Feb. 4, 2026
376: Eternal September
The internet is forever changed in September 1993.
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WEBVTT
00:00.031 --> 00:05.738
[SPEAKER_01]: American idiot, I'm Jason Horton, I'm Rebecca Leib, and this is Ghost Town.
00:20.062 --> 00:24.727
[SPEAKER_00]: We often talk about a different time in the internet's relatively short history.
00:25.067 --> 00:42.605
[SPEAKER_00]: And earlier time, simpler time, a time when the internet was actually cool, exciting, populated by young, savvy users who enjoyed discourse, had opinions and were down to stay up late, drinking jolt, eating 3D Doritos, and textually sparring with strangers.
00:43.546 --> 00:45.288
[SPEAKER_00]: Some call this the internet's golden years.
00:46.209 --> 00:48.111
[SPEAKER_00]: Others, the beginning of the end.
00:48.091 --> 00:50.373
[SPEAKER_00]: or the eternal September.
00:51.494 --> 00:54.797
[SPEAKER_00]: Jason, does the term eternal September mean anything to you?
00:56.619 --> 00:56.939
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
00:57.420 --> 00:58.561
[SPEAKER_00]: No, you're new to this.
00:58.741 --> 01:00.623
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like a little lamb, just being...
01:01.043 --> 01:03.245
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm only 19 years old.
01:03.285 --> 01:05.828
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you're a little kid.
01:05.908 --> 01:06.528
[SPEAKER_00]: Internet.
01:06.548 --> 01:07.509
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but tell me.
01:07.850 --> 01:08.510
[SPEAKER_01]: I was one.
01:08.751 --> 01:09.651
[SPEAKER_00]: I was right.
01:09.671 --> 01:10.052
[SPEAKER_00]: I was right.
01:10.072 --> 01:11.673
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, we'll start at the beginning.
01:12.354 --> 01:17.659
[SPEAKER_00]: Way back when, think, 1979, you're only 40 at this point.
01:17.639 --> 01:18.841
[SPEAKER_01]: I was early foldies.
01:19.662 --> 01:30.081
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dawn of the Internet, Duke University grad students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis created a computer to computer discussion system developed from general purpose Unix to Unix copy.
01:30.241 --> 01:36.171
[SPEAKER_00]: It's called UUCP, a dial-up network infrastructure, you know, the sound of this.
01:36.151 --> 01:39.495
[SPEAKER_00]: They were collectively called UseNet, a portment to a user's network.
01:39.976 --> 01:46.024
[SPEAKER_00]: Think messages to one another on a kind of bulletin board system and early way of communicating on your computer to someone else's.
01:46.324 --> 01:46.865
[SPEAKER_00]: Easy, right?
01:47.726 --> 01:54.134
[SPEAKER_00]: Colleges, most notoriously, UNC, Duke, and UC Berkeley were the first to employ UseNet computer to computer discussion.
01:54.675 --> 01:59.781
[SPEAKER_00]: But in the early 90s, the first internet service providers began to offer UseNet to the general public.
02:00.402 --> 02:01.003
[SPEAKER_00]: That went well.
02:01.624 --> 02:02.665
[UNKNOWN]: I'll tell you why.
02:02.645 --> 02:12.580
[SPEAKER_00]: It was essentially an internet infrastructure for us, normal people, not programmers, chat rooms, online forums, read it, read it was happening way back then, etc.
02:13.041 --> 02:20.292
[SPEAKER_00]: And like the things that I just mentioned, use net wasn't all housed on one server, and essentially owned by no one, again, very odd in this day and age.
02:20.893 --> 02:25.480
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a democratized form of an online communication communicator on every subject.
02:25.460 --> 02:26.903
[SPEAKER_00]: and big things happened here.
02:27.484 --> 02:31.391
[SPEAKER_00]: Used out was the place for many important public developments in the pre-commercial internet.
02:31.772 --> 02:42.492
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, in August 6th, 1991, computer programmer Tim Werner's lead used to use net to invite the public to collaborate on something he was creating, called the World Wide Web.
02:43.073 --> 02:44.616
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, that World Wide Web.
02:44.596 --> 02:53.773
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also where we got the term LOL, laughout loud, of course, and the term spam, a reference to spam or spiced ham from a Monte Python sketch.
02:54.033 --> 03:07.498
[SPEAKER_00]: And basically spam meant back then excessive posting on use net, which was just like, again, over and over messages, think like the Reddit kind of format, flooding of sorts to overwhelm or drive users away.
03:07.478 --> 03:20.708
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also where software engineer Mark Anderson announced the creation of the Mosaic browser and the introduction of the image tag, which made the Internet's a purely text and code-based medium to one where we can post pictures.
03:20.828 --> 03:23.715
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, revolutionized, and that's very big.
03:23.695 --> 03:31.833
[SPEAKER_00]: In any case, useNet was generally for internet savvy nerds and engineers, maybe a couple of rich guys trying to capitalize on the new technology somehow.
03:32.635 --> 03:40.793
[SPEAKER_00]: During most of the year, just a handful of new people would get access to useNet, because people weren't really excited about going online back in the 80s and 90s, they were
03:40.773 --> 03:43.438
[SPEAKER_00]: playing football and going outside.
03:43.478 --> 03:46.223
[SPEAKER_00]: They're mostly into pretty much anything else.
03:47.165 --> 03:55.982
[SPEAKER_00]: The exception every year came in August or September, when a new class of freshman went to college and gained access to the internet and use net through the university system.
03:56.583 --> 04:01.212
[SPEAKER_00]: From those already deep in use net, this was a bad time to be active online.
04:01.192 --> 04:11.864
[SPEAKER_00]: Young and annoying newbies cluttered their news groups didn't know the etiquettes, the vibe, the slang, yes, even LOL was new, and were generally extremely annoying to the nerds who called Usenet home.
04:12.845 --> 04:22.356
[SPEAKER_00]: That's when we first see the use of September being a bad time for the internet, and in particular Usenet, but in September 1993 something very, very bad happened.
04:22.957 --> 04:28.583
[SPEAKER_00]: It became the September that never ended, a phrase coined by computer guru David Fisher.
04:28.563 --> 04:29.904
[SPEAKER_00]: Why did he make up that phrase?
04:30.345 --> 04:32.407
[SPEAKER_00]: We will tell you after this break.
04:33.788 --> 04:39.913
[SPEAKER_00]: In the early days of the internet, use net was where the action was, and every September use net would have a crop of annoying newbies to contend with.
04:40.394 --> 04:46.499
[SPEAKER_00]: They'd learn the ropes, things would calm down, but invariably the next year comes September, the same shit would happen again.
04:46.960 --> 04:49.482
[SPEAKER_00]: That is, until September 1993.
04:49.582 --> 04:54.186
[SPEAKER_00]: In September 1993, AOL connected its users to use net.
04:54.206 --> 04:55.988
[SPEAKER_00]: What is your AOL history?
04:55.968 --> 04:57.110
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I was on it.
04:57.591 --> 05:06.045
[SPEAKER_01]: I was on it and I was on I was on AOL chat rooms and stuff like that Like I was on the Morrisee chat room like the straight-in-age hardcore chat room.
05:06.065 --> 05:09.351
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah I was on like horses horses you like horses.
05:09.491 --> 05:13.077
[SPEAKER_01]: I like horses Mine was probably a control.
05:13.298 --> 05:15.061
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah, remember what your AOL name was.
05:15.341 --> 05:16.664
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, it was cappy 9704.
05:17.144 --> 05:19.849
[SPEAKER_00]: That's my cat in my home address
05:20.217 --> 05:20.820
[SPEAKER_01]: It's dangerous.
05:21.283 --> 05:22.569
[SPEAKER_01]: Mine was worse.
05:22.630 --> 05:24.801
[SPEAKER_01]: Mine was.
05:24.821 --> 05:27.797
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a JKD 101.
05:28.317 --> 05:29.218
[SPEAKER_01]: strap in for this.
05:29.918 --> 05:40.988
[SPEAKER_01]: The JKD stands for Gekundo, which is Bruce Lee's martial art, and one of one is like, we're getting down base AB.
05:42.310 --> 05:49.416
[SPEAKER_01]: I was a full blown adult when I was doing this, and I was like, ladies, do you want cool?
05:49.936 --> 05:52.559
[SPEAKER_01]: How about Bruce Lee's martial art?
05:52.619 --> 05:58.324
[SPEAKER_01]: And what does Gekundo stand for?
05:58.304 --> 05:59.986
[SPEAKER_01]: Women would date me.
06:00.687 --> 06:01.488
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
06:01.508 --> 06:03.129
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, that's on them.
06:03.330 --> 06:04.051
[SPEAKER_01]: That's on them.
06:04.151 --> 06:05.032
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's on them.
06:05.172 --> 06:08.275
[SPEAKER_01]: The all the signs were there that I was a total dork.
06:08.395 --> 06:10.438
[SPEAKER_00]: This is even before they saw your tattoos.
06:11.599 --> 06:23.873
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I have, I have, I have in Chinese letters.
06:24.359 --> 06:26.462
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the dark part of this episode.
06:26.642 --> 06:27.884
[SPEAKER_01]: You didn't see this coming to you.
06:27.984 --> 06:28.205
[SPEAKER_00]: I did not.
06:28.745 --> 06:29.146
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
06:29.166 --> 06:31.549
[SPEAKER_00]: I need a minute.
06:32.791 --> 06:32.991
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
06:33.492 --> 06:40.482
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you want to see those tattoos head on over to Patreon, and you will not see them there.
06:42.385 --> 06:43.166
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll see something though.
06:43.186 --> 06:44.829
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll see that.
06:44.849 --> 06:45.409
[SPEAKER_01]: It won't be that.
06:45.510 --> 06:46.010
[SPEAKER_01]: No, yes.
06:46.090 --> 06:46.391
[SPEAKER_01]: So.
06:46.551 --> 06:49.255
[SPEAKER_00]: OK. Well, that took a dark turn.
06:49.295 --> 06:52.780
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll get back to the episode.
06:52.760 --> 06:56.186
[SPEAKER_00]: So, AOL connected its users to use net.
06:56.566 --> 07:01.855
[SPEAKER_00]: These AOL users thought that use net was something that they were paying for, so they were kind of entitled about it.
07:02.796 --> 07:11.410
[SPEAKER_00]: In a way, in the words of one editor, it made these AOL users, quote, unusually resistant to efforts to condition their behavior to learn about the culture.
07:11.390 --> 07:36.334
[SPEAKER_00]: says Opus the Penguin about that time on Reddit quote they just moved in they didn't bother to learn the local rules or stand topic they pooped on the furniture and rated the fridge and stayed up all night and yacked on and on about nothing suddenly use net was a much less pleasant place to be said engineer and coiner of the eternal September phrase David Fisher quote new users were encouraged to read posts and get used to the social environment for a week or two before posting anything
07:36.314 --> 07:44.002
[SPEAKER_00]: People who didn't follow that advice and ran a foul of the accepted Neticate, Nat, etiquette, thank you, were flamed into submission.
07:44.843 --> 07:53.012
[SPEAKER_00]: Fisher saw this is also going to be an internal problem for the young internet because it was going to permanently and irrevocably change use net culture for the worse.
07:53.773 --> 07:56.917
[SPEAKER_00]: In the course of a discussion about it, he said, quote, it's mute now.
07:57.177 --> 08:03.604
[SPEAKER_00]: September 1993 will go down in net history as this is as the September that never ended.
08:03.584 --> 08:15.256
[SPEAKER_00]: It was shortened to eternal September and eventually became more generalized, meaning that a sight or some part of the internet had become so flooded with newer, dumber people that had overwhelmed and permanently changed the culture that was there before.
08:15.757 --> 08:28.090
[SPEAKER_00]: For the worse, said, editor, www.wolf, quote, once upon a time, back when the heaven was new, the only new people coming to the internet and making new sense of themselves due to their incompetence were the university freshman.
08:28.070 --> 08:37.132
[SPEAKER_00]: Every September there would be lots of idiots around, but by the end of the month everything was normal again, and the new students learned to behave to them, and the new students learned to behave themselves.
08:38.034 --> 08:41.622
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, AOL offered internet to everyone, and it never ended.
08:41.663 --> 08:43.547
[SPEAKER_00]: The idiocy that is...
08:43.527 --> 08:56.067
[SPEAKER_00]: People on Reddit talk a lot about eternal September in the context of 4chan, a site similar to usenet in the simplest sense of very, not say for work, bulletin board launched in 2003 and is now default.
08:56.227 --> 08:57.589
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you, were you ever on 4chan?
08:57.809 --> 08:58.010
[SPEAKER_01]: No.
08:58.951 --> 08:59.813
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't care what anyone says.
08:59.853 --> 09:00.654
[SPEAKER_01]: I was never on it.
09:01.856 --> 09:05.001
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not for, yeah, it's a wholesome thing to talk about.
09:05.021 --> 09:06.463
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I was, I was this not for me.
09:06.730 --> 09:13.256
[SPEAKER_00]: says Redditor Chuck Carmichael, something similarly you might hear from time to time is the endless summer, which is something that comes from Porchanne.
09:13.636 --> 09:22.965
[SPEAKER_00]: Every summer all of four chans boards noticed an increasing number of shit posts, aka posts that were clearly made by somebody new to 4 chan, who had no idea of the 4 chan etiquette and lingo.
09:23.365 --> 09:27.749
[SPEAKER_00]: This was usually attributed to all the school kids staying at home all day, surfing the internet.
09:28.129 --> 09:36.737
[SPEAKER_00]: But now that everyone has access to the internet all the time, and school kids can post in 4 chan whenever
09:36.717 --> 09:45.752
[SPEAKER_00]: Idiots flood the internet and that's what happens now some people thought that this all was inevitable Which again, I did I did too.
09:45.852 --> 09:52.863
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like once you get unleashed upon the internet There's really no going back and the people on it will do what they please.
09:52.903 --> 09:59.434
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't create like an environment That's a specific way and has specific etiquette especially now
09:59.414 --> 10:01.557
[SPEAKER_00]: The internet was growing and changing always.
10:02.058 --> 10:11.432
[SPEAKER_00]: Said Redder, COS, the main distinction of earlier September is was that a flood of new people on the internet temporarily overwhelmed existing internet culture until they got some experience.
10:11.532 --> 10:13.034
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, things stabilized a little.
10:13.635 --> 10:19.985
[SPEAKER_00]: Starting in the fall of 1993 for a long time, there were a lot more new people on the net than old timers, so it felt like an eternal September.
10:20.005 --> 10:28.257
[SPEAKER_00]: I date the end of eternal September to the first time after 1993, the majority of regular users of the internet had been on for longer than a year.
10:28.372 --> 10:32.618
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't remember exactly when that was, but I think it was around 2000 or not long after.
10:32.679 --> 10:35.303
[SPEAKER_00]: September has been over for more than a decade.
10:36.024 --> 10:42.053
[SPEAKER_00]: And it really is, and no longer feels like it did during that time, you know, the early 2000s, the late 90s.
10:42.694 --> 10:49.384
[SPEAKER_00]: It was different then, and the dominant group of people on the internet were, I mean, they would label themselves this in the know.
10:49.364 --> 10:51.946
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, none of us are really in the know, ever.
10:52.867 --> 10:57.211
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that a turtle September is based on a delusion that Internet culture was going to stay fixed.
10:57.812 --> 11:03.617
[SPEAKER_00]: It's always changing even before 1993, and in some big ways over the course of just a few years, even now.
11:03.937 --> 11:08.041
[SPEAKER_00]: The time when the Internet was popular enough to have traffic but not widespread enough to be mainstream.
11:08.601 --> 11:10.723
[SPEAKER_00]: Only dedicated and interested people were in it.
11:11.064 --> 11:19.371
[SPEAKER_00]: The sense of community combined with novelty of using a service that had no other parallels in human technology until that point must have felt pretty damn good.
11:19.351 --> 11:30.681
[SPEAKER_00]: It's curious to think that no one will ever get to experience a feeling of I was here before it was cool on that scale and probably hundreds of years until they get another breakthrough in technology, or maybe when we start colonizing other planets.
11:31.742 --> 11:34.005
[SPEAKER_00]: But let's leave this episode with some positivity.
11:34.545 --> 11:48.598
[SPEAKER_00]: In the sage words of the Eternal September's originator, David Fisher, he said this in interview with Vice, quote, it's a complex world and the problems lie with humanity not the net.
00:00.031 --> 00:05.738
[SPEAKER_01]: American idiot, I'm Jason Horton, I'm Rebecca Leib, and this is Ghost Town.
00:20.062 --> 00:24.727
[SPEAKER_00]: We often talk about a different time in the internet's relatively short history.
00:25.067 --> 00:42.605
[SPEAKER_00]: And earlier time, simpler time, a time when the internet was actually cool, exciting, populated by young, savvy users who enjoyed discourse, had opinions and were down to stay up late, drinking jolt, eating 3D Doritos, and textually sparring with strangers.
00:43.546 --> 00:45.288
[SPEAKER_00]: Some call this the internet's golden years.
00:46.209 --> 00:48.111
[SPEAKER_00]: Others, the beginning of the end.
00:48.091 --> 00:50.373
[SPEAKER_00]: or the eternal September.
00:51.494 --> 00:54.797
[SPEAKER_00]: Jason, does the term eternal September mean anything to you?
00:56.619 --> 00:56.939
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
00:57.420 --> 00:58.561
[SPEAKER_00]: No, you're new to this.
00:58.741 --> 01:00.623
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like a little lamb, just being...
01:01.043 --> 01:03.245
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm only 19 years old.
01:03.285 --> 01:05.828
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you're a little kid.
01:05.908 --> 01:06.528
[SPEAKER_00]: Internet.
01:06.548 --> 01:07.509
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but tell me.
01:07.850 --> 01:08.510
[SPEAKER_01]: I was one.
01:08.751 --> 01:09.651
[SPEAKER_00]: I was right.
01:09.671 --> 01:10.052
[SPEAKER_00]: I was right.
01:10.072 --> 01:11.673
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, we'll start at the beginning.
01:12.354 --> 01:17.659
[SPEAKER_00]: Way back when, think, 1979, you're only 40 at this point.
01:17.639 --> 01:18.841
[SPEAKER_01]: I was early foldies.
01:19.662 --> 01:30.081
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dawn of the Internet, Duke University grad students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis created a computer to computer discussion system developed from general purpose Unix to Unix copy.
01:30.241 --> 01:36.171
[SPEAKER_00]: It's called UUCP, a dial-up network infrastructure, you know, the sound of this.
01:36.151 --> 01:39.495
[SPEAKER_00]: They were collectively called UseNet, a portment to a user's network.
01:39.976 --> 01:46.024
[SPEAKER_00]: Think messages to one another on a kind of bulletin board system and early way of communicating on your computer to someone else's.
01:46.324 --> 01:46.865
[SPEAKER_00]: Easy, right?
01:47.726 --> 01:54.134
[SPEAKER_00]: Colleges, most notoriously, UNC, Duke, and UC Berkeley were the first to employ UseNet computer to computer discussion.
01:54.675 --> 01:59.781
[SPEAKER_00]: But in the early 90s, the first internet service providers began to offer UseNet to the general public.
02:00.402 --> 02:01.003
[SPEAKER_00]: That went well.
02:01.624 --> 02:02.665
[UNKNOWN]: I'll tell you why.
02:02.645 --> 02:12.580
[SPEAKER_00]: It was essentially an internet infrastructure for us, normal people, not programmers, chat rooms, online forums, read it, read it was happening way back then, etc.
02:13.041 --> 02:20.292
[SPEAKER_00]: And like the things that I just mentioned, use net wasn't all housed on one server, and essentially owned by no one, again, very odd in this day and age.
02:20.893 --> 02:25.480
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a democratized form of an online communication communicator on every subject.
02:25.460 --> 02:26.903
[SPEAKER_00]: and big things happened here.
02:27.484 --> 02:31.391
[SPEAKER_00]: Used out was the place for many important public developments in the pre-commercial internet.
02:31.772 --> 02:42.492
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, in August 6th, 1991, computer programmer Tim Werner's lead used to use net to invite the public to collaborate on something he was creating, called the World Wide Web.
02:43.073 --> 02:44.616
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, that World Wide Web.
02:44.596 --> 02:53.773
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also where we got the term LOL, laughout loud, of course, and the term spam, a reference to spam or spiced ham from a Monte Python sketch.
02:54.033 --> 03:07.498
[SPEAKER_00]: And basically spam meant back then excessive posting on use net, which was just like, again, over and over messages, think like the Reddit kind of format, flooding of sorts to overwhelm or drive users away.
03:07.478 --> 03:20.708
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also where software engineer Mark Anderson announced the creation of the Mosaic browser and the introduction of the image tag, which made the Internet's a purely text and code-based medium to one where we can post pictures.
03:20.828 --> 03:23.715
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, revolutionized, and that's very big.
03:23.695 --> 03:31.833
[SPEAKER_00]: In any case, useNet was generally for internet savvy nerds and engineers, maybe a couple of rich guys trying to capitalize on the new technology somehow.
03:32.635 --> 03:40.793
[SPEAKER_00]: During most of the year, just a handful of new people would get access to useNet, because people weren't really excited about going online back in the 80s and 90s, they were
03:40.773 --> 03:43.438
[SPEAKER_00]: playing football and going outside.
03:43.478 --> 03:46.223
[SPEAKER_00]: They're mostly into pretty much anything else.
03:47.165 --> 03:55.982
[SPEAKER_00]: The exception every year came in August or September, when a new class of freshman went to college and gained access to the internet and use net through the university system.
03:56.583 --> 04:01.212
[SPEAKER_00]: From those already deep in use net, this was a bad time to be active online.
04:01.192 --> 04:11.864
[SPEAKER_00]: Young and annoying newbies cluttered their news groups didn't know the etiquettes, the vibe, the slang, yes, even LOL was new, and were generally extremely annoying to the nerds who called Usenet home.
04:12.845 --> 04:22.356
[SPEAKER_00]: That's when we first see the use of September being a bad time for the internet, and in particular Usenet, but in September 1993 something very, very bad happened.
04:22.957 --> 04:28.583
[SPEAKER_00]: It became the September that never ended, a phrase coined by computer guru David Fisher.
04:28.563 --> 04:29.904
[SPEAKER_00]: Why did he make up that phrase?
04:30.345 --> 04:32.407
[SPEAKER_00]: We will tell you after this break.
04:33.788 --> 04:39.913
[SPEAKER_00]: In the early days of the internet, use net was where the action was, and every September use net would have a crop of annoying newbies to contend with.
04:40.394 --> 04:46.499
[SPEAKER_00]: They'd learn the ropes, things would calm down, but invariably the next year comes September, the same shit would happen again.
04:46.960 --> 04:49.482
[SPEAKER_00]: That is, until September 1993.
04:49.582 --> 04:54.186
[SPEAKER_00]: In September 1993, AOL connected its users to use net.
04:54.206 --> 04:55.988
[SPEAKER_00]: What is your AOL history?
04:55.968 --> 04:57.110
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I was on it.
04:57.591 --> 05:06.045
[SPEAKER_01]: I was on it and I was on I was on AOL chat rooms and stuff like that Like I was on the Morrisee chat room like the straight-in-age hardcore chat room.
05:06.065 --> 05:09.351
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah I was on like horses horses you like horses.
05:09.491 --> 05:13.077
[SPEAKER_01]: I like horses Mine was probably a control.
05:13.298 --> 05:15.061
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah, remember what your AOL name was.
05:15.341 --> 05:16.664
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, it was cappy 9704.
05:17.144 --> 05:19.849
[SPEAKER_00]: That's my cat in my home address
05:20.217 --> 05:20.820
[SPEAKER_01]: It's dangerous.
05:21.283 --> 05:22.569
[SPEAKER_01]: Mine was worse.
05:22.630 --> 05:24.801
[SPEAKER_01]: Mine was.
05:24.821 --> 05:27.797
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a JKD 101.
05:28.317 --> 05:29.218
[SPEAKER_01]: strap in for this.
05:29.918 --> 05:40.988
[SPEAKER_01]: The JKD stands for Gekundo, which is Bruce Lee's martial art, and one of one is like, we're getting down base AB.
05:42.310 --> 05:49.416
[SPEAKER_01]: I was a full blown adult when I was doing this, and I was like, ladies, do you want cool?
05:49.936 --> 05:52.559
[SPEAKER_01]: How about Bruce Lee's martial art?
05:52.619 --> 05:58.324
[SPEAKER_01]: And what does Gekundo stand for?
05:58.304 --> 05:59.986
[SPEAKER_01]: Women would date me.
06:00.687 --> 06:01.488
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
06:01.508 --> 06:03.129
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, that's on them.
06:03.330 --> 06:04.051
[SPEAKER_01]: That's on them.
06:04.151 --> 06:05.032
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's on them.
06:05.172 --> 06:08.275
[SPEAKER_01]: The all the signs were there that I was a total dork.
06:08.395 --> 06:10.438
[SPEAKER_00]: This is even before they saw your tattoos.
06:11.599 --> 06:23.873
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I have, I have, I have in Chinese letters.
06:24.359 --> 06:26.462
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the dark part of this episode.
06:26.642 --> 06:27.884
[SPEAKER_01]: You didn't see this coming to you.
06:27.984 --> 06:28.205
[SPEAKER_00]: I did not.
06:28.745 --> 06:29.146
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
06:29.166 --> 06:31.549
[SPEAKER_00]: I need a minute.
06:32.791 --> 06:32.991
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
06:33.492 --> 06:40.482
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you want to see those tattoos head on over to Patreon, and you will not see them there.
06:42.385 --> 06:43.166
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll see something though.
06:43.186 --> 06:44.829
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll see that.
06:44.849 --> 06:45.409
[SPEAKER_01]: It won't be that.
06:45.510 --> 06:46.010
[SPEAKER_01]: No, yes.
06:46.090 --> 06:46.391
[SPEAKER_01]: So.
06:46.551 --> 06:49.255
[SPEAKER_00]: OK. Well, that took a dark turn.
06:49.295 --> 06:52.780
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll get back to the episode.
06:52.760 --> 06:56.186
[SPEAKER_00]: So, AOL connected its users to use net.
06:56.566 --> 07:01.855
[SPEAKER_00]: These AOL users thought that use net was something that they were paying for, so they were kind of entitled about it.
07:02.796 --> 07:11.410
[SPEAKER_00]: In a way, in the words of one editor, it made these AOL users, quote, unusually resistant to efforts to condition their behavior to learn about the culture.
07:11.390 --> 07:36.334
[SPEAKER_00]: says Opus the Penguin about that time on Reddit quote they just moved in they didn't bother to learn the local rules or stand topic they pooped on the furniture and rated the fridge and stayed up all night and yacked on and on about nothing suddenly use net was a much less pleasant place to be said engineer and coiner of the eternal September phrase David Fisher quote new users were encouraged to read posts and get used to the social environment for a week or two before posting anything
07:36.314 --> 07:44.002
[SPEAKER_00]: People who didn't follow that advice and ran a foul of the accepted Neticate, Nat, etiquette, thank you, were flamed into submission.
07:44.843 --> 07:53.012
[SPEAKER_00]: Fisher saw this is also going to be an internal problem for the young internet because it was going to permanently and irrevocably change use net culture for the worse.
07:53.773 --> 07:56.917
[SPEAKER_00]: In the course of a discussion about it, he said, quote, it's mute now.
07:57.177 --> 08:03.604
[SPEAKER_00]: September 1993 will go down in net history as this is as the September that never ended.
08:03.584 --> 08:15.256
[SPEAKER_00]: It was shortened to eternal September and eventually became more generalized, meaning that a sight or some part of the internet had become so flooded with newer, dumber people that had overwhelmed and permanently changed the culture that was there before.
08:15.757 --> 08:28.090
[SPEAKER_00]: For the worse, said, editor, www.wolf, quote, once upon a time, back when the heaven was new, the only new people coming to the internet and making new sense of themselves due to their incompetence were the university freshman.
08:28.070 --> 08:37.132
[SPEAKER_00]: Every September there would be lots of idiots around, but by the end of the month everything was normal again, and the new students learned to behave to them, and the new students learned to behave themselves.
08:38.034 --> 08:41.622
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, AOL offered internet to everyone, and it never ended.
08:41.663 --> 08:43.547
[SPEAKER_00]: The idiocy that is...
08:43.527 --> 08:56.067
[SPEAKER_00]: People on Reddit talk a lot about eternal September in the context of 4chan, a site similar to usenet in the simplest sense of very, not say for work, bulletin board launched in 2003 and is now default.
08:56.227 --> 08:57.589
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you, were you ever on 4chan?
08:57.809 --> 08:58.010
[SPEAKER_01]: No.
08:58.951 --> 08:59.813
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't care what anyone says.
08:59.853 --> 09:00.654
[SPEAKER_01]: I was never on it.
09:01.856 --> 09:05.001
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not for, yeah, it's a wholesome thing to talk about.
09:05.021 --> 09:06.463
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I was, I was this not for me.
09:06.730 --> 09:13.256
[SPEAKER_00]: says Redditor Chuck Carmichael, something similarly you might hear from time to time is the endless summer, which is something that comes from Porchanne.
09:13.636 --> 09:22.965
[SPEAKER_00]: Every summer all of four chans boards noticed an increasing number of shit posts, aka posts that were clearly made by somebody new to 4 chan, who had no idea of the 4 chan etiquette and lingo.
09:23.365 --> 09:27.749
[SPEAKER_00]: This was usually attributed to all the school kids staying at home all day, surfing the internet.
09:28.129 --> 09:36.737
[SPEAKER_00]: But now that everyone has access to the internet all the time, and school kids can post in 4 chan whenever
09:36.717 --> 09:45.752
[SPEAKER_00]: Idiots flood the internet and that's what happens now some people thought that this all was inevitable Which again, I did I did too.
09:45.852 --> 09:52.863
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like once you get unleashed upon the internet There's really no going back and the people on it will do what they please.
09:52.903 --> 09:59.434
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't create like an environment That's a specific way and has specific etiquette especially now
09:59.414 --> 10:01.557
[SPEAKER_00]: The internet was growing and changing always.
10:02.058 --> 10:11.432
[SPEAKER_00]: Said Redder, COS, the main distinction of earlier September is was that a flood of new people on the internet temporarily overwhelmed existing internet culture until they got some experience.
10:11.532 --> 10:13.034
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, things stabilized a little.
10:13.635 --> 10:19.985
[SPEAKER_00]: Starting in the fall of 1993 for a long time, there were a lot more new people on the net than old timers, so it felt like an eternal September.
10:20.005 --> 10:28.257
[SPEAKER_00]: I date the end of eternal September to the first time after 1993, the majority of regular users of the internet had been on for longer than a year.
10:28.372 --> 10:32.618
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't remember exactly when that was, but I think it was around 2000 or not long after.
10:32.679 --> 10:35.303
[SPEAKER_00]: September has been over for more than a decade.
10:36.024 --> 10:42.053
[SPEAKER_00]: And it really is, and no longer feels like it did during that time, you know, the early 2000s, the late 90s.
10:42.694 --> 10:49.384
[SPEAKER_00]: It was different then, and the dominant group of people on the internet were, I mean, they would label themselves this in the know.
10:49.364 --> 10:51.946
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, none of us are really in the know, ever.
10:52.867 --> 10:57.211
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that a turtle September is based on a delusion that Internet culture was going to stay fixed.
10:57.812 --> 11:03.617
[SPEAKER_00]: It's always changing even before 1993, and in some big ways over the course of just a few years, even now.
11:03.937 --> 11:08.041
[SPEAKER_00]: The time when the Internet was popular enough to have traffic but not widespread enough to be mainstream.
11:08.601 --> 11:10.723
[SPEAKER_00]: Only dedicated and interested people were in it.
11:11.064 --> 11:19.371
[SPEAKER_00]: The sense of community combined with novelty of using a service that had no other parallels in human technology until that point must have felt pretty damn good.
11:19.351 --> 11:30.681
[SPEAKER_00]: It's curious to think that no one will ever get to experience a feeling of I was here before it was cool on that scale and probably hundreds of years until they get another breakthrough in technology, or maybe when we start colonizing other planets.
11:31.742 --> 11:34.005
[SPEAKER_00]: But let's leave this episode with some positivity.
11:34.545 --> 11:48.598
[SPEAKER_00]: In the sage words of the Eternal September's originator, David Fisher, he said this in interview with Vice, quote, it's a complex world and the problems lie with humanity not the net.
