Bullshit. I haven't posted yet. I waited for Suki to post because I knew what he was going to say.Spawn of Yanni wrote:Everything that needs to be said has been said.
So I think it's funny, the people here who contrast us with the chans. I like the chans; I'm a regular-ish on 420chan. The admins of 420chan, Kirt and Sparto, met over the Internet, and now live together. They met over 420chan, even. 420chan holds drinkathons and smokeathons and tinychats and it can get damn personal at times. Some people from there have invited me to come hang out or do things. One of my best childhood friends is a regular on the place. I've had conversations that go something like this: "Did you post ###?" "Hahaha, yeah, that was me". Crazy shit, that we can recognize each other through the hilarious, horrible anonymous BBS that makes up the place, and /weed/ has over two and a half million posts these days. I'll get back to that last bit in a moment.
Point is, though, when humans are involved, any form of communication can be as intimate or as barren as any other. It's a function of the people using them and how they choose to use them. When Kablizzy uses them, when SlappyMcGee uses them, cool things happen. When rubico uses them, he does illegal things to impress people, like hacking Sarah Palin's e-mail. I don't actually know a damn thing about rubico, but he was a good example.
I do this scythe thing a lot. There are more than a few Internet communities plagued by the demon known only as scythe. I've used other names, too, and they're really all the same, with the exceptions of the ones that aren't. Here are a few: the name (and it's subtle variations) I use wherever I think I'll be stalked and harassed to no end, the name I had planned to use as a contributor to open-source, the name I use on tornet, and the name I used on "raids" from back when /i/ was good, those little stints where we would cheer up the depressed by throwing them a pizza party. Those were all bullshit, by the way. I mean, the names were real, but there's no real difference between this place and any of the places I had used those names.
The difference was me, it was how I was acting, that was how I chose the names. I was never going to be stalked when there were more interesting people to stalk, none of it ever really mattered (Maybe tornet mattered). Those places didn't make me wear the mask, the Internet didn't make me wear the mask, I made me wear the mask. The ASCII character codes in this post encode no less meaningful form of information than the pressure fluctuations in my voice. If I say "it's the Internet, it doesn't matter", I'm saying "I'm scythe, it doesn't matter" (or "I'm ***, it doesn't matter"). Saying somewhere is "the Internet", where you expect the meaning of "the Internet" to be implied, is saying precisely shit about the place, and plenty of things about you. It's saying "you don't know who I am, and I don't care about you", sorta. And that's cool, because you all don't know who I am. I'm 48 bits. "scythe".
But those masks all suck. My Californian buddy can catch my posts when there's nothing more attached to them than "Faggy Tiddlewinks ID:zOWna8lK". There's a person writing all of this, and he writes most of the shit he writes in the same choppy, pretentiously colloquial style that this is written in. Sometimes there are more goddamn cocksucking curse words. When I troll, I say most of the shit I would have said otherwise, only condescending. It is breathtakingly effective, might I add. The difference between that person at two different times is how he's thinking, not the name he's wearing. It used to be how I felt when I sat down that determined the sites I visited, the name I used, the shit I wrote. Casts a different light on /b/, if you think about it. What if it's composed of perfectly normal people who only post there when they feel like acting like an asshole? Shit, what about the places composed of perfectly normal people who only post there when they feel like acting nice? They're just as shitty as /b/, but in a subtler way. Read AskReddit for a while and you'll start to catch the vibe I'm talking about. The saccharine nature of the place is worse than the trolls that plague it. Anyway, fuck reddit, it has nothing to do with this essay.
Point being, Internet you and real you are pretty much the damn same, and it's a shock if anyone hasn't figured that out yet. Personal info means shit all. Shit all. Why Suki cares that he knows nothing about Atilla is beyond me. Atilla was never even here; he didn't contribute much. Related. When he posts on /b/, Kirt acts as much like a /b/tard as anyone even though everyone knows he's Aubrey Cottle of Ontario, and that he didn't get much sleep last Thursday. The difference between Kablizzy and Tsukatu on Metanet is confined to the way they think. That is to say that the Internet, and /b/, is not a place, it's not a form of communication, it's the way we think about our communication, our state of mind if you will.
It's a difference in Dave and Grant's perceived and real states of mind that we've created this thread for. Grant pretended to find us interesting and want to share his experiences with us when he really found us intimidating (lol?) and wanted to impress us. Dave pretended to find us cool and want to hang out with us when he really found us stupid and wanted to fuck with us -at first- and later he legitimately found us cool and didn't want to alienate us and actually wanted to hang out with us, and yet it's the pretense of longtime honesty that had people angry (if in 2006, he had simply said "oh, some of this is bullshit, sorry", nobody would have raised an eyebrow). I mean, I accuse neither of any malice at all, though I could persist in being an asshole armchair psychoanalyst if I so desired. I can't say much more about Dave, because I'm not a part of the tight-knit community here (Dave once said "it's not worth trying". Whether he just wanted me to fuck off I'm not sure and not concerned.) I can't say much more about Grant, because there isn't anything more to say.
But I'd like to reference Zed Shaw, a brilliant hacker who makes Suki look both kind and dumb, for The Impermanence, Karma, and Bad Behavior of Why the Lucky Stiff. Zed captures how I feel about this whole thing quite perfectly. If I might talk about _why, he was a member of the Ruby community who constructed a hilarious persona that put blue_tetris to shame, and while doing so created some pretty awesome things (Camping, Markaby, Try Ruby, Shoes, WPGTR). The guy was a rockstar, and I'm sure the real why was every bit as hilarious as the why that hung out on IRC, but that doesn't mean that acting like _why wasn't showing a healthy amount of disrespect for your compatriots. In a way, it didn't matter at all when _why did it, because the purpose of the hacking community is to produce software, lots of software, and excellent software. But Zed has a point: there is nothing noble or valuable in the "rockstar" persona he gave off, nor in the "rockstar" persona worn by either Dave or Grant, and certainly not when you let that interfere with the main purpose of the project you're working on.
As to whether either of them *did* let it interfere with the "project" they were "working on", that's only up to them to decide. But I certainly can't let the idea of "the Internet" as a machine that turns normal people into assholes gain traction, because it's a lie. The asshole at the keyboard is the same asshole at parties in their asshole frame of mind.
tl;dr: stoner would like to remind you that it's all in your head, maaaaaaan.
PS: You hadn't heard? I was under the impression that everyone had heard. The bird, bird, bird, b-bird is the word.
