Fall2015-Wysocki

“the new in the old”: The Potential for Variantologies of the Internet

Rick Wysocki

In Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Anarchaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, Siegfried Zielinski proposes and models a theoretical deportment and a methodological practice for studying media—defined as “spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separate”.¹ He refers to this form of inquiry using the terms “anarchaeology” and “variantology.” The first—a recasting of Foucault’s seminal archaeological method—recommends an intellectual ethos that “reserve[s] the option to gallop off on a tangent, to be wildly enthusiastic, and, at the same time, to criticize what needs to be criticized.”² The second, variantology, is an epistemological result of the anarchaeological stance. Outlining this potential form of knowledge, Zielinski writes of anarchaeology that

one should be able to discover individual variations. Possibly, one will discover fractures or turning points in historical master plans that provide useful ideas for navigating the labyrinth of what is currently firmly established. In the longer term, the body of individual anarchaeological studies should form a variantology of the media.³

Zielinski’s framework, then, provides an alternative to narratives of linearity and progress in the histories of media technologies by placing value on heterogeneity and divergence. Witnessing today the increasing standardization of information technologies—both of their interfaces and their histories—Zielinski maps areas of resistance by providing a robust and compelling method of thinking otherwise.

In this short essay, I take up anarchaeology—which should be understood from this point forward as the method presented in Deep Time more generally—in order to modestly frame how it might be employed in research projects interested in the histories of information technologies. Analyzing Usenet, an information technology predating the World Wide Web, I intend to show, through a brief and incomplete history of how Usenet has been refashioned for new and unintended purposes, how scholars should respond to Zielinski’s call to “not seek the old in the new, but find something new in the old”⁴ and argue for the necessity of a non-linear understanding of the development of information technologies. My telling of this history, then, attempts to resist being ensnared in the norming history of the Web and, through an anarchaeological stance, I seek to carry out a form of resistance to the standardizing linearity of certain media scholarship.

Usenet was brought into being in 1979 by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, two Duke University graduate students. While the first incarnations of Usenet networks relied on direct connections between computers, the development of the TCP/IP Protocol in the mid-1980s allowed the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) to be created. This protocol made connecting computers easier and afforded the development of newsreader clients that gave users the ability to select only the Usenet articles they wanted to view. It is important to understand that Usenet existed before both hyperlinking and search function technologies; it was, and at the technical level still is, more like a large, unsearchable forum made up of individually posted articles (what one might retroactively think of as “posts”) than the network of links that characterize the dominant model of the World Wide Web today.

In 1987, a group of individuals referred to as “The Backbone Cabal” carried out was is now known as “The Great Renaming.” Originally, there were only three hierarchies in the Usenet file system: net.*, mod.*, and fa.*. The stars refer to sub-listings in the hierarchy, so, for example, a moderated newsgroup for conversations about movies would exist in the Usenet hierarchy as mod.movies. To make the system more efficient and user-friendly, the Cabal members reworked Usenet into seven hierachies: comp.*, sci.*, soc.*, talk.*, rec.*, misc.*, and news*. The talk.* hierarchy was meant mainly for non-mainstream or controversial discussion, but the fact that all proposed newsgroups in the talk.* hierarchy had to be approved by the Cabal, which was seen as undercutting its very purpose, became the source of some contention. At this point, a resistance to standardization emerged though the development of the alt.* hierarchy—literally an alternative to the influence of the Cabal.

While this act of resistance was obviously quite small and limited to the Usenet community, its effects allow for an anarchaeological reconsidering of networked information technologies. Specifically, a particular newsgroup called alt.binary was established that became a place for users to exchange not communicative information as it might typically be conceived (news, how-to information, etc.) but binary information: files. As readers today might find unsurprising, the information exchanged here tended to be illegal, and activity on the newsgroup fell on an ethical spectrum that spanned from what some might understand as acts of civil disobedience against copyright law to the circulation of vile and reprehensible media artifacts.

Perhaps more curious, however, is that Usenet is still widely used today. This initially seems puzzling because, after the development of HTTP Protocol, search functionality, and the affordances of the World Wide Web generally, much of Usenet’s interface seems unnecessarily restrictive. On one hand, the functions of the World Wide Web tend to be far more compelling to users, perhaps only because the standardization of media has convinced such a large swath of the networked population that it is the only option for networked communication. On the other hand, because of the lack of hyperlinking and search functionality, it seems that people interested in file-sharing would find the lack of searching, among other things, too limiting. The service, however, remains and has become increasingly popular for file sharing. First, due to technical limitations throughout the historical development of Usenet, there are features of the service that actually make it more secure and anonymous than the World Wide Web, such as automatic SSL encryption and, unlike BitTorrent (an alternative system of file-sharing) the fact that a computer’s IP address is never broadcasted when downloading from Usenet. Second, Usenet indexers solve the problem of searching by sifting through alt.binary newsgroups and turning the files into .nzb files which, putting aside a more technical explanation, “point” your computer at that particular file on Usenet for download. For these reasons Usenet, which tends to be narrated as an inferior precursor in the assumed linear progress toward the World Wide Web, in reality has been revealed as a better method of file-sharing. In Zielinski’s terms, this is finding the new in the old.

In his conclusion, Zielinski distinguishes between two paradigms of media: the economy of adjustment and the economy of friendship. The former, “serves to effectivize systems, to protect them, and to ward off attack by rival, competing systems,” while the latter “has a subversive relationship to the first and is a luxury. It requires no legitimation, just as pleasure and art require none.”⁵ A larger project would allow a deeper consideration of economies of friendship as they relate to Usenet and the World Wide Web, but I hope to have modeled in some small way, by recounting the history of Usenet, that academic work can indeed resist ergonomizing media histories by rejecting linear models of development and focusing instead on variance. While dominant technologies of media seem to demand increasing convergence and participation, their histories are in reality deeply rhizomatic. With this in mind, Zielinski’s call for anarchaeology, for plumbing the depths of information technologies from a wandering and unfixed, yet critical, perspective represents fertile conceptual territory for producing more accurately heterogenous narratives—a variantology—of media development.

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1. Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. 7.

2. Zielinski 27.

3. Zielinski 7.

4. Zielinski 3.

5. Zielinski 269.