I assume you refer to things like homosexuality which were already totally normal there back then. Transsexualism was a bit less common back then but I imagine this was also because the medical tech wasn't at the required level yet to really make a transition possible.
But I wasn't really talking about those things. More about sexuality in general being a taboo in the media and popular culture.
Transsexualism/trangenderism was indeed a bit less common then (or at least more hidden from the public sphere), but that wasn’t so much due to surgical tech. Gender affirming surgery in the form of vaginoplasty was performed as early as 1922. Gender affirming hormone replacement therapy and other procedures also date back decades.
Of course, the availability of these procedures have increased over time, but I don’t think the technology has been the primary barrier to trans people’s public existence. The trans movement’s progress has had far more to do with advocacy and activism increasing cultural tolerance. And also creating a broader cultural awareness, which in turn allows even more closeted/questioning trans people to put a name to their experiences, and learn about the possibilities available to them.
For perhaps the vast majority of time prior to the mid twentieth century, most trans people had no trans role models, and often no awareness that other trans people even existed, much less that medical procedures were available to help them. That’s all, mostly, thanks to the many trans people who fought (and died) for things to improve.
Surgical tech advancements have definitely helped, but they aren’t as central to the growing numbers of trans people coming out. Our social, legal, and political changes have been hard won, and we are constantly fighting to preserve them—see Michael Knowles recent call to “eradicate transgenderism” to a crowd of applause at CPAC: https://www.rollingstone.com/t/michael-knowles/
Surgical tech does us little to no good if our public existence is outlawed and violently suppressed.
...unless you were gay. I'm old enough to remember how casually homophobic 80s society was. (At least in the USA).
Or did you mean to make vague racist reference where we are supposed to fill in the blank?
I would not ask Google about those stuff today and I would certainly not dare downloading them for fear of triggering so many alerts and red flags, and these days it would probablu be possible to be jailed (in the UK) just for having this material on your computer.
It puts them on your radar, so when you're later investigating a pipe-bomb mailing spree and come across them again, you know better than to believe the "he would never / but he's such a good boy" you always hear from the parents.
But you're mostly wrong. The majority of people you would call British are classed as citizens, not subjects:
If you get arrested for child porn, will police get your google search history and check you haven't googled bad things? Sure.
Unless you piss off the wrong people that is. Selective enforcement is very much a thing.
Arguably "tame" but not something you want to be associated with today.
Or so I’ve heard from, ahem, some people during the early 00s.
I always wondered - was it pronounced “loft” or “low fat”?
I think the edginess comes from the implication that there were people out there actually doing this. And perhaps that people read this when they were 14.
2) I wonder if this magical period was only possible because it was reachable by a few, and this knowledge was not largely abused because of the entry fee.
3) AI is lowering the barrier to entry. The great equalizer, to see what we do with valuable insight ~ Politicians should fear computers more than disgruntled citizens.
4) I hope we don't see export laws changed to cover AI models like encryption was.
And punishment for abuse is mostly non-existent
HA!!! I ran a BBS Warez Site out of my North Tahoe High School CAD lab on an everex step cube on a 9600 baud modem in 1991
I was 14.
I was grounded for a MONTH for calling long distance into a BBS in San Jose CA in order to play "The Pit" and "Trade wars" and the phone bill was $926 and I failed to buy all the wheat in the galaxy and accidentally SOLD all my wheat failing to corner the market, but flooding it...
Yeah, that was on a 286 with an amber monitor that I convinced my dad he needed a computer for his business... and then a 2400 baud modem was important... so I could play Populous with a friend over modem.
Its wear i learned the first of Jaron Lanier and UI/AI/etc whatever he was talking about at the time.
Was later a long time subscriber to WIRED before they got too smug.
But the sold it in LAKE TAHOE. IN 1990-ish!
UHM, was also a subsccriber of 2600 and a total phreak (built blue/black boxes that fit into film canisters, and had an official captain crunch cereal whistle when it was released)
I also pulled the famous 'packing tape on dollar bill' hack (theft) to play video games ;
So there was this 'hack' where you put a strip of packing tape (folded over itself such that the sticky parts are together) - you put them on a $1 or $5 bill\
You put the dollar into a vending machine at the post office to buy stamps.
You buy the cheapest amount of stamps, then you YANK the dollar-in-packing-tape from the machine...
You receive the stamps, the change from the yanked bill, take the change to the Safeway (grocery store) next door and you play the video games they had in them ; Defender and Contra.
It took us $25 in stolen quarters from the post office machine vuln to this attack to beat contra.
My buddy who I did this with is now EVP at Blizzard.
Back then it was 90% fun and maybe a few random guys were trying to figure out how to start some sort of tech business. It was mostly hobbyists just screwing around. That sense of play and screwing around is what made it so magical.
The last time I felt that kind of magic was when I attended an event called BIOcurious (Note the 'O' in previous word) where they showed complete novices how to use a minION device to sequence DNA with pipettes and reagents. It's the kind of thing that you need to be physically present for. The tech is not easy, but crazy powerful. With biotech gear getting cheap enough to be prosumer, maybe there will be that kind of extreme hobbyist thing forming around biotech? In a similar way, in the 80s computers went from things only big companies could afford to prosumer and even consumer devices and so all these people were getting involved just to see what they could do with these new magical devices.
the profit motive creeping in changes the dynamic completely. btw i think this seems to happen with everything, i don’t think it’s limited to just technology—it happens with anything that transforms from fun hobby. this always seems to sap the energy from many of the most passionate.
I love those because it's 2 days of challenging yourself to actually finish your project and do something crazy if you like. These constraints make it fun.
Our regular meetings are a good mix of hobbiests, professionals and the very occasional idea guy to allow great discussions and feelings of community.
Obviously there is no corporate sponsor and no prices besides the appreciation of your fellow hackers.
I also participated in "local government" sponsored Hackathon and while those are nice to meet people and encourage the bueocracy to embrace the modern world it's almost always about some social goal like accessibility, open data etc. These are important and interesting topics but the projects are never that "fun".
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27495517
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26mkK7s--I0 — the unexpectedly sincere description of which. Excerpt:
[...]
(retvrn to Konata)
Hey if I’ve been pretending it’s 2011 for the last decade so can you.
(le verboten maymay arrow)you will never watch “Haruhi Suzumiya Episode 1- Part 1” for the first time ever again
Or were you more indie, and instead hit up “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya English Dub Episode 1 [1/3]”?
God what I’d do for my exact watch history from 10 years ago…
I think I jotted down the date and time, down to the morning I discovered Miku, at least I have that…
Miku lead to MMD (tutorials), which lead to Caramelldansen (heh), the top results after searching that were Haruhi (naturally), and then some time later I was led back to Haruhi. What good times…
.
I think the most profound think I’ve realised in life, after endlessly trying to recapture so many emotions, is that it’s not just a matter of being in the same place, with the same devices, watching the same media, at the same time of day, during the same season, it still won’t be the same.
Even with the same old friend group, it’ll be different, because not only are they all different people to who they were at the time, so are you.
You can never be that person again, and you can never experience it the same way again. That’s why nostalgia’s such a blessing, you can still feel things the same way, not by experiencing it again, but simply by remembering it.
I was talking to a friend, they said they got really into LOTR when they were in their late teens, read all the books cover to cover, absolutely loved them, and that they know damn well they’ll never read them again.
I think they understood the same thing.
Truth be told I think I’ve only watched all of Haruhi through three times, Yuki-chan maybe twice, Disappearance twice, and Lucky Star once, and those viewings of Haruhi have been spread pretty evenly over the last decade, I’m not sure I’ll watch them again for a while.
But I know I will watch them again.
Preferably from the rooftop of an apartment complex in Nishinomiya…
I was there in the BBS era too. I remember one such text file explaining a simple mechanism to light up a bomb without leaving much trace of the mechanism used to delay the bomb blowing up: it consisted of lighting a cigarette in which a small hole was drilled. Then the text file was going into details, explaining which type of cigarettes to buy so that it wouldn't consume too fast / not get blown by the wind / etc. It was totally hilarious too.
Louis Rossetto had this viewpoint 20 years before he launched Wired, and was smart enough to focus on the tech and tech people and tech business for the most part. The right-libertarian philosophy was doled out lightly and cleverly. Wired did try to make it seem that Silicon Valley was just a right-libertarian utopia, and made it seem everyone was of this mind - more than was the case.
R U Sirius had similar ideas. I think it made things seem different than they actually were.
I remember downloading it and putting it on a floppy disk, I'm not sure I ever even look at it :D
There was also this feeling at the time that I'm finding hard to express or even really understand. There was of course the corporate tech world, exemplified very nicely by various magazines and shows like Computer Chronicles. But there was this other world of real techno-culture that seemed to be growing and compounding on itself. There was literature like the Cyberpunk genre, music like early techno and what we now call IDM, BBSs, periodicals like 2600 and Mondo and countless zines. Wired launched sometime in that era. Linux was the work of a single disaffected hacker. The early piracy and demoscenes seemed to give other artistic voices to this counterculture. Technomages were concepts on popular tv. Early ftp and gopher sites (pre-WWW) felt like the work of super l33t nerds. The USSR had just fallen, information wanted to be free, and communicating with people across the planet became something we could do daily, helping us find more of us. It felt like we were building towards something -- billions of minds were about to be unlocked by the commoditized availability of information, computation, and communication and making money was a secondary thought.
And then there was a shift. I don't know when it was, but it felt like the shift onto the WWW allowed the Computer Chronicle watching corporate world to buy up, buy out, co-opt, and extinguish all of it. That nascent tech-culture of the BBS era wholly was unable to truly pivot to Web. Instead of connecting and growing us, it stole, fractured, and repositioned us away from those passions. The corporatists realized that we would never pay for things at the revenue they wanted, and slowly raised the temperature like frogs being boiled, with free services for advertising and entire generations of possible techno-culturalists were diverted from counter culture into optimizing ad placement. Instead of challenging people with new information and ideas, the populace was encouraged to build information echo chambers through which propaganda could be injected and money extracted. What we're becoming was not Hiro Protagonist, Y.T., or Case, but the cautionary "Fitless Humans" from Wall-E.
I'm writing this on a site called "Hacker News" which uses the word "hacker" in a way that I would not recognize back in the 80s and 90s, to drive discussion about hyper growth startups.
I think I'm going to go outside now.
There were hundreds of these and it was a practical thing to share back when 1 megabyte took an hour to download. One that cracked up to no end that I still remember vaguely was "How to be a gigolo.". Apparently, you have to move to South Florida and wear a sport coat. I don't remember anything else from it except it was hilariously written. Good times.
Also, since BBSes required a lot of technical knowhow to get into, it was this back channel for all the extreme teenage geeks in the local calling area. It was this phenomenally fun secret club that I met some exceptionally weird people through, but also lifelong friends. There were some great magazines of the time like Mondo 2000, and the ethos was real techno-libertarianism, information wants to be free, and all that fun stuff. Everyone was coming off the high of the Soviet Union falling apart and believed that now human liberty would flourish everywhere.