Let’s face it by most student’s definitions I’m old. Very close to 40 is indeed quite old. I have a joke with my old friends about being ancient for a cave person. That being said being around to see the inception of broad usage of the internet, having used it in my daily life, and seeing the thing come and go does give me some interesting perspectives, well I think so at least.

I started with computers early on, in primary school. To set the scene for you we had a bunch of black and white apple mac’s in the art department of my local state school in Kindergarten, years 1 and 2. Later on, I remember getting one in my year 3 and 4 classrooms. Being one of those annoying children who use up far too many teaching resources with there constant demands for attention, questions of why, what does that do, how do I spell such and such, etc. All this led to teachers working out very early on that the students that don’t fit the mold can go be quietly playing with the box in the corner, it’s like TV but it’s actually teaching them something. Now having been given access to this wonderful box of switches what do you think I did, I played games because that’s pretty much all I could get the bloody thing to do. I started with Sun Tzu’s Art of War, it was fascinating but not overtly interactive a bit like backgammon but on steroids. I played through Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, multiple times, like literally for 2 years of school and multiple revisions of the game. I was hooked from the start, to beat the game you had to use a book, The World Almanac, the game designers pretty much had you reading the almanac from start to finish, and that’s one skill I had in abundance. This lead to an interesting learning style, when I didn’t know the answer to a question, I pretty much knew the answer was in a thing called an Encyclopedia. The answer was always given in a very specific mode of language. I’ve no idea what that type of writing is called but it worked for me as a child. As with everything schooling moved on I went from enjoying playing this mad game that had me exploring books, and searching for facts and learning to stare out the window because in year 5 we didn’t have access to computers, so I pretty much turned off.

Other stuff didn’t, a long time before I had anything to do with writing code a bunch of people got together and started sharing code, from this grew the GNU movement. GNU is one of those weird things most people have no idea about. What makes the world tick? Let alone what keeps it afloat and running. If you use any technology you owe GNU a lot. GNU is based on the idea that this weird thing called an operating system called Unix, which was built, rebuilt, hacked, played with, toyed with, broken, fixed, broken again, buried in peat and left to grow fungus spores, replanted, etc. Unix was basically rewritten from start to finish, and the rewrite collectively got released for free. That the important bit: all that it is should be Free. Like really free, like I can do what I want with the output of human knowledge, and I can’t mess it up for others by stealing the creative works of others because it will stay free. This a big concept, that’s the concept that has literally allowed the internet to become what it is today.

Back to me, here I am rather bored having pretty much failed at formal schooling, there’s bugger all work about. Having grown up with the parents I did you pretty much see the futility of ‘work’, Marxian analysis of society was described to me by Professor Petra Brown at Deakin in ASP129, I hadn’t realised I had been doing it for close to 40 years. So what’s a young man to do. Well you try doing to University, but Uni. is weird, you have to succeed at school to get on in University, there’s a bunch of stuff your expected just to know how to do, which if your me staring out the windows watching the trees you planted for plant a tree day grow, you completely miss. I find writing hard, really hard. I have a brain that can literally spit words out at multiples of what I can speak them, let alone putting them down on paper with the torturous device called a pen. I’m told I’m not alone in the world. People have tests done to know, where and how to help their children to learn, teachers do there best to help the kids that were like me. Now I’d had an Atari 1040st for years, the parents had got it for me. Much fun was had, but it was weird compared to the stuff at school, it seemed to play games well, but if you wanted it to do anything it didn’t have the instructions, it was hard to work out what you were meant to do to make it work, there wasn’t a useful manual. Then came GNU, I found an installer disk, one the front cover of a computer magazine in the local newsagents. It came with RedHat, that’s just the name of the variety of GNU the distribution systems as such, the name of the group that puts that versions of the GNU system together and makes it work a little bit easier. I went home and one my then old 486dx intel clone I installed it. It kinda worked, things were fascinating the way bugs are under a microscope, but it did stuff and it taught me things.

Now at the same time that GNU was being developed into a thing a ‘rival’ camp of people were working on a completely different operating system BSD. BSD came out of the university systems, it ran alone similar but different lines in terms of ‘rights’ and ‘reproduction’ but it developed, its story is interesting and equally worth a read. But the thing that got me was someone, forced people to write documentation. I pretty much found the book when I found the man pages for OpenBSD, they explained things in a way in which I had seen since that battered copy of the world almanac back playing catch the ghost in the Apple Mac as a kid. Suddenly it all started to make sense, well sense enough to me, life’s important rules were being written in that style of Encyclopedic writing I could grasp.

In my adolescence, I met some strange people in the Urbex scene in Sydney. A few of them stand out, some I’m still in contact with as even though their lives moved on. One of them particularly was a man named Michael Carlton better know in my circles as . An interesting guy he wrote a book, started a movement, got a Ph.D., and died far too young. Now Michael was interesting to me for lots of reasons, he lived in a squat, he wore cargo pants and rode a motorcycle, he once explained anarchism to me with the help of a football oval and a nature reserve. But he also worked at this thing called Catalyst. Now catalyst was a tech collective of anarchists It basically gave groups of people unfettered access to the internet in the ’90s and early ’00s. Catalyst was the reason why there was an Indymedia collective around the time of the Seattle World Trade conference riots. They helped make an idea a reality, they helped build lots of pieces of software, one called Drupal. Drupal was a method of turning static text documents into dynamics web pages. You know that thing that every news broadcasting company uses to display the news. The idea that twitter, facebook, etc use to feed you stories. Now Michael was good for lots of things, he was right clever my Dad would say, but he used it interesting ways. He did the work thing but not for social glorification and monetary rewards. He did work because that’s what humans do, we work, we create, we use what makes us different to create wealth. Michael left his entire life’s work under a licence meaning anyone could and should reuse it. He also far more importantly helped teach a bunch of people how to access technology well before it was cool or easy.

When people talk about creating in the postmodern terms, not often do they realise just what the commons gave them to allow the creation to be shared. They do talk a lot about what the world owes then for creating a some might say trivial item…

When people talk about copyright theft it’s very interesting to look at just who is talking and what their interest might be in a wider scope who do they work for, what is there class situation, what do they do for a living. As for me, I don’t really care what you use ‘my’ ideas for I stole them all anyways, I just don’t pretend. I always liked the story that comes from the people that developed the idea of a spreadsheet…

If you want more details about GNU and BSD the internet has a plethora of details if you want to know more about Michael Carlton I’d start here. If you want more entertaining media then you can point a stick at I’d search up Patrolling with Sean Kennedy which has led to a lot…