underground - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

The digital underground: computer users of anarchist, libertarian and post-modernist (eg. '90s interest in "temporary autonomous zones") inclinations were interested in pushing the boundaries of the possibilities of discourse and exchange in [cyberspace], and curious and contrary hackers and transgressive online youth sought forbidden knowledge and virtual outlets free from the onerous regulations of the real world and their rigid and bureaucratic intrusions into the virtual sphere (eg. [FidoNet]) (and let's be fair here, many of them were also just seeking free commercial software.) Thus, parallel to the "public domain" BBS community emerged an "underground" BBS community (whose phone numbers were not typically publicly distributed) that manifested in many flavours, some boards offering metred exchange of pirated game software (or "[warez]"), some offering pornographic images (and, initially, stories), some offering [tfile]s (short for text files: documents encoded as raw text, formatted for 80-column fixed-width printing on dot matrix printers) of forbidden [cybercrime] knowledge in the [h/p/a]/v/c realms of, respectively, hacking, [phreaking] (misuse of telephony infrastructure), computer viruses, "anarchy" (of the "The Anarchist Cookbook" / Loompanics variety) and cracking (the gentle art of disabling copy protection on commercial software) -- and some dabbling in all of the above under the rubric of "free speech". In the digital underground, SysOps didn't ask for your real name and address and would frankly prefer you not provide them. A 21st-century counterpart or inheritor to this legacy might be "the dark web" or the Silk Road.