Tech Brew Ride Home - (IHP) The "First" Extremely Online Person, Justin Hall

Episode Date: November 26, 2023

A lot of people give credit to Justin Hall for being, if not the first, then spiritually, at least, the “first” blogger. Since early 1994, first as Justin’s Homepage and at various points, as Justin’s Links from the Underground and Links.net, Justin Hall has been writing online and sharing online—especially, sharing himself online—longer than almost anyone else on the planet. Hear his story today, and watch his documentary at: http://overshare.links.net/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Internet History Podcast. I'm your host, Brian McCullough. On the internet, it's sometimes difficult to say what the first of anything is.

This is especially true of blogging. What was the first blog? Well, to figure that out, it would require you to parse the exact moment in time when having a personal homepage morphed into having a personal blog. But a lot of people like to give credit to Justin Hall for being, if not the first, then, I don't know, spiritually, at least, being the first blogger. Since early 1994, first as Justin's homepage and at various points as Justin's links from the underground and links.net, Justin Hall has been writing online and sharing online, especially sharing himself online,

longer than almost anyone else on the planet. In this episode, Justin shares with us the evolving, almost 25-year journey of his blog slash website, and shares some amazing background stories of the beginnings of Hotwired, but also the very interesting and I think important story of his own experience sharing his life online. We use terms in this episode like Patient Zero or Pioneer, but I think it's true in this case. In our modern world where all of us share everything all of the time, Justin Hall has been one of the first ones into this breach. for better and for worse. And as you'll hear at the end of this episode,

I suspect that his experience and his example might have something to teach all of us about sharing online. So please enjoy this conversation with the first blogger, Justin Hall, and check out his free documentary about his experience called Overshare, The Links.net Story. Justin Hall, thanks for coming on the Internet History Podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Brian.

So if you have listened to previous episodes, you know one of the things that I find useful for getting into it is sort of like technology bona fides, things like, what was your first computer? So let's start with what was your first computer, either your families or your personal, personal? Thank you so much. I have fond memories. And my mom, I think, took an active interest in educating her children in the state of the art. And in 1981, she got our family an Apple 2 plus, which had a green and black screen. And we had dual discs drives. And you could put five and a quarter inch floppy disks in there.

And not only did she get our family a computer, Brian, but she hired a guy named Miles with large square glasses. and he came over and he brought pirated video games, and he taught us how to program in Basic, my brother and I, and I took to it much more than my brother did, and it became one of my favorite beings in the world to hang out with was this new computer buddy. I loved playing games and then trying to tweak the game variables in Basic and see if I could resurrect myself after death

or give myself additional gold de blooms. What were some of the games? Oh man. The one that etched itself most deeply in my memory is a game called Odyssey, The Complete App Venture by, I think Robert McCarty was his name, something like that. But what I loved about that game is that it really captured the game dynamic of exploration. So there's a fog of war over a land, an island ahead of you, and as you travel around, your unearthing temple. and tombs and towns and villages and interacting with all these things you discover to sort of build yourself up so you can sail off the island to the next island. And if you died, and when you died, you were booted to the prompt. And if you typed GoTo 32,000, that would take you back into the program right before you died somehow. So it was, I have those memories from Odyssey, the complete adventure still warming my you know exciting my that game that gamer in me which i'm i'm now 42 years old

i was playing that game when i was seven and so it's it's just like i can still feel the urge to like go into that you know like six pixel by 10 pixel temple and see what's inside you know yeah well we'll come back to the to the gaming obviously um in a bit here uh all right so then the second obvious one is your first online experience or how you start going online. I'm assuming it's BBSs, but you tell me. Yeah. So my father passed away when I was young and I was read and I was read as an adult. I was reading the eulogy that my father's buddy had written. And in my father's eulogy, it was 1983. They wrote Justin and his father hang out on the computer and they use a modem and they dial in to other computers and Justin is very excited about this. I don't really

understand, but Justin's very excited about this. And I don't remember doing modems on the Apple computer, but I remember doing modems on IBM that we had a little bit later, a PCXT. And I would, a lot of the first bulletin boards that I dialed into were for hints for video games. So Sierra Online, the Kingsquest or Police Quest or Space Quest series. Right? I think I think, I think, I think I've said on the show before that I got in trouble because a friend of mine and I rang up several hundred dollars trying to get through. I think it was Space Quest two possibly. Bingo, right? You're like, you get the game.

You dial into the bulletin board. There's helpful people. There's chat. You can chat with people. Oh, my God, this is so awesome. Let's dial in tomorrow the next day. Then, you know, a month later, your parents are like, this is $360. You just spent calling California.

What's going on here? This internet, this computer stuff is way too out of control. So I was right there with you. Perhaps we were both chatting with each other, asking if we were, you know, I would sort of pretend to be, I would just talk to people and then they would ask how old I was. And I was got a kick when they were like, when I was like, I'm 11, you know, or whatever. Yeah. So it was definitely BBSs. So you were doing gaming and stuff through that as well.

Yeah. And I think, you know, at some point BBS has started adding those games that are sort of, asynchronous turn-based games. You can play your Yankee trader turns and Trade Wars 2000 or whatever. Yeah, and then you could sort of like leave and come back. But I, when I was 14, I was seeing a shrink because I was, you know, I was a lively kid, I guess, and that's what my family did to try and sort of make sure I could play by some of the rules. And I saw this shrink like two or three times a week. And the shrink happened to be in the same building as a bookstore that had a computer software store in the basement. It was a B. Dalton bookseller with a software, et cetera, in the basement. So when I was 14, I got a job as a software salesman because I would come into this software all the time. And the manager was like, you know more about this software than a lot of my employees. Why don't you sell this stuff? So I was 14 hanging out in the software

store and I got a free account to Prodigy, which was like a sort of prototypical, you know, walled garden internet thing. And so I was hanging out on Prodigy. And I thought, oh man, I'm done with BBSs. I'm all about Prodigy, and they have like this sort of 3D, you know, pseudo-3D maze game I can play, and everything on Prodigy sucked, and the BBSs continued to be great, so I didn't spend much time on Prodigy. I was on BBSs until, you know, I started to catch glimpses of the internet. And that was in 1988. I had a babysitter who basically said, oh, yeah, I'm a med student. I have a Vax account at Northwestern. You can borrow it if you want. And so he let me dial into his account. And now in 1988, I'm like, oh, my God, news groups.

Like, Prodigy doesn't have, like, the anarchist cookbook. Prodigy doesn't have, like, alt-sex, bestiality. Prodigy doesn't have, like, you know, psilocybin that grow your own recipes. Like, this is crazy. You know, I think of that a lot. Like, all of us at age 12 or 14 had the anarchist cookbook. Like, today, the NSA would be banging down the door, but there was a whole generation of 14-year-olds that had that. Right, and it was on floppy disks and modems, and we were untraceable, maybe. Maybe, right? Yeah.

So, okay, but that's actually interesting. You're one of the few people that I've talked to that had experiences with the internet before the web even existed. Hmm. I feel very lucky for that. I, you know, using the text prompt to get into news and to email a little bit, gave me this. Hey, guys, Brian jumping in here real quick. Skype crapped out on us twice, and this is the first time that that happened, but we'll pick it

right up from once we dialed back in right now. So I don't know where I was, but, you know, when I was on BBSs, it was a sense of like, here's a bunch of suburban kids in Chicago. When I was on Usenet and newsgroups on the early internet, it was like, wow, here's a whole bunch of kids, but they're from colleges, and they're all over the country. So that seemed more diverse and exciting. But because you're not at university yet, you don't actually, for several years, you're not able to replicate this experience that you have. Right. I got on my friend's account and then I was emailing a bit and then somehow one of the emails bounced and a sysadmin saw it and they were like, oh man, this guy, the account is for this person but the signatures for Justin.

So we're going to, you know, give a warning. So my friend kicked me off his account. So I actually went to Northwestern and I got a job when I was in high school. I got a job in their computer lab being a tech support person. But then I got like a really bad sore throat. And I didn't tell my boss and I didn't go to work for a week because I was like in high school. I didn't do a good job. And I lost my job and I lost my internet access for like two years until I went to college.

It might be it might be obvious, but maybe not obvious. So that's why I'm pointing it out. But we think that just getting online, you can just do it on the street corner. whenever you want, but prior to 94, 95, and prior to the internet being commercialized, like you, the only way that you could have access to the actual internet was either through a university or maybe your job, if you were lucky enough to have a job that could access the internet, that sort of thing. That's exactly right.

It was basically, you know, I remember being on the phone someone. I don't remember who it was, but I was on a pay phone from the lobby of my school being like, oh man, so I think I was calling Northwestern Computer Center. And I was like, you won't give me an account, but nobody will give me an account. Won't you give me an account? Nobody will give me an internet account. And they're like, yeah, sorry, there's nobody will give me an internet account. Why don't you go to college? Right. Okay. So I'm, was that a motivation perhaps?

Yeah, right. Like, are you, when you're looking around at colleges, are you like, who's, who's got the best connections to the web? No, I mean, I think I had a lot of discipline and focus problems in school. I got like sophomore year I failed history, biology, and math in one semester. I sort of had a rocky road of it and I managed to pull my grades together by the end of high school. But I think when I was looking for colleges, I was really like, oh man, who's going to take me? And how smart can I find, you know, where's the place with the smartest people I can find? So that was my criteria. When I got there, I ended up picking, I ended up getting into Swarthmore College, which is a small liberal arts school.

I would say now that I've been through it, I would say Swarthmore is especially good at training people to be academic, to sort of think meta about learning and to think meta about how people, you know, inhale knowledge and what biases come with that and how you can evolve. And it's sort of a very academic, nerdy place. I chose it because it was the best school I got into. And it turns out that the year I moved there is the year, by then they had wired all the freshman dorms with Ethernet to the dorm room. So I had Ethernet in my dorm room.

Or maybe it was even Apple Talk or something. but it was like very, I had a network connection at my dorm room. I'm not sure I asked about it when I went, but I was certainly glad to have it when I got there. Well, so from what I've read, around 93 or so, there's that famous John Markov article in the New York Times that's talking about mosaic, probably the first time the web had been mentioned in the New York Times. Is that the first time you heard of the web, or had you been using that before as well? Yeah. So when I got to college in September 93, I was like, okay, I got Gofer.

I got my news groups. I got my favorite FTP sites. I'm going to be, you know, but my mom had also got me a subscription to New York Times because she's an inveterate newspaper reader to this day, still, paper newspapers. So I found that Markov article, and it was the first I heard of the web. And I will tell you, man, I went in deep after finding that article. I was like downloading it, using. it and then very shortly thereafter just inhaling the web and then going around and installing

web browsers on any computer I could get access to my my roommates, my teachers, the deans of the school, you know, family members, friends, anybody who had a computer and, you know, I could figure out how to get them dialed up. I would say, look, you got, especially at a college, it was a ripe place to say, hey, you got this computer so you could write papers, but did you know that if you plug it into the network, you can get on the internet. And then they'd be like, so what? I'd be like, well, there's a website for the World Bank and they have a sound file of a guy speaking Polish. Like, check this out. It's amazing. Yeah, I actually, I love to ask people about that, like, especially if you're on in 93, like, what was a website that really

wowed you? And you were like, oh, my God, the possibilities are endless here. I think, I mean, the NCSA had a sort of showcase site, which wasn't much, but it had a sound like two or three sound files of Mark and Dresen saying like here we go let's do this thing. It's something about hypertext media. Yeah, because Alex Stockich sent that to me once. Yeah. And it's basically like, oh my God, you can click on it. And then you go somewhere else and then you can click on that. You hear a guy. I mean, it was the architecture of the web itself was enchanting. So I mean, I think one of the sites that I remember is Otis, which was an, an art website that had to rename itself because the elevator company was harassing them eventually, but I think they might have been based out of the UNC, you know, University of North Carolina.

You know, there were people who were already trying to do like poetry and art and zines and like weird culture stuff. And so I was just so turned on by that stuff that, you know, I chased it down and then I started indexing it and creating lists of stuff I liked. And that was really, you know, it was about five weeks later or so six weeks later that I was like, I got it. I'm going to make one of these. These pages are like you said what was so impressive on the web. The structure of the web itself was so impressive. And then the dawning realization that, oh, my God, all this stuff is just made by people who are tinkering. And what they made looks so basic. Like,

why don't I just do this too? Which was such a feeling of excitement and awakening to be like, oh my God, there's this amazing tech party and like, I can join it. Wow. Well, you know what? Because again, this is something that's so easy to do these days, so common to, you know, put content on the web. So could you just quickly walk me through? Do you use, like, your university account? Do they allow you to have space on their domain? Like, how do you get your first homepage up? Oh, man, great question. Thanks, Brian. So I had a laptop. I had a Powerbook 180, and it had a track ball in it. I had swapped the track ball out. I had found like, a like a pink fuchsia trackball. So I had like a custom trackball in my PowerBook 180. And it was on the network. And as long as I left the network plugged in, as long as I left the computer plugged in, I could keep the same IP address. And, and, and so what I did is I sent, I built a web page on my local computer and you could look at, you know, I could use a text setter, make a very basic page, open it up in mosaic, you know, see the HTML rendered out. And then I would look at it

locally and I'd be like, okay, now I'm going to share it with people. There was a web server that ran on Macs called Mac HTTPD or something like that, and I ran that server, and I would share my IP address with people remotely, and then that would be amazing. And then I needed to reboot my computer or the power would go out or something. And then I'd be like, oh, my God, I have a different IP address. Nobody can see my website anymore. I've got to email everybody and tell them my new, telling my new IP address. So I did that for like two weeks or something. And then I was like, okay, you know what? There was a group of computer enthusiasts, student, the Swarthmore College Computer Society, SCCS with computer nerds who got their own antique. I think it was a deck server,

and they created accounts in Unix for students who signed up for the club. So I signed up for the club, and I got, you know, my, I think the first URL was raptor.s.s.s.s.swarthmore.edu slash J.A. Hall, because another guy named Justin Paulson was already slash Justin. So I was slash J.A. Hall, which I had that URL until I got to, you know, later in the year, I joined Wired and registered my own domain name and sort of took my web game to the next level. But when I first started off, I was a, you know, sub-server, a sub-directory on a subserver of this Fourthmore College Computer Society. And what do you start posting up there? You know, Brian, my first instinct was, this is a growing community.

I'm going to introduce myself. So it was a photograph of myself. Hello, how do you do? I don't know what's really going on here, but let's figure it out together. Here are like my eight or ten favorite links. I'm a big fan of the band Jane's Addiction. Here's some of my, you know, a list of my bootleg records I have of their concerts. And, you know, here's some of the sort of collectibles that I found across the web.

a picture of Kerry Grant putting a tab of acid on his tongue. I found, you know, a recording of, I think maybe I put one of Mark Andreessen's sound clips on my site or, you know, just sort of like, I want to show you what the web can do and what turns me on about it. But it was really those links. Like, hey, I've got these links. And then over quickly, I was updating the links. Like, oh, man, I found some other stuff. I better make sure my list of links has, is comprehensive for all the cool stuff, because I was such an evangelist just in my dorm, you know, and just on my campus. I was like, oh, my God, look at this, and look at this, and look at this. And then I started circulating.

Once I had that personal introduction, I was then telling the web, you know, and the web was a pretty small place. So I had learned a lot from a guy named Ranjit Bahatnagar, who was studying at UPennan and had put up his own personal site, and his was the site where I viewed source. I mean, that's one of the things to, I like to remind people is, that the web, you can still view the source. You can still look at the HTML and the CSS and the elements that lie behind the content you see on the web. You can take them apart. And, you know, whatever, 23 years ago, it was a lot easier to sort of read because there was less technological complexity. The point was, if you saw something, you could see how it was built.

And so I looked at what Ranjit built, and I said, I want to build that. So when I had my own thing built, I sent an email to Ranjit. and said, hey, man, check out my website. And then I'm sending it to, like, three or four other people. And they're saying, oh, like, oh, great, okay, cool, you know, I'll put you in my list of links or some reciprocity just in the fact that we were all exploring in this new place together. And why don't we keep track of the one of the people who are having fun in public?

Was Rungi, was he the guy that was posting what he had for lunch every day? Was that him? I think he might have been, although at that time, it was, it was before I think he did that he ended up working in video games with Game Lab in New York. He now makes his own musical instruments. He ultimately claimed the domain moonmilk.com. But what I saw was the weekend that I was really working on my website, there was like a horrible ice storm where like there was like a half an inch layer of ice on everything around Philadelphia. And so I was really, you know, incarcerated in my dorm room. And he was posting pictures sort of the day after this ice storm. So that I was like,

wow, this guy's like reporting on it with like pictures of like, you know, buds on the trees with like covered in ice. You know, this is this is almost live what I'm going through. How exciting. Right, right. How soon does it start to get personal? How soon does it become sort of like, you know, a diary that you're opening up into the public? Yeah. You know, I think first it's the list of links and then I share it with people. and now I'm getting some visitors, and I could look at my logs, and the logs are hugely validating. It's like, wow, all these other people are like, what's the web for? Would end up my drift by my site? What an honor.

What an excitement. I've got the attention of random strangers, and they're thanking me, or they're leaving a comment, thanks for these links, or what fun. Or, you know, you showed me something of the web I hadn't seen. Thank you very much. And I thought, okay, I've got an audience. What am I going to do? So I started saying, okay, I had written all these poems and short stories, and I was the type of person who was contributing to the school newspaper and the school literary magazine anywhere I could find an outlet. So I said, oh, well, I'll just self-publish these things. So I started self-publishing my short stories that I'd written in high school and self-publishing my poems that I'd written. And, you know, I think it was within, you know, a few months that, okay, I now have poetry and short stories and lists of links and tours of the web. And then, man, the height.

hypertext structure, the web itself, was so inviting. It was saying, like, you can connect ideas together, and people can browse at their fancy. They can follow their curiosity. So why don't I allow someone a wide range of curiosity about me? If they want to explore me, why don't I give them as much as they want to click through? And so I sort of, you know, began to get this idea, not so much as a diary as more just like an autobiography that's hypertext. so that like if you're really interested in the video games that I played as a kid, you could click on that. But if you're really interested in like love and and danger and heartbreak, you could click on that kind of stuff. And if you're interested in like, you know, psychonautic exploration, you could click on that. And if you're curious about like, you know, IT jobs in suburban Chicago, you could click on that, you know, whatever area of my life you wanted to follow, I wanted to feed you. So I just, it became dozens of, of pages, it became hundreds of pages and ultimately thousands of pages as I was attempting to

account for all these areas of my life and then stitch them together to make this kind of meanderable journey of like, you know, meeting someone. So the impulse to share is almost a desire to create a dialogue with these strangers that are coming to your site. Yeah, and the dialogue was It was interesting because I built a site that was like not technological. It was flat HTML. Almost every part of the site was flat HTML. So I didn't have comments. I didn't have message boards. I didn't have threaded discussions around my personal content. So if somebody would often, people began to write me back and say like, oh man, you know, you fought with your girlfriend. I fought with my girlfriend. Here's what that felt like. Or like, my boyfriend won't understand these things. And I would say, oh man, it's nice that you're telling you. me, but you should really have your own website. And here, I'll make a little tutorial to teach you HTML and give you a sense of how easy it is so that you can introduce yourself to everyone. And I think, you know, I'm 19 years old. It's 1994. I'm sitting there in my dorm room, telling the world about myself, and thinking, someday everyone will have one of these pages where they sort

introduce themselves. And people can pick which part of you they want to interact with and learn more about. And then you can have an exchange after you've already come to know some of the basic details about yourself or some of the intimate details about yourself. I thought, you know, if you could introduce yourself to the world of strangers, then you could move more quickly. You could, you know, have more empathy, have more understanding, and also just like get to get to what you want to do with someone faster. If you've already read their stories, if you've already sort of gotten through some of what makes them tick, you'll be ready to sort of create more advanced social interactions. It's obviously quite a bit more complicated than that.

But that was the initial impulse. All right. I'm going to return at the end also to that initial impulse to share. But picking up the chronology, so you're 19, it's 1994, and you want to get a job at Wired magazine. Yeah. So I think the year before when I was a senior in high school, I saw an ad on a bus for the first issue of Wired. And I think Bruce Sterling's eyes rolled by with a day glow background. And I saw it, you know, I was like, man, this was the first tech publication I'd seen with a human face on the cover.

I was in Chicago. I didn't see Boing going. I didn't see Mondo 2000. I didn't, I hadn't seen these other cybercultural rags. You know, I had only seen Wired. And I was like, wow, this is, this is really it. This is really like a, they've got technology is culture and culture is technology. I want to work for them. So I called them the day I saw the issue and I left to like a voicemail for. Louis Rosetta saying like let me connect you with the hacker underground of suburban Chicago BBSs or whatever and obviously didn't get a phone call back and then so I apply my freshman year in college I applied to be a write I called and asked if I could you know apply to work in the journalism sort of writing department if I could work in the design department if I could work in

custodial services emptying trash cans and each time I was refused and then I called up like the fourth time and I was basically like oh you have a website could I like be an intern on your web team and they were like, well, maybe, why don't you talk to this editor, Julie Peterson? I was like, all right, Julie Peterson, their name's now Julie Chiron. Julie, could I be an intern? She said, oh, yeah, we're interviewing interns. You know, why don't you send me an email?

And I was like, well, I have a website. She was like, great, send it to me. I was like, actually, could you look at it right now? She was like, okay. And she, you know, types in the URL and like, I hear her laugh on the phone. I think because I had, you know, like kind of drug, kind of raunched. crazy, you know, edgy stuff in there. And she was like, hey, this is kind of funny and weird. And okay, yeah, we'll give you a shot, you know, if you can do an interview out here. And I had a

sister who lived in San Francisco so I could, you know, have a place to crash and the sort of, you know, somebody to loan me some nice shoes for the interview. And I was, I was hired in June 94 as one of four sort of interns. And at first, we were just sort of noodling on the wired website and doing some special projects. I did like an image map of the United States for somebody who was on a road trip that was going to launch on the Wired website, but pretty soon we were full tilt planning for this, you know, fall launch of Hot Wired. Yeah, let me, I tried to talk to Joey and Carl about this a bit, but if you've listened to that episode, we, as Joey and Carl will do, we got derailed into other things, but.

Beautifully, beautifully derailed. So let's just talk real quick. I've talked to a lot of people about the launch of HotWired, especially on the first banner ad angle, that sort of thing. Yeah. Just give me a sense of what that project, what you guys thought it would be, what it turned into in actuality, and just at the time of conception and launch, like what that project was like.

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of what was happening in 1994 is people saying, what can the web do? like how can we take like these crude HTML 1.0 tags and the server capacity and image maps and sound files and like can you create like a multimedia publication and you know CD-ROMs were kind of a big deal but they were crashing like the economy wasn't take materializing around them to be a mass media so but people still had this expectation of like well could you get like full motion video and like sound effects and kind of interactivity and stuff on the web and not really but how could you get close to that. And then how could you also make it so that there's like this hypertext stuff so

that you can create these libraries or encyclopedias or immersive projects through pages? And then it's like, oh, well, actually, is there any way you could actually have interactivity? So like, yes, you can put up static content and yes, that's exciting. But how can you get people to feel like they're doing something unique? You know, you can read a magazine. You can turn any page you want. But on the web, how could you make it feel like you were somehow shaping the thing or the thing was somehow more than what you'd seen in media before? So I think, you know, when I first joined Wired, we were noodling with the technology. And then the sense was, wow, Wired is a huge technology brand right now. We have so much brain power.

We have so much momentum. We have so much access to the smart people in this area. Let's do something great with the web. Let's make a publication. Let's make a platform. let's make an experiment in public about what we think the web is capable of doing. And I think, you know, the initial designs for Hotwired, as I, you know, now I'm 19 years old, I have long hair, I like cannabis.

I'm like living in a group house in the Mission District where they have Apple Talk to the bedrooms on a Unix server in the kitchen. So I had some great ways in which I was like participating in this community sort of oriented grassroots vision of the Internet. like we're all going to share and live together and have internet access and, you know, talk to strangers and stuff. And so I think a lot of the initial brainstorming from HotWired came from that mindset that I had thrown myself into of, you know, how do we build a place where the people want to come and everybody can see what we're doing? And ultimately, they will create their own version of HotWired and people will be talking back to us and the audience will become the performance. performers, and we'll all sort of grow into this world in which we are not the only experts.

We are sort of starting the conversation, but then, like, the conversation is bigger than us. And it involves our, you know, these other people who are also exploring the web with us. And so, you know, we designed, like, a rich commenting sister, like a rich sort of bullet that, not bulletin board exactly, but, like, there would be comments on the articles. And then people could, like, curate their own lists of things that were interesting. on the web and then we would, you know, pick winners and surface some of those user, user curated lists. And so I remember those are things that I was like, yeah, obviously, this makes a lot of sense. Like, I'm a wet, like, I think my job at that time was basically a lot of it was to surf the web,

find out stuff that was interesting and then tell people in the company like, oh, hey, by the way, somebody figured out how to do this, look, you know, or here's a, wow, this guy's a really great writer and he keeps turning out funny shit. Look at this. So I was doing that for the company. and trying to figure out how to do all these special projects. But meanwhile, as the site's taking shape around all these various ideas we've had for interactivity and participation, you know, the web is just starting to roll at greater and greater speed down a taller and taller hill. And so, you know, I think Lewis Rosetto, the editor of Wired, is getting all these phone calls,

like, oh, you guys are launching a website. And, you know, this is Wired. You guys are like the tastemakers for digital. Like, what are you doing on the web? And I think slowly the people on the magazine side were sort of like, wow, you guys are just like talking all this hippie shit and like make it. And you're running late on your deadlines. And like it's not clear that this like if somebody looked at this, how would they know it was wired? Like we need to make this thing visually distinctive.

We need to make sure that people have exclusive access. If they're part of our community, we need to make this thing like something that has more control, more brand identity, more, you know, more of a sense of like, you know, wired is showing you what the web is. And I think, you know, there was really like a pretty clear clash of priorities and values around the people who are like, no, no, man, we don't want, we don't want a big, huge image to be the first thing you see that takes like 45 seconds to load on a modem. We don't want it to be you have to log in and create an account to be able to see anything. Right, because Lewis originally wanted you had to register before you could even see page one, right?

Yeah, which is, I mean, you know, you could say the guy was visionary because he was looking at paywalls. Like, how are we going to pay for this thing? We need demographic info. We need to be able to throttle access. We need to be able to, you know, get demographic data on our community. All that stuff is true for a lot of publications now. But in the earliest days of the web, it was like, if you weren't accessible, like, nobody was going to look at you. And I was like, you guys, I just was so frustrated because it's like, we're putting out all this shit. We're hiring all these writers. We're getting all this content together. and what we're making is inaccessible, and that's like the first error on the web. It's like make your links something that people can trade. If people can't trade your links, like they're not, you've got no commerce, you've got no value, you've got no participation if people can't swap your links. And if it takes a long time to load, people aren't going to look at it. And I think the argument coming back at me was, you know, we're doing something different.

The web has been about this open access, and now it's about a curated experience. The web has been about low-fi, fast loading, and people on modems, but now it's going to be about people getting, you know, broadband connections and, you know, wanting to be delighted by big graphics. And so, you know, and I think I felt like they were wasting an opportunity and basically, like, you know, a third to a half of the staff left in six months and went on to do a wide. range of other projects and Hotwire evolved its approach. But for that crucible time, you know, it was a real thrashing out of how could they exploit this first mover advantage they have to making a publication on the web. And I think, you know, ultimately I felt they made choices that I didn't believe in. And, you know, I could say, oh, the web validates my approach because, you know, if we had done user curated link lists, we could have made some combination of

delicious geo-cities and, you know, and Tumblr, like in 19... 1994 and but but if but if they had been more successful maybe they would have made you know the new york times and you know lexas nexus or i don't know you know i think it you were just we were just too early either way and there was you know and and and sometimes i think you know nobody's really like it's funny to me brian that you're like oh i've done all these interviews about hotwire and it's mostly about the banner ad it's so funny for all the things that we thought we were pioneering at the time And what we pioneered was like, you know, 468 by 60 or whatever, you know. Well, you know, I've said many times it's like, you know, feeling around in the dark is different than retrospectively going back. Because you can see the structures in hindsight, right?

So like when I go back and I say, well, the important thing that came out of that was the business model of the web or whatever. But at the time when you're actually feeling around in the dark, like you have no way of knowing what will evolve into A, B, or C. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And you were talking about that crucible time where there's the debate about like the sort of, I guess the idealistic web. I don't know if that's the right word versus, you know, what HotWired eventually became. But like early on, your site, because you're still running your personal website, is getting way more traffic than HotWire does.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and that was very funny. And I think they kind of didn't know what to do with it. But I'm sitting over there. I'm getting more traffic than Wired magazine, and I'm 19 years old, and I'm just running linkless, you know, and I'm just surfing the web voraciously and telling people what's out there. And, you know, Yahoo had just begun as a sort of hierarchically organized list of sites, and there was no search engines.

And so if people were like, huh, what should I look at on the web, you know, there was a cool site of the day you could look at where a guy would sort of curate a site. But I think what I was offering is for the people who are like, how is this thing going to expand our minds or how is this thing going to freak me out or how is the web going to you know change media i was trying to curate some of that stuff and and it got me a lot of traffic absolutely but you know i never you know i think for a lot of reasons i just never was eager or ready to monetize or turn or make what i make my traffic into a business it just was my i never i don't know i just never was like okay i've got like like by

By 1995, I had like 27,000 daily readers for all my links. A big part of that was I had set up like a link sort of trading system where people could come and post links for each other. Because I was like, oh man, the audience, they have, they know what's out there. They know what they want to see. Like here, you know, and people would build their projects and then share them. You know, it was sort of, I was trying to run an open mic on the web in a way. Like, what are you working on? Come tell us.

Like, and as the web began to scale up, you know, a lot of traffic to my link open mic scaled up. And 27,000 daily readers was, I think, the high watermark of my sort of traffic. And, you know, it's a lot of, on the web in 1995, that was a lot of readers, you know. And, yeah. You, the point is, because actually, you don't stay at Wired for very long. You're just an, it's an internship. You go back to school. but you keep the site going and like do you ramp up because the story that I I've read a couple

times is that Joey and Carl encourage you to post every day so how does it evolve into the site that it becomes later on in the 90s yeah thank you so I am I'm super passionate about links I love the link collecting I love trading at some point I realized you know I was my approach to the web early on was always like if something doesn't exist, you have to create it. And you be was often me. So it was like, oh, I can't find a list of all the Native American oriented sites on the web. I will create a list of Native American sites on the web. So if you want to find out about Native Americans, you can find my list and then find other Native American sites. So but at some point, you know, as the web grew, it was like, I'm not going to

be the Native American like link keepers. Somebody else should do that. And and and and and I can't scale these. So I had set myself the task of like, here's a list of all the art sites on the web, and here's a list of all the drug sites on the web, and here's a list of all the literary sites on the web. And that quickly began to seem kind of silly. Like, you can't list all the art sites on the web. Like, there's so many. I'll ask the users to list them. But then the users began to prank a little bit. So the most notable one was I had a, you know, I had a list of, oh, please post sexy links if you find something you know kind of sexy and fun like share it and and somebody shared a link and and it was to the and it was for you know something raunchy and crazy and totally

hot and sexy and wild and when you clicked on it it actually took you to the indiana university student government homepage and these poor people were like their servers were down and they could and down and down and they were getting all this email it's like you know we're looking for this but you're offering that and they were like oh my god you know what's going on And I thought, you know, I don't want to weaponize attention on the internet. Like, I'm not here to help people sort of inflict a prank on someone else in this way. It's not what I'm about. So I took that whole thing down.

And I went and my readership crashed. I mean, I lost 20,000 readers, but I was still, you know, 7,000 a day or something, which was such a lot. And I was, but, you know, I thought, oh, man, I'm not doing these link lists anymore. But I just loved the personal content. I loved writing. I loved getting into trouble or having an adventure and sharing it on the web and putting the photos and maybe having a sound sample and linking it into the other stories. And so I was just making, making, making. And then it was actually January 1996. I sort of went as my friend's date to the Wired Magazine anniversary party and ran into Joey and Carl and they're like, yeah, your site's all right, Justin. But like, and I'm like, oh, did you see this new thing? And that thing I added. And they're like, no, because when we go to your front page, it's. static. You know, why don't, you know, why don't you, like, post something on your front page, you know, when you're doing new stuff? And I was like, holy smokes, what I should do is update my front page every day with a diary entry. I was like, I resolved on January 10th, 1996. I like went home and I was like, I'm going to do this every day. And I, and my approach was basically like, I'm going to write a free verse poem. And I'm going to link all the stuff I can in my website and out of my website. I think, you know, when you look at that first generation of web, right, like Suck and and myself and other folks of that era, there was a way in which you would write

and then you would casually link something. It wasn't like, you know, the report on the FBI testimony is here and the word here is highlighted. It's more like, you know, when I walk down the street and walk down the street might be a link to a Robert Crum comic and you're not exactly sure why that link is there, but maybe you can get there's something humorous and so there's like a gap between what you, what you, what the word is that you write and what the link turns out to be, there's a gap that you can fill with your own interpretation or with your own sort of poetic understanding of what the author intended. And I loved that kind of layers of inference. So you could write, you could write a poem, you could write a story, but then you could add all this

kind of humor and sly suggestion with all these links. And of course, I thought of this as sort of knitting a web of adamantium. Like we were somehow building this, this like ironclad like connect collection of human thought that would all be wired together. But of course, like within months, like all these links started disappearing and moving and servers are down and it all seems now like so antiquated because you try and read some of this stuff. And unless you're deeply wired into the internet archive, you're not going to be able to really follow these whimsical trains of thought anymore in the way that we intended. Anyhow, I started writing these free verse poems and I would write supporting pages and I would write, you know, if I went to a party at my school, I would

write about the six people I met and I would write a little description of them. And maybe I would even draw a cartoon or like take a picture and then I would post all this stuff. And so I had, you know, this growing daily updated, this growing account of my whole ongoing life. And it was, you know, now wired into hundreds of pages or thousands of pages about my parents and my friends and wired and, you know, San Francisco and different drugs and sex and experiments. And so the links part of my site became, you know, small and sort of a remnant of this, you know, time when I was a tour guide on the Internet in 1994 and 5. And then it really became – and I was a teacher trying to encourage people to find their own voice online

and happily, you know, pulling back the curtain and saying, I have done nothing miraculous. and you should please do what I'm doing. Well, two things on that. First of all, the sharing the personal things, like, you know, you write about your father's death, you write about your dating life or contracting an STD or whatever. A lot of the early articles about you, like that's the thing that they're so amazed about is that that sort of openness about your personal life, like warts and all, Howard Stern style. obviously it's 20 years on so it would color it's almost probably impossible to answer this but what

why did you want to share that much like what was the juice of doing that for you at the time oh that's an interesting question um i'll try some theories on you brian okay so one is um a couple of theories one is uh i think my father was very funny and raw uh before he died He drank a lot. And so I think there was a ways in which he would sometimes get very upset and curse me out and swear at me. So I think there was a level at which I was accustomed to profanity and sort of aggressive dialogue. He was also a lawyer. My mom was a lawyer. A lot of their friends were lawyers and judges. So I think I was accustomed to some level of sort of argumentation and public inquiry. Then because my father died at such a young age, I went to see therapists kind of like from when I,

and I was acting up so much in school. I was in therapy from like the age of seven until 14 and then from like 16 to 18. So like I was in therapy so much. And what this meant is once or from one to three times a week, I'm sitting down for an hour and talking about myself with a paid listener. And so I think I had like as an at an early age, I had, you know, sort of the ability to argue and discuss with my parents. And then I was asked to tell stories about my life in this, you know, sort of safe space of therapy on a. regular basis. So I definitely got used to talking about myself and thinking about and reflecting on my day or reflecting on my conflicts or reflecting on my successes and sharing them with someone. And then I think my father died and my mom worked very hard. And so I was lonely in a lot of ways. And I craved sort of people paying attention to me. I think, you know, there's a lot of ways in which the problems I had in school were me saying, you know, I'm not getting the attention I want. I want people to engage with me differently. And I think that's one of the things that so turned me on about writing was, wow, if I write well, or if I write compellingly, I can get attention, I can get

acknowledgement. People will connect with me. And when I start, when I took all that bundle of like, you know, I'm needy, I'm not getting enough attention, I'm writing, and people connect with that. And I want to, I enjoy talking about myself. I enjoy getting a reaction out of people. Oh my God, when I talk about certain things, people get, pay a lot more attention to me. You know, if I talk about sex and drugs and death and failure, people get so turned on or, you know, freaked out. You get a feedback loop, yeah. Well, or a negative one, but at least you get a feedback loop.

You know, I mean, you know, when I, attention. And so when I brought all that swirling energy to the web, the web was like, hell yeah, let's do this thing. I start getting emails from people who are like, oh, my God, you're the first person. I've ever met who talked about suicide and their family. Oh, my God. I have an alcoholic parent, and this is the first time I've ever told anybody. Oh, my God, you know, I was, I didn't know what to do when I saw your website. I decided to start my own website, and now I'm writing stories about my, you know, my brother, and it's changed my life. Thank you so much. And I start feeling like, whoa, like, I knew I wanted attention, but now I'm helping other people who need attention.

And this has got like a great potential, a great power. So it really made me, it amplified, you know, my conviction around sharing stories. And, you know, I would say it was like a 10 to one ratio of like, wow, Justin, this is really amazing to the one person saying, I'm going to stick a shotgun down your throat and blow a hole in your ass, you know, or something really, people were like, you know, this is screwed up and I want to mess with you. those in the earliest days of the web those people were very few and um but the people who were like whoa i had no idea tech could be used for this kind of human sharing warts and all bravo and i was like yeah all right cool i'm doing the right thing and all that sort of began to change when they invented search engines well to keep on the chronology here so because you are this very high profile

proponent of sharing and living online, you get a certain amount of fame and you start to go around the world expousing this idea. Like you said earlier, you say to people, hey, if you like what I'm doing, you can do it too. And so you're traveling the world. One of the writers calls you like the Johnny Appleseed, going around the world sharing this ethos.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was like, I think there was some way in which I was like, man, I'm so privileged. I'm a white male. I came from a, you know, like a upper class background in Chicago. My parents are lawyers. They bought me computers.

They sent me to private school. Like, I've had all the advantages. So maybe all this internet, all this tech stuff, all this freedom to share online, maybe it's only applicable to people who are as privileged as me. Oh, man, that's kind of sad, if that's true, because then it's not really like a transformative social phenomenon. It's really the same old where the power structures are really. rebuilt, you know, with slave labor to, to, you know, empower the same people over and over again.

How do I prove that wrong? How do I do something to make, make myself believe that what I'm doing truly is human liberation practice that anyone might undertake? Okay, I should hit the road and try to teach anyone, but especially people who might not otherwise have access to computers, teach those people the tools that they can use for their own attention getting, for their causes, for their travails, for their triumphs, you know, for their community to have a voice in this growing, you know, sort of myasma of human, you know, attention marketing. So I, my scheme was, I sort of posted tutorials and things and I would give a talk anywhere people would invite me. But then I said, you know, I had all these readers and they were so nice to me.

I said, okay, well, how about if I take a road trip and I go from, you know, Philadelphia through the American South and, you know, Alabama and Louisiana and Texas and then up to the, up to the Midwest and Kansas and Colorado and go to any school, you know, church cafe that'll have me. And, you know, I think at one point I ended up, thanks to a reader named Rob Badoor, he got me. me into a home for them mentally ill, like a halfway house where people were come to try and get some job training, try and see if they could, you know, sort of, you know, they had problems, but they were still ready to contribute to society. I said, okay, this is great because I've been on the web for two years now. I don't see these people having web pages. Why don't I help them make web pages? That was sort of a, you know, the type of thing where I was like, if this is really going to be an empathy engine, if we can really use the web to grow closer as a species,

then places like the Breakthrough Club in Wichita, Kansas, if those people can talk and be on equal footing with anybody else with a link to share, then maybe it will help prove that the web does have this potential. And when you start working at places like, or with places like ZDNet and things like that, are you still, is that still sort of the thing? I'm the Johnny Appleseed of like this personal revolution. this broadcasting yourself sort of thing? Yeah, I think so.

So, you know, I'm getting towards the end of college. I work for Electric Mines in 1996, which is Howard Rangelds. Right, right. Index of all communities on the web. Time magazine declared it one of the best websites of the year. You know, nine months later, it's bankrupt and gone. And the idea of indexing every community on the web now seems like it's kind of wild to imagine. How would, what would that index look like?

How would you keep track of all those things? I mean, search engines have totally changed our sort of orientation around the web. But anyway, you know, by 1998, I'm graduating college and I'm like, holy smokes, I should, I need a job. And at the same time, Zip Davis had started a television network called ZDTV, and they were looking for talent. And somebody put me in the hopper for an audition. And I auditioned, and they ended up giving me like a five-minute segment during a, like, a call-in tech support show.

And I got a web workshop segment. I think I did one segment where I sort of introduced how you can make your own web page, and I did one segment where I interviewed the guys from Bianca's smut shack, you know, Bianca.com. And then I did a few more segments, and then they got a letter of protest from Tupelo, Mississippi, saying, hey, this guy's website is radically alternative in ways we don't appreciate. There's bisexual content, drug content, profanity. We don't appreciate this. You know, you should take him off the air.

or we're going to boycott your channel. And it's this fascinating moment where I think the early, you know, the earliest days, the first few years of the web, it's like anything goes because the only people that are on there are academic. Oh, well, now maybe they're, you know, in the media business. Now maybe they're in the, you know, as the circles grew around the web, it became a little less safe to sort of be weird. And that's sort of a natural tradeoff as you're trying to bring in like, you know,

people of older people and younger people and school people. church people and, you know, business people, they all have different needs and different things they want to see. And it gets harder, you know, it gets harder and harder to introduce yourself with a 2,000-page comprehensive website to specific groups. People are like, holy smokes, that's threatening and strange. And, you know, I don't want to, I'm, what you're doing makes me uncomfortable. And for ZDTV, they didn't, they didn't want to make people uncomfortable. So, you know, in that vein, how do you experience the dot-com boom? Because again, your vision for the web is so personal and all of a sudden the web becomes so corporate and there's so much money sloshing around. So

what was that era like for you? You know, I think in some ways I've been really helped by my 19-year-old sort of punk communal DIY attitude, which was like, you know, I'm sharing on the and the point is sharing and the point is like let's all see what kind of tech party we can have. And so my instinct to do that meant that I was never trying to be like, oh man, how do I monetize my personal site? How do I, you know, I asked for donations and people sent donations and I was honored, but I was never like, I got to run ads, I got to have sponsors, I got to have a paywall, I got to have a VIP club, I'm going to sell my old underwear. I'm going to, you know, I never had any business lines really coming off my website other than, hey, pay me to give a speech or pay me to

write an article, which is separate from my website. So when the commercialization of the web hit, for me, you know, I think in a lot of ways, I was like, yeah, I knew it was going to be a great place and now all these other people want to be here. And sure, a lot of it's corporate and a lot of it's selling things to each other. And there were ways in which I found that discouraging or sad. And is it really about pet food? But, you know, I mean, I didn't mind if people wanted to sell pet food by delivery to each other using sock puppets in the Super Bowl. Like, that's just fine. Like, the internet is big enough for all those things, you know? And so for me, it was not like, hey, screw the corporate titans of greed who are squatting and taking a dump on our beautiful

little internet garden. It's more like, oh, hey, you know, that stuff is probably boring. We should keep just emphasizing how interesting personal content is. And I think I was really validate, I felt very validated by like, GeoCity's blowing up. I mean, and then it goes away. But then Tumblr blowing up. I mean, if you look at like Tumblr and GeoCities, it's like especially young people, they have such a yearning to express themselves and to formulate their identity. And the internet can be such a fascinating place to attempt to formulate your identity and get feedback on it, that that's timeless. And it's timeless.

And sure, people try to make money off of it and people try to build business on it. And now that I'm in my 40s, I appreciate that. Somebody's got to pay to keep the lights on. Somebody's got to pay the sysmen to keep, you know, changing the power cord or figure out to turn off the coffee maker to keep the server on. Like, whatever it takes, you know, you got to do something to make your business go. You can't be just like, we should all have free web pages. I mean, at some point, I'm on a Greyhound bus riding across America, and I go to a housing project somewhere. I'm like, okay, where do we put them? And I'm like, oh, yeah, wow, fuck. Where do we put all the web pages for all the people? Like, okay, maybe it's geo-cities. Maybe it's Tumblr, maybe it's Facebook. I mean, all these corporate architectures have their sadnesses and their limitations and their inhibitions and their constraints, but humans always usurp them. It's so remarkable and wonderful to see the ways in which humans and kids and renegades and weirdos always usurp the medium. And what I try to take a comfort in is it's all so impermanent. I thought we're all

going to have these permanent web pages somewhere. We're all going to formulate our identities online. it is a continual process. And in a few years, it's a remarkable thing, Facebook will not be dominant anymore. You know, Microsoft bestrode the earth as a titan. And now they're sort of running, you know, playing catch up. And so all these titans that have made businesses on the internet, they too shall pass. And the constant is people want to connect with each other. And as long as I think about the web and I see that thread that humans desire to connect with each other, that pushes so much of technology, that pushes the innovation, that pushes new entrance, all that gives me a sort of perpetual hope that, you know, it's all going to crumble,

and then people will rebuild it, and it will astound us once more, you know. Creative destruction, it always comes back. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so I didn't, when I looked at the dot com, I watched the dot-com bubble happen. I said, I've got to get a job in doing video game journalism because I don't want to write, I don't want to write about my own tragedies and success in life for a living. I don't want to be a paid select. I don't want to live my life for money. I could already see, like, if I was going to break up with my girlfriend and write about it on my website and get more clicks,

that would be, like, so depressing if my salary depended on sort of how much traffic I was getting for my personal life. I knew that was like a recipe for ill mental health. And so I was like, why don't I pick a separate subject that I love video games and I'll be a journalist there and then I can keep my web writing as a sort of project of human connection and passion. So this is around the early 2000s that you start to get into gaming journalism? It was actually after I got laid off at ZDTV like 1998. I was like time to be a video game journalist. By 1999 I got a job with a startup with a 23 year old CEO and $14 million. I was employee number 19 at gamers.com.

About 14 months later, I was laid off by voicemail after the company had grown to 120 people and then contracted down to eight in the course of like 14 months. And that was all happened like 99, 2000, 2001, you know, right as friends of mine who were like, who are all web idealists who had moved from like, you know, Georgia to San Francisco to sleep on a couch and make some web pages and be queen. and have purple hair and live their identity and suddenly became fabulously wealthy and had houses and cars and and and then their stocks plummeted as you know accounting crises set in or something and then now they you know they owe more taxes than they have in assets and they're weeping and you know and having to go back home to virginia or whatever i mean it was just it was a wild cycle of boom and bust um i want to point out that becoming, people might not be aware of this, but becoming a gaming journalist was not a thing until about this time period. Like because, you know, before I would say certainly the late 90s, you know, aside from trade publications, no publications took games seriously as a subject matter or that there was an audience to speak to, that you could treat it as criticism, as news, as journalism. So just a little word into getting into that world, or, or,

or being a part of starting that world. Sure. Well, so, I mean, I was, you know, now in my 20s and I had loved video games. And I was like, oh, yeah, there isn't, there are publications. There aren't really publications that are targeted at, like, adult people who want to play video games. And so I got my first break. I got a gig writing catalog copy for, like, a video game catalog website. And they asked me for, like, 300 words about the latest Blade Runner game.

and I was and I was like I wrote 3,000 words and I would like, you know, use like sexual metaphors, Max Headroom and like, you know, it was just like, wait, and they, you know, where I would write a song about a video game for their catalog. It was just like inappropriate. So, but that gave me a portfolio that allowed me. I found this website gamers.com and they hired me to be their PlayStation editor, which I thought, okay, I'm going to be writing articles about great PlayStation games

and pulling all this content together. And it meant that I was running like, a content farm being packed. I had 15-year-old. I had like 10-15-year-olds on ICQ who were writing these, you know, summaries. We were trying to build the database of every game ever invented as to create the ultimate destination site for gamers.

So we had a database of 32,000 games from like Native American bone games to like, you know, every PlayStation title ever. And, you know, it was fun, but it wasn't like, it wasn't my, my sort of journalism dream of like I'm going to write you know I'm going to amuse myself by celebrating video games which is what I think I got me into video game journalism and so in 2001 when I laid off in that from when I got laid off from gamers.com Brian I actually didn't go deeper into video games journalism in quite that way I said I'm going to move to Japan sort of on on a whim because I went there to cover an event and I was like wow this place is totally tech and if I go there the

the challenges I had relating to people because of my website, like, they won't exist in Japan. I can go to Japan and, like, people don't speak the language. They don't know me, so I can, like, write about my life here, and I won't be offending people. Several times during our talk, Brian, I've alluded to the advent of search engines. I would now like to digress on that topic. Please, please do. So around 1996, they started inventing search engines, and quickly people were like, wow, you can search the web. This is such a big deal. Before that, browse and surfing, the verbs and then it became more about searching. So from browsing and surfing to searching, and suddenly people, obviously, they type in their name. It's like one of the first things I

searched for. And a lot of these people, when they typed in their name, I mean, that I knew, you know, friends and family would type in their name and they would find my website. Because I would say, well, I went to the store with Rob Smith and man, he's so thirsty for beer. He bought two six packs and he finished one when we got home. And then Rob Smith searches for name and there's not that many Rob Smith. So maybe I have a picture of him. And now he's like, dude, I'm going to lose my job. If somebody sees this, this is terrible. And you know, my goal as a writer was to say, oh, let me be honest. Let me tell you about what I'm experiencing. Let me tell you about my life. So you can know me. And then if you do the same, I'll come to know you.

But I didn't want to say, I'm going to write about Rob Smith. I'm not going to describe Rob Smith's life. That's not fair. It's not, it's Rob Smith's job to tell you about his life. And so the the core architecture of, I'm going to build this hypertext autobiography began to break down. And the ethics of writing a hypertext autobiography began to break down as search engines became more popular because I realized like, oh, I want to be totally honest. I don't want to write fiction. This is not fiction. This is nonfiction personal journalism. But if my personal journalism mentions other people, I'm now writing their webpage for them. And that is not appropriate. And so I began to take out last names and not mention specific people and grow more elliptical with details.

And I found it very troubling because I could no longer sort of write unbridled stories about my life I had to be. You know, and even if I didn't write about other people, but I wrote I'm doing this crazy sexy thing or I'm trying this weird drug thing or I'm feeling really lonely and angry. Like that's suddenly like a little bit weird in a lot of social contexts in the United States. So I think in some way, my desire to move to Japan in 2001 was like, well, at least I'll get a, I'll be able to write what I want because most of the people I'm interacting with won't sort of know of it. And so I'll be, I'll have a very much a separation between my professional life and my social contacts and then this life of my soul or my mind that I'm exhuming on the web. And, and when I went to Japan, my, my beat was I said, I'm going to write about the first mobile multiplayer video game. because they had the 3G networks coming online in 2001 in Japan. They had phones that could do photos and sharing photos and doing video chat and, you know, listening to music on the phone. And I thought, okay, if you have a constantly networked portable computer, you're going to have awesome multiplayer video games. I want to write about these video games.

I was in Japan for like almost two years and there weren't a lot of mobile multiplayer video games. But the ones I found, I definitely wrote about them. Well, I want to, this might take us out of the chronology, but I, you're starting to talk about pulling back about the, what you're sharing and it, um, so moving to around 2005, you do kind of stop sharing almost completely. So just. Yeah. Describe for me like the evolution that gets you to that point and, and why is it, if it's burning out, if it's, if it's, if it's too personal, just take me to 2005. and the Dark Night video and things like that. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, I moved to Japan.

I do all this writing, you know, sort of in this context of travel. It's like, look at this amazing event of travel. Like, I have gone to this new town. I have gone to this new restaurant. I am living in a difficult place. And, you know, being a journalist abroad, you just have a – all your stories have, like, import value-added. You know, like, just by virtue of being abroad,

my webpage was sort of interesting in a sort of. of exotic way. But then I didn't want to live there because I couldn't communicate well enough and I didn't feel at home. So I came back to America and my webpage is much more like just trying to find things, trying to find myself. Like on my webpage is about finding myself and what do I want to do now and who do I love and what motivates me and it's not nearly as exotic or interesting until I meet this young woman. I decided to go to graduate school because I wanted to learn to produce software after being a journalist for a while. I go to Interactive Media grad school. And I meet another student there and I fall in love. And I start writing about how I'm falling in

love with this person. And by now I've shifted from doing static HTML. Around 2002, I shifted from static HTML to a weblog software. I used movable type, which was advanced weblogging software at that time. And it allowed you to really easily do reverse chronology posting. And then it also allowed for user comments. So now I'm starting to have people. people who are along on the journey with me. And these are people I've known from email forever, but they can start to talk to each other in my comment threads. And they're saying like, yay, you're going to grad school. Or, oh, you know, you're sort of like a privileged time wasteer. Like, grad school's perfect for you or whatever. It's like a range of feedback. And that's fine.

We can throw the medicine ball hard at each other. And I don't take it too personally. And then I start to fall in love and I start to write about falling in love and what this feels like and what the person's like and what I'm feeling. and man, it got so intense. This one person was basically like, you know, Justin, I've seen you in love these two other times. You fell in love with this person and this person. And based on what you wrote there, you were not good at being a partner in these ways. And here's why I think this next relationship's doomed to failure. And they did a sort of analysis of me and my conduct in prior relationships and my current emotional state

and my current, you know, sort of engagement with this woman and sort of tore down the whole idea that I would be like a good partner and that this was a good relationship. And then that led to a sort of discussion of all the other people in my, in my, you know, sort of chime in like, oh, yeah, he is kind of like, you know, like lying or, you know, not good. And people started insinuating that I was concocting parts of my website. And they were really like, it was like, it was fascinating, Brian because I'd created this website. I'd attempted to share incredibly honestly. I'd pulled back content only to protect other people and I was being accused of both lying and then being like not a good person to be involved with. And they were using the material I'd given them and they were posting

it like on my webpage. And I shared all this with this woman that I was falling in love with. And she was basically like, whoa, this is totally weird. And I don't like these strangers like getting into what we're doing between us. I don't like the things they're saying about you. I don't, you know, it doesn't reflect well on you and I think I'm falling in love with you. So why don't you leave me out of your website? And suddenly, I'm like, it brings, it brought the whole question of what's appropriate to share to a head. It was like, if I have to protect people's names and not use their names, okay. If I have to write elliptically about weird things, that's okay. but if I can't write about the person with whom I want to spend all my time,

then my website becomes like a list of books, or it's like the video games I'm playing, or like all this impersonal stuff that, you know, I really saw, like, in the earliest days of the web, a lot of people would share, they would attempt to share really radically weird or personal stuff. And then if you look at like famous people's blog, like famous tech people's,

their earliest blog posts are often very personal, and they're like about a medical thing or a family thing or like a self-doubt thing. And you fast forward five or ten years. You're in the late 2000. I'm sorry, you're in the mid to late 2000s. By now, most people's blogs are like, here's this inspiring book.

You know, or like, here's a trip I took and some photos. But like, it gets more and more difficult to share authentic personal comment because of user comments, because the stakes go up as so many people join you in cyberspace. And so I basically face this moment

where I was like, holy smokes, I've been talking to myself on the internet for like 11 years. I've been sharing everything I'm passionate about through my fingers in text with whomever wants to read my website. And now I feel like I can no longer do that in an authentic way. But I would rather be true with this person than be true with strangers on the internet because the strangers on the internet are being mean. And I basically said, I'm going to step back. I'm not going to feed these people anymore my secrets.

It doesn't feel safe to me and I want to be intimate with this person. and these are the terms under which I can be intimate with her, so I'm not going to post. So I sort of was, I was going through, it sounds very rational now, but I was going through it in a, in very much like a crisis mode. Like, what am I going to do with all of my feelings and thoughts since I can't post them on the internet? Oh my God. And I was crying and I was sobbing and I was talking to my friend, G.K. on the phone. And I recorded it because I just started making videos. So I said, why don't I record this?

Because, you know, it's weird. There's some way in which oversharing about your life for 11 years will give you a sense of, oh, this is good content. You know, like, oh, like, oh, I'm having a breakdown. This is good content because I'm talking about the challenges of sharing yourself on the internet. And, you know, and I think I may not be sharing myself on the internet too much. I should, like, record this. And maybe this is a useful way to tell people like, oh, hey, here's why this website in the future is likely to be less interesting. Here's a video.

And people, like, the response to video was remarkable because I made a tearful video and I think it somehow broke through. Like when I was just doing like, here's a tech, like the difference between text and video is so astounding, Brian. And you do an audio podcast. How different would it be if we could see all the old craggy faces of these internet veterans you're interviewing? But when I did a, when I did a video, suddenly like, you know, newspapers were like, the San Francisco Chronicle put it on their front page. It was like a tearful apology from Justin and like, and like people, random strangers on eBowm's world. Like, we're like, look at this pathetic faggot like crying. We got to like find his house and teach him a lesson. They doxed me and posted my address like they were going to come beat me up.

And they found a picture of the woman that I fell in love with and like found her name and address. And I was like, whoa, I posted a tearful apology to sort of turn the volume down on the internet. And then everything just got crazier. Like, like I'd never been docked. before and then I posted something so personal as this video to say goodbye and people were like saying oh no you're not going anywhere and I was like okay this is like really remarkable and scary so then I like had the I contacted the e-bombs world Sissimans and I was like please take this stuff down and they did and you know and then I said okay that's really it I'm not going to update my website anymore I did leave it there because I think I just was like I put so much work into the years of sort of inscribing my thoughts that I didn't want to take it down but

I felt like I didn't have anything to add at that time. In that moment when you stopped posting, do you think that what you had done for those 11 years was a mistake? Or was it just that it no longer worked for you at that time in your life? Yeah, that was exactly the latter. It worked for me until it didn't. It was a tool of liberation. It connected me with all these people. It got me a job at Wired.

I got flown to Sweden and paid and put up in hotels. to talk to Swedish people about the internet. I got to take a bus trip through Mobile, Alabama. You know, like, all this stuff happened to me because I opened myself up to the world. And that was fabulous until it wasn't. You know, and it wasn't because I was older and I wanted to have a type of intimacy that might not have survived being aired in public. You know, prior to the woman I started seeing in 2005, prior to that, I had done some experiments where like I would write an account of some intimacy and then the person I had been with would also write an account and I would publish parallel accounts of like how two people saw

a night of intimacy, you know, or how two people in a relationship saw a fight in a relationship. And I think, you know, for me, those were media experiments. They were intimacy experiments. They were truth experiments. But by the time it was 2005, I'm sort of like, you know, I just want to have a relationship with this person. And I'm realizing that, the public scrutiny of sharing that relationship with the internet is not tenable. This is going to skip over the chronology again, but when do you come back and what, and by come back, I mean start posting again online and start sharing details of your life. When do you come back and what was the, what brought you back?

Yeah, so it's fun. I stopped sharing in 2005. I went to grad school. I made a lot of little art projects and things. And I put them into subdirectories on my website and I just never. publish them. You know, I was like, I just bury, basically, I continued to use my website as archive, stash, notes of all my stuff, but I just didn't update the front page to tell you what was where. And then my thesis project in grad school was an attempt to turn surfing the web into a

massively multiplayer online game. And in some ways, I felt like all the pent up energy I had around like, I'm going to share, I'm going to write, I'm going to connect, I'm going to publish videos, I'm going to make all this stuff about my life, all that sort of, energy instead went into, I want to make software, I want to make a game, I want to make a game that everyone on the web could play together. How do I make a game that everyone's surfing the web right now could play together? And that was fun to see that sort of if I, if instead of publishing a poem every night, if I took that instead and made software, I could make something interesting. And I ended up starting a company around that thesis idea. It was called Passively Multiplayer

Online Game, P-Mogg. And my girlfriend at the time, and I, ran this company and then we got married. And then I was chief executive officer. She was chief creative officer. We were both on the board with our investors. We took venture capital. We hired nine employees. We moved together. We got an office. We went through this entire cycle of running this startup. And I didn't have a personal web presence. You know, I wasn't a blogger. I didn't share my diary. I didn't. But, you know, I had a deep love for the web that I was sharing now through this game. and then the game was not monetizable and it was extremely expensive to run. So the game shut down.

And then we tried to make some other games and that failed. The company failed. And then my marriage failed. And once my marriage failed, it was like, oh, man, she was the one who was like, please don't write about me. But if I'm not going to write about her, then I think I want this back. I want to have a place to express myself. But this time without comments, you know, I didn't, I wasn't ready for other, I just wanted

to talk. And there's ways in which, you know, I confront my desire to share on the internet as a sort of essential narcissism or vanity or desire to not be forgotten. You know, and I think I'm okay with that. I think it's very human to not want to be forgotten, but I understand there's something kind of essentially petty or sort of silly about it. And so, you know, when I came back to the web in 2010, it was like, look, I wrote some poems about how much I hurt. And they were like, you know, and they were funny. I mean, I think they were funny in some ways because they were like, the infinite darkness of sadness is consuming my heart.

You know, that kind of poem. Like, you know, like that kind of thing, which, you know, I think I knew when I was writing and posting it that they would be funny someday, but they were also so real and so exactly how I felt as a divorce person. And then, you know, for me, a real point of liberation was by, I think by the end of 2010 or early 2011, I published the first ever links.net most bachelor, most eligible bachelor award. And I gave it to myself because I was now an eligible bachelor, but I was like, you know, I always loved to use my website to poke fun at what people were trying to do with the web. So I would remake my website to make it look like it was Yahoo news, but it was all about me, or make it look like it was wired news and it was all about how sexy my gadgets or my life was. And, you know, so in this case, I made my site a sort of like links.net is some kind of award-giving entity that gives out awards and the award we're giving is most eligible bachelor, but it's for,

this guy who's talking about how he has most of his teeth, you know, like, that's, I tried to, I always try to humble myself before other people get to me. And so it was fun to be able to use the web to say, boy, I am humiliated in divorce. Check it out. Check out how humiliating this is. Because for me, that was cathartic. Again, somehow just writing made me feel not alone. And then I got the trickle of emails from people who are like, we're glad you're back, or I'm divorced too. or, you know, now I've had readers who are like, have been known me sort of for 15, 18 years, and they're like, oh, man, I've been divorced too. Let's have, let's have beer next time you're in whatever, you know.

You've run through entire life cycles together. Exactly, exactly. That's right. Correct me. I just get the impression, and if I'm wrong about this, you can say so. But I got the impression that also video might have rejuvenated your interest in sharing, because a lot of what you've done over the last few years has been video. Yeah, thanks.

think the threads running through my life, geez, now that I'm talking to you about it, Brian, I'm like, yeah, it's a lot about sharing. It's also about new technology. I mean, I loved the web when it came. I loved the internet when I first saw it. I love video games. I love, you know, the web. And then I loved mobile phones. And then I loved mobile video games. And then I loved, you know, this browser, toolbar, memo we tried to make. And then I was like, you know, video is not like a new technology, but the power to edit, the way we can edit today with even, now you can use a mobile phone to put together a video with multiple feeds and sound source files and text and like,

it's still fundamentally static. I mean, you could argue the 360 video on. Hey, Brian again. Skype crap out number two, but this is the last one. Thanks. There you are. Okay, so video. Yeah, videos.

So it's fundamentally static and linear in many sad ways, but it allows me to challenge myself as a personal storyteller. And I think it took me back to the earliest days of the web where when you read suck.com and you saw an article and there was a link, you knew that it would be a witty aside. It would often be a witty aside. It might be useful information, but it was often like a wink at you. And I thought you can use, like if I'm going to talk about my life, I always wanted to undermine my own narrative. because I loved the fact that the web was not mass media. We were not attached to advertising dollars. We were, in some ways, pranking the media by linking to it and by taking things out of context and remixing them.

And could I do that to myself so that when people read my content or viewed my content, they thought of themselves as an active viewer, as someone with engagement, as someone with some kind of power to do something about it. So I thought I could use video to make narrative that undermined itself in an amusing way because I could be talking and then my vision was if I had a green screen. So I got a green screen. This was really exciting for me because if I got a green screen, then I could stand in front of it, tell a story. And then behind me, I could be doing all this stuff that would support it or challenge it.

And I could make like a multi-layered narrative, which is so much of what's fun about hypertext. It's multi-layered because at any point your viewer can go off into some other part of the narrative or call up something to support or refute what you're saying. could I sort of instantiate that, you know, that dynamic in video? And it just turned out to be a lot of fun to make videos. It's a lot of work, especially when you want to interview people and you have too many cameras and you try and make it a green screen and you're a one-man band. And again, I have so much trouble making money off of this stuff because I can't, I'm not very good with being professional.

I always want to be personal and funny. And I know people make money off of being personal and being funny, but I feel pretty validated because I've now been online long enough that I've seen enough of these cyber celebrities who burn the F out. You know, it is brutal living your life in public for people. And as long as I've been able to keep my personal sharing personal and not get paid for it, I can burn out on my own schedules. You know, I still burn out. But I think for me, it's like I can, it's part of my spiritual journey of learning who I am and testing new technologies for storytelling without saying like, you know, and having a job on the side, you know.

I get a job on the side and I make money and then I come home and I say, who am I? And I, for me, that dynamic works. For other people, they can ride that edge of, hey, what I'm doing today is actually consumable content for everyone, including my sponsors. And, you know, and I do that every day. And my friends say to me, why don't you make a video every day? And I think part of it is just I got, I got kind of burned. I think this is where I think I begin to see myself as old on the web, Brian.

And one, I can't get down with ephemerality. So for me, when I was working on the early web, I was like, we are building the archives of our life and understanding for future generations. And so I don't like to do ephemeral stuff because, like, I just want to build my archives. If I take a photo of something and I take two minutes out of my life to make a note of it, I don't want that to go away. And, you know, I actually, I take a, my modus operandi these days is I take pictures of a ton of stuff and I never, I don't post them because I want to be in the moment. So I see all I see my friends who are on the social networks.

They take pictures and then you have to drop out of whatever you're doing for 90 seconds to type up a description, to tag it, to make sure the location's right to ask the three people around you if they're also doing it and if you want to link or if it's allowed and then to post it. And then 20 minutes later, someone comments, shouldn't you comment back? I'm like, I only, I think this is where I'm old. I'm like, you know, I want to tell a story. I'm going to tell a story in a way that I make sure I'm not offending someone because I don't like offending people. You know, I could offend someone in power, but I don't want to offend ordinary people. And most of my stories are about ordinary people, I know. So, you know, the time to take a story, tell it about someone you know, make sure you're not hurting them.

all that means that I'm not dashing off ephemeral media, which leaves me out of some of the modern technology revolutions, but I still manage to masturbate using technology in public in ways that make me feel satisfied. Well, because I think Skype is trying to tell us something, and also you've been super generous with your time, let me get to some of my wrap-up questions here and then now. Thank you so much. First of all, and this can be a quick answer. a lot of people call give you the label like the first blogger or a pioneer of blogging do you like that do you embrace that or what you've been doing for 20 years is it is it bigger than

just blogging thanks you know i am i thought to myself why am i going on this guy's show like i don't have a book to promote i'm not like you know you know i like why do i want to talk to you Brian, and I think it's I want to be remembered a little bit, or I feel like what I did was important, or I want the kids to know that I was there, man, and I fought for freedom or something, you know, but I think in some ways when people, when I started getting people saying, are, you're the first blogger, I would always say I wasn't the first. I copied other people, but I was early and I was persistent. But there's ways in which for me, as a person who wants to be invited to conferences every five years about the history of the internet or who wants to talk to cool podcast hosts and

like, you know, be interviewed for a book about the internet or something, I've got to sort of remind people that like maybe the New York Times said I was the early blogger or like maybe, you know, I've got to sort of, it's a weird line because I've got to sort of be a little bit famous and I've got a traffic in my own fame. But it makes me kind of queasy because I was, I was so inspired by Ranjit Bahatnagar, and I viewed his source, and he had a page where he wrote about his life, and then I wrote about my life after him. So, all, you know, am I the first blogger? I mean, maybe because I wrote thousands of pages about my life in excruciating detail and then wrote a poem every day, and I updated all that stuff. Maybe that does make me the first blogger. But like, you know,

I think, I don't know, if you try to track down the first car, or if you try to track down the invention of the TV. You know, like France has its own first car story or America has their first airplane story, but China has their own first airplane story. And, you know, and so everybody has their own version of what the first is. And so I think, again, when I think about my mental health, I think, I would be a, I will be a insecure, unhappy person if I go around telling people, I am the first blogger. I am important because I am the first blogger. What I like to say is I was early to this party, and now we're all at this party, and it's a crazy party. When I was researching you and reading the articles from the time or even like that New Yorker, early article about things like that, they...

You go deep. I try to. I try to do the work. The thing... How should I put this? they treat you especially, but anybody that was blogging or sharing things online at that time as sort of like it's this freakish thing, you're these exhibitionists. But now that we're living in the world we're living in, now that everybody's doing it, how do you feel about that?

Like, is it vindication? Is it like, see, you were all just like me. I told you, I told you. Or how do you feel that now everybody's sharing just like you've been for 20 years? Wow, you know, I think on some level, I live in San Francisco today, and there's sometimes I'm like, oh man, I should have started a blogging company or oh man, I should have started a media empire. Oh, man, the validation for me being early should have been like untold riches and instantiation in the corporate pantheon, you know. So there's sometimes I think like, oh, I am not sufficiently capitalistically, you know, celebrated or I did not. I did not. I think like, oh, I am not sufficiently capitalistically, you know, celebrated. Or I did not. I did not. take the capitalist steps to success to capitalize on my on my presence in the early internet. And then there's other times where I think, oh, my God, I was just like patient zero in this outbreak of infectious vanityitis. But I couldn't have done anything. I was just acting out

the human drama and I was a puppet of our deepest, you know, and maybe darkest impulses. And then, but I think really what I'm doing is I am trying, if I was early and now, we're all in this world and the president of the United States overshares on social media and sends the world into a dangerous tizzy. I think to myself, I have I have homework to do, which is my own reconciliation with ethical sharing and what the most positive uses of this technology are. I mean, for me, I was always trying to figure out, okay, let's get everybody on because then we can all meet each other and be empathetic. And now we sort of got everybody on, but I'm not sure we're like connecting for empathy. And so when I think about,

Like, what do I think about everybody sharing online? I think, man, I got more work to do. What can I contribute today if I contributed by being a sort of weirdly dreadlocked, long hair, sarong wearing role model of, you know, aberrant oversharing 20 years ago? Now, is there some way I can be a role model or a thought provider on ethical, gentle sharing? And for me, it's actually, I have a daughter. She just turned one years old on Sunday. And for me, a lot of my thinking today is about ethical sharing for her.

And I think that's where I can continue to evolve and possibly contribute to the discussion of how people should use social technology and communications is I think about her. And what would she want me to say about her before she can speak for herself? And what would I want her to be able to say to the public? And what would I want her to say to her friends? And what would I want her to say to her children? And what will she look at when she's of age and she looks at me as a 19 year old oversharing all this stuff? What will she think of me? And I think this is the opportunity I have to continue to be useful to society as a patient zero in the internet influenza war, you know? The pioneer of this. Okay, I'm going to build directly off of that. But you're going to have to go with me here because it's going to, take a while to unspool. Thank you. So I noticed that, okay, if you go with the timeline, you start your website in 93, 94,

and then in 2005 is when you go offline. So we can say that, you know, it got to be too much. You reevaluated what sharing was. If you look at where we are in terms of this modern world where we're all sharing all of our lives, it's only been going, it's only been mainstream for about a decade. Like Facebook opens up in 2006 or 7 or whatever. And the fact that my mom is now online sharing everything now is only about a decade old, right? So I feel like we're in this time where people are sort of having a backlash and, you know, fake news or the trolls on Twitter and all that stuff.

And it sort of lines up almost exactly because a decade into you doing it, you sort of, it becomes too much and you pull back. And a decade into it being mainstream, I feel like we're starting, it's too much and some of us are starting to pull back. I'm just curious, and again, maybe this is just my dumb theory, but would you feel like that there's some sort of natural cycle to this that everybody goes through where it's euphoric at the beginning and then it becomes too much and then you got, just, what do you think of my little theory there? I like it a lot. I mean, I think I'm totally fascinated by collective response. to these sorts of technological advances or these sorts of social advances. I think what you've described sounds pretty accurate to me in terms of all of us sort of reeling from the access we have to people's personal lives or their thoughts and how to deal with that.

And I think there's, it's fascinating to say, like, you know, I had this firm conviction that we are becoming more enlightened as a society and this technology will help us do it. But there's ways in which we're now thinking, oh my God, this technology has just addled us, and it's just confused us, and it's just motivated us to be, you know, animated by hate and by lust and greed and all these sad things are what this technology is really bringing into our lives through social media. And there's a, as you said, there's a sort of backlash to that. And I'm so excited that it's happening because it means that it's not stable, you know,

and I think constantly or routinely, I think about the advent of the novel. And how everybody's like, oh, my God, the novel is enslaving our young people. And it's changing, you know, it's getting women to start reading. And now, you know, we're going to lose our social fabric and our control on our institutions. And yes, the novel had quite an impact on our society. And it changed people's relationship to each other and to text and to understanding. And now we've begun to digest the Internet. And what the heck is coming?

You know? And so you could say like, oh, man, why? we figure out how to handle wide scale access to social media, then we'll really be ready for, like, you know, being together as a species and banding in to solve social problems. But that's, I mean, we're likely to be just as torn up by the next advance of sort of social connection, you know, that might come our way. VR. Yeah, well, I mean, I don't know, you know, I think long term when I think about what this really is, is it's like, it's sort of like telepathy in that we're all going to be tuned in. We're all gradually, if this, if we don't, you know, extinguish our planet or like obliterate

ourselves through disease or war and we keep on tinkering with our devices, we're getting toward, we're headed towards a sort of telepathy type thing where it's like, hey, Siri, what is my mom doing right now? Like, suddenly we're in each other's lives in a way, we're co-present in this weird way that I think it's just going to be very exciting to adjust to, you know, I, you know, it's conceivable to me in a few years. I will have a device that allows members of my friends and family to sort of pop up in my house and sort of say, hey, Justin, you know, and I'll say, oh, look, I'm playing with my daughter. You can see her. She's stacking these blocks. And then they'll say, oh, that's so great. Look, I'm wearing my new sweater. And I'll say, great. And all that will, and then they'll go and that'll be fine. But what happens when we share that sort of intimacy with each other? It's already like, you know, you say we've been wrestling. with social technology for 10 years. We've been wrestling with smartphone computers in our pockets for 10 years. And now think of how integrated they are in our lives if this pace of technology

continues at any comparable rate. In 10 or 20 years, we are neck deep in a whole, even more immersive level of sort of ability to know about each other in our affairs. So we better, you know, sort of get the technology of understanding, empathy, connection, kindness, rules, boundaries, limits, best practices, holy smokes, the stakes are high. And whatever that next thing is, you're still excited to see what it's like to share your life on it. Yes, although I am very much conscious of the fact that I am not native to it, you know, and that, you know, sometimes I look online and people are like, oh man, look at all these YouTube stars. Why aren't you a YouTube star? And I said, because, you know, the struggles of me today are not, they're not as

compelling as someone who's for me. Watching someone form their identity in real time in public is a fascinating exercise. And I feel more formed, you know. I don't, I'm not hungry to sort of like do, you know, rapid fire self-exposure and experimentation in public. And I'm, I'm happy with that, you know, and I think that's what lens, like, I will have fun. I've, I've already tried to make VR personal religious experiences. in 3D, but like I don't need to, I'm not, I'm not sharing those, you know, that's not, I don't, like, it's not part of who I, how I'm formulating my position in the world. And there's people who are so ready to share, so ready to be acknowledged that they will define how we think about future

technologies. I, I really hope that people aren't saying, I can picture like, oh man, one of the godfathers of blogging is back, except now he's a VR avatar. in your living room. Like, maybe, maybe that, I could do that in a way that's authentic and useful and stuff, but I think it'll be more for the, like, you know, Garrison Keeler NPR crowd as opposed to the, like, the Snapchat sort of like appetite for the future crowd, you know. Yeah, but hey, if what this has been all about for you for 20 years has been about being authentically you, then that's fine. That's authentically who you are at that age. So I, well, I'll tell you this. I'll tell you one, one dark fantasy. It's not a fantasy and

I want it to happen, but it's a fantasy in that I can't, it's a thing I think about unbidden that sort of has a deep hold on me. And I think about if my wife and my daughter died and I was left alive, that I would be so stripped to the bone emotionally that I might like, you know, howl on the web. Well, listen, if anybody is going to explore the ultimate boundaries of sharing in the future, I believe it's you definitely. Thank you. Justin. Brian?

Patron. Can I give, yeah, go ahead. Could I give, I want to give one plug when I thought, oh, man, this guy's having me on a show. I don't have anything to promote. And then I realized, like, in 2015, I published a documentary about all this stuff with video footage and blah, blah, blah. The links. That story, yes. Exactly.

Overshare. com.net. And I published it freely on everywhere I could find. It's bit torrentable. from the internet archive, and then I spent 18 months making it, and I spent about two hours marketing it. So this is another marketing moment for that crazy documentary, and I'm very grateful that you found it and rang me up. Yeah, it's online. I'll have a link in the show notes. It's overshare, the links.net story,

because obviously Google can get you there as well. All right, Justin, you can, patient zero is one way to say it, or Pioneer is another way to say it, but thank you for coming on the show and sharing. What is it that they see on radio shows? First time, long time. So the first and the longest sharer on the web. Thanks for sharing that story. Oh, man, Brian, you are so nice.

And what you do to dignify the earliest days of the internet reminds me that we're in a continuum of human experimentation. And thank you for helping people see that they are today. making what is newly experimental. If this is the first time you're listening to this podcast, please subscribe to us on your podcast app of choice. There's plenty more great internet history where that came from. And if you're a long-time listener, then you know what to do to help us out.

Rate and review us on iTunes. Because iTunes gives credit to reviews and ratings, and the more great reviews we get, the more people will discover us. As always, there's more info on our website, www.com. www. internethistorypodcast.com. The show's Twitter handle is at NetHistoryPod, and my personal Twitter is at Brian MCC. Thanks for listening.