I gotta write a science fiction story about some astronauts who visited a planet that once had intelligent life, but then it invented memes, and then it didn't have intelligent life anymore.
This blog post reminded me of that because it shows the mimetic mindset unable to understand anything (say Ben Franklin) being anything other than memes. The next stage past free speech activism is that they're going to have to force people to listen to them.
You got 5 "Nyms" that could be used on a TOR type network. The network was made up of companies that set up exit nodes in exchange service fee. ISPs were a target but anyone who had a public server could sign up.
Some features were free with sign up. Firewall,form filler(early password manager)
You could use a credit card to pay for the premium service.(Web Browsing,Secure Email, chat)
There was a process to pay for the "nyms" anonymously for the justifiable paranoid.
Sort of human to human crypto authentication and digital payment pre-blockchain.
Lasted a few years until venture capital ran out because nobody wanted
Pseudonymity. They wanted free services and eventually got anti-Pseudonymity on facebook
You worked for one of the greatest companies that failed to survive the dotcom era. Freedom.net (wasn’t that what it was called?) was an absolutely amazing service. The conspiracy theory was that y’all ran out of money and shut down right after 9/11 for all of the reasons someone might expect for a service like yours to mysteriously shut down, but it sounds like that wasn’t the case?
PaulHoule|3 years ago
This blog post reminded me of that because it shows the mimetic mindset unable to understand anything (say Ben Franklin) being anything other than memes. The next stage past free speech activism is that they're going to have to force people to listen to them.
prosaic-hacker|3 years ago
You got 5 "Nyms" that could be used on a TOR type network. The network was made up of companies that set up exit nodes in exchange service fee. ISPs were a target but anyone who had a public server could sign up.
Some features were free with sign up. Firewall,form filler(early password manager) You could use a credit card to pay for the premium service.(Web Browsing,Secure Email, chat) There was a process to pay for the "nyms" anonymously for the justifiable paranoid. Sort of human to human crypto authentication and digital payment pre-blockchain.
Lasted a few years until venture capital ran out because nobody wanted Pseudonymity. They wanted free services and eventually got anti-Pseudonymity on facebook
numair|3 years ago