Thread by @doctorow

I'm not planning a thread/newsletter/blogpost for today, but for complicated workflow reasons I just teed up tomorrow's "This day in history" segment with a trawl through my archives, and tomorrow's such a fucking amazing day that I decided to do a preview.

Thread!

Today's the 20th anniversary of the Napster shut-down. I mentioned this to my wife. She said, "Yes, we're old now."

wired.com/2002/05/last-r…

Instructions for rolling your own tampons, from @tnielsenhayden. 20 years old, more relevant than ever in the face of continuing sales/luxury taxes on menstrual products.

nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/ar…

20 years ago, the second O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference was the first event I ever attended where laptops outnumbered plugs. I led an expedition to buy dozens of power strips and then handed them out.

memex.craphound.com/2002/05/14/dis…

15 years ago: experts warn that virtual worlds are a source of money-laundering risk. They're worried about Second Life, not Axie. Truly, Second Life invented everything good, bad and ugly about metaverses.

web.archive.org/web/2007051703…

Super-relevant to the John Deere repair wars, a 1932 Modern Mechanix ad (posted 15 years ago) for a kit that converts your Model T to a tractor. Remember, Deere's "innovation" strategy was visiting farmers to learn about their cool tractor hacks.

web.archive.org/web/2007051901…

It's easy to forget that Microsoft was once the worst tech company in the world. They didn't get better - the others got worse. Here's Microsoft's 2012 announcement of an investment in a Russian "company" that breaks Bittorrent swarms.

torrentfreak.com/microsoft-fund…

2012: The guy who played Biff in the Back to the Future movies tells us that he gets accosted in public by people who hate his (fictional) guts so often that he created a FAQ on a postcard explaining that he's really a good guy and it was just a role.

hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-n…

Ten years ago, The Yes Men scored a major victory - they tricked a business lobby event into letting them present a "Corporate Power Tool" award to the US Trade Rep, Ron Kirk, who was leading the charge on #ACTA (remember ACTA?!)

theyesmen.org/project/tpp/re…

Also ten years ago, on the eve of the publication of my YA copyfight novel Pirate Cinema, Booklist raves about it:

memex.craphound.com/2012/05/14/adv…

It's also the tenth anniversary of "Forming" - an absolutely bonkers, horny, psychedelic graphic novel I called "a dirty Gnostic creation-myth comic of high and lavish weirdness"

memex.craphound.com/2012/05/14/for…

Ten years ago, I published a Guardian column explaining the two failure modes of nerd politics: determinism (our superior tech makes your stupid laws irrelevant) and fatalism (tech can't and shouldn't be involved in politics)

theguardian.com/technology/201…

That wasn't the column I'd planned, though. The Guardian refused to publish that column - the only time that ever happened - in which I excoriated the UK press for its cowardly habit of letting official spokespeople request anonymity. I ran it myself.

memex.craphound.com/2012/05/14/ano…

I do these retrospectives mostly for me, though I include them in each newsletter, thread roundup and blog-post. Looking over the past 20 years' worth of posts every day is an enormous, unbeatable source of perspective. It's what gives me object-permanance in these chaotic times.

My workflow (as noted) is very complicated, and for reasons I won't bore you with, my Tumblr feed gets my historical roundup posts a day ahead of my other feeds. This thread is just a slice of today's edition. Here's the rest of it:
mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/684144537…