Lost on Usenet

I’m pulling archived Usenet pages for a story I’m working on. This is unmistakeably the Internet, but in the uncanny valley of a totally bygone culture.

Whether the old internet is inherently eerie by modern standards — it’s decluttered, styleless, emotionless — or whether it’s only cast that way by horror fiction that uses the old internet (like Welcome to the Game) is, I guess, a philosophical problem. Chicken, egg.

Which, by the way, is there a name for that genre? In fiction it would be called “epistolary.”

Anyway, it has me thinking about discoverability again, the refusal of the internet to show us something unless we know to ask for it. Usenet was an insular community of insular communities. Discord, if you want to compare the two, feels like a vast community full of vast communities. I’ve tried my best to get involved with Discord servers. You can’t get a word in edgewise. The early adopters, the people who were “there,” acquire the clout to moderate a conversation. As a newbie, things become much harder. You can scroll through thousands of users and struggle to find your own name.

“Community” is a bigger word than it’s ever been before. It unshutters a far more grim angle of discoverability. Namely, who will discover you?

Conversely, maybe what fuels internet-interface horror is the idea that you will certainly be seen?

Yeesh. You don’t want to see someone in an empty hall, and you don’t want to cram in a crushed hall. It’s almost like the march of technology asks difficult questions that force us to adapt to new realities. Someone should write several centuries of genre fiction about this stuff.