The most Pynchon-List article I've read

[John Bailey]

Further to last rant, I also came across this piece yesterday which floored me.

As someone who has great nostalgia for the Old Web when the P-list
came into being and the internet was mostly a weird, inconsistent,
deeply idiosyncratic and polyvocal environment whose mediocre search
engines set me daily into territories that were very alien, as opposed
to the four or five formats every page follows today, the accidental
emergence of this odd community network had me hooked from the get-go:

https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf

"Many, many more people wrote me about how much they missed the old
web, that sense of quiet and intimacy and patient thought [...] This
made sense to me, because I miss it too. The modern social web is a
miracle of progress but also a status-driven guilt-spewing shit
volcano. Back in the 1990s—this will sound insane—some of us paid a
lot of money for our tilde accounts, like $30 or $40 a month or
sometimes much more. We paid to reach strangers with our weird ideas.
Whereas now, as everyone understands, brands pay to know users."

This is SUCH a Pynchon-relevant story that also illuminates some of
BE's tech corners.
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l