[docpop]

Thanks so much for joining this conversation, I’m a big fan of your work! Years before I joined any social network, the Remote Lounge already had me thinking about online sharing, consent, and the future of the web.

I’d really like To know how your experience working on The Remote Lounge affected the way you viewed the rise of Web 2.0 and the way we share our lives online.

[nhod]

This is a good question. Remote (and its ancestor We Live in Public) was way ahead of its time in regards to how public people were going to be about sharing their lives online. In many ways Remote was merely an instance of much larger trends in society that began decades (centuries?) before. Sharing your life with people you have never met; the culture (and cult) of celebrity; the long tail; constructing a persona for the public vs your private life; taking pictures of people without permission or knowledge; meeting people in the same room as you not via talking directly to them but through a technological disintermediation; technology as art... Remote had all of these things and more, all incorporated using the available technology at the time. (The medium is the message!)

Those same trends continued on as technology improved: as hundreds of cameras in a single venue became billions of cameras all around us and in every pocket; as capturing a grainy black and white photo on a single debaucherous night and sharing it via email became sharing high resolution 4k sex videos on Grindr and Tinder; as dressing up infrequently for a single night so as to take advantage of the video and photo technology in an unusual venue became constant "dressing up" via creating an entire persona you constantly curate on various social media platforms; as small-time surveillance you willingly went into for fun became ubiquitous surveillance that made trillions of dollars for new hegemonies and entrenched the other powers that be even further; as the "innocent" early internet culture we started with that was all about freedom and revolution and individual power turned ugly and scary following 9/11 and became walled gardens and centralized control. (As another commenter pointed out, Remote opened shortly after 9/11 — we were supposed to open around 9/13, but then the world ended, and we had to push it back a bit.)

Anyway not sure I answered your question fully but hopefully got in the right neighborhood!

[docpop]

Thanks so much for your replies. I'm updating my blog (which is linked at the top of this HN post) with the information I'm learning here. How would you like your name credited there? I have you listed as "nhod" for now. https://docpop.org/2023/07/some-updates-on-the-remote-lounge...