imagine any future of the net and it just might come true. == The history of the future of news == The history of the future of news has quite a bit of fiction in it and some very useful fact. I'll share the facts first, since the fiction gets repeated over and over again in new guises, and the facts are much less often visited. My first exposure to the future of news was in reading bits of the Associated Press wire service, culled by the AI systems that ran at Stanford's SAIL lab, and subsequently forwarded out to mailing lists and the occasional Usenet newsgroup very selectively and somewhat surreptitiously. AP often had better stories than anything that the netnews people were writing - better writers, more detail, better quotes from more interesting people - and thus pulling in their stream meant that you were better informed for some increment of journalism. A subsequent experience with wire service news was a short lived commercial service we set up at MSEN that took the Reuters news wire, pulled it off a satellite dish, decoded it, and repackaged it as NNTP-ready Usenet news postings. Reuters had no clue that this was even possible, and they weren't happy when they found out, but I have to tell you that this is the only way to read breaking news - fresh stories off the wire as soon as each paragraph is complete. The typical history of news goes back to the "Daily Me", Nicholas Negroponte's fiction of a personalized newspaper that looks like something no one else would ever see. Lots of systems have been pushed into this void (as portals, customized clippings, or personal dashboards) and none of them are news wires; they all rely on some overly dumbed down Central Services bundling out a sanitized stream into neat little bits, surrounded by generic advertising for It's Not Butter. bleah. The other futuristic vision is a Stasi-like "hyperlocal" reporting, where every single person on every block is a snitch for a local news outlet, and no conversation in any cafe goes unreported. This is fine if you live in a fishbowl, and irritating otherwise. It's not clear how anyone will protect themselves from an irritated neighbor going on a network-assisted vendetta, so I guess you need to make good friends with your neighbors in this particular hyperlocal future. == Distributed systems vs centralized == Call me old-fashioned, I guess, but when I think of a future of news, I really want to be a wire service editor, with way too much copy streaming into my own desktop and lots of flexible tools to store it and sift through it and send back updates to be distributed elsewhere. We've lost in this late 2000s web 2.0 era of the net quite a bit of the distributed systems world view that characterized the 80s and 90s, and instead of world-wide confederations of independent systems we have Google and Twitter and Yahoo and Facebook. Allow me to be irritated by that just long enough to want to fix it. == Re-establishing old connections == A piece of my goal for this effort is to reconnect on my own terms with people who have faded out from the nets that I watch just because they don't read the same kinds of news that I watch, in part because the net has exploded in size and some part of that explosion wants me to twitch every time a movie star reaches for Twitter. Delay Line will promise to be slow in coming, and longer in format, if only to counteract that premise that shorter is better. It will not be possible to read it on a mobile phone screen, and it will look best on a 24x80 screen. My best source of long lived connections is the directories and accounts of long-dead systems. UUCP and Usenet maps are good, as are notes on old conference proceedings, ancient Rolodexes, and technical notes on long-dead protocols. Some of the people who were my teachers in this world have retired, and a few have passed away, and my upstart peers trying to overthrow the world of bisync with their analog modems are getting gray. == Terms and conditions == Unlike other things I've put together in the past, Delay Line is not free. You have to pay something to get it in your hands. I'll accept barter of many things, and won't insist on specific amounts, but at the very least you should be prepared to buy me a very fine lunch in order to get this. Perhaps indeed you'll be introduced to others who have bought that same very fine lunch. == References == "Borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s" is a line from LCD Soundsystem's "I'm Losing My Edge", a good theme song for this issue. Lloyd Dunn's "Photostatic 1983-1993" is a retrospective archive. http://psrf.detritus.net/ Lou Montulli gets blame for the BLINK tag. Prentiss Riddle gets credit for taking good notes for GopherCon, documenting the people who built a system later destroyed by the World Wide Web. Les Earnest is the person I associate with SAIL and their AP news wire. Tim Endres wrote the code to parse the Reuters satellite data, running on an Apple under A/UX. Negroponte wrote of "predictive models" for human behavior, which is just about enough motivation for me to smash the machine right there. == Credits == Copyright 2009 Edward Vielmetti. Redistribution of this document is encouraged, as long as you charge something for it, and give me half of what you get.