A Deeper Look Inside The Rabbit Hole of Utopia — PART II
In PART I we traveled back in time 40 years to help trace what may be described as the technological grandfather of Utopia in the form of Usenet (User’s Network). Let us now begin moving forward in time from there to help better appreciate the evolution of digital communication and the internet in order to obtain a more profound understanding of what Utopia seeks to accomplish. The 1980s brought the heyday of the BBS, (Computer) Bulletin Board Service. The younger generation of today will have no conception of what the BBS represented, but it spoke to an earlier era before the popularization of the internet we know today, when personal digital ownership (at least for the host) was taken for granted. A host user would set up a service that other users from around the world could dial into using a computer modem. Users were then free to communicate with each other, share files with each other and even play games with each other in a very independent and unbridled form quite unfamiliar to people today.
1988 witnessed the birth of IRC, Internet Relay Chat, a protocol that enabled text-based communication through TCP between users around the world. Users could also share files using the Direct Client-to-Client protocol. Similarly to a BBS, it involved connection through the server-client mechanism, however anyone with initiative could play the role of server, the controlling computer as it were. In the popular culture of the technically inclined (ie. geeks), IRC represented the best of the internet; freedom. Freedom to associate with whomever you chose and freedom to discuss any issue you chose. IRC’s power to enable that freedom was perhaps best illustrated during times of government orchestrated media blackouts. During the first Gulf War and during the attempted overthrow of the Soviet government in 1991, conventional means of communication were either censored or completely shutdown. Information was nonetheless passed along through these controls via IRC.
The next decade brought revolutionary changes to the way people shared content with others, and with those changes came reactionary efforts from vested interests to control the flood at key, central choke points. In Part III we will examine those profound changes and their consequences.
Originally Published By TheMerchant in TheMessage within the Utopia P2P Ecosystem in February of 2020. Upgrade your internet at https://u.is
