Monday, September 11, 2000		Article

When with geeks do as geeks do

The right gear

THE weeds have to be righteous (remember the Webbie culture grew up in a basement along side super skunk culture). Anything Maharishi (preferably those early hemp clothing samples) or Mandarina Duck (designer Anorak 'n' Velcro chic); otherwise you are safe with Carhart combat pants (say you got them in Walmart, San Fran), garish Hawaiian shirt or customised T-shirts (suggestion: a screen-grab from Saphire and Steel, Planet of the Apes or a photo of your PC with some ironical witticism such as "every day computers are making people easier to use" or "our Website is now WAP enabled!"). Trainers: those Ninja-toed Nike water socks. Obligatory WAP phone must be Nokia 7110 or later, hanging from key chain. Other accoutrements: Palm V PDA (personal digital assistant) and a travel-lite Sony Vaio (weighs no more than The Face).

Big Brother: Have you been able to get onto the Website lately? Channel 4's servers have been having problems coping with Friday night eject-ulation fever but you could speculate knowingly that the problems are the result of a massive DoA (denial of access) job by the Harringay Hackers Massive.

Big Brother ("for real"): Cultivate outrage over the recently-passed RIP (Regulation of Investigatory Powers) Bill, which grants the UK security services access to ISPs' customer details, spells the end of encryption-protected data and is driving ISPs overseas. If that wasn't bad enough, with the "always on" broadband (increased bandwidth) Internet, personal data becomes increasingly "slippery", with advertisers (not to mention the men in black) able to find out which porn site you visited last night, what topping you had on your pizza and how huge your student loan debt is now.

Napster, the person 2 person MP3 file-swapping service that was shut down last month, was just the tip of the joystick. But the authorities will never find Gnutella, an open source P2P music downloads site that has an untraceable server. Postulate that it spells the end for anyone trying to make an honest (sic) buck on the Internet and a return to an era of free-for-all cyber-anarchy in which capitalism, starved of a single revenue stream, will finally eat itself.

Satire on the TV Times, which gave birth to Nathan Barley, the trustafarian new media tosser, who has become a cult hate figure.

http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html

For the Web bullshit generator.

www.ntk.com

The Need to Know network, a groovily retro HTML site for insiders.

www.netimperative.com, the word on any Internet news.

www.the451.com and www. proteannewsfeed.com, must-have IT industry news.

www.thestandard.com — US-based industry knowledge.

UK weeklies: Revolution, New Media Age, Mute

US monthlies: Red Herring, Fast Company, Wired and the weekly Industry Standard.

Impressive Reads

Anything by post-modern theorists, Deleuze and Guettari, Kevin Kelly or cyberfeminist Sadie Plant. Randy Komisar's The Monk and the Riddle (Buddhism and making piles of money); The Library of Babel by Borges;

Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen.

— By arrangement with
the Guardian