ldt003: Inactivity
#003 - [ inactivity ] [ - xod ]
I sit here thinking.
I'm trying to find something.
A scene, a place, whatever, just somewhere i'm sure exists.
But, the more I think about it, the closer I come to the conclusion that its all in my head.
A figment of my imagination.
Its as if the scene, the underground of the Internet, or whatever you wish to call it, has disappeared. Its either gone so underground that the underground now consists of one person in their bedroom in an irc channel with a mode similar to +l 1 or a private mailing list with only one address on the list.
Perhaps everyone grew up?
I guess thats what happened, most people got bored, got a job, got a girlfriend or a boyfriend, 2.4 children, a house in the hills, a comfortable family car, and decided to forget about what they once consumed all their time doing.
Another theory is that people just got pissed off with the commercial infiltration of the internet and decided to leave before they became puppets in a sense. I mean, everyone is on the Internet nowadays, and a lot of people think they know everything about it. But in reality they've only been online for 6 months yet talk as if they were employed at BBN during the 1970s.
IRC seems dead nowadays, perhaps I don't join the right channels, but they used to be full of people talking 24/7, now its all idlers or non-existent users.
I'm not even going to start talking about BBSes. I recently found an apparently up2date list of BBSes so I spent half the night trying them all. All of them dead. No one is interested anymore. I have found a couple good telnet boards over the past few years but they are very short lived or their boards aren't frequently enough posted to for my liking heh.
Usenet isn't what it was, sure there are still some relatively interesting posts on various groups but it has seemed to lose a certain spark that it used to have.
Who is writing text files nowadays?
Where have all the quality H/P zines gone?
I've been trying to trace the moment when it all turned sour. I guess its really been the last few years, the tail-end of the slow descent that probably began in the mid 1990s..
Sure, there are still zines being written, and its nice to see people still show an interest but on the whole, the amount being released recently is a small percentage compared to a few years ago for example.
A classic example of inactivity has to be Phrack magazine. The H/P zine has been releasing issues since 1985 yet the last issue to be released (Issue 56) was released over 15 months ago. Yeah, I hear a change of editorship and a new issue is on its way, but compared to their apparent target of 3 or so issues a year its a very long break to take.
Fair enough though, I guess everyone is busy, possibly with some of the things I mentioned earlier in this file.
The problem with all this inactivity is that it makes me sit down and think hard about what i'm doing. Should I be doing this? Maybe our time has been and gone, we did our thing and we are currently witnessing the bottom of the barrel as far as anything 'scene'wise goes. But I guess every scene has its ups & down and when you're down you can only get up (or stay down..).
I read a quote somewhere once..
'Its better to be coming down than to have never been high at all'
When I read it at first I related it to drugs. I had just run out of weed at the time so brains think in that way I guess. But the more I thought about it the more it related to the underground and so many of the little 'scenes' it has produced, all the things and people that we have seen come & go.
I guess at the end of the day we are the underground, its our thing and we are the only people to blame if its fucked up.
We make it what it is.
The Underground is..... ?
Answers on a postcard plz.
/-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-\
Long Dark Tunnel 2001 - http://www.hobbiton.org/~ldt - ldt@hobbiton.org
\-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-/
