IT History Society Blog

By now you have probably heard that Yahoo! is shutting down its Geocities site. There has been a lot of coverage in the press about this, usually relating to two themes. The first is that it illustrates the worst of the dot.com bubble, as Yahoo! bought Geocities for way too much money, at the height of the bubble, and then proceeded to run it into the ground. The second is that Geocities represented the worst in web design, as it allowed hoi polloi to create their own sites, using a simple web-creation tool, resulting in excesses of garish colors, mis-matched type fonts, and the infamous blinking .gif images.

All true. But I have much fonder memories of the site. For me it was the first opportunity to post things to the Web, not just read stuff that others posted. I’ve talked about how critical this is before. As many news accounts have mentioned, Geocities was a precursor to Facebook, Twitter, and of course, to blogs.

Yes there were wretchedly excessive layouts on peoples’ home pages. But there was also a lot of great and reliable information, too–a precursor to Wikipedia. The concept of “neighborhoods” worked, too. Geocities was my first exposure to chat rooms, and I’d go into ones that matched my “neighborhood” and — get this — chat UNDER MY REAL NAME! Amazing! (After Yahoo! bought it I stopped.)  Finally, although you could create a page using their tools, you could also make a page using raw HTML, which I did. Real Men don’t use tools to create Web pages.

The other theme mentioned in the press is that Geocities died because it was overtaken by blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Any bets on how long these so-called replacements are going to last?

I had not gone there in two years, but when I heard the news, I went & found my Geocities page. It is still there. I will leave it as an exercise for the readers of this blog to find it.

So the verdict is in. After being indicted in February for copyright infringement and the promotion of illegal file-sharing, The Pirate Bay has finally – maybe not so surprisingly – lost its case against the Swedish government. That means one year imprisonment for the four leaders of The Pirate Bay, and a load of cash – 3 millions dollars or so – to be paid back to the plaintiff.

To the phonographic industry, this sentencing is a sort of a victory. It means that the legal dispositions are there for the legal pursuit of internet piracy, and that these tools and dispositions can lead to a successful – for the phonographic industry – outcome. Still, I am not sure at all this will affect fundamentally the extent of file-sharing worldwide. As The Pirate Bay’s leaders commented, in their ironic and very sms times sense of reply, “Stay calm – nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or filesharing what so ever. This is just a theatre for the media.”

And indeed, it was a theatrical play that was showed off to us. On the one hand, The Pirate Bay gloried itself as an expression of an increasingly popular habit of diffusing for free otherwise payable cultural productions through the hosting of search engines and organised libraries of torrents to download. On the other hand, the phonographic industry played out the awful suffering of its creative work. At the end, neither the defendent, northe plaintiff seemed particularly appealing, however, to the everyday man and woman.

The creative artists and authors find enraging to see their cash potential disappear through file-sharing, and, to them, The Pirate Bay founders are geeks jeopardising their likely survival on the market. As for the consumer of the productions of the phonographic industry, (s)he finds it quite OK to, once in a while, if not regularly, sneak out for a free movie or music album from the big moguls of the phonographic industry. There is often a realisation of the financial consequences for the other less paid workers of that industry. But the temptation is massive: leaked materials are everywhere to be found, as with The Dark Knight, for instance, and hearing the palmares of Hollywood best paid actors and actresses sometimes makes us wonder why they earn so much for so little.

What fascinates me in that story of The Pirate Bay trial is that after 30-40 years of computer communications and hacking, the popular imagination as regards to the pirates of the virtual remains virtually unchanged. Those behind The Pirate Bay, Kazaa are all but attractive pirates of the modern electronic ocean, such as Angelina Jolie in Hackers or young Micah Sanders in US hit series Heroes.

And where there is pirate, there is a flag too, supporters of The Pirate Bay manifesting at the door of the trial bearing pirate flags. And they were judged like pirates too. The fluidity and unregulated nature of the technology was advanced to support Pirate Bay. But this unregulated -  unregulable maybe? – nature also led to a certain legal fluidity too, with charges changing according to technical issues discussed between experts and expert advice sought for by the prosecution.

I understand the financial and cultural need of curbing on-line copyright infringement. But I also think about the need to acknowledge the potential social utility, and cultural and technical inevitability of piracy practices. While some are rightfully hurt at seeing their work diffused without the due financial reward, hacking has got some good points: it also highlights where in expert systems weaknesses lay out, leading out to the diffusion of expert knowledge on how to better secure our own electronic accounts.

Also I am quite happy to know that there are hackers capable to hang in government data bases. If there were some dwindling with the data stored in the electronic chips of my identity and social security cards, only readable electronically the expertise will be there outside to crack in the systems. In other words, before judging, we still need a balanced account as to the actual impacts of on-line piracy, and copyright infringements.

It started as an off-hand comment by someone at the office: too much junk was piling up; can you go through your stuff & see if you can’t get rid of anything you don’t need?  Sure. I am a big fan of de-clutter. In fact, over the past few years I must have bought at least three books on “how to declutter your life”!  Sort of like trying to lose weight by buying another diet book, instead of eating less.

Anyway, I had boxes of proceedings of the Joint Computer Conferences sponsored by AFIPS: the American Federation of Information Processing Societies. My DC colleague Tim Bergin gave them to me, after I had just spent countless hours scouring the local DC libraries for copies–no single library had a complete set. But once I had finished my book on the history of computing, I turned to other topics, and the massive proceedings sat, unused, in boxes cluttering up the office.

After some inquiries, and after being turned down by a number of places that I thought would want them, I found a home, in a university library. But my troubles were only beginning: as I began packing them up, I made the mistake of opening up volumes at random, and losing myself in the contents. There was Herb Grosch, the original “wild duck,” pontificating poetically on AFIPS’s 25th anniversary. Or Heinz Zemanek on the early history of computers in Europe. Or the seminal papers describing the ARPANET.

I had to stop. The boxes are going into the mail.

AFIPS “died of euthanasia” on December 31, 1990, having outlived its usefulness. Its conference proceedings had less and less of importance as the years went by, and its annual computer conference simply grew too big to be manageable. But before its death it accomplished much — including above all, providing financial support for the history of computing, especially the Annals, which it founded and supported for the first eight years of that journal’s existence. As Eric Weiss said at the “funeral”: “We shall not see its like again.”