11 Mar 2026
This is rare for me, sufficient documentation about an event of the past to tell at least a partial story. I'm terrible at archiving!
The early 90's for me was a busy and interesting time: I was living in San Francisco in a group house/warehouse/project warehouse called Shred of Dignity (two locations, 164 Shipley, then 666 Illin'Noise (our spelling); FidoNet had peaked for me, half a million people, we'd successfully terminated an attempted takeover ("enshittification") and I'm heading into early commercial internet stuff ("toasternets"), eg. The Little Garden then TLGnet. WIRED and INFOWORLD and other magazines were moving from BBSs to the internet for juice, and there I was. Problem was, I had (and still don't have) any institutional affiliations. "Everyone does", meaning they work for a corporation or institution. My path through this is a separate story.
Anyway I somehow got invited to Interval's online communities mini-conference, a one-day (I think) event down on Sand Hill road, a notorious ghetto of the ultra-rich SV folk. I knew many of the participants from grass-roots networking of various sorts; things were a lot more varied then.
My FidoNet experience at that time should have been in sync with the presentations, but I can't remember a single one of them. I honestly don't remember much of the event, though it obviously left some impression, lol, to induce me to write the response below. Which is one I still like, decades later, and minus specifics of why I wrote it.
Its a bit harsh on the fictional cyberpunk idea, probably to my own detriment, especially as I blurted it out here, seeminlgy out of context. But recall that at that time I and we were living in an extended constructed anarcho punk world, somewhat self-contained, to a degree even economically, the view from there, via BBSing, the cypherpunk list, early COmputer Freedom Privacy conferences, the clear and obvious signs of our present corporate surveillance were easily seen, but no one wanted to look. So what appeared then to be cynicism was a skepticism that has been totally justified. As I said somewhere else, that plus five bucks buys coffee at a Corporate Chain.
ANYHOO -- the reason this page, here, exists is because I found the documents below in the usual way -- while looking for something entirely unrelated. And realized they at least partially told a story of that time. So here they are as a little tale.
Because these are pre-world-wide-web files I am leaving them as utterly minimally formatted character text files, except for the minutes/summary, which was a print document I scanned on modern gear.