Server side netizen

This is a personal statement, so I'll use first person. It is relevant to the pubwan movement, though, so this is probably an appropriate enough place to put it.

I suppose I became a netizen in 1991. My first exposure to the Internet happaned as a result of taking a computer science class at a local university. I didn't even know the internet existed when I started there. I was exploring the local filesystem and inevitably found my way to /usr/spool/news. I was udderly amaized. It was like letters to the editor, but without the editor. It was like talk radio, but without the call screener. It was like a 1980's style "bulletin board," but with multiple hosts. It was like ham radio, but without having to get a license. In a multi objective optimization sense, it was clearly the most significant development yet in the area of communication. I knew intuitively, of course, that it was too good to be true. Even during the Internet's age of (relative) "innocence," I was as troubled by the conspicuous rarity of third world participation as I was delighted by the otherwise highly international nature of the netizen population. I was as troubled by its origins in the Military Industrial Complex as I was intrigued by its apparent lack of central organization.

Thirteen years later, my access to the internet is still through academia, as the library at Macomb Community College is (as of this writing) open to the general public. You might say I'm a transient among netizens! Macomb's public access point is especially appreciated because they even offer non-diskless workstations! Without sneakernet, this "wiki" would be all but impossible. I am also very grateful to Bill and Melinda Gates, and philanthropists everywhere who have acted to provide the Internet with free public points of access.

While I am still impressed with the Internet's (and its users') capability to find creative end-runs around de facto barriers to sam izdat, I am more than a little disillusioned with the overall trends in its development over the last decade or so.

Many fans of the Internet have contrasted it with television, pointing out that television is a passive audience medium. There is a lot of truth to this, and even during these ultraproprietary times, I think, from an "active audience" standpoint that the Internet is (still!) vastly superior over all other media and communication technologies. But I now think of this difference as one of degree, not kind. I no longer think of the Internet as "samizdat friendly," rather "less samizdat hostile." Samizdat itself, of course, originated in an extremely hostile environment, so I am not discouraged.

My goal in life is to become a successful volunteer coordinator. My other goal is to become a server-side netizen.