Reply All - #10 The French Connection

Episode Date: January 18, 2015

In the early 80's, way before the world wide web existed, the French government shipped a $200 terminal to every home with a phone line, and created a service that for decades ran alongside the internet. It was called The Minitel. Producer Carla Green speaks to reporter Jean-Marc Manach, who, in the early 90's, made a living posing as a woman in sex chat rooms on Minitel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So PJ, you are not much younger than me, but younger enough that you come from like a different internet generation than I do. Yeah. When I started using the internet was like 91, 92, and it was sort of before the World Wide Web. So I would dial in to a local bulletin board. There was four phone lines. And I would just get hours and hours of busy signals while everybody desperately jockeyed for one of those four phone lines. And then I would connect. And then my dad would get call waiting.

And 15 minutes later, I would get bumped off, which was unbelievable. frustrating. Wait, and also when you started going on the internet, wasn't it like you could log onto a bulletin board, but only you could be on it and you'd like leave a message and someone else would go on it? They had four, so four people could be on at the same time. It was pretty fancy. I used AOL like every normal person, which meant that I could talk to Americans from anywhere in the world who had gotten a disc in the magazine. Wow, that's pretty cool. You were pretty futuristic. I have a memory of going to like a chat room and talking to something. some adult woman who was like, I guess she was flirting with me, but I didn't understand

flirting. And she was like, hey, do you want to talk in a private chat room? And I was like, yeah. And she said, age, sex location. And I was like, 12 years old, male, Haverford. And she was like, I got bigger fish to fry. And then she logged off. Those were her exact words? I've got bigger fish to fry. Oh, that's so brutal. I felt so, like, lonely. And also, like, I was like, yeah, I understand that. Wait, once she said that, did you realize? what was happening. I realized that I disappointed her in some way, but it took me like a long time to figure out how and why. When I first connected, my first conversation was with an Iraq war vet about the band Black Flag. That's pretty good. Yeah, I know. I was, I was way cool even back in

1991. Well, don't you also feel like, like we both had kind of typical experiences early on? Like mine was lonely and alienated and yours was like pop culture, weird stuff. When you say typical, you mean like typical of us as human beings? Yes. I think that you give your too much credit as a lonely alienated person. I think you, I think you think that. You're going to take that away from me? Did you're damn right? Jesus.

I think that you think that you're much, you're like the, you're like a way more popular and sociable and friendly than I am. Thanks. It's not a compliment. But the reason we're talking about it is because we have a story this week from producer Carla Green. It's about the back in the day internet in France, which is in some ways very similar to the back-of-day internet that me and PJ experienced,

but in a lot of ways, much, much weirder. Carly, I'll take it from here. In 1982, France's national telephone company, France Telecom, decided it was spending too much money printing phone books. So it put the phone books online. Well, kind of. What it actually did was convince the French government to distribute a $200 computer

to every French household with a phone number. It was an ungainly, clumsy piece of technology, just a little CRT monitor with a keyboard. When you wanted to use it, you plugged it into the telephone line, meaning you couldn't use the phone at the same time. France Telecom called it the Minitel. Here's a French newscast from the Minitel's launch. Now, we're going to talk about something that's relevant to you,

or at least will be relevant to you, very soon, in your daily life. It was unveiled yesterday by the Minister of Telecommunications. It was the electronic phone book. At first, you couldn't use them for much. You could look up phone numbers and addresses, banking information, the weather, stock prices, things like that. The Minitad charged by the minute, and each minute could cost anywhere from 50 cents to a dollar or more.

Companies that provided these services would split the proceeds with France Decomm, and quickly everyone was making a ton of money. But what the Minitel lacked, crucially, was a feature so integral to today's Internet that sometimes we don't even notice it. the ability for users to interact with each other. So not long after its release, a teenager who was never identified, as the story goes,

hacked the Minitel and added a messaging feature. People liked it. And since they liked it, usage of the Minitel increased. So France DeCom integrated chat rooms into the Minitel's design. Those chat rooms quickly became the single biggest reason people logged on. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the chat rooms French people loved most were the sex chat rooms. They were called Minitel Rose, French for pink Minitel. This is a TV ad for a chat room called The Diablo Core, or The Devil Inside.

It's just a still photo of a woman looking suggestively over her shoulder and the phone number for the server. Of course, the ad was kind of a lie. Jean-Mauk, as you can probably tell, is a man. And he, along with thousands of other students and struggling artists, was a miniatel animatrice. Animatrice is the feminine form of a frustratingly untranslatable word. It means at once radio host and camp counselor.

And somehow, it also came to mean what Jean-Marc did with his Wednesday nights for a couple of months in the mid-90s. Jean-Marc worked on the 17th floor of a tall building in Paris. During the daytime, the room would be full of animatrice, 15 or 20 at a time. Almost all of them, men.

Jean-March preferred to work nights when he was often alone. There was a great view of Paris from the office building he worked in in, and it was quiet. He sat in front of an array of four minitel. He was a different woman on each. Jean-Mauk's English isn't great,

so he did the rest of the interview in French. I ate beforehand, because it was hard to eat when you were on four minuetel at once. We didn't have time. I think I filled up a bottle of water. I'd turn on the minitel and not gone to the forums, and then I was off for the whole night. I think I started around 10 p.m. or midnight,

and I would leave around 5 or 6 a.m. to go to sleep. And I'd run into all these people waking up, going to work, and I'd just spend the night talking about sex with people all over the bizarre to normal spectrum. There was such a disconnect between me and the commuters who were half asleep. And I wondered if the people I'd been talking to all night were there, among the commuters, like right in front of me. During the day, the boss would breathe over the animatrice's shoulders,

pressuring them to finish up with each partner more quickly so they could move on to the next. Being romantic or engaging in anything that would slow them down, really, was strictly forbidden. Industrial work, Jean-Mont called it. But he was, in his words, an artisan, a budding cyberfeminist. He's only using that word artisan, half ironically. You can hear it in his voice. He's proud of his stint as a night shift artisan animatrice. So he tried to incorporate his own unique worldview, his artisan.

cyberfeminist politics into every aspect of the job, even the identities that he chose to inhabit as a woman. On one minitel, I was a 56-year-old woman. On another, I was a 35-year-old woman named Brigitte. And on the other, I was a 19-year-old bisexual student. Unsurprisingly, the 19-year-old bisexual was far in a way, the most popular. But Jean-Moc was insistent on subverting expectations. I liked refusing to only be blonde girls with giant breasts.

And being a cyber feminist also meant that Jean-Marc insisted on pushing past the verbal abuse that most men used to open the conversation. The guys would log on and say, blow me, whore. But I'd say, no, no, you say, Bonjour, Madame.

And I always worked quite well. Once he managed to get past the abuse, he found Minitad Pink to be a uniquely raw and emotional place. People told me things they'd never told anyone, and other things that they'd never would have told a man. So it was interesting to discover these secrets.

They trusted me. with their secrets, their sexual fantasies, their fears, their life dramas. There were people who were genuinely traumatized who told me about their trauma. Maybe they told him those things because he was Brigitte or the 19-year-old bisexual co-ed. But it was also probably because they were reveling in the newfound anonymity of typing from behind a screen, said Jean-Mauk. That anonymity revealed an intimate side of people he'd never really seen before. I got a lot of people who were suicidal.

There were even a couple of women. young women who were really freaking out. I wasn't face to face with them, so I don't know how much of what they told me was the truth. But what I do know is that the Miniterre cost money, and the longer you were connected, the more expensive it was. I don't get the point of lying when you're going to be paying so much to be connected in the first place. One time, he said, a man logged on and immediately pelted him with a clod of vitriol and verbal abuse. He started out bitch and was really violent, and I managed to calm him down. I said, you can't talk that way.

And after 15 minutes of this, he told me that his daughter had gotten hit by a car leaving school, and that he'd come onto the Minitel to let off some steam. That was really touching. And discovering how open people would be with him on the Minetad chat rooms was a revelation for Jean-Manc. I really didn't expect for people to reveal so much of themselves emotionally. It kind of changed my life. It helped me to understand that what we call Internet networks today is first and foremost, just people, human beings.

It's not cables and computers, it's not technology, it's humans. Not many women were animatris. They had a hard time with it. It was pretty violent, and they didn't have the perspective that I did on men's fantasies. I had enough distance from it and enough of a sense of irony about what I was doing to not get depressed about the human race. Because I was a heterosexual guy. I wasn't going to think that all men were like that.

In fact, Jean-Mont could see him. himself and the men he talked to because he'd been them when he was younger. Like all teenage boys, I managed to get on Minitelros when it was just starting to get really big, to see what it was. So I was on the other side of the equation, too. And when I was a teenager, I made up women's usernames to see what it was like. And it was much more interesting because all the men wanted to talk to you, since there weren't many women.

So even before I was paid to pass myself off as a woman on the Minitel, I had already done it, just to see. Jean-Malck's tenure as an animatrice was short-lived. Not because he was sick of the cybersex. It was for a different reason. They moved us to another building and stuck us next to fortune tellers and astrologers. I mean, fortune-telling. That's going too far.

Fortune-telling is just stupid. That's right. Jean-Malck had no problem staying up all night impersonating a woman in sex chat rooms for money. Fortune-telling, though, was more than he could bear. But while Jean-Malck only lasted six months, the minute that lasted quite a bit longer. In fact, when the internet did come along,

France Delacom viewed it as a competitive rival. In 1995, a French journalist asked to interview one France Decom executive for a book he was writing about the internet. The executive famously replied, The internet, but we're going to ban the internet and create a French one, internet 2.0. That plan, of course, didn't work.

For a company that was cashing in on fortune-telling, France Telecom proved to be awful at actually predicting the future. In the end, when the World Wide Web finally beat the France Wide Web, the only real surprise was that it took as long as it did. The Minutan network was shut down in the summer of 2012, turning the 400,000 remaining Minita terminals into permanently blank screens. As for Jean-March, he's a writer now covering tech for Le Monde. He says we shouldn't miss the Minitel.

It was too expensive, too limited. Nostalgia for Internet's long past? That's an American indulgence. Carla Green is a radio producer, currently living in New Zealand. Coming up, we humiliate an old man. Stay tuned. This week we're trying a brand new feature on reply all, which we call yes, yes, no. We've found that our boss, Alex Bloomberg, comes to us so frequently with questions about Internet Arcana

that we thought we'd just record one of those questions to see how it goes. Take it away, Alex. Hey, guys. So I was on Twitter, and I came across this tweet from somebody named Laura June, and it says, What if Leah gets a Pulitzer for doxing the fridge? Do you know what that means? Yes. PJ, do you know what that means?

Yes, Bloomberg. Do you know what that means? No. Okay. Before you get an explanation, which are the words in that sentence do make sense to you? Pulitzer. I've heard of Pulitzer. You've heard of fridges, right? I don't know. I've heard of fridges.

But you can tell that that's a specific fridge. I don't know what the fridge is. I don't know who Leah is, and I don't really know what doxing is. I sort of know what doxing is it, but I thought it had something to do with computers and not fridges. It does have something to do with computers. All right. As a public service to me and all the listeners who might be like me, as old as me, what does this tweet mean? So Leah Finnegan is a writer at Gawker.

And she wrote a piece, guessing at the identity of an anonymous Twitter account called NYT Fridge. And NYT Fridge is supposed to be, I guess it's like a parody. It's supposed to be like witty stuff from inside the New York Times building. Right. Because a few years ago there was like a trend of there's like Goldman Sachs elevator, which was like things you might overhear at Goldman Sachs. And so it was like the institutional gossipy voice of Goldman Sachs. And NYT Fridge started like that at the New York Times, but it's morphed into something like grumpier and weirder, which is just like a mean media critic who hates everything except for Michael Wolfe's calls. But there is a joke Twitter account that involves the, that is called at NYT Fridge.

Yes. Okay, good. Fact number one, I now know. So then there's a woman named Leah Finnegan. Yes. She writes a Gawker. She likes writing about the media. And so she didn't say who's behind the fridge.

She wrote a piece being like, here's the evidence. we have. Here's who we know it's not. So she, but so basically what she did is she wrote like essentially an article trying to actually get to the bottom of who the NYT. It's like they're trying to flesh it out. Like they're trying to say like if anyone knows like who is deep throat. Yes, exactly. But unimportant. Yeah, nothing like who is deep throat. Exactly. There are a number of internet personalities who are anonymous who interact with the media a lot. Like the opposite of NYT fridge is this account called Darth. Darth. Darth has 20,000 followers. He talks a lot to, like, Claire Jeffrey at Mother Jones, like people like that, like editors. And he'll do sort of cute Photoshop's. It'll be like Mitt Romney with a Photoshop dog. Like they're sort of funny and a little critical. So people like him because he's like a helpful sprite of the internet. He'll like whip up a Photoshop for you. And Gawker, I think last winter was like, we're going to docks Darth. And people were mad like they said they were going to murder Santa Claus. They were like, how dare you? Darth doesn't want to be public.

There's no journalistic value in this. So now Gawker doxing unimportant, anonymous media figures is like its own institutional reporting in-joke. But they're kind of serious about it. And they're kind of like they do get a lot of traffic for it because people do want to know. All right. So I'm going to try to explain it now that you've explained. In a sentence. It doesn't be in a sentence.

So what if Leah gets a Pulitzer for doxing the fridge? What this is is a humorous tweet filled... You got it so far. And it refers to a article that was written on Gawker in which the author is trying to uncover the true person behind an anonymous Twitter account, which is called the NYT Fridge. And it's funny because Gawker has a history of going after somewhat annoying or somewhat friendly,

but ultimately benign and unimportant anonymous Twitter handles and attacking and trying to uncover their true identities with the seriousness that is to some people on the Internet mockable. Pretty good. Yeah. I think we're at yes, yes, yes. Thanks a lot, guys. Okay. Do you feel better informed about the world? I'm glad you know that.

Do you feel happy that you know this? Or do you just feel like, okay, now I know. Now there's like another piece of information in my brain that's probably crowding out a memory of one of my children's, one of the amazing experiences I had with my kids. That's like how I feel about this stuff. Yeah, I don't think I'm happy that I know this. But that's okay. I think we should do the next segment. I think we should do another segment.

Okay. All right. So thanks very much for listening to Yes, Yes, Yes, No. And we'll be back with more Yes, Yes, No on future episodes of Reply All. Unless you guys absolutely hate it. And let us know in the comments. Don't let us know in the comments. Reply All is PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. The show is produced by Lena Massities and Chris Neary and edited by Alex Bloomberg.

Matt Lieber is the lone voice of reason in an otherwise insane world. Our theme music and scoring are by Breakmaster Cylinder, and our ad music is by Bill buildings. Special thanks this week to Rachel Emily and to Anthony Prowowski, who provided the American voice of Jean Mark Monach, and to Sean Ramos Farm for playing the voice of the newscaster. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.