When the Town Square Shatters
Once again, science fiction fandom shows us how to use the internet.
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When it comes to the social internet, chances are that science fiction fans got there first. The first non-technical discussion forums on the internet — ancient mailing lists — were devoted to sf. The original high-traffic non-technical Usenet groups? Also sftnal. (This isn’t always something to be proud of — long before Donald Trump’s dank meme army, before Gamergate, sf’s “Rabid Puppies” and “Sad Puppies” were figuring out how to combine pop culture, the internet and far-right conspiratorialism into a vicious harassment machine).
Sf’s mix of technophilia, subculture, and its long tradition of gluing together a distributed community with written materials made it a natural for digital, networked communications.
Long before Twitter created — and then destroyed — a single, unified conversation that linked practitioners with the people who normally lived far downstream of their work, science fiction had created a single, unified “town square.”
And decades before a mediocre billionaire uncaringly smashed that unified conversation into a million flinders, sf fans and writers were living through their own Anatevka moment.
Twitter users bemoaning the end of the “unified conversation,” I am here from your future to tell you what happens next.
In 1985, engineers at General Electric realized that they had a vastly underutilized, incredibly expensive resource and resolved to find a way to press it into service and grab a piece of the future in the bargain.
That resource was GEIS, the General Electric Information Service, a commercial, time-sharing mainframe network that GE marketed to its blue-chip clients as a turnkey way to coordinate inter-office memos and data-sharing between branch offices.
GEIS combined multi-million-dollar computers with modem-banks that could be reached via local dialup from most of the USA. In other words, it looked a lot like Compuserve, AOL, or other online services — but GEIS was much older than either. Built for intracompany business, GEIS nevertheless ended up hosting an ever-growing, stubbornly unkillable quantity of conversational socializing. Once you connect…
