This is a really good thread from mastodon about the counter culture scenes of the 1980s and 90 and how they were destroyed and what we can do to rebuild them.
I’ve now spent more of my life online than off. My generation came to adulthood before the internet arrived, but we were young enough when it did to be formed by it. No one will ever go through that transition again. I got my first home internet connection in 1993 and soon became what is now known as “extremely online,” spending hours every day perusing bulletin board systems, Usenet newsgroups, and the austere gray pages of the World Wide Web. I feel I ought to be able to say something about what that change was like, to reveal some truth about the global experiment of linking ourselves together. Instead I find I’m starting to forget how I used to do things in that other country, what made it different from where I live now.
In medieval Europe, if you wanted to access the technology of writing, you had to acquire a new language at the same time. Writing meant Latin. Writing in the vernacular—in the mother tongues, in languages that people already spoke—was an obscure, marginalized sideline. Why would you even want to learn to write in English or French? There's nothing to read there, whereas Latin got you access to the intellectual tradition of an entire lingua franca.
We have a tendency to look back at this historical era and wonder why people bothered with all that Latin when they could have just written in the language they already spoke. At the time, learning Latin in order to learn how to write was as logical as learning English in order to code is today
We know that Latin's dominance in writing ended. The technology of writing spread to other languages. The technology of coding is no more intrinsically bound to English than the technology of writing was bound to Latin. I propose we start by adjusting the way we talk about programming languages when they contain words from human languages. The first website wasn't written in HTML—it was written in English HTML.
In Cuba there is barely any internet. Anything but the state-run TV channels is prohibited. Publications are limited to the state-approved newspapers and magazines. This is the law. But, in typical Cuban fashion, the law doesn't stop a vast underground system of entertainment and news media distributors and consumers.
"El Paquete Semanal" (The Weekly Package) is a weekly trove of digital content—everything from American movies to PDFs of Spanish newspapers—that is gathered, organized and transferred by a human web of runners and dealers to the entire country. It is a prodigious and profitable operation.
I went behind the scenes in Havana to film how the Paquete works. Check out the video above to see how Cubans bypass censorship to access the media we take for granted.
