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        Gopher Reply, (circumlunar), 09/06/2018
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I just  enjoyed sel20's  8th layer[1]. The  concepts therein
were pleasing to me, and the reading experience was as well.
In  a  previous  layer,  sel20 expressed  concern  at  their
English skills, but layer8 was quite good.

One thing  that was  touched on was  the light  and enduring
nature of strings of text.

"When  bitrot  destroy  our compressed  images,  videos  and
audio, future  archeologists will  still scrape  strings out
our ancient hard disks and tapes."

This bit-mining archaeology is already real; we do this when
we  need to  recover lost  data  or inspect  a binary  file.
Extracting strings-  legible letters  strung together-  is a
valuable method of digging out lost or obscured information.
Like sel20  points out,  it will be  even more  valuable and
interesting in the future.

With all  of our  progress, it would  be interesting  to see
more wellsprings  of connectivity cropping up.  I don't know
what it would look like. I  think of the BBS days, where you
could  dial-in to  a variety  of numbers,  some at  people's
homes,  some  online only  at  times,  others in  commercial
buildings with many lines...

It  was   the  dialing  in   to  people's  homes   that  was
interesting,  and that  is  what was  lost  with the  modern
internet. Sure, you can have a  server at home, but it's not
the  same. It's  not a  one-to-one connection  with the  end
user. It's not at all private.

I setup a Rachel server a  while back[2], for my kids to use
for educational content.  I added custom content.  It was an
open WIFI hotspot with no connection to the internet, just a
boatload of content. You could  connect to it and browse the
network and consume.

Remember war dialing and war driving? I recall using  Kismet 
to find open hotspots. It was  hard, back then, to configure 
my pcmcia  wifi card to work properly in promiscuous mode. A 
lot of  things were harder,  but there was a lot more fun in 
them.

If a cyberpunk  future were in store, I do  wonder what that
groundswell,  wellspring,  organic connectivity  would  look
like. I'm positive it would be fun.


[1] gopher://circumlunar.space:70/0/~sel20/layers/layer8.txt
[2] https://worldpossible.org/rachel/