![]() The pirates believed in common ownership of the means of production, free self-expression, and self-management in digital realms. Pirates and hackers were battling against companies who would enclose their software and games behind digital copy protections by giving them away effectively for free on BBSs. Michael Hardagon explains in his thesis how these autonomous, dial-in computer systems dedicated to software piracy were, "worlds unto themselves – secret, sub rosa societies that unified form and system outside the boundaries of the familiar." These pirate BBSs and the communities around them were thought of as alternative, anarchic spaces that resisted authoritarian forms of consumer capitalism: sharing files illegally was done not only for the purpose of sharing free software, but for ideological purposes. People who had their own BBS tailored their boards to suit a specific interest or topic, but boards sharing cracked copies of games and software were the most popular. This meant that connecting to a BBS was inherently an intimate experience between the caller and the system operator, as the host could see on their screen how the visitor navigated the board, and the host could initiate a chat discussion with the user at any time. With some additional hardware and software any computer could be turned into a BBS, and other people could connect to it by “calling” it over a telephone line. BBSs allow a finite number of persons to access the board at any given time often, only one person at a time. ![]() On the Internet, any number of people can visit the same website, but BBSs work in a different way. In the early 90s, the process of distributing warez moved from sending files on a disk via snail mail to distributing files via the digital networks of Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs). To understand how ASCII art came to be, we must have a look at another overlapping community: the software pirates. Why does ASCII art exist? Does the ASCII art community have the kind of qualities that define the "cyberspace" era? However, the questions of how this community originated and how it organized itself remained open for me. Partaking in the community of ASCII artists made me feel like I belonged to some arcane, long-forgotten society. To me, ASCII art is like folk art of the digital era, and it carries a faint echo of the "cyberspace" era. Even though I enjoy the often delightful and obscure visual quality of ASCII art, I was more interested in what it represents. For my bachelor's thesis in 2014, I wrote about Amiga ASCII art and the method of producing images with a small set of typographic glyphs. While researching e-zines, I found a community that seemingly embodied a fraction of this "cyberspace" era even today: the world of ASCII art. ![]() Legowelt's description of “cyberspace” seems to be the polar opposite: a place for people to build communities around their niche interests with other like-minded people and without the control of any external authorities.Įven though some of this off-beat mentality has persisted in the internet culture at large, finding and especially joining these kinds of communities nowadays is a difficult task. Platforms that dominate the market for community building, like Reddit and Facebook, are highly controlled, commercialised, and give users little to no ability to self-govern or build their own digital space. Legowelt’s romantic view of the pre-internet era feels far removed from the internet of today. Legowelt, ORDER OF THE SHADOW WOLF -cyberzine CYBERSPACE extends all over the place, lightyears removed from your lolcatz and facebook likes.a transcendental hyperreality matrix from seedy little corners only visited by enlightened freaks to an infinite world of clandestine knowledge that extends into infinity without CONTROL. CYBERSPACE is not facebook, twitter, LinkedIn or your google+ prison which scans every fart you make to sell you more useless stuff you don't need for your consumer selfie "look at me I am so happy" lifestyle. Most of these e-zines would be about hacking and anarchic subjects especially nowadays where it seems that all these original romantic vibes of the cyberpunk/space world are falling apart with corporate institutions dumbing everything down. E-zines were text files written by Hackers, freaks, nerds, Sci-Fi fans, outcasts, psychotic weirdos, mad dealers and kindred folk, about what was happening in their lives, to reach out to other people with similar interests, lonely people scattered around the world connecting in CYBERSPACE and creating their own micro cultures around their hobbies and beliefs.
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