I'm happy to see this entry for Apotheosis—not just because it's the 10th entry, but because it wraps up the Mondo 2000 3-parter, which followed on the heels of the Boing Boing 3-parter. Revisiting both publications/communities just reminds me too much about how the edgier (experimental would be a more appropriate term) aspects of cyberculture quickly fell to commercialism, leaving those in the community stranded.
Yesterday I was going through my GitHub starred projects on my phone using the beta lists feature to organize them. In that process, I culled the stars, reducing them from ~530 to 237 (as of this writing). I posted the accomplishment to Phil Eaton's excellent Discord. Later I mentioned...
I had heard bits and pieces about Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, but it was mostly sitting on my wish list as something I'd get to in the future until the Exponential View reading group picked it for their book club. I decided to put some of my other reading on hold and dove in since I felt it would provide some good debate and discussion with other thinkers from across various industries.
If you're first exposure to Mondo 2000's narrative of the Internet was with The Cyberpunk Handbook you might have looked no further—sending it to the trash heap—not even fit for recycling. But those who grew up and explored the Internet during Mondo's days didn't live in reverse like we're doing with this look back at cyber history. The handbook was the final push of California cyberpunk satire, but Mondo did lived on the edge for a few years, much like the earlier zine version of Boing Boing.
I want to take a trip down memory lane to a whitepaper I wrote over a decade ago. It was originally titled Ruby on Rails Death to All Hobbyists. I wrote it near the peak of Ruby on Rails popularity, and it was an analysis of hobbyist languages and hype versus proven scalability and development processes.
In the last Apotheosis post, we had some fun reliving a little early 2000's Internet culture, but what we're doing here on Codepunk with Apotheosis is digging deeper into the roots of cyberspace. That brief interlude was me reminiscing of a time when I was highly involved in an underground culture, while also checking in on an old friend and his work...