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April 20, 2004
Dead Web Notes Note: this page is gradually becoming defunct and eventually will be terminated, because I've decided to switch Ghost Sites to a more efficient publishing model using Blogger. Please continue to check the main page of Ghost Sites for content that will always be fresher than anytying that appears here. Yes, thi page served me well during 2003 but will soon grow more cyber-mold than an unrefrigerated cheese hunk. Thank you!
Much has recently been written about the fact that Hollywood is seriously setting its sights on video games. This trend, welcomed by some, decried by others, has clearly been spurred by the much-cited fact that the $20 billion shelled out annually for videogames now exceeds box-office takeaways. (See: http://www.economist.com/business/ These discussions, interesting as they are, rarely talk about the degree to which certain category-leading games, such as ID Software's Quake, have already created large libraries of digital movies that are now invisibly festering in cyberspace. "Quake Movies", as they were known, were a pioneering genre of digital filmmaking whose rise and fall has yet to be openly chronicled. Google the term "Quake Movies" and you will immediately come across a rich gaggle of Web sites that not only hosted these films, most created 1997 and 2000, but reviewed, rated, and otherwise sought to jumpstart a vibrant community of independent digital filmmakers. Today, as noted by one of this community's creators, Quake Movies have succombed to the same "slow death" afflicting just about every digital product that mankind has ever produced. Why was Quake Movie-making such a phenomenon back in the late 1990's? Well, for many of the same reasons that Hollywood is citing today to explain its newfound interest in virtual entertainment. With a few clicks of the mouse (actually, thousands of clicks), any kid with fantasies of being Orson Welles or Fritz Murnau could build a massive virtual movie set and populate it with robotic stunt men clamboring about its treacherous walls with chainsaws, grappling hooks, and rocket-propelled grenades. Forget union rules and insurance requirements - if an actor or a camera man got killed, you simply yelled "cut" and reloaded the game engine. Of course, I'm oversimplifying the ease with which these early films were made, especially in a day when State of the Art 60MHz processors required that any customized "sets" often took hours, not minutes, to compile. Bugs with first-generation authoring software were frequent, important game features were undocumented, and one's carefully crafted set was often obliterated when certain unknown thresholds were exceeded in the game engine. The actual experience of designing and delivering a Quake movie was, in other words, more akin to being a beseiged Second Unit director for "Heavens Gate" or "Cleopatra" than it was being Orson Welles. Beyond the joy and pain of creating these first-gen digital movies, the Quake Movie craze also illustrates the rapid accelleration of networked-based creativity possible when, for a brief moment in time, everybody tunes into the same game experience while being offered cheap tools for the customization of one's experience. If you'll remember, for a brief time, Quake was the "it" game - the one shoot-em-up that every young male on the planet needed to exorcise his aggressive demons. Within a few short weeks, most players had shot their way through Quake's canned levels, and were clamboring for new levels, weapons, and ways to experience Quake, a condition that thurst the Quake Move auteur community into existence. Especially important in the genre's development was the decision by ID software to tolerate the distribution of 3rd-party creations made using a standard set of freely available authoring tools - a tradition which continues today among the distributors of Half-Life, Quake's successor. The logic of this decision was simple: by permitting individuals to modify the game to their liking without charging them an extra penny, sales of the licensed game version were spurred, even if the quality of the resulting modifications was often laughably below the canned elements included in the game itself (as was often the case). One has a hard time imagining Walt Disney or Universal allowing similar liberties to be taken with the likenesses of Pierce Brosnan or Bruce Willis in any forthcoming virtual complements to the James Bond or Die Hard film franchises.
Were Quake movies any good? Well - one is left with the reviews - (see: http://www.planetquake.com/ What happened to the legions of shoestring Quake Movie autuers - the Bruckheimers and Irwin Allens of Quake? Well, a number of them are likely continuing to crank out independent "movies" using the more advanced tools and engines provided by Quake's successors under the general umbrella of "Machinima" - a term that is shorthand for "machine produced cinema". Others may well have taken their virtual set building and storyboarding skills and upgraded them to the point that they are now "CG" (computer graphics) creators working in Hollywood. But others have laid down their virtual Panavision cameras for the same simple reason that most Ghost Site creators abandon their cherished projects - because it becomes evident at a certain sad "Puff the Magic Dragon" moment in time that their Herculean efforts and enthusiasms have been overtaken by events - a depressing experience so common in the computer industry that it has long enjoyed its own acronym (OBE). Consider this poignant farewell note from the creator of www.planetquake.com: I opened this site more than 3 years ago as just a small listing of all the Quake movies I could find, and it quickly snowballed into something larger than I could ever imagine. I never really wanted to review movies, but rather provide a listing of every single Quake movie made. Reasons for closing? A few. First and foremost, I have become increasingly busy due to increasing responsibilities, such as family matters, my social life, and school. I have to devote most of my time to those things. Secondly, the slow death of the old Quake Movie community. In the beginning, I ran this site passionately, updating constantly with news about upcoming movies, and reviews of just released ones. The community is still going strong, but not as strong as it use (sic) to. With less and less (sic) news and movie releases to cover, this site has slowed down in the area where (sic) it excelled at covering. I really miss the days of when Quake was the only game people used to make movies with. There wasn't machinima, there were Quake movies and nothing else. TheDeadRoamHere [Weekly Ghost-O-Meter Report: 04/14/04] Thanks to all who have sent me Ghost Sitings through the Ghost-o-Meter. This week's list is UNVERIFIED - this means I haven't had a chance to check whether these sites are in fact "ghost sites". Many may well just be sleeping peacefully or quiet for another reason. This list may not, therefore, be 100 percent adequate. But it's here because it's what Ghost Sites' readers reported for this week: TheDeadRoamHere: www.handmadetreasures.com TheDeadRoamHere: www.haunteddiary.com TheDeadRoamHere: http://www.arrakis.es/~raulgt TheDeadRoamHere: www.calottery.com TheDeadRoamHere: www.snoop.net TheDeadRoamHere: www.transstaravition.com TheDeadRoamHere: www.homegrocer.com TheDeadRoamHere: www.royalmeerschaum.com TheDeadRoamHere: http://www.geocities.com/ TheDeadRoamHere [Weekly Ghost-O-Meter Report: 04/05/04] Thanks to all who have sent me Ghost Sitings through the Ghost-o-Meter. This week's list is UNVERIFIED - this means I haven't had a chance to check whether these sites are in fact "ghost sites". Many may well just be sleeping peacefully or quiet for another reason. This list may not, therefore, be 100 percent adequate. But it's here because it's what Ghost Sites' readers reported for this week: TheDeadRoamHere: www.bobmoose.com TheDeadRoamHere: www.geocities.com/Daniel_Hoz TheDeadRoamHere: www.munshine.org TheDeadRoamHere: www.blacknudeamateur.com TheDeadRoamHere: http://www.crq.com/ TheDeadRoamHere: www.2draw.net TheDeadRoamHere: www.ucs.vt.edu TheDeadRoamHere: geocities.com/b2klovher04 TheDeadRoamHere: www.erotimall.com TheDeadRoamHere: http://atlantainternet.com TheDeadRoamHere: www.legendofzelda.com Jayson Blair Article Correction [3/01/04] An article posted a long time ago on New York Times reporter Jayson Blair earned me an e-mail from Douglas Mintz, who very courteously suggested that I overlooked important facts relating to his own role in New York's Internet reporting media. Its text follows:
----- Original Message ----- Somehow I just stumbled onto an article you wrote about Jayson Blair last year. In it you talked about a panel that I sat on with Jayson Blair. In the column you noted that the reporters offered "tricks of the trade" on how to get media attention.
Let me say that I was surprised to see my name swept in with Jayson's for several reasons. One, I was the antithesis of the "puff piece" writer during my time on the alley. For instance the prophetic: http://siliconalley.venturereporter.net/ Second, believe it or not I was also a subject of Jayson Blair's once. He and I attended U. of Maryland at the same time I did and I served on the Student Government while he was a beat writer. Needless to say he was much despised by the Student Government Association members. Ultimately, while I have no need to defend my career as a journalist, I would prefer not to be grouped in with Jayson Blair, for whom I have no respect now and had no respect when our paths crossed earlier in life. Anyway, I just wanted to set the record straight for a moment.
Douglas S. Mintz TheDeadRoamHere [Weekly Ghost-O-Meter Report: 03/01/04] Thanks to all who have sent me Ghost Sitings through the Ghost-o-Meter. This week's list is UNVERIFIED - this means I haven't had a chance to check whether these sites are in fact "ghost sites". Many may well just be sleeping peacefully or be quiet for another reason. This list may not, therefore, be 100 percent adequate. But it's here because it's what Ghost Sites' readers reported for this week: TheDeadRoamHere: www.superdudes.nl TheDeadRoamHere: www.cesart.com TheDeadRoamHere: gamemasterz.bravehost.com TheDeadRoamHere: everwars.com TheDeadRoamHere: adequacy.org TheDeadRoamHere: http://support-federal.com TheDeadRoamHere: govworks.com TheDeadRoamHere: http://www.web.com TheDeadRoamHere: www.cheatland.com TheDeadRoamHere: http://www.ticonet.com TheDeadRoamHere: http://www.mitsubishi.be TheDeadRoamHere: www.lunarstorm.com TheDeadRoamHere: www.snuttis.com TheDeadRoamHere: http://www.shrumtribe.com TheDeadRoamHere: http://hometown.aol.com/lillovelyangel15/ TheDeadRoamHere [Weekly Ghost-O-Meter Report: 02/16/04] Thanks to all who have sent me Ghost Sitings through the Ghost-o-Meter. This week's list is UNVERIFIED - this means I haven't had a chance to check whether these sites are in fact "ghost sites". Many may well just be sleeping peacefully or be quiet for another reason. This list may not, therefore, be 100 percent adequate. But it's here because it's what Ghost Sites' readers reported for this week: TheDeadRoamHere: complaintous.org TheDeadRoamHere: www.indianerotica.com TheDeadRoamHere: nikkihot.com TheDeadRoamHere: www.micro-safe.com TheDeadRoamHere: www.gamedev.net TheDeadRoamHere: www.planetnamek.com TheDeadRoamHere: http://www.geocities.co.jp/CollegeLife-Cafe/2089/ TheDeadRoamHere: www.thedojo.com TheDeadRoamHere: bentlybabe.friends.com TheDeadRoamHere: http://www.bbwmagazine.com TheDeadRoamHere: http://www.dreamticket.com TheDeadRoamHere: sarah overwise TheDeadRoamHere: www.ghosts.org TheDeadRoamHere: www.geosites.com TheDeadRoamHere: http://www.spotlife.com TheDeadRoamHere: www.planetnamek.com TheDeadRoamHere: http://www.grampasgraphics.tk TheDeadRoamHere: www.planetnamek.com TheDeadRoamHere: www.pe2000.net TheDeadRoamHere: lastwarrior.proboards20.com Web's First Blog is a Ghost: [02/10/04] Back in December of 1997, long before "Weblogging" or "Blogging" were popular verbs, Jorn Barger launched RobotWisdom, thus inventing the basic beast that we know today. Unfortunately, we were informed today by Chris Stamper, a friend and occasional contributor to this column, that in September of 2003, RobotWisdom fell silent, and it's been silent ever since, thus qualifying it as a fully bit-rotten, mouldy-beyound-repair, 5-Star Ghost Site. What caused Barger to quit? In December of 2003, this note appeared on a friend's site at www.ericwagoner.com/whereisjorn: Jorn Barger, editor of Robot Wisdom, is missing. He resides in Socorro, New Mexico, and was last seen there by his housemate in very early October. Most if not all of his possessions, including his ID card, are still at his residence. Jorn is a prolific Usenet poster, but his last posting took place on September 30. His last posting on Slashdot was also on September 30. He last accessed his website via an FTP connection from Socorro on October 1. If you have heard from Jorn since the end of September, or have any notion of his whereabouts, please contact Eric Wagoner at whereisjorn@ericwagoner.com. Jorn Barger is one of the earliest webloggers, and indeed coined the term "weblog". Jorn's vocal political opinions, particularly his views on the mid-east conflicts (that have at times moved well into vitriol), have turned many people against him, but still... he's missing, both virtually and physically, and I for one would like to know where he is. Fortunately, Barger was subsequently located, and when reached, said, somewhat cryptically, that he simply wanted to "get away from it all" - a reasonable statement from a man who had continually output so much data for nearly seven years. Time alone will tell whether Barger ever intends to "get back to it all" and resume his pioneering Blogging tasks. One must hope he does, for the same reason that one hopes that Henry Ford never abandoned fondness for the automobile or Tom Edison for the electric lamp. RobotWisdom, despite being defunct, remains online and its archival material extends to its very first days of existence. The Internet Archive's more than 50 passes preserve its 1999-2003 incarnation (see: http://web.archive.org/web/*/robotwisdom.com), so even if RobotWisdom.com is decommissioned tomorrow, historians will have a very accurate picture of its life. The loss of the first Blog marks a milestone in the annals of Web history, but not an unexpected one. Glance at the thousands of abandoned Blogs that exist today and it will be obvious that all good things - even pioneering ones that spawn ten thousand emulators, must come to an end someday. TheDeadRoamHere [Weekly Ghost-O-Meter Report: 02/07/04] Thanks to all who have sent me Ghost Sitings through the Ghost-o-Meter. This week's list is UNVERIFIED - this means I haven't had a chance to check whether these sites are in fact "ghost sites". Many may well just be sleeping peacefully or be quiet for another reason. This list may not, therefore, be 100 percent adequate. But it's here because it's what Ghost Sites' readers reported for this week: TheDeadRoamHere: www.thedojo.com TheDeadRoamHere: gesammelte-werke.de TheDeadRoamHere: http://www.goosehead.com TheDeadRoamHere: games.com TheDeadRoamHere: www.govworks.com TheDeadRoamHere: www.educagri.fr TheDeadRoamHere: www.philhuang.com TheDeadRoamHere: www.Dollsmania.com TheDeadRoamHere: http://www.lumpycat.com TheDeadRoamHere: http://www.spotlife.com/users4/lissa713/webcast/ TheDeadRoamHere: www.awod.com TheDeadRoamHere: http://www.stealthdisco.com TheDeadRoamHere: www.cableone.net TheDeadRoamHere: bulldog.cannelton.k12.in.us TheDeadRoamHere: http://www.lantimes.com TheDeadRoamHere: juliette lewis and the licks TheDeadRoamHere: http://jh.pair.com/bnb/ TheDeadRoamHere: jaimemodel.com 01/30/04: Today's Inflation Stopper Sandwich: $0.50
In some ways, the Belmore was better than the Web will ever be. Forget broadband - the Belmore had breaded veal! It was cheaper than AOL (observe the ads for a "$0.50 Inflation Stopper Sandwich"). And it was always busy. even at 4 in the morning, filled not with Virus writers, Asian Teens, and Internet Cannibals, but with the sort of supremely twisted New York Night People that Jean Shepherd talked about in the early 1960's and Martin Scorsese immortalized in a scene from 1976's Taxi Driver in which Wizard (Peter Boyle) fails to ease the mind of Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) "in the blood-red light of an outside neon sign". (you can clearly see this sign in the photo, although Bickle and Wizard are missing). Taxi Driver made the Belmore Cafeteria world famous, but unfortunately, this noble staple of '70's Low Rent Night Life closed in the early 1980's, when Manhattan real estate prices began to crawl upward, prompting its owners to sell out to developers of a sliver-shaped residential high rise. New York changed, I stopped walking the streets at night with a camera, the Web was invented, and all of the young people in this photo - in just a few instants, it seems - became old, although most are still too young to have joined the $0.35 2-Egg Special in the dustbin of history. Today, one's Orpheus-like journey through the Stygian underworld begins and ends within the confines of one's browser. Yes - time unravels, erodes and erases everything (except, perhaps Hard Times, which for many people are as real now as they were in the 1970's), but this image, and, of course, Scorsese's film, are capable of bringing me back to the Belmore - for one last $0.50 Inflation Stopper Sandwich at 4:00 AM. (Note: If you're a Belmore Cafeteria fan and want a high-resolution version, I'll make it available, provided that you have memorized all of the dialogue in the scene between Wizard and Travis, especially the part relating to Bertrand Russell.) I was rummaging around inside Yahoo a few weeks ago and found a bunch of very early GIF89A ad banners. GIF89A, of course, was the magic technology that was discovered in 1996-97. Within a very short time, animation-fever gripped the cube farms of Web designers across the land. Sadly, few examples survive today, which makes the Yahoo Find significant. These ads are not cached copies - they actually still exist on Yahoo, although it is improbable that they're linked from any active areas of the site. These ads, therefore, may be among the oldest commercial digital objects still doing what they were designed to do - sell products (even if these products were "overtaken by events".
This nearly seven-year old ad for a long-forgotten technology conference dates itself authoritatively in early 1997. It is significant in terms of perserving one of the major intellectual conceits of the dot-com era ("Independent: On the Edge"). Note that the copy provides not a "Front Door to the Future", but a "Frontdoor" - a textual consolidation possibly forced by the spatial limitations of the 468 x 60 canvas. Like virtually all of these early ads, it has no way of turning itself off.
"When you're done browsing here - Shop at IBM's World Avenue", this looping ad announces, but not the differences. Neither IBM's holy "eight bar" logo nor any of the Times Roman text is animated - doing this would have clearly outraged whichever Interactive Design Subcommittee oversaw this ad's production. IBM's "World Avenue" was closed in late 1997. According to the Wall Street Journal, "when it came to shoppers, World Avenue was more like a deserted street, producing minimal revenue not only for mall tenants like department-store chain Gottschalks Inc., but also for IBM, which had planned to make money by taking a cut of every World Avenue transaction.
" IBM's choice of the endlessly looping "revolving door" may seem an ironic one, given how many former managers of this company have now passed through it.
The early adopters of GIF89A animation might have been technology firms, but it wasn't very long before big consumer brands sought to upgrade their static banner ads with animation, often in connection with the promotion of an online contest or game."Get Quenched" is obviously an early effort whose unimaginative use of the animation medium seems tangibly primitive today. Sunny Delight - the drink, still exists, although it is inconceivable that the "Get Quenched" game is still in existence on the Web. If you find an old banner ad out on the Web somewhere, please tell me about it. Early examples of these loopy, looping animations are very hard to find these days in the ever-deleting, snake-eats-tale bitstream. 01/19/04: Endangered Media: Pop-Up Ads Pop-up ads are becoming an endangered Net artifact, thanks to a widespread consumer backlash that has stimulated online services and browser vendors to incorporate pop-up-blocking software. Already, pop-ups - once hailed as the revenue savior for many small sites, are declining in terms of share: 8.7 percent had them in 2003. but now only 6.2 percent do, and the future looks very dim, as cited in this New York Times article. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/technology/19popup.html (free registration required) Few will mourn the extinction of the pop-up. But future-minded media freaks might seek to save one or two operating examples - perhaps from the early X10 campaign - and create a "circa 2003 pop-up simulator" just to show people of the future how miserable life on the Web was between 2001 and 2004. No, few classic pop-ups or pop unders - not even the cute series from Orbitz - will be saved from global erasure, even though creating them constituted a significant cottage industry for many Web designers in the last 3 years. What museum would have them? Few artists actively used the pop-up as a serious visual, much less a literary medium, most people hated them, and thus the pop-up - a true mass phenomena - will likely become completely opaque to future generations thanks to a lack of interest in documenting the form. Eugene Bergman, who is working on a book about Jean Shepherd, e-mailed me asking to resurrect an ancient (1973) recording which meditates on the topics of obsolescence and decline in the West. The reason that Bergman was interested was to substantiate Shepherd's bona fide interest in technology history, which is often overlooked. The fact that the author of A Christmas Story was a philosopher and media prophet is less well-known than it should be. I did my part today, digitizing the old tapes in MP3 format and uploading them to the Web. The theme of "Dead Sea Tapes" is how machines fade, and how future civilizations will likely find our own times completely opaque. This monologue also takes skillful aim at many over-ballyhood fads and trends of the 1960's, including "The Now People", "The Flower People", and "The Swingers. The files can be downloaded by clicking on the following links:
shep_dead_sea_tapes1.MP3 Jean Shepherd was a contemporary of The Beats whose pioneering media jamming activities (Shepherd invented the "mob-in" and was the prototype for Howard Beale's "Mad as Hell and I'm Not Going to Take it Anymore" stunt in the film Network). He took the long view of things in a way that he acknowledges has a "considerable irritant quotient". He died in 1998, but will be long remembered on the Net. For more information on Shep, go to flicklives.com - the essential Shepherd Studies site. For those interested in wire recorders - a technology referenced in The Dead Sea tapes, an excellent site called "The History of Sound Recording" provides insight into this lost breed of machine. 12/15/03: Call for BitMagic movies I received e-mail from a reader bewailing the demise of BitMagic.com - whose Web Elegy exists elsewhere on this site. The reader claims to have a large library of BitMagic animations, and has graciously offered to help me view them, using an old player. I am looking forward to helping unlock this lost genre of early Web animations, which were delivered via a proprietary player used in concert with e-mail during BitMagic's brief reign as a serious challenger to Shockwave. I cannot at this time know whether the BitMagic animations contain any gems, but am grateful to have a chance to inspect this lost archive. If you happen to run across any stray BitMagic movies on an old hard drive, please let me know - the long term plan is to build a complete filmography listing of BitMagic films. 11/25/03: "No Way to Run a Culture" Officialdom is regarding the phenomenona of disappearing Web pages with increased seriousness. Take this recent article from the Washington Post, which dwells at length on the problem afflicting scientific writers who footnote their research with URLs. Often, by the time the article is published, all of the source material disappears, making verification of one's findings difficult or impossible., See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8730-2003Nov23.html
This article makes clear the need for researchers, writers, and historians to take account of the fact that Web sites disappear. It doesn't provide a remedy, but there is one - an easy one Frankly, I find it surprising that backing up source material - rather than citing URLS that live on the Web, isn't yet standard practice with most people doing science. Caching one's research material in .html is very efficient. Most projects could probably be documented in 100K to 500K of .html documents. It's as easy as "SAVE AS". While this is not a perfect solution, it eases the pain of being confronted with dead URL footnotes that were not cached by search engines or the Internet Archive. 11/19/03: This Site is Suspended: The Motion Picture Site Suspension notices, which are generated by a given Ghost Site's hosting company, generally aren't much more interesting than the robotic "Page Not Found" messages generated by one's browser. While some show a bit of flair, or some elegant Euro-Style, most of them are so forbiddingly spartan, or at least so generic that they fritter away the expressive possiblities available to the ISPs that create them. I suppose that one can actually judge a lot about the quality - or at least the graphical sensibilities - of a given ISP by studying them. But knowing how angry that ISP's get a deadbeat site owners, it's not surprising that most of them choose sombre, somewhat humiliating messages to express their umbrage. Today I happened to be surfing by a Web-based bulletin board frequented by owners of small ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and noticed that one of them is now supplying a free Macromedia Flash application that conveys, in rather dynamic terms, the fact that the site owner's account (and therefore his or her web site) has been suspended. See: http://www.freeflashmedia.com/resellers/index.html Kind of cool, eh? Well, believe it or not, this small masterpiece has been getting mixed reviews from the ISP community. Muses one: "why waste bandwidth prettying up a site that hasn't paid their bills?" - a fair question to ask. But others agree that something like this beats a notice that says what ISPs are actually thinking, i.e. "This site's owner is a deadbeat and has not paid this months hosting fees. Therefore unil it is paid plus late fees... Eat Dust!" I like this movie and have watched it several times (you can tell that I don't have much of a life, can't you?). It's appropriately dark, abstract, and forbidding in the way that the intros to the best noire films are. My only criticism is that it might have contained a soundtrack with the sound of "whooshing" (that sucking sound that you hear between your ears when you realize your Web project is dying), some cheesily dissonant MIDI music, or perhaps the ominous sound of a creaking, closing door. Even the jangling of coins could have dressed it up a bit, but perhaps silence was deliberately chosen by its author to save a spot of bandwidth or set the tone of mute horror that's wholly appropriate to the situation. Let's hope that this anonymously crafted Flash application is the first in a line of many customized Site Suspension online films. I doubt this will happen (ISP administrators aren't exactly an artsy crowd), but perhaps one or two of them will begin deploying something more interesting than the typically unimaginative "This Site Suspended" screens that look so banal to those who stumble upon them. 11/17/03: Crimes Against History: CNET, MP3.com to Destroy World's Largest MP3 Archive A sharply barbed, but cheerfully cheeky article written by Andrew Orlowski in The Register contains details about CNET.com's recently announced "partial" acquisition of the assets of MP3.com - the world's largest repository of "legal" MP3 music files. According to the article, CNET.com's acquisition only extends to certain "specific assets" relating to MP3.com's domain name and back end file-serving technology, not the site's massive file MP3 music file archive, which will be destroyed sometime after December 2, 2003.
Orlowski writes:
Some might find it a bit disingenuous to compare the millions of MP3 files on MP3.com - many of which even the most open-minded music reviewers would agree are of marginal quality - with the fine old books destroyed by the Communists and the Nazis back in the bad old 20th Century. But Orlowski is making an important point here: the destruction of the multi-gigabyte MP3.com libraries will create a gigantic hole that will be impossible to be patched by future cultural historians - a "data holocaust" whose future effects cannot possibly be known right now. One might even go so far as to question whether the music on MP3.com - at least some of it - isn't superior, or at least more originally innovative than the vast majority of music playing on America's tightly playlisted FM radio stations, which are controlled by a handful of conglomerated, juvenocratic taste arbiters that have "dumbed down" society's collective pop culture to the sub-nadir point. Of course, it's true that many or most of the files now residing on MP3.com's servers will continue to exist on the hard drives and CD disks of the many thousands of artists who chose to upload their creative works to a central repository. So what's the fuss about? Unless all copies of a digital work are wiped out, how is digital culture diminished? Well, it's not just the information that's important, but the information about the information (Note: pipe-smoking, chin-stroking, lotus-eating info-theorists from Northern California call this stuff "meta-information"). In the case of the MP3.com file archives, this meta-information is frequently more interesting than the files themselves. How many times was a given satirical tune about, say, Bush or Blair downloaded? Which appeared on whose streaming radio playlists? Did, say the "grunge" genre grow or wane from 1998 to 2000? What did the digital musical underground think of the 9/11/01 attacks and how did they respond? What was the ratio of pro-war to anti-war songs uploaded in, say, the Spring of 2003? The list of possible "meta-information-related queries" that might be posed in the future goes on and on. In its heyday, MP3.com also provided artists who agreed to freely share their musical works home page-building tools, resulting in many thousands of home pages being built from 1998 onward. What will happen to all of these fascinatingly obscure pages, which MP3.com's users spent hundreds of thousand of unpaid person-hours creating? In the flick of a switch on December 3rd, 2003, all of this will be lost - forever. Funny, isn't it, that we live in a time where you can go to jail for copying a single MP3 file, but not a single law prohibts a company from destroying millions of them! Defenders of the impending destruction will surely mention that neither MP3.com nor CNET had any necessary contractual obligation to preserve works uploaded to its service, and that is certainly true in the purely legal sense. In a moral sense, however, the callous disregard for the worldwide collaberative effort that built MP3.com ranks among the most sordid acts yet seen in the history of the Web. Without the critical mass of content uploaded by musicians to the service, MP3.com would never have become enough of a force on the Web to gain investment money from Vivendi/Universal, and now, to seal a lucrative deal with CNET. These musicians were used by MP3.com's executives to get rich, and now everything they built is being junked. My guess is that had any single artist known the fate eventually awaiting their virtual projects, they would have chosen another service, or built there own sites, but now, all that awaits them are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of broken incoming links. History is a fragile thing in an age of bits. Any "guarantees of persistence" that history used to enjoy becuase its vehicle was a physical medium no longer exist. Once destroyed, it is gone forever. By presuming that people of the future will regard our electronic cultural products such as the MP3.com archive in exactly the same way that we do now - in terms of their commodity value - we take an enormous, arrogant risk. By shunning any and all obligation to the future, as well as to the artists across the world who invested millions of hours of creative effort in creating a shared cultural resource, we commit a new category of crime: call it "A Crime Against History". Those of us who spend time worrying about digital history - and the larger question of whether digital information has any history at all in store for it - will find a disturbing precedent here. Other common resources that we take for granted (even the Web itself) may soon be balkanized, broken up, or deleted for purely economic reasons. Other "trusted" institutions (and MP3.com was certainly trusted by the people who uploaded files to it) may turn wicked in a moment's time. Perhaps history, to paraphrase Clauswitz, is now "too important to be left to the historians". It is certainly too important to be left to the wiles of callous businessmen who, for a few pounds of silver, will so easily betray the trust of thousands of digital musicians and listeners across the world.
Years ago, hardly a November went by without my employers sending me to Comdex - the computer industry's largest trade show, held in Las Vegas, Nevada. I made many trips in the early 1990's, and my Comdex experiences always colored my perceptions of this industry. In a nutshell, I began seeing it as an overheated, hooting freak show filled with frantic marketing dweebs, incomprehensible acronyms, milling barkers, dancing show girls, fast-talking BPI's (Blonde Public relations Ingenues), mad-eyed Microsoft evangelists, and free-spending, heavyset IT "influencers" dropping expense account dollars into the $100 slot machines, all the while drunkenly slurring the lie that they had come to Vegas to seek out "an interoperable cross-platform solution". I don't exactly miss Comdex, but when November rolls around, I can't entirely free myself from the mad, fugitive urge to hop on a jet, get a cheap hotel, and stagger around with hundreds of thousands of bespectacled geeks slavering for the latest and greatest in overdriven EISA motherboards. Fortunately, my current state of unemployment means that I will simply stay put on a hard wooden chair, let Comdex slump its way into another liquor-soaked conclusion 2,800 miles away, and dredge through some of the slippery sludge that past Comdexes have left behind on the Web. Let's start with a moldy page left behind on Sun's servers entitled "Fun and Networking in Las Vegas" (a title that wryly plays on Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing..."). The page itself appears to be quite current, although the Comdex in question happened way back in 1999. On this and successive pages, we find reams of the sort of breathless, un-bylined prose that could only emanate from the keyboard of a well-paid corporate flack. The obvious thing about this page is that almost none of the links work anymore: if you attempt to download a copy of Star Office, attempt to inspect Sun's fleet of Formula One McLaren racing cars, or try to tune into Scott McNealey's streaming web keynote speech, you'll get a bunch of broken links. And is it my imagination, or have Scott McNealey's teeth been retouched to make them whiter than white? Looks like a case of historical revisionism in action! Is it fair to expect Sun to maintain its links from a show that nobody probably even remembers? Well, maybe not. But if they don't want to do this, why can't they simply slap on a GIF that says "archival material: do not touch"? Maybe doing so would do something terrible to their J2EE. Over at The Techzone, we're presented with a view of Comdex that's a lot more honest in terms of providing an actual view of the kind of nonsense that most Comdex attendees actually experience at the show. After a grueling day spent jostling in aircraft hanger-sized spaces roaring with noisy hoopla, young males sit together in low-ceilinged restaurants, eating tasteless food shipped from California in refrigerated trailers the week before. "Booth Babes" smile beguilingly at the digital cameras, quietly counting the minutes before they can go home. Speaking of "Booth Babes", the Web site of the J. Williams Agency, the company responsible for booking of many a trade show performer, is showing more than a few signs of bitrot these days (check out the broken buttons on the bottom). This is not a good omen for the future fortunes of the tireless crowd of dancers, magicians, stuntmen and leggy models once known to frequent Comdex in its salad days. Too numerous to enumerate among our Dead Comdex Tour are the many outdated, but still visible first-person accounts written to commemorate one's own survival of the show. In fact, tales of "Comdex Trauma" probably represents the most prevelant, but most frequently overlooked form of computer culture writing of the last 10 years, and there are literally hundreds of these accounts dotting the Web. Each of these antique stories provides a variation on the classic, paradigmatic fable of the earnest geek, working for some 3rd or 4th tier software company who is marched off to Comdex at the behest of his employer with a mission to "get a good look at the latest, coolest stuff". At the show, our cool-headed protagonist does in fact see a few cool pieces of hardware, but somewhere in the process - perhaps while trudging through the vast expanses of desert separating one pavilion from the next (because he can't get a taxi) - he suddenly realizes to his shock and horror that the gentle industry that he thought he was in bears no resemblance to the crass, howling, beast-hearted business that he's actually part of. After realizing this great eternal truth about America, Technology, and the Unbearable Shallowness of IT, he returns to his employer, broke, shaken, but indelibly transformed, a modern-day Orpheus restored from the Underworld. These "coming of age in Las Vegas stories" have been churning around the Web for a long time, and perhaps they deserve their own book (although I wouldn't want to be its copy editor). Meanwhile, they can easily be accessed by Googling on the terms "Comdex", "Diary" and "Geek". I suppose I've added enough to the collective subliterature of Comdex in this note, except to say that, as Comdex's fortunes fade (its parent company recently declared bankruptcy), and the show shrinks, we'll likely be regarding these minor tales of woe with considerable nostalgia in coming years. The idea that one would seriously want to return to the world of 1993 or 1996 is actually a pretty sickening one, but it's understandable - at least we can say that we survived those years, and there are few guarantees ahead, either for Comdex, technology employment, the future of wearable hardware, or anything else in these uncertain times. Let us not conclude this tiny tour of Dead Comdex Digimatter without referring at least once to Comdex's main page, located at http://www.comdex.com. No this page isn't exactly broken, but more than a few of its featured links are. Take a quick gander at the entries grouped under "Comdex in the News". At least two of them - the articles entitled "Show Changes Are Anything But Conventional", and "Venerable Vegas Tech Trade Show" are as grotesquely busted as an Enterprise Middleware Manager weeping after a poor streak of luck at the slots - they yield nothing other than Page Not Found error messages. If this is the best that the IT industry can do to revive itself, maybe it ought to stay dead. 11/11/03: Raiders of the Lost Kozmo.com Files On November 11, 2003, our skeleton crew of researchers, while digging through another midden heap of cybergarbage, discovered a rare and extraordinary find of images, sounds, and movie files developed to promote Kozmo.com - a star-crossed Internet project that was well known to New Yorkers and San Franciscans in the late 1990s. This find, we believe, significantly expands the supply of first-generation digital artifacts associated with Kozmo.com. Before discussing the gems found within the 11/11/03 Find, let's look at the Kozmo.com digital artifacts that are known to exist today, and the gaps in the historical collection. First, it should be noted that the Internet Archive does appear to contain a fair collection of Kozmo.com, a list of which can be viewed by going to http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.kozmo.com. Unfortunately, much of Kozmo.com did not survive the WayBack Machine's data collection process. None of the examples from 1998 appears to have been preserved intact, and only one recorded example from 1999 survives - the one archived on October 13. The reasons for this seem to be associated with the CGI scripting that Kozmo.com used in this period, which seems to have thrwarted Archive.org's Web-whacking efforts. Of the 33 efforts the WayBack Machine made to archive the site in 2000 and early 2001, the results are slightly better. One can clearly make out the Kozmo logo and some of its product offerings. Unfortunately, only the home page was preserved in these passes - what was once inside Kozmo is invisible. The last image that survives of Kozmo.com in its pre-failure mode is from March 31, 2000. Ghost Sites made its sole screen grab shortly after this time. So Kozmo isn't very well preserved, which is sad for those who grew to love this service. Here is where the Ghost Sites Find of 11/11/03 serves to fill some of these gaps, so let's take a quick tour. All of these artifacts were recovered from the Web site of DiMassino, the ad agency that sought to make Kozmo.com a household word in the late 1990's. On the agency's main Kozmo page, you'll see a quick overview of some extremely strange Kozmo offline branding objects, including a Kozmo Metrocard, a Kozmo business card, the uniform of one of its messengers, and one of its phone booth ads. It's interesting to note that Kozmo.com actually went so far as to trademark the phrase "We'll Be Right Over" (which means that you might want to refrain from ever saying or writing these words unless you're prepared to be sued by whichever liquidator wound up owning the Kozmo.com corporate assets!). Unfortunately, you can't see much more by clicking anywhere on this page - the really interesting stuff is buried deep within unlinked areas of the agency site that our skeleton crew had to find by resorting to a set of sneaky and stealthy means passed directly to us by Indiana Jones. So without further ado, here is a list of precious, historically significant digital matter that very few people outside of DiMassimo's tight circle of brand identity experts have likely ever seen:
The next two pages present examples of Kozmo's attitudinally-driven rest-room advertising (a method also used by Half.com, which placed its ads at the bottom of urinals in the well-trafficked mens room at New York's Grand Central Terminal). One such ad is "He's Such a Loser - Why Don't You Go Home and Rent a Movie", and a similar one from the male point of view - "That Girl's a Bitch - Why Don't You Go Home and Rent a Movie". Each speaks far more eloquently about American sexual attitudes in the late 1990's than you'd ever find in a skidload of sociological texts borrowed from your local university library. http://www.dimassimo.com/site/work/kozmo/kozmo_work11.html and http://www.dimassimo.com/site/work/kozmo/kozmo_work12.html contain Kozmo.com screenshots that neither Archive.org nor Ghostsites.com was able to capture. They are perhaps less interesting than the other examples here, but do serve to illustrate what the site actually looked like during its brief sojourn on the Web. The next two pages in the Lost Kozmo.com Archive contain fascinating radio spots, the first of which is a fake testimonial from one of Kozmo's messengers; the next a curiously homoerotic interview between a customer and a video store owner that was targeted for use in San Francisco. The Ghost Sites Find of 11/11/03 presents an extraordinary look at the life - both internal and external - of a legendary dotcom that time and memory have not been kind to. Unfortunately, this view - one of the greatest surprises to Web historians since the discovery of the Lost Pathfinder Archive - may not last for very long. Although the GIFs and JPEGs can be saved by historians, neither the Quicktime movies nor the radio spots - the richest data forms in this collection, can be captured for posterity, and DeMassino may have have wanted it this way. In the flick of a switch, we will lose these few remaining pieces of Kozmo's history and it could happen tonight or tomorrow. The pages on DeMassino's servers provide a rare look into the past that illustrate much more about our time than even its brand identity gurus could have ever intended. One might hope that DeMassino donates some of this material to one or another of the Internet's many data depositories, but this is unlikely. Commercials, in radio, TV, print, or hypermedia, rarely survive more than a few years before they are destroyed completely, and I doubt that Kozmo will provide any exception to this immutable rule. Note: on November 16, I heard from someone who states that the Kozmo .MOV and audio files that I said "could not be saved" can in fact be saved, and that he has saved them. This is very good news and I hope to have more information about this soon. 11/07/03: Holes in Web History? I am a great admirer or the Internet Archive. It represents the greatest single repository of dead Web-related matter that is publically available today, and whenever I give a talk or send an e-mail about my own modest work in this field, I always mention it in glowing terms. Still, one cannot fully serve the cause of digital history preservation without pointing out that there are flaws many of the artifacts in Archive.org's collections, and that these flaws are already making it difficult for Web historians to glean much more than a surface understanding of what many of the early Web pioneers were up to. What am I talking about here? Well, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here are a few screengrabs taken this week from exhibits in archive.org's collection. (caution: these files are fairly large - I intend to put lower-resolution images up soon, but am not currently at a machine that has a copy of Photoshop aboard it).
Exhibit A: IBM.com, circa 1999 As you can see, the page, as preserved, reveals very little about what the IBM webmasters intended to show back when they put this page up in 1999. It's not even clear that it's an IBM page, because even the famous "IBM 8-bar" logo is missing, and so is a date-stamp.One can presume that the large grey areas of the page contained some sort of graphical images, or perhaps Java elements (I very much doubt whether the very conservative IBM would have ever deigned to put shockwave on its pages!). But in truth, the grey areas could have contained almost anything, and given that it is unlikely, although not impossible, that any other copies of this page exist anywhere, future historians will be left with far more questions than answers as they ponder this page.
Exhibit B: MSNBC.com, circa 1998 This page is a bit better preserved than IBM's, but not by much. One can readily identify the MSNBC logo, and see a date-stamp, but the most important story of the day - the one that would have appeared in the large blue area - is missing, as are what appears to have been a "scrolling headline" that would have appeared in an area immediately above the blue area, and the navigation bar to its left. What did MSNBC's editors think were the most compelling issues on the date of April 28th? We'll never know.
Exhibit C: TalkMagazine.com, circa 2002 Could any article about Bitrot be complete without referring at least once to Tina Brown's extraordinarily ill-conceived venture into cyberspace known as talkmagazine.com? Of course not! Unfortunately, future historians using archive.org to see exactly what Ms. Brown built with her millions of dollars of funding will be hard-pressed to say anything more than "we know that there was a site called talkmagazine.com and it seems to have used frames and a bunch of navigation buttons along the top". Of course, I have chosen this example not just to skewer the honorable Ms. Brown, who now has a spectacularly well-paying job at the Washington Post while other better writers are starving for a single paying assignment, but to point out the fact that a screenshot in my own collection happens to do a better job of presenting a good illustration of Ms. Brown's site was doing. I hope, but by no means expect that future social critics of our celebrity-glutted age will thank me sometime after I've died. All right - you've seen my three exhibits. So what's the "takeaway" from them? Well, it certainly is not to bash archive.org - which has done more to preserve our collective digital history than any single institution I'm aware of. In many, many cases, the Web sites in archive'org's collection are much better preserved than the three you've seen here - especially those that didn't use fancy home pages elements such as Java, Shockwave, or other history-resistant dynamic elements. This brief tour of inadvertently-induced "bitrot" does, however, show some of the limitations of the robotic spidering approach to compiling digital archival matter. Spiders and robots, however efficient, have not had the capability of recognizing the presence of dymanic elements as a condition warranting any special action by a human being. Perhaps some day they'll have this ability, but this doesn't help any of the three cases above. Whatever they looked like a few years ago, whatever content was served up - well, it's as much a mystery now as it will be in a thousand years. Should we mourn and tear our hair out because archive.org's history collections aren't perfect? Of course not. Nobody in his/her right mind believes it's possible or desirable to save every last bit that's been churned through cyberspace over the last ten years. One might have hoped that IBM and MSNBC - major, well-funded sites that one might have thought "socially significant" entities - might have survived the historical mill with fewer broken parts. But both of these organizations clearly have the wherewithall to have performed internal archiving on their own, and if they're particularly bugged about this, well, they can simply FedEx a tape drive over to archive.org's offices in San Francisco's Presido. And if they don't, well, they obviously don't give a damn about the problem, in which case history will give them what they deserve: obscurity. One thing is perfectly clear, however, and it's a lesson worth noting by anyone building Web sites today: if you want people in the future to see your site the way you intended it, you really should eschew fancy, faddish "gimmick du jour" technologies and stick to good old fashioned plain vanilla HTML, GIFs, and JPEGs. Unless you resist the temptation to load up your pages with Java, Shockwave, Flash, XML and other fancy-dancy presentational goodies, the only thing that people of the future may see when they key in your URL is a big grey hole in Web history. 11/03/03: The Rorschach Enigma Sounds like a bad book by Irwin Shaw or Robert Ludlum, doesn't it? Well, no, the Rorshact Enigma isn't a plot to destroy the world, it's just a nettlesome problem that Web historians often face when trying to decide what the heck is worth preserving and what really isn't. Let me explain what I mean. The Rorschach Enigma refers to the familiar psychological inkblot test. I first observed it in practice when I was working at Pathfinder, Time Inc's famously doomed Web site whose fate I have discussed ad nauseum here and elsewhere. Basically, the Enigma is something that makes the Web, the Net, and just about everything else that goes on in this very strange world of bits look so very much like something that's already familiar to them that it blinds them to any other possibilities. Let me be more concrete: if you've spent your life creating TV programs, you're more than likely to view the Web as a great place to produce TV programs. Why? Because the irregular pieces of the utterly mixed up Rorshact patterns begin to resemble little TV screens, little TV channels, etc. If you're a person who's labored for years in radio, well, the Web begins to look more like an infinite-channel FM radio station than anything else. If you've spent your life hacking away in the incestrously cloistered confines of the book world, well the Web is nothing more than a vast library, a book store, or perhaps a space-age book with a zillion chapters, narratives, etc. The Rorschach Enigma, in other words, works by the well-known principles of analogy and anthropomorphism. Why do kids feel friendlier toward squirrels than they do toward spides? Well, squirrels look a lot more like human beings than spiders do. Following the same logic, the Web - a shapeless, organic thing with a million personalities and as many unknowable nooks and crannies as any wacky nth-dimensional space yet discovered by cosmologists, is a lot easier to fathom if one likens it to something else: the radio, the TV, the telephone, the telegraph, etc. This is why when Al Gore mentioned so famously that the Net was simply "the information superhighway", all Americans were able to immediately place themselves there in that space, breezing along past innumerable roadside billboards, strip malls, and traffic cops. Okay - I think I've explained this phenomenon as fully as the subject deserves. So how exactly does it apply to the problems that Web historians face when attempting to grapple with preserving our collective digital heritage? Well, I'd claim that it blinds us in the same way that it blinded early Web content pioneers, who relied more on analogy than on any genuinely bold research, when they launched their projects. Why? Because, to put it bluntly, the Web really isn't The Library of Alexandria. Nor is it an open sewer. Nor is it a wilderness where weeds need to be cast aside and strong fruit-bearing trees need to be conserved. The Web might look like one or more of these things at any given time, but this appearance may be as much a function of the mood and background of the observer as it is a function of any given quality that the Web itself possesses. It's pretty clear to me that the Web is too big, too fast-moving, and too anarchic to be "saved" in a centralized, singular, hierarchically-organized canonical container. Nor do I suspect that any effort - however grandiose - is likely to really capture the flavor that historians will really need to decrypt its hidden meanings, which by their very nature are opaque to the people who live within its space and time today. So a lot will have to be thrown out, and the rest - probably no more than one percent, will have to stand as a representation of the rest. What shall we save? The stuff we "understand" (which, the Rorschach Enigma holds, will best represent forms of information that we already are familiar with), or the stuff that we really can't understand? It's fairly clear that it will be the former, not the latter. Whether historians of, say, the 22nd Century will agree with our choices is highly debatable. One can almost hear these people moaning about our short-sightedness, wrong-headedness, and inability to see beyond our own Rorschachian subjectivity. I suppose the best thing that can be said about the situation is that we will all be dead and gone before any of their complaining even begins about how all our thinking about the Great Interactive Inkblot was wrong. 11/01/03: What's So Dead About Dead Media? After coming back from Rotterdam, I began thinking long and hard about what and where I want to take this project. Running a project like Ghost Sites for seven years has immersed me so thoroughly in the lore of "The Lost Web" that it's been a real battle to see what lies beyond the cyber-wreckage. So what lies beyond the legion of abandoned Web sites that have cluttered my consciousness these past seven years? Well - nothing: a yawning abyss, a vortex of post-futurist mu-ness. And so, with this spirit in mind, I contacted Bruce Sterling, to see whether there was any way I could apply my particular spiritual fungus to any sort of cultural work that he's now doing. Bruce and I have sort of crossed paths before - several years ago, I interviewed him for a lost Wired News project called "The Real Web", and I nearly ran into him on the Lower East Side in 2000 for an event called "Man Transforms". It turned out that Bruce is in need of somebody who can help reanimate his long-standing Dead Media Project, and I offered to step in and help out with the e-mail list. I've always liked Bruce's work, and consider him to be one of cyberculture's founding madmen. If I can lend a hand to DeadMedia.org, well, that's just a good thing to do. But frankly, I'm also doing this for reasons of self-interest, because I believe it will allow the collective research base represented by this project to expand into new areas that need to be researched so that Ghost Sites can move further into the yawning abyss referenced earlier. This is not a merger - Ghost Sites will steam on to its own peculiar destiny, and DeadMedia.org will simply reanimate a bit, braced by the mad efforts of our skeleton crew to engage in issues that amplify and further contextualize our own media studies weirdnesses. So Ghost Sites - this foothold on the lava mountain - will continue, right here on disobey.com. In fact, if you've been watching this site since the Spring of 2003, I hope you've noticed that there's a hell of a lot more activity than there's been in years. And with Morbus' continuing support, I fully expect to be here in the year 2006 to celebrate GS's 10th Anniversary, provided the whole cosmos (or at least my part of it) doesn't go "pffft" before then. Anyway, here is the announcement that Bruce posted tonight on his e-mail list. I believe it says it all
From: Bruce Sterling Key concepts: Dead Media Project, media studies, Steve Baldwin Attention Conservation Notice: Has nothing to do with environmental issues, even though a patch of California the size of Rhode Island is on fire. The Dead Media Project died some time ago, although all the data is still there. (Whew!) Years of selfless labor! The world's greatest single repository on the subject of weird, gimmicky, extinct forms of communication! I worked on that thing for ages. http://www.deadmedia.org But Halloween rolls around == and lo, the DEAD WALK AGAIN!!
Suddenly a new, selfless martyr is willing to appoint
himself editor of the Dead Media mailing list!
It's Steve Baldwin of "Ghost Sites," the website
where extinct websites live on (whether they
want to or not)! You can see from this that, if anything, Mr. Baldwin is overqualified for the job. http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/scb.shtml Here is his email. If you want to be on the revived Dead Media mailing list, let Steve Baldwin know. steve_baldwin@hotmail.com Lord knows I will. If you want to contribute, even better. Needless to say, since Dead Media Project went into abeyance, media have been dying at unprecedented rates. There is plenty to discuss in this line of research, and just maybe, someday somebody will really write that "Dead Media Handbook." Tangentially, I am informed that my net.art installation "Embrace the Decay" (a work blatantly infected by dead-media aesthetics) has broken all previous LAMOCA records for web art traffic, over at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. http://www.moca.org/museum/dg_detail.php?dgDetail=bsterling A rare but precious example of Viridian design activists actually designing something! Hooray for us!
O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O 10/30/03: Antique Web Browsers Still Surfing at DejaVu.Org
A few nights ago, we were doing some nocturnal Web History research and came across an extraordinary site that's been online for several years called DejaVu.org. It isn't a new site (it went online in the late 1990's), but its main offerings - a timeline of Web development, and a uniquely compelling WWW browser emulator that lets the Web surfer see sites the way early Web pioneers experienced them, using vintage NSCA Mosaic 0.9, Netscape 1.0, Internet Explorer 2.0, Lynx, line-mode, and even my personal favorite: the famed HotJava browser - have grown even more appealing as time has moved on. We were so moved by the experience of viewing the Web in this way that we reached out to DejaVu.org's creator, Pär Lannerö, and he granted us this brief interview from Stockholm. Ghost Sites: What was the inspiration behind DejaVu.org? Pär Lannerö: As you can read in the timeline part of dejavu.org, I was watching and taking part in the development of the Web from a very early stage. Everybody I knew in the IT sector 1996-1998 was playing around with fun Web ideas, and dejavu was simply one of many ideas I came up with. Another one was a Web-based buddy list system which I finished the day before Somebody told me about a similar project from a company called Mirabilis. With the speed that their project spread over the Internet, there was no use in releasing my own project. Yet another idea was a system to manage Web bookmarks on the Web instead of in the browser client. That one I actually implemented, and I have been using it almost every day since 1996. It wasn't just me - everybody seemed to come up with fun ideas those days... :) Ghost Sites: It looks to me that several people besides yourself were instrumental in creating the browser emulators. Who did what and how long did it take to get it going? Pär Lannerö: My friend Elias Bengtsson and a Ville Hising at Bazooka.se produced a few images. Per Gullfeldt of Digital Equipment Corporation provided a server as sponsorship. Daniel Bergström has made sure the Web server is (almost) always up and running. The rest of the people in the credits list are colleagues from the time when I was working with dejavu. They provided the necessary encouragement for me to actually launch the site. I did all programming and writing by myself. Mostly in 1997-98, but I have been fixing a few things since then. Ghost Sites: As you're probably aware, there is a lot more historical Web matter online than there was back in the late 1990's. I speak specifically of archive.org's massive "Wayback Machine". Do you have any plans to work with this organization so that your browser emulator might be used to view some of the preserved historical sites? Pär Lannerö: I have thought about that, too. But since I have no income from the dejavu project, I can only spend a few hours now and then. If I get sponsorship or if I lose my job or something I might be able to develop the site further. One big advantage, though, when dealing with history, is that it doesn't change very quickly, so there is no hurry. :) Ghost Sites: Your excellent Timeline of Web Innovation seems to stop at the end of 1999. Why does it end here? Did innovation trail off or did you stop work on DejaVu.org? If the latter, do you have any plans to revive it? Pär Lannerö: I have not spent much time updating the site since 1999. Of course, a few things have happened since then, but I definitely think innovation slowed down around 1998. Before that year I always used a beta version of Netscape - every new improvement was worth the time it took to download and install. Today I don't care what browser I use, since there is nothing much happening. 10/28/03: Why Study Web History at All? I've been collecting all kinds of cyberjunk for years. Old Microsoft Developer T-shirts, Flooz handerchiefs, pre-AOL Time-Warner frisbees, and yes, pictures of old dead web sites. I also collect old railroad timetables and match book covers - maybe there's a connection there somewhere. So I'm a pack rat - on the Web and in RL - and I know I'm not alone. In fact, pack rats are probably less interesting and less numerous creatures than Jackdaws, which steal, horde, and festoon their nests with any shiny bright bauble they fly over during their work day. Neither Charles Darwin nor anybody else has figured out why these strange birds collect the shiny effluvia left behind by human beings: they just do it, and perhaps their behavior furthers their attempt to gain a long-term foothold in evolution's spiral that we'll never completely understand. Perhaps you're a digital jackdaw too. Perhaps there's a part of you that will really never get over the first hallucinogenic moment - perhaps in 1993 or '94, perhaps last week, when you saw the Web for the first time. In the same way that drug addicts will spend their life savings trying to recapture that first mad moment of ecstacy, people deeply impressed by their first exposure to the World Wide Web frequently return to it, or perhaps it returns to them. Either way, the Web provides constant reminders of its past - and a vortex back into time, when we were all younger, richer, fresher, and life at 56K was the norm. Nostalgic sounding, doesn't it? Web Nostalgia isn't really big right now - the last 10 years are still with us - some would say "all too much with us". But it will come, in the same way that Saturday Night Fever keeps coming back, or scooters, skateboards, yo-yo's, and mindless rhythmic music. At the risk of sounding like a latter-day Joe Franklin (the "world's number one collectible of memorabilia"), it's all too likely that the Web soon take its place in the pantheon of lost fads, and perhaps that's where it belongs, right next to one's old 386SX notebook, an Apple IIe, and one's never used Radio Shack CB Radio. But wait a minute - wasn't the Web - yes, this thing that somehow is bringing you the thing that you are now reading - going to be a lot more than simply a fad that would come, go, and expire as soon as something better more interesting came along? Didn't the Web represent a quantum leap for humanity, in terms of realizing the global "noosphere" predicted by visionaries such as Tielhard De Chardin? If so - if there was and is something culturally unique going on here that is the very beginning of what is a much longer-term trend - are we not obligated to treat it with a bit more respect than yesterday's garbage? This isn't just idle "jackdaw-level" curiosity at all the bright shiny baubles we've created in the last 10 years. The very idea of studying Web History (as opposed to Net History or Computer History) supposes that there was and is something unique on the Web - especially in terms of how it synergetically combines text, image, speech, and anciallary forms in a special "sensory web" that makes it more than simply "all that there stuff that uses the Hypertext Transport Protocol), And yet the sad truth is that most of the Web - perhaps 99% of its terrabytes of information - is cybergarbage whose evanescence is probably well-deserved. The problem, of course, is deciding which part gets preserved and which thrown out. Who controls history? Well - we do - at least until the historical record disappears (Note: the average life of a Web page is a mere 44 days). One thing we - historians, amateur ones like myself and profession ones inside the academy - can say is that the Web is a creature with a big brain but no memory facilities. In fact, one could almost call it brain-damaged in terms of its inability to retain much of its own past. Dystopians term it an Orwellian medium that doesn't even need a poor sot like Winston Smith to rewrite the files maintained at the Ministry of Truth - the Web deletes itself, through a complex web of interactions - some technological, others purely social - all of which conspire to make it an ephemeral, malleable, and impermanent.communications channel - more like the telephone than the telegraph. Why study Web History? Well - because it's really damned strange, when you really start to sort though the digital dumpster. And once in awhile, one can find a discarded pearl or two of wisdom there. But more importantly, as computer-mediated information grows (in 2002, human beings created about 800 megabytes each), it's clear that nobody - outside a handful of institutions that each have their own approach to the problem - is making the connection between our digital past and our digital future. What was the Web Generation up to in its first 10 years? What did they build here? Was it good? Was it bad? Was it blind? Was it stupid? Could it hold a key to what's next? Is it simply rubbish that's as dead as yesterday's news? Or do all of these questions pale when compared to the ultimate question - did Karl Marx's prediction that humanity will reach "The End of History" actually refer not to a triumph of socialism, but to our arrival at a cliff heralding a new, possibly digital Dark Age, wherein history will actually disappear in some undreamt of meta-systemic-crash, like an "info-stroke"? Is History Itself "Obsolete"? That's the "ah-hah" question that lurks - like a ghoul - at the end of any extended meditation upon this subject. Web Historians are not futurists, but anti-futurists who reason that our strange, jackdaw-like behavior and our habit of looking backward, not forward, is no more dangerous than focussing exclusively on the road ahead. Studying the past through the Web presents a view that cuts against the grain of the future-bias of this medium, which always and forever will be focussed on the Now and the Next (as it was designed to do). Many of us reject the notion that a central canonical "Web History" can ever be written, or that it even should be written. That perhaps a decentralized set of "histories" might more accurately describe the actual zeitgeist of digital culture, even if they suffer from an alarming lack of comprehension. What unites us is that there is something about the notion of all this impermenance that deeply disturbs us. Perhaps we see that the New Library of Alexandria is being made not of marble, but of straw. Perhaps we're just a bunch of jackdaws whose Quixote-like quest to capture and preserve artifacts from early digital culture is ultimately pointless. Maybe we're just stick-in-the muds suffering from a kind of nauseating motion sickness that Internet Time induces over long periods of exposure. Or brave "Necronauts", as Bruce Sterling puts it, who just dig banging around in abandoned industrial sites. We ourselves do not always know who we are. But these and other considerations go a long way to answer the question: "Why Study Web History at All?" 10/23/03: Exploring the Lost Canon of ANSI Art It's eye-opening to get a glimpse of what online life, culture, aesthetics, and graphics were like a mere 10 or 12 years ago. One of the best places to get reacquainted with the lost zeitgeist of this prehistoric, pre-Web era is by pointing your browser to one of the Web's many obscure repositories of ANSI Art. What was ANSI Art? Well, according to the Webopedia, this brief but important computer art movement owed its origin to the inclusion of a device driver called ANSI.SYS that was first bundled with MS-DOS 3.3. This driver allowed "extended screen codes", otherwise known as "escape sequences", to be used to define a series of colors that considerably spiced up MS-DOS's traditionally ominous and forbidding "jet black" screen interface. Images created in this way frequently migrated out to Bulletin Board Systems, in fact, it was the very popularity of these BBS's which created a demand for so many of them. The easiest way to get a feel for the ANSI Art genre is at http://www.mjbdiver.com/ansi/. Here, through clever use of a Java applet, 35 early ANSI works - many of them serving as the home pages of BBS systems - are easily accessible. ANSI Art was never really accepted by "serious digital artists" (who used Macs with better resolution and higher color depths), and perhaps the state of psychological exile - imposed from within by the limitations of ANSI, and from without by the scorn of the "fine arts" Mac-heads explains the negative images we often see in ANSI collections. At mjbdiver's site, we find more than our fair share of images reflecting situations of conflict, alienation, destruction, death, extinction, repression, and isolation. Happy/positive images are frequently presented by alien presences, or as an experience that a human is enjoying in solitude (eg. fishing or walking on a beach). Images in "Remembrance Pack", a remarkable collection of 1989-91 ANSI work by the artist SHADOW DEMON available for download at: http://www.acid.org/ftp/aaa-8991.zip explore the outer limits of abstraction possible within ANSI - to the point that some observers need to spend many minutes studying these images before being able to parse through any possible meaning. This artifact - I term it "ANSI image blanking", is caused by the fact that viewing these images locally is a very different experience than viewing them when using a slow 2,400 BPS modem - the delivery platform for which they were designed. Of course, the users experiencing these screens in 1990 or '91 had a very different experience - the screens scrolled, often at 14.4K, slowly from top to bottom, hence the consistent placement of text at the upper-left hand corner, where it would be displayed first - tipping the user off as to what was being illustrated, which appeared slowly, line-by-line, as the data was passed from the BBS to the user. As a result of this low-bandwidth delivery method, ANSI Art became spectacularly, floridly abstract (one might even say "fauvist"). Artists like SHADOW DEMON freely used the 640 x 480 space to move and morph text to reaches of abstraction often seen in subway graffiti, but very seldome elsewhere. Blocky figures - human or otherwise - looked cartoonish in the same way that Keith Haring's subway chalk drawings were crudely symbolic - pictograms made on the fly, as temporary interfaces - pre-Web, proto-interactive experiments that existed free of any necessary expectation of permanence (Haring's early chalk drawings were literally often wiped off subway walls, often in just a few hours, by the movement of rush-hour crowds). Other examples - animated crudely, with strangely sized ASCII text elements mixed in, recall Stuart Davis, as well as just about every artist ever commissioned to design a jacket patch for the Hell's Angels. (Note: there are two "erotic" ANSI images in the aforementioned collection which might conceivably offend some people, so please do not download the pack if you are likely to be offended by these images, are under 18, etc.)
Is ANSI Art "Fine Art?". Probably not. Several fine arts institutions have actually recognized ASCII Art, a distant cousin, as worthy of curatorial respect, but never ANSI, which is likened more to digital folk art - a provisional form that had too many limitations - both technical and those resulting from the uneven design training of its artists - to make it acceptable to the digital art critic or a wider circle of enthusiasts beyond those using the systems in which it was embedded. One factor that keeps it a surpressed, or at least largely unknown digital art genre is the fact that few of the pre-Web BBS's are still running, nor are there any legitimate efforts to memorialize these systems in the same way that there are multiple efforts to memorialize the Web in projects such as the Internet Archive. Computer historians, however, see that ANSI Art tells us a lot about the state of pre-Web culture in the early 1990's - a world of BBS's, 14.Kpbs modem, and SYSOPs. Embedded in its clunky, boxy screens is a concrete representation of a common, widely-shared online experience likely to provoke a measurable shock of recognition for those using these systems in those days. For more on ANSI Art, see History of the Underground Scene: ANSI Art, available at: http://leo.ice.org/ansi/ansiexp.html (Note: acknowledgements need to be made to Morbus, the mysteriously influential webmaster of disobey.com, who introduced me to ANSI Art several years ago. I've been wanting to write something about the genre for some time, but never quite got around to it until now.) 10/20/03: Happy 10th Birthday, WWW (Let the Worldwide Browser Party Begin!) This past Summer, the World Wide Web had its 10th birthday - a significant anniversary for those millions of people who've been involved in creating it, as well as those who have made it an integral part of their lives. Congratulations, WWW - you made it through your first decade! Amazingly, however, very few people are paying any attention to this date. Where is the champagne, the presents, the ponderous speeches from futurists? Where are the massive multimedia presentations showing the Web's earliest, flightiest experiments? The plans for Worldwide Browser Parties? Well, they don't seem to exist. Sorry, but in the grim, post-futurist world of 2003 nobody seems to give a damn about the 10th Anniversary of the WWW. Maybe people are just too angry about losing their jobs or all of their 401K money, and blame the WWW. Or maybe people think that the WWW, like the Holland Tunnel or the Golden Gate Bridge, is a timeless institution that's always been here, and doesn't deserve celebrations more frequently than every 50 or 100 years. It's really kind of sad! So how do we remedy this situation? Well, with a party, of course, a worldwide browser party. Let's dig up the oldest browser we can find - perhaps an old copy of Netscape Navigator 2.0, and steam around the infohighway in style! Experience the excitement of nested tables, server push, GIF89A animations, and unpredictable MIME plug ins, just the way they were experienced by the pioneers of late 1993 and 1994. How about it folks? OTOH, maybe the idea of firing up ancient browsers and seeing if they can still navigate past the default home page is pointless. Maybe we need some other, more sensible method of commemorating the last 10 years. Did anyone save - perhaps on a hard drive now sitting on a shelf - any vintage Internet-related artifacts from 1993? Could this artifact be shared with the wider public without disturbing the wrathful gods of copyright?
If you have an idea for how best to celebrate the WWW's 10th Anniversay, please send it on to Steve Baldwin. Or build something yourself and send me your link. There really isn't much time available to prepare a proper birthday party for the WWW but there's never been much time for anything on the Net. But building something - however small - is the least we can do for a medium that's given us all so much joy, pain, enlightenment, and bitrot.
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Ghost-o-Meter You're on the web a lot. You've seen many a dead site. You've forgotten our email address... and you don't feel like coming back here to get it. What do you do? Ghost-o-Meter (javascript required) The Ghost-o-Meter opens a small, movable window... if you've found a Ghost Site, fill in the blanks, fire it off, and go back to foolin' around. Its that easy. You can also use this form: What the ??! Well, this is all very interesting, but what the heck is Ghost Sites anyway? Why devote a live site to Dead Sites? If you're interested in this Ghost Sites thing, it is a project that I began in the summer of 1996 while I was working for Time-Warner's Pathfinder. Late in the evening of July 4th, while piloting a small craft across Long Island Sound, I had what only can be described as an epiphany. From out of the depths came a cruel vision of the World Wide Web. It wasn't a friendly place - an innocent place of community, commerce and chat. It was a great and utterly pitiless electronic ocean that swallowed up sites, careers, and venture capital like a ravenous killer whale. Great sites - sites like Mecklerweb and iGuide - were going down with all hands. Great fortunes were collapsing and proud content sites lay wrecked on the bottom. No one seemed to care. The future was a vast abyss - who would record these days of New Media folly, disaster and despair? Back on shore, but still haunted by this vision, I launched Ghost Sites as a modest attempt to document the great disappearing fleet of web sites sinking beneath the waves. This project briefly made me spectacularly famous, and then I was quickly, and completely forgotten. By March of 1997, Ghost Sites had succumbed to the same deadly entropy that had settled over the Internet, and became a crewless wreck itself. For six cruel months, it drifted like a despised garbage barge, broke its keel in a summer squall, and finally washed up on Geocities. On an icy November morning, Morbus boarded the wreck, inspected the damage, and offered the captain a safe harbor. The bilge pump was started, and the squealing, rusty hull lifted off the sands again. It soon arrived here - in the dark, unquiet waters of Disobey.Com. If you have a favorite rotting site that you'd like to mention, email me at Steve_Baldwin@hotmail.com. Ghost Sites has appeared in a number of places including Time Magazine, ZDNet, The Netly News and more. For a list of all those we know of, as well as links to online counterparts, click here. You can also take a look at the limited edition t-shirt we once offered. Previous Issues Text issues? Click here.
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