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One thing about 80s and early 90s pre-internet counterculture that current internet counterculture misses pretty hard is the culture of publication and curation.

I don't know what's got me thinking about this so much this morning, but I am, so it's time to talk about it.

In the 80s and 90s, if you wanted other people to find something you had to put in some effort. You had to make a physical artifact, a mixtape or a zine or whatever, and you had to include all the information they'd need on that artifact, because there was no way to bootstrap discovery from nothing. All discovery was dependent on either a social layer or a publication layer or a social publication layer.

(That is to say, someone told you about it, you heard it on the radio, or someone made you a mixtape.)

Search engines didn't exist. Independent fact verification didn't exist.

What did exist? Networks of indie zines, of semi-pro zines, of fan centered magazines. Flyers, bulletin boards, the guy at the counter at the video store or record store (who was often a sexist prick, but like you win some you lose some.)

If you didn't live through this (and, to be clear, I only lived through the dying days of this) it might seem like Hypertext and The Web have fully supplanted that earlier method of curation and distribution with something better.

This is a mistake.

The web and search engines enabled a different kind of distribution and curation, but they also robbed the earlier curation and distribution of one of it's key incentives (cash! I'll talk about this more in a bit) and one of it's key strengths (fellowship!)

Shareware thrived not in the era of downloads, but in the era of the Floppy Disk.

It wasn't enough to see a game on the net, you played it with a friend, you copied the floppy.

When I was a kid, internet access was still slow and not universal. I had 33.6 dial-up (and so did a few other people I knew) but I was in the minority, and I was connecting the prodigy (and later AOL) so I didn't get The Internet in all it's glory, I basically got web and email.

Shareware games were an artifact of my community (and, let's be real, I was young for that community. Shareware games were an artifact of my Uncle's community.)

I had Microsoft Publisher. It had a Newsletter template.

I'd take screenshots from games and write three or for sentences about them and format them as a little newsletter and print out 10 or 15 copies on our dot-matrix printer.

I'd pack those small handful of games on to a floppy disk. I'd do hand written labels with funky names and stickers.

I'd give them to my friends with the newsletter to explain what the games were and how to launch them. I focused on games that would run on My PC, which was a pretty generic packard bell running windows 95.

Amazingly, I kept this up well in to the XP era (because, let's not forget, most XP era machines still had floppy drives!)

I'd stick the games and newsletters in ziplock bags and take them to the flea market. My mom sold stuffed bears and the fleamarket twice a month, and I'd go sit with her, take a corner of the table and sell my little ziplock bags with newsletters about shareware games and floppy disks with 4 or 5 games on them.

I can't remember how much I charged, no more than a few bucks. I wasn't charging for the *games*, which were free for anyone with the patience to go download them. I was charging for the time I'd put in to curating and describing the games, and for the cost of the paper, the bags, the labels, the stickers, and the disks.

In the grand scheme of things, I couldn't have made more than 15 or 20 dollars over the course of a weekend, but for a kid under the age of 12 an extra 15 or 20 dollars meant a lot more shareware CDs and floppy disks. (and paper and ink and so on and so fourth.)

Eventually, I moved on to CD-Rs. I might still have one or two of those around, but I don't have any of the floppy discs or newsletters around. It didn't occur to me that they were special.

I wish I did.

But that's not the point.

The point is that, for two decades, people who put the effort in to curate information, review games, write docs, publish zines, make mixtapes, etc...

Those people would be compensated for that effort. Sometimes that compensation was purely social capital, but often it was actual cash. A few bucks here or there to support their efforts, pay for a cup of coffee, and keep them going.

You'd SUBSCRIBE to zines you cared about. Sometimes you'd even keep getting issues. Sometimes, you'd send $15 off to subscribe and never see another magazine. So it goes, that's what it's like working with people. We're messy and complicated and it's easy to fuck up.

*and then the web happened*

And all of these activities were possible on the web, but they were only possible if they were stripped entirely of commerce or if that compensation was replaced with advertising and donations.

Suddenly, the things I wrote could be seen by a Lot more people, which was cool! And, sometimes one of those people would click on one of my ads and I'd get 10 cents or whatever, and that was also exciting.

In the first year I was blogging, I got myself up to about 500 regular readers. I made about $10 in ad revenue.

I was putting in just as much effort as I had to make the curated floppy disks. Maybe more, even, because I was publishing more often, and with more images, and the games were bigger and I was sharing music and sometimes flash animations or youtube videos or whatever.

500 regular readers for a blog run by a middle schooler was Ballin', frankly. And *anyone* could find what I was writing. It showed up in *search engines*! All I had to do was wait for the traffic to come to me!!

But I went from making $500 or so in a year to making $10.

I went from supplying games and media recs and comics and occasionally short fiction pieces to people who lived near me to yeeting blog posts in to the void and hoping google gave me some traffic.

I went from having a network of people who would *show up* to get the latest games I had put together, and who would talk me and suggest other games and occasionally bring me collections they'd made or purchased or whatever and swap them with me, to getting 6 real emails and thousands of spam emails over the 4 years I ran my gaming blog.

Most zines moved online or shuttered.

No.

Most zines moved online *and* shuttered.

The ones that survived the transition were the exceptions, rather than the rule, and they were the ones that already had Big Names backing them up.

But a lot of value was lost.

Hold on, I have to go steal a video off instagram.

This is a video that Weird Paul posted on Instagram yesterday. My wife sent it to me.

In it, he describes what it was like getting his first recording contract.

He mentions opening for a major local band on the strength of a DIY cassette release. He mentions that cassette release getting sold through a zine based record catalog. He mentions his first 7" being reviewed in other zines. He discusses that, on the strength of those zines, a bigger DIY label with some street cred reached out to him directly and put his first record out on cassette, CD, and LP.

Think about the networks that had to exist in order for that to happen.

Think about the Discovery Process that had to be in place for a kid from suburban pitsburg to put out a tape at 16, end up opening for a band out of washington, and included in a catalog of records that that band endorsed and recommended to fans across the country while they were on tour.

Think about the Power in those kinds of networks, and the way that power has been diluted by search engines.

Imagine, for a minute, that you:

1) still go to live music shows
2) go to a live music show in a suburb of the major metropolitan city in your area featuring a band that was big enough that you were willing to drive a little while to be there
3) arrive to find that the opening act is a 17 year old, and he's surprisingly good
4) find at the merch table that this band that you love has a printed catalog of music they recommend, along with prices and mailing addresses, and you can just ship an envelope with $10 in it (or however much tapes cost in 1988) and a few days later a tape would show up at your house, recommended to you by the band that you had just paid money to see.

I spent a *lot* of time in the modern DIY music scene. I ran a venue for several years. I still book shows.

I've almost never seen anything approaching that level of solidarity from modern artists. They have websites and bandcamps and instagram feeds where they share posts from "the homies" and they'll talk about "the homies" but they aren't taking the time to collate and curate the info. They depend on spotify for discovery. They get fucked.

Anyway, the culture jammers and indie publishers of the 80s and 90s got a lot wrong, and they didn't know their own history very well.

But they really nailed some stuff too.

1) Print is good.
2) Sharing info about the things you love is *vital* to helping them survive
3) Give away a sample, encourage copying, make it crystal clear how to get the full thing (and keep that network running as well as you can for as long as you can.)
4) solidarity forever

So, discussion questions:

- How can you lift others up?

- How can your work be a pointer to the work of others?

- How can you (re?)integrate Shareware Principles into your life and work?

- If someone's work brings you joy, how can you support or encourage them?

- How can we re-build and re-strengthen the networks that Google, Facebook, Youtube and Amazon have stolen from us?

- How can we reclaim the magic of tape traders, pirate radio, and zine culture in the modern era?

- When and why did we decide that Free was the most important consideration in media consumption and curation?

- Who is harmed by the spotify/youtube/netflix model? Does that matter?

- Who is harmed by piracy? Does that matter?

I'm going to start talking about some of these, slowly, from the bottom up.

Who is harmed by piracy? Mostly billionaires. Individual artists and authors and whoever mostly do better when people are exposed to their work.

Who is harmed by the spotify/youtube/netflix model? Mostly artists and creators, who used to be able to make a medium sized amount of money from direct sales, and who are now reduced to a very small amount of money (or to negative amounts of money) by streaming services. (There are exceptions! They are exceptional.)

We have a problem right now where it's not a choice between Piracy and Paying artists, it's a choice between Piracy and Paying Spotify/Netflix, et al. Both ways, artists lose!

There was a time in the recent past where widespread piracy resulted in a direct material increase in revenue, either from Ticket Sales, or Merch Sales, or Physical media sales.

This is rarely the case anymore.

Artists get ~half or less of what you spend on their tickets (because ticketmaster turns a $60 ticket in to a $160 ticket after fees. This is hardly an exaggeration, and the reason I'm not going to see bright eyes next year in spite of the fact that I could easily afford the base ticket price) and venues even horn in on merch sales, demanding a commission from the artists for the privilege of selling merch.

It's absurd.

We, as listeners, watchers, and consumers can help!

When I say we can help, what I mean is this:

1) share the things you love as often and as widely as you can
2) Link back to whichever sales platform is the closest to giving money directly to the artist (itch, bandcamp) or is in direct control of the artist (personal website)
3) buy the things that bring you joy. Give your money to artists instead of publishers and gatekeepers. Fuck spotify.

When and why did we decide that Free was the most important consideration in media consumption and curation?

I dunno when it happened, but I understand more or less why it happened.

We were sold a false bill of goods w/r/t the ad supported internet. We were told that it was sustainable for publishers and readers. (It wasn't! It was only sustainable for Double Click/Google)

But once the promise of free and ad supported took hold, getting people to pay for information (regardless of how valuable that information was) became a very difficult task!

And, once internet connections got fast enough, lots of people embraced piracy over payment. (and, generally, those people were also the people who spent the most on media, but that's a separate conversation.)

And so we ended up in the position we're in now, where Free is the overriding concern. Folks pay for spotify and netflix, but they don't engage in a transaction. It's an auto-refill. They don't think about it. Most of them don't notice it. For them, those things are effectively free.

How do we break out of this?

In terms of Why free was deemed the most important consideration in media, I think there's also a bit of blame to be placed on the software industry.

Many people would never be able to afford the sometimes tens of thousands of dollars worth of software that it took for them to participate in their field. Piracy was tacitly encouraged for teens and individuals to keep corporations paying tens of thousands of dollars.

On the flip side, the Free Software movement was in full swing.

This created a generation of computer users who were raised in a world where paying for things was the mark of a foolish loser. (Who registers winrar?)

So what can we do about it?

Well, I dunno! I can tell you what I'm trying.

I don't have streaming subscriptions (well, sort of. My household has two or three, but they're not *mine*) but I have the budget that I had previously allocated towards streaming services and every month I spend it on independent media.

For every streaming service my household subscribes to, we also allocate at least that much money towards paying artists directly.

It's not a ton of money, a few dozen dollars. It buys a couple of digital albums, a game or two, whatever.

But it's cash going directly to artists.

If more folks would do this, it would be a net good.

@ajroach42 It seems like the major thing the web results in is centralization/reintermediation, where some huge player like Google or Facebook comes in and steals the work of all the curators, but then keeps them going by throwing them scraps. Then all the decent curators move on to something else because it's not worth their time, so we're just left with masses of mediocre curators (and, to be fair, good ones but who live in much lower cost places than we do so those scraps go farther).

Seems like we're in the heat death of that process now.

@ajroach42 create indie search engines for music and local culture?

@ajroach42 I actually pay for SiriusXM because it's the cheapest way to get MSNBC. None of the very many other streaming things I pay for, including Peacock (!) included the news I wanted. It's otherwise only available through $45/mo things like Sling. I can't even subscribe to it on YouTube. You need YT TV for $ridiculous.

So I guess I'm the other side of the coin.

@ajroach42 Have you read any Walter Lippmann?

Yes it was a problem 100 years ago and it still is today.

@Dianora Not that I'm aware of. Should I?

@ajroach42 thinking specifically about video based media and even more specifically about "the news" it's got to be rooted in the original regulation of broadcast television. Back in the day there was a #publicgood requirement that went with the licensing of the #Big3. But they funded everything with ads that advertisers believe convince people to buy their product instead of another.

That model is probably just the default for every new type of media.

@wdhughes For sure.

It was true for the newspaper, it was true for broadcast TV.

@ajroach42 piracy is an ethical imperative. Support individual artists if you can afford to, but even notes of appreciation are acceptable if you can't.

@Crow @ajroach42 I'm assuming the Trump administration will crack down harder on piracy, so it's probably time to go back to archiving, burning, & trading for those of us who have moved to the more ephemeral world of debrid & iptv.

@ajroach42 there was a lot of potential for abuse in those old style networks. For instance, to do well a record depended on airplay on just a few radio stations, in the UK often a very few. This made gatekeepers to the mainstream very powerful, too powerful perhaps.

@Kevin_D_Tennent Are you implying that modern gatekeepers are somehow less powerful?

@ajroach42 not at all, just that it was the grip of a few corporations over distribution that forced the sort of shareware you mention. At least now the alternative has better access to mainstream channels.

@ajroach42 pirate radio is still very much alive in Europe and Asia (the Chinese make decent TX and RF power modules by the thousands) - just a few weeks ago I was listening to a very good drum and bass station in outer London on the way back from a rave - my car's infotainment (which can be flaky) had glitched out and corrupted the USB I had made to listen to on the journey, but the radio was still behaving

@ajroach42 I mostly did shareware back then, and didn't do a great job of outreach, but still made respectable side cash, and later '90s-00s paid my bills a few years. Early mobile device stores were a ripoff with 70-90% store cut, but then Apple dropped it to 30% (and now it can be 15%), which made indie without a publisher work again. Now I have Itch, Paypal, and Patreon, which get some tips and if I put in effort could pay out well again. Beats an address & checks.

@mdhughes Oh absolutely.

The web has enabled a whole mess of payment options that weren't possible before and are valuable.

I'd much much rather sell a digital download than a physical good.

and itch is as good a place as any to do it.

But we no longer have the culture of shareware that once existed that, in many cases at least, obviated the need for marketing.

@ajroach42 That's my point, tho, shareware *needed* marketing. It was so painful getting anyone to see your thing. The kind of marketing was different, but it's still some annoying guy chasing every concert-goer and handing them a flyer, but badly automated. And then Google turned off the guy for indies because Ticketmaster or whatever pays them more.

The payment processing now is the one part that really works, it's awesome as long as you're not selling smut or weed-related product.

@mdhughes Certainly.

I guess what I was saying is that there were methods to marketing shareware that were distributed and decentralized. Once an app or game reached a certain threshold, it could self sustain.

Google made that much easier for a small amount of time and much harder afterwards.

I'm trying to figure out what content discovery looks like in a post-google world, and what we can do that will actually support artists.

@ajroach42 BBS, classifieds in The Stranger or some computer mag, shout-outs in zines, weren't very successful at getting me leads. Local computer club got me a couple years funding for my BBS & doorgames in early '90s. One zine I contributed to got some traffic which got a few Paypal tips, way below 1¢/word but something.

Web search and occasional <$100 ads were pretty effective, not great. Recent Google (this decade) is useless, actively hostile to me getting paid.

@ajroach42 I want to go live shows that don't involve ticket master