Note the date: August 1994. In earlier
days, Usenet was pretty quiet during the summer but heated up every
September as the new, clueless college kids discovered their school
access. In 1993 and 1994, lots of other people started getting
Internet access for the first time, traditional media started to
pay attention, and a sort of rehash of 1980s cyberpunk briefly
swept mass entertainment. Hence 1993 had "The September That Never
Ended."
We were expecting a particularly massive influx of newbies in
September 1994, when the kids had been exposed to a year's worth of
this, and, wow, did it ever happen.
From mcirvin@scws36.harvard.edu
Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology,alt.newbie,alt.wired
Subject: Re: Prediction: "best" September ever for newbie-watching
Date: 26 Aug 1994 15:42:49 GMT
Organization: Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Lines: 41
James "Kibo" Parry <kibo@world.std.com> wrote:
People who troll for newbies will probably have scads of evil
fun. It seems to have started already.
It has-- I'm suddenly seeing lots of threads in which the
originator posts something, gets a perfectly ordinary followup,
then follows up to that with "Hey, I only asked an innocent
question, why are you using such a NASTY TONE OF VOICE? There's no
need to BITE MY HEAD OFF!!! You people are all mean!" I believe
that this is the first sign.
To celebrate the influx of new and pure souls to the Net, I
offer the following \<-|^a|)|) sybur-poetik ma|\|ifezto:
O slipstream bitstream of cozmik bytes
Cascading across universes of virtual space, cold as alien
chrome
Liberate us from the tyranny of flesh
Into new flesh, pure & orgasmic & delocalized, the peaceful
atom
Out of the sight of deathweapon conspirators
Out of the sight of the heavy hand of the past
Into a place where epiphany arrives at the speed of light
squared
Into a place that is no place, where we send faxes from the
beach
Here is the astral info-plane of cyborg
magicks
A virtual reality where all body parts are pierced by the Light
Meat and machine, we dance to the pulsing heartbeat of
negentropy,
a positive tetrahedron at the center of the cybersexual chakra;
Away from dead rot and corruption and politics and people
who don't like my poetry and the bully who used to snap his
towel at me in the locker room and steal my lunch money and it
wasn't fair and someday I'll show him ha ha HA HA
HA!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Anyone who doesn't like my poem is a mean old fuddy duddy!
--
Matt 01234567 <-- Indent-o-Meter
McIrvin ^ Harnessing tab damage for peaceful ends!