Date: Tue, 23 Mar 93 22:58:31 -0600
From: jonl@tic.com (Jon Lebkowsky)
Message-Id: <9303240458.AA27193@aahsa.tic.com>
To: pacoid@wixer.cactus.org, tomj@fido.wps.com
Subject: Interview
Status: OR

Tom Jennings Interview
6,140 Words
 
Tom: This people tracking stuff...what little
I know of it sounds very creepy. I don't want
a box that reports where the hell I am all
the time, and when I walk in the room, it can
tell the local machine that I'm there. It's
none of anyone's goddam business. It's the
corporate culture invasion on real life, like
the top 1% who make all the money, and think
everyone's gonna live like them. If you can't
afford it, why?
 
Jon: Well, if you're living in an ivory
tower, after you live there for a while, you
start to think, not that it's YOUR
environment, but it's THE environment.
 
T: Yeah, it is reality, but it's a local one.
Everyone they know is like that...well, they
don't know everybody.
 
J: In a conversation I had the other day with
Sandy Stone, she talked about ubiquitous
computing, that computers or computing will
be invisible, it will be so omnipresent...
 
T: That's what Alan Kay pointed out years
ago, that when technology gets done right,
you don't even see it. Like who thinks...when
you walk in a room, your hand goes and flicks
a switch...how much thought do you give to
that stupid light switch? Hopefully very
little. The light comes on, and...telephones
are getting close to that.
 
J: Even better, there's some rooms you walk
into and the light switches on automatically,
because there's motion detectors.
 
T: Yeah.
 
J: Tell me about FidoNet. As I said, I'm
sorta ignorant on the subject....
 
T: I have a weird point of view on it, of
course, having been involved in it...this is
its tenth year, at the end of this year. The
network itself I guess would be...February or
March of '94. It is a network, a collection
of bulletin boards. It is a loose
confederation, and it is completely and
thoroughly and utterly decentralized. There
is literally no one at the top. This reality
then is perceptions of what the FidoNet's
like. Even among the people who are members
of it, they think that it looks like one
thing, they have this particular reality
filter on of living amongts hierarchy
addicts. But FidoNet's most basic element is
a bulletin board, and it's about as vague as
that, too. The basic element is not definable
other than that. What it is is a set of
protocols that lets the bulletin boards
communicate. FidoNet started as a bunch of
Fido boards, running my Fido software. And
later, adding FidoNet to it, that allows
point-to-point email, the equivalent of just
a plain old UNIX type email message,
user@domain, user@fidonet, unless the syntax
is different.
 
J: Did you start with just a single bbs?
 
T: It started with my system. I was writing
software for Phoenix Software, which is now
Phoenix Technologies. I was their first
employee. I did all their portable MS DOS
stuff prior to the ROM BIOS they did, which
was partly based on my previous work with
portable...we were doing MS DOS installations
in three days, and charging exorbitant
sums...and delivering really good stuff,
people got their money's worth, and got it
damn fast! We had it down to an art of just
totally portable stuff. So I had this
portable attitude toward hardware, and wrote
a bulletin board sort of based on it. FidoNet
is a bulletin board with this network thing
attached, but it's more importantly a social
mechanism. It was pretty obvious from the
start that it was going to be a social
monster, almost more so than a technical
thing. And it had to do with the original
environment of bulletin boards, which were
around for a long time by the time I got
around to doing Fido. So when I came by doing
this, doing Fido, the way they were used was
pretty much pre-existing. Every one was
completely different, run by some
cantankerous person who ran their board the
way that they saw fit, period. No one was
going to tell them how, no one would ever
occur to do that. So FidoNet had to fit in
that environment.
 
J: A very anarchic environment.
 
T: Yes, explicitly anarchic. Most people just
ran them for their own reasons, and they were
just separated by large distances of time and
space, so they were more local. FidoNet was
explicitly anarchist from the start. I just
ran across old interviews and old
documentation from '83 - '84, and we were
saying it then. It was just...people didn't
hear it, it just went off. They think of,
like, anarchism, that means throwing rocks at
the cops! Well sometimes, I suppose, but
that's mostly a cop's definition of it.
 
J: The sense of the bomb throwing anarchist,
I guess, is sort of in the sense of political
disorder...
 
T: ...which was a specific event in the 20s
in San Francisco having to do with union
labor busts. And blackmail...this guy Tom
Mooney, they planted a bomb, a bomb went off,
and they said "He did it, Tom Mooney, this
damn anarchist!" Which was more like American
Socialist, not even commie, just this big
American Socialism at the turn of the
century. It let the air out of the sails of
this big labor stuff.
 
J:  Anarchy has this sorta bad connotation,
but anarchy itself is not unlike what so many
seem to want to embrace now. I think the
libertarian philosophy is fairly anarchic,
and you find it widespread throughout the
net. It's basically a hands-off philosophy.
 
T:  I think people often take it too
seriously, like anarchist camps that have
more rules than not. I consider it a personal
philosophy, not a political thing at all. It
has nothing to do with politics.
 
J: If it becomes overtly political, it ceases
to be anarchy...
 
T: Yeah, more or less, and I don't really
care about what's considered politics, it's
personal interaction, how I treat other
people and how they treat me, and my
relations to other people, it's anarchism...I
always call it Paul Goodman style, which is
the principle that people work together
better if they're cooperating than if they're
coerced. Very simple, nothing to do with
goddam politics. It has to do with how you
treat people that you have to work with. And
that's what FidoNet was based on, very
explicitly. It was sort of laid over the top
of a lot of Fido bulletin boards, and let
them talk to each other in a straightforward
point-to-point manner.
 
J: Was it just Fido boards?
 
T: Just Fido at the time, because it required
a fairly low level of restructuring of the
innards, message bases and stuff. And Fido
was a pretty good bulletin board, has been
for years, though now it's definitely old
fashioned. I've never done a revision of my
Fido software for over two years.
 
J: Are you thinking about doing that?
 
T: No, I'm thinking about dropping it.
<laughter> I've thought about it, and it's
done. So FidoNet started up in spring of '84
with two systems, me and my friend John Medel
(sp????), and Bob Moore, and within four
months there were twenty or fifty...by the
end of the year, it was approaching 100 by
the next February, in nine months. It started
growing really fast. And every single one was
run by somebody for their own reasons in
their own manner for their own purposes, so
it had to accommodate this. And this is
nothing unusual, in one sense. All computer
networks are essentially run this way. The
Internet is. There's no central Internet
authority where you go to get a system in
Internet, you just put it online, and find
people to help you, register with the NIC
(????), which is just a convention for
handling names.
 
J: Sort of ideally cooperative.
 
T: Yeah, it's quite cooperative, and you
don't really get kicked out unless you
technically screw up, or do something
massively illegal or glaringly obvious. Most
likely technical, like don't answer mail for
a long time. Most electronic things are like
that.
     It didn't start to take off until
Echomail came by, which was done by this guy
named Jeff Rush in Dallas as a way to talk
among Dallas sysops about organizing pizza
parties. It's a fully distributed, redundant
database using FidoNet netmail as the records
in the database. It's literally equivalent to
a newsgroup, they gate back and forth very
easily.
     I find it hard to talk open-endedly
about FidoNet without really knowing what...
 
J: Can you link FidoNet very easily to
Internet or UUCP Mail?
 
T: There's gateways between them. You can
just set up the UFGate package...you know,
they have totally different paradigms. IP,
the Internet stuff, is fully connected all
the time. When you want to connect to a
system in Finland, you just rub packets with
them and they come back in generally under a
second. FidoNet is all stored forward,
offline processing....
 
J: How big is it now?
 
T: Just short of 20,000 systems.
 
J: Wow, that's a lot....
 
T: It's doubled in a year...I think more than
doubled in a year. It's been doubling every
year for a long time <laughs>.
 
J: There's a lot of discussion today of
encryption schemes, are you involved in that?
 
T: Actually, yeah, I'm a user routinely.
 
J: Using PGP?
 
T: Yeah. FidoNet was pretty intentionally
involved in getting PGP ubiquitous the first
time around....an intentionally, consciously
quick dump of about 10,000 copies in a week,
starting on a Monday, just to be sure that it
was unstoppable, and it spread very quickly.
There's all kinds of arguments over whether
it's legal, or whether it's going to
incriminate me to use PGP, and the traffic
into the network itself....
 
J: It wouldn't be a criminal issue....
 
T: People believe all kinds of crazy
nonsense.
 
J: Somebody has a patent on the algorithm, is
that it?
 
T: Yeah, and then they're afraid that if they
send encrypted data, that the police will
bust into the house and steal the computer,
all this kind of stuff...the thing is,
FidoNet sprung up fully-formed out of seeming
nowhere into the rest of the computer world.
Most people on the Internet have access to it
through schools or industry. They went to
school, then they got a job, and they
maintained Internet...they were brought up
into the sort of Internethood.
 
J: I think that's changing a bit....
 
T: Oh, it is changing, it will continue to
change, and someday it will be
incomprehensible that it was this way, but of
today, it's sort of how it is. FidoNet did
not come from that direction at all. It came
from...hopefully, again, professionals, white
guys who could afford a computer :-), but in
the best tradition of radio and astronomy,
they were amateurs, it's truly called an
amateur network. It is not professional, in a
way that...profession-al, not in a
way...profession has that
other...professional is frequently used to
mean legitimate, as opposed to amateur...
 
J: You mean "hobbyist?"
 
T: Yeah, amateur as a word become
disparaging, but we mean it actually in the
older sense, like the radio amateur sense. We
don't do it for money, it's done for the sake
of itself. So they never had the traditional
kind of connectivity, and also didn't have
the corporate culture, and didn't have the
computer network culture, so it basically
formed in the dark, on its own.
 
J: Speaking of the word "culture," do you
find that within the FidoNet universe,
there's a particular set of cultural
predilections? Does there tend to be a
general kind of group or community that uses
FidoNet?
 
T: Well, it's like any of those things, it's
really subjective. But, yeah, it does seem to
be, in my travels on Internet and FidoNet,
distinct flavors. One is not better than the
other, I can tell you that. The Internet
people say, "Oh, but the flame level on
FidoNet is so awful." Bullshit. The flame
level on the Internet is just as high. It's
in loftier language, five line signatures,
and all that kind of crap...but I'm sorry,
it's not any better, it's just different.
What it is is less alien, it's more
comfortable...and vice-versa from the FidoNet
side. It's more comfortable, it's more
familiar, the language used and the acronyms
and the smiley faces, all of that junk. But
there is a FidoNet flavor, through the usual
sociological things. The people who
originally populated it defined this vague
common set, and people who come onto it self-
select ("Oh, I like that!") and join it, and
then enhance it, or they're sort of neutral
and they come in and they just absorb it
because...you know, you start hanging out
with people, and you pick up their manner.
And there are people, of course, who are
utterly opposed to it, and want to make it
professional or just don't care, live in a
corner of it.
     But yeah, there are things in common,
and I have a hard time putting my finger on
what they are. But it is fiercely
independent, utterly, fiercely independent.
It has a long history of some nasty politics,
some really enlightened politics, and I think
in a lot of ways they have more pragmatic
view, and a better view -- better meaning
more functional in today's reality -- than
people who haven't had to pay their own phone
bills.
 
J: Some people argue that you can't have
strictly online community, and others believe
that you can. Some feel that there has to be
some kind of face-to-face interaction. In the
Internet there has not been as much of that
until it began to become more broadly
accessible to regular people....
 
T: The Internet is still completely and
thoroughly inaccessible...I'm sorry, it is
simply not accessible. You have to have a
large amount of hardware or an intimate
relationship with someone who does, like you
have to go to school or something. Otherwise
you're paying money...and there are people
who fall through the cracks....
 
J: How about public access Internet?
 
T: Yeah, but if there's more than 100
terminals in the U.S. that any average person
could walk up to and figure out how to use in
less than a week, I would be surprised. It
still takes huge amounts of specialized
knowledge. It's relatively speaking easy to
get to...
 
J: But the technical side is fairly dense...
 
T: Oh, yeah...I've been a DOS hacker and
hardware hacker for fifteen fucking years,
twenty years, and UNIX is so intimidating,
arbitrarily difficult to use...a lot of the
users have this macho attitude that "Well,
you should plow through it, I did." The whole
priesthood nonsense. You know, it's stupid.
And the discussion or argument whether there
could be an online culture or not, that ain't
where it's gonna get decided. It's either
gonna get done or not done. I think there are
online communities. The people who're doing
it aren't asking themselves, "Are we an
online community?" They're just going about
their business. They're not tangible enough
to really get documented except in hindsight,
you look back and say "Oh, yeah, those people
are" or "No, they really weren't, when push
came to shove, they didn't stay together."
 
J: At EFF-Austin we've been a little more
self-conscious about it, we've actually been
trying to do some community-building, to try
to structure an online community in Austin
where we'd have some force to get things
done, various projects. One of the things
we're doing that other EFF-related groups
haven't been doing is arts projects, and in
doing those things, in talking to some of the
people who are interested in doing that, I
realilzed that there are a lot of writers and
artists who are hungry to get online. They
know it's there, they'd like to be using it,
but they can't get access to it because they
can't, unless they stumble into it, find a
system that'll give them an account. It's
kind of like what you were saying about
barriers...but I wonder if, in the FidoNet
world, you find writers and artists using
FidoNet to share information and to form arts
communities?
 
T: Well, there's a lot more less-technical
people involved, because you can, in a
practical sense put a $300 end-to-end line
cord phone wall jack, $300 systems together.
That just means that the entry level is a lot
lower. And it's functional as hell! I mean,
it works great! You don't really have, it's
not much slower...and what's speed, anyway.
5 seconds or 100 milliseconds, what's the
difference?
 
J: The link, the network, is strictly for
email? Or do you have some other stuff, file
transfer...?
 
T: Oh, there's lots of file transfer stuff.
As a matter of fact, it's a lot more
sophisticated than the FTP stuff from the
user's point of view. There's this thing
called the SDN, the Software Distribution
Network, which looks like, it's a conference
for files, where the objects are not
messages, the objects are files. And they're
stored in a redundant manner, they're locally
concentrated, some are far away and
scattered. It's kind of nebulous, like most
network things are. But they do monthly
announcements of new products, and most of
it's shareware, actually all of it's
shareware, or free. You can do things like
file and patch, and file requests, you can
send a message and say, "Oh, by the way,
here's your files." They don't have the
problem that a lot of older networks have,
with seven bit channels and all that crap. We
have eight bit channels with 32 bit CRCs. We
do run into the alien system
problems....ASCII character sets vs. the
cyrillic alphabets and all that kinda stuff.
Those problems are about as chaotic as they
are anywhere else.
 
J: How about remote login?
 
T: No, it's a store-and-forward mail system,
essentially. Thing is, with remote
login...all the systems in FidoNet are
*radically* different. There's Radio Shack
color computers, there's CPM machines, Apple
IIs, giant DOS machines, giant LANs of UNIX
boxes, all running common protocols in a far
broader hardware base than most, even UNIX
boxes. There's no unified operating system,
there's a set of protocols, there's 40 or 50
different mailers, and FidoNet interfaces in
bulletin boards, and they all look completely
different. So it's at a much higher level of
abstraction than the FidoNet gets defined at.
A lot of the...like Internet, it'd be safe to
say almost everything is UNIX, these days, or
some huge proportion of it is UNIX....
 
J: You certainly need some kind of standard
to be interoperable to the extent that the
Internet is, don't you?
 
T: No, where the real compatibility is is the
TCP/IP layer, and that's rock solid, and
that's the thing in common. All the rlogin,
telnet, and ftp stuff is a user paradigm,
rather than just a set of protocols. It's
well, and fine, and wonderful, and I love it,
but it does put a real crimp on style. Have
you seen OS2s interfaced to ftp?
 
J: No, I haven't....
 
T: Oh, it's really nice. It's point and click
and drag. I kind of get annoyed with
windowing things. It just proves that this
horrible looking upper-case command line
thing CAN be done  in what appears to be an
incompatible paradigm. "Oh, I want this
file...<click>...gopher, you say, I want
this, and it goes and does all the nasty work
for you, puts boxes on a screen...they did a
good job.
 
<Ed Cavazos, almost-attorney and vice-prez of
EFF-Austin, shows up and settles in to
listen. The conversation continues.>
 
T: A lot of FidoNet is so radically
different, you can't get people either hear
it or understand what's going on, because
it's NOT like any of the others, and it was
intentionally not made like the others, and
some of the really basic principles that seem
random are intentional...they're in writing,
and have been in writing for seven years. The
strictly American anarchist principles that
it's based on are written into the policy
documents. We actually had in '85, '86, '87
an attempted takeover by a corporation that
was formed from within, it was like a cancer
that became a giant boil on the surface,
called IFNA, the International FidoNet
Association, that was sort of a good idea, or
a potentially good idea, when we started it
at the 200 node level. By the time it got
around to being implemented at 500, the world
had utterly changed. With 200 people, you can
run it like a club. It was 90% U.S., 90%
white guys with computers, and at the 500
node level, it was about 20% European and
definitely, obviously growing. It hopped the
puddle, with systems appearing in South
America, scattered, but you know how that
goes...when you get one, then you get two,
and then four, and they start to grow. It was
starting to subspecialize in this whole
overall view which was a naive view,
admittedly, and I was right in the middle of
it. We learned, "Oh, this isn't going to
work," and this corporation grew, and became
a 501C3, and like all of those things, they
get power-hungry, and they get grabby of
territory, and we had to fight it off, and it
was fight off by the constituents of the
membership, by the constituents of the
network...actually fought it off, and it was
killed off. They had gained control of the
copyright and the trademarks, and they were
fought off. The network, instead of dying,
like everyone predicted, thrived.
 
J: So how did this fight go?
 
T: It was fought by lawyers and proxy votes
and all the usual crap, in a goddam hotel in
San Jose, was the final straw....
 
J: Were you a part of this corporation at
all?
 
T: Well, a bunch of us started...we were at
first, we were brainstorming what we could
get...deals on modems, some obvious stuff.
And we'd have a spokesperson from FidoNet
who'd attend the EMA meetings once a year and
represent bulletin board operators and
FidoNet members in electornic privacy things
and the technical trade stuff and the obvious
things. And those are still lacking, we still
need them. But it was established really
early that everyone not only retains control
of their system, but they're expected to do
their part to run it, because there is no one
else to run it. And as simple as it sounds,
it's a really radical act to get that across,
so that people don't just sit on their butts.
And of course, the usual 10% does the work,
and 90% sits on their butts, but that's fine,
too. FidoNet's a little odd, unlike the
Internet, which has a domain server...you say
"Connect to toad.com," it says, ".com, okay,
here, toad...here's an address," and you go
after it. FidoNet has what appears to be a
centralized database that every system in the
net has, a copy of this at the moment 2
megabyte long ASCII database, with 20,000
records in it. And it's updated every week,
it contains the full physical and logical
information about the entire network...phone
number, system name, restrictions on use,
protocols supported, some ASCII text, like
system name, and city, you know, all that
kind of junk. It contains the hierarchical
addressing scheme of the network, and it
contains a lot of redundancy.
 
J: Given that there's no central authority,
who maintains this database?
 
T: The terminology in FidoNet is point-node-
net-zone. Points aren't really part of
FidoNet, they're a peculiar thing....a node
is the basic unit, it is a bulletin board or
a mailer, generally a phone number with a
modem on it. A net is a cluster of Fidos, a
cluster of nodes, like San Francisco has Net
125, SFBay Net, 75-80 systems. A node in a
net is the basic social organizational unit.
It was designed to be small enough to
comprehend in regular old terms, like we all
know and love, clubs and that kind of
group...when they get too big they tend to
fragment into pieces, which become autonomous
units, then nets are collected into the real-
life geography of continents. The North
American phone system is alien to the Western
European ones, and they have lots of alien
phone systems. The North American tend to be
a lot less political...Zone 1 encompasses
Mexico, U.S., and Canada, and nobody ever
batted an eye over it. It's like, "Oh, okay,
that makes sense." In Europe, they're
fiercely independent of the natural
boundaries, and it's really silly. But,
that's what we say here...they say there
something else. Local autonomy was their
critical thing to make it work, because who's
going to allow somebody in New Jersey to
dictate how they're going to run their
system. There'd be no way to exert any kind
of control, and once you start getting into
control wars, you spend all your time doing
that. So the way the node list is made is
that every net fragment makes its own chunk
of the node list, which is a very
straightforward task, even though it ends up
being work. They;re passed up through...one
level is twenty regional coordinators who
take these fragments, and everybody gets a
copy of everybody else's weekly list, and
each of those guys compiles a giant list,
then they do a difference, this week from
last week, and mail out that difference back
down the tree. So if you halved off half the
network and smashed it flat, it would
regenerate in parallel, there's nobody in
charge. It's a balance of terror, that's what
it is. It's a genuine balance of terror in
responsibility and power. What you get for
that redundancy is that no one can cut you
out of the network, no one can declare that
you can't communicate. In the UUCP world none
of this happens because the social
environment is much more
substantial...universities, Hewlett
Packard...your neighbors, in theory, can cut
you off, and you disappear, no one knows
about you, if you're eliminated from the bang
path, no one can talk to you, and that's it,
you don't exist, it's as simple as that. In
FidoNet, and this has happened recently in
England...a bunch of religious
fundamentalists by just hammering away gained
control of large chunks of the FidoNet in the
U.K., and they started having..."Why, there's
perverts on this board, and we're not gonna
have 'em!" <laughter> And they clipped them
out of the goddam list, they removed the
entries from the U.K. list.  You sort of
noticed they disappeared, but those people
can still communicate, they can mail you
their fragment, hand-generated if necessary,
and all the node list processors let you
incorporate private lists, and you can reply
back, just like that. No one can be cut out
of the network. If you start thinking about
it, you realize that there are a number of
good and bad side effects from this. Like, if
you have some real asshole troublemaker,
there's nothing you can do about it. Like,
unless somebody comes in and pulls out a gun
or something, it's kinda hard to get someone
kicked out of a more or less public
place...well, the hotel would be relatively
easy, but out in the street, you've just
gotta live with your neighbors. And the same
is true in the FidoNet. You have to learn to
live with your neighbors, and vice versa. The
flaming assholes have to learn how to behave
well enough to not be utterly censured. Which
is what generally happens to them...people
just ignore them. There was one guy, he was
another fundamentalist Christian nut case. He
was amusing, actually. He was a true Bible
believer, this was called pre-rapture, or
something or other, some pre-rapture
network...he was persecuted by all sides, and
he loved it. He was mailing everybody this
gibberish, pages and pages of gibberish. And
there's programs that just filter out mail,
and you say, I don't wanna see mail from this
address....
 
J: A bozofilter.
 
T: Yeah, basically, it's a bozofilter, we've
had 'em for a long time. And there's also
another one that's called bounce...whenever
you get anything from this guy, bounce it
back.  It appends a bit of text that says
"This message is refused at site so-and-so,
have it back," which IRRITATES people! But it
just works out that people, even the crazy
ones are social organisms. We don't really
like to be disliked too widely, we like to
have an audience, if nothing else. So that's
the underpinnings...it was implemented pretty
much that way, explicitly...it's written down
in the policy documents, which are
unreadable...40 page boilerplate...and the
mechanism of the organization has been very
flexible technically. When technological
changes or opportunities come by, within a
year half the net supports them.
     In about '85 U.S. Robotics very smartly
discovered bulletin boards, and they realized
the way it works is, even though there's a
relatively small number of bulletin board
sysops, if you're bulletin board caller, who
do you look to to see what hardware to get?
The sysop. And you wonder, "What kind of
modem do you have...oh, it must be pretty
good if you use it," because when it's bad,
he mouths off to hundreds of people about it.
So they basically courted the FidoNet, and
said "What do you want to see in a modem?"
And the first they did this with was the
Courier 2400, which was 600 bucks new at the
time, or 700 bucks. They offered a 50% off
deal, down to about 300 or 400 dollars, which
was a bargain, relatively speaking. And we
wanted true flow control, and symmetrical
modem with basic AT command set, and they did
it. It was an instant success. And then they
did the HST, much to most of the industry's
annoyance, they did this blue g proprietary
protocol asymmetrical 9600 one way, 300 baud
the other way...they came to us again, and we
worked out more handshake stuff, and started
changing protocols on our side. We were
originally based on xmodem, which is
amazingly similar to X.25's packet ack, like
Kermit, only much more efficient than Kermit,
and very much like UUCP-G, only it's not
windowed...block ack block ack block
ack...it's fine at 2400 baud and below, above
2400 baud it was not good. We had
asymmetrical modems that collapsed. So there
had been another protocol called Wazoo
floating around, and it instantly became hot,
because it did a protocol negotiation when
you started the session, and you could pick
zmodem, which is fully-windowed, screaming,
you can run it ackless. You could work the
hell out of an HST in ways that other
protocols couldn't. Internet protocols and
UUCP-G were just useless, in other words, the
modem was useless for existing protocols.
     So FidoNet's historically been very
flexible, technology-wise.
 
Ed: Are you familiar with John Quarterman?
Have you seen his maps of FidoNet?
 
T: No, I haven't seen his maps of FidoNet. I
talk to him occassionally, I republished one
of his articles in Fido News a while
ago...FidoNews is a weird phenomenon in
itself...a 20,000 circulation weekly
newsletter in its tenth year. It sort of goes
unacknowledged...FidoNet has a giant
credibility problem, because it sprang forth
fully-formed 'way outside all traditional
computer things, and because it works on PCs
and Radio Shack Color Computers, which
actually turns out to be a nice processor, it
runs OS9 on a 6809...you can run multiusers
on a $99 packaged machine. It's really some
amazing software. It was designed in '84 in
the first year as the Metanet, to discuss the
net, to discuss the social end of the net. In
the first issue was a retired Air Force
colonel or something, whining about the
military retirement process, and people
instantly said, "This is supposed to be a
technical newsletter, this is FidoNet..." and
I said, "No, bullshit, it's not. I'm tired of
this techie crap. Do you talk on the phone
about your telephone all the time? "Gee, I've
got a great new phone, it's got all these
pushbuttons..." and you get bored very
quickly. It's like radio amateurs talking
about their goddam antennas. Who wants to put
up with that stuff?
 
J: We've been talking about that a lot.
There's three or four magazines devoted to
online cultures, cultures of the Matrix, that
focus on the Internet a lot. Wired is one,
Mondo in a real different way, and bOING-
bOING, of course, in a REAL different way.
And we realized that a lot of the articles
are preoccupied with the carrier, with the
technology for carrying messages, and not so
much with the messages themselves or the
cultures themselves, the sorts of cultures
that are evolving.
 
T: Yeah, they forget that what we're making
is a goddam conduit, it's a medium, it's not
content! A content comes with it, because
they're brand new mediums, they fail a lot,
and they need to be developed...all software
sucks, and all hardware sucks, so you end up
talking about it a lot, but yeah, that's not
the point.
 
J: What's really more fascinating is what's
at either end of the conduit....
 
T: Yeah, the telephone proved that. It's
actually a way to convey social information,
emotion, that's why telephones worked, you
can talk over them. How many ways can you say
"No" with a keyboard? Not very many. 25 or 50
if you're incredibly ingenius. Smiley faces
and uppercase....All the cultural information
is stripped. And a lot of it has simply been
access. Those at the gates determine who
comes in. If you own the $5,000 PC....
 
J: Is that what brings you here? (To the
conference on Computers, Freedom, and
Privacy) Access issues?
 
T: Yeah, that's why I'm always skeptical of
large-scale networks. While I'm on the
Internet, I don't have any pretensions of
being..."Why, the world is connected!" No,
one percent of one percent is connected,
barely, and the tools really suck. Through no
fault of the authors, they're incredible
works. But they're hardly accessible to
everyone in the world.
 
J: I had to buy my access to the Internet, at
first. The WELL....
 
T: Mine I get because I'm managing a small IP
cooperative, and I get it sort of as a perk
to my $400 to $500 salary for what is
essentially a full-time job.
 
J: Actually, I've been able to pick up other
accounts since, but the only way that I could
have got in in the first place was by buying
access, because I'm not really very
technical. My interests are more
sociopolitical, I guess....
 
T: I don't rally have any serious problems
with the way things exist. For better or
worse, that's the way that all complicated
things have been developed in our little
Western history timeline. It takes resources
and effort and energy, and they do spread
out, it sort of trickles down. And they get
defined along the way, they definitely have
paradigms glued into them at the very base.
 
J: It allows a more distributed way of
organizing and doing things...
 
T: We'll see if it's ever as good as the
telephone is. It doesn't get much better than
the telephone, when you think about its
position in society. Like Bruce said in his
_Hacker Crackdown_, you notice them when you
don't have one, they're so ubiquitous,
they're like light switches. You don't think
of a telephone, it's not an exciting object.
 
J: I can remember when there was a single
phone in the house, and it was a big deal to
have a second phone, which was usually on the
same line. And now I have three phone lines,
and one is a dedicated data line. I don't
think I know many people who don't have at
least two or three phones in their house.
 
T: I'm down to two, and I consider that
rarefied...I only need two lines now, after
having six at one point, all these bulletin
boards and data lines, now it's like, oh, a
voice line, and a data line....
 
J: I prefer asynchronous text swapping, but
I'm not sure why, maybe a personal
idiosyncrasy. It seems funny to me, because
Matisse Enzer, the support guy on the
WELL...when we're having a problem, and we
can't quite figure out how to communicate
about it, he always says, "Well look, why
don't I call you up, and we'll talk about
it." And I always say, "No, wait, I don't
wanna talk, I just wanna text!" <laughter>