Oh much better if we all ways thought about interacted with others in terms of our own mount to pole identity is think about what's going on now in our world but trying to do this if ness the insistence that some folk shouldn't be here are some folk aren't good enough to be there and we didn't characterize someone in singular terms that's a black person that's a Muslim while each of us I think may well have a primary identity or way in which we sot of thinking about selves most often or perhaps most strongly but we are many identities I am an African-American woman in terms of class probably go to upper middle class in terms of sexual orientation heterosexual in terms of ability or disability Well the prison of my knee is kicking up a knot vibe going to say I'm fully able in terms of religion in terms of age in terms of nationality all of those specific identity t. Is come together but you know I have an identity as a mom I'm a grandma. I'm a wife I'm a car Lee I'm a museum director I'm an anthropologist so I can be victimized because I am African-American. Or a woman or both but when I claim all of my identities including being heterosexual I could turn and victimize somebody else based on their sexual orientation when we become more thoughtful about and understand the sin Trammell t. Of I didn t. And how I didn't t. . Capture who we are we can actually make a great contribution toward dealing with one of the greatest problems in our world. It's called bigotry. And discrimination. Today we have 2 more stories of identity one identity that is being kept alive in the face of terror and one that was built to bring power to an invisible community identity is more than just who you are it's also you aren't in the late 1970 s. Some lesbian feminists decided that instead of arguing about equality within marriage childcare or lower pay then remove themselves from the fight entirely. Rather than work the changes aside it didn't represent them several 1000 women in North America decided to create their own separate society my co-host Meghan brings you the story of one of these women in the world but she set out to create. Sometimes called Jeb spent her career as a photographer and filmmaker documenting lesbian communities and progressive movements starting in the 1970 s. . Interviewing Joan at her bungalow just outside of d.c. Now inner seventy's Jim is an absolute spark. Ok. You're not the only here. Within minutes of our arrival she's just the dogs barking in the yard crack jokes about her flannel shirt and ushered us aside. 'd on a report she's left out this plate of water with the sponge in it for b.s. She says bees are dying out and with this at least there was a safe place to trick it's easy to see how she was able to shoot such intimate vulnerable photographs of women the truth is when you meet her you want her to like you very badly for lesbians in particular we really were invisible at the time that I came out which is why I decided to become a visual artist than a visual activist because I needed to see myself and others like me Joan authored 2 groundbreaking collections of photography Catherine not a curator at the Smithsonian's Museum of American history says the work had a huge impact on young lesbians Katherine is researching these overlooked moments in l b g t Q history including a time when lesbians forge new societies and even religions so many women who were questioning found her portraiture her books portraits of was Binns was. The 1st time you could see were gay women look like really as a documentary filmmaker Joan knows how to create an opening scene and we begin our chat with a quiet ritual lighting a candle and imbuing a crystal with our intentions for the interview. Usually there would be a blessing. It's akin to the sort of thing she would have done back in her coven Yup coven back in the 1970 s. Joan was part of a group of women who created their own religion. So I'm picking up the big crystal and I'm holding it to put good energy and intention for the interview we're about to do for our new podcast and my name is Joan Byron Actually religion was just one aspect of the movement Joan was a part of the separatist movement was made up of feminists many of them lesbians who tried to create a new world where they could live entirely separate from men separatism gets a very bad rap and primarily gets a bad rap from people who have been centered in society and in theory and in conversations for ever so they don't understand why identity is important because their identity is sort of the default identity this is all happening as women were organizing and demanding neural Xin society but lesbians often found themselves silenced within the feminist movement while the most painful reaction was that many of us had been part of the women's liberation movement in d.c. And when we came out as lesbians we were purged from that group they felt that we were a big threat to women's liberation both on a personal level and on the level that. Feminist movement that was drug going to get credibility in the mainstream would be tainted by the lavender herring of having lesbians as part of their movement so they started their own movement by starting their own society and they weren't alone separate. Form collectives all across America from farms to publishing houses to women's only music festivals they called communes women's lands and even the word women got scrutiny they'd spell it with a y. You now keep in the man out when your identity is invisible are marginalized you have to figure out a way to both be yourself which helps to have other people with you who are like you and make other people see that you are not like them so that's why we formed this lesbian feminist separatist collective they called it the firies made up of 12 women who lived and worked together in 2 houses in Washington d.c. They pooled incomes and split chores publish a separatist newspaper The goal was complete autonomy and it seemed at the time and I still believe this even though I'm no longer a separatist is that it's important to have a period where you do figure out what your identity is and figure out a way to convey that to other people with like identities and to people who are different than you. For 2 years the collective in its newspaper shaped the discussion of lesbians place in society they wanted to dismantle societal confines and change politics capitalism and yes spirituality to fit them the religion that Joan and other lesbians created was one that left behind what they saw as patriarchal traditions I say dynamic Wiccan religion because if I said we were. Witches and Pagans it would freak you out a little more. At that time I became a witch we were reimagining and reinventing everything and if you know anything about culture you know most cultures have some religion to have a spiritual dimension was very important this religion Katherine says made Joan and her contemporaries feel seen at least amongst themselves they made music and sang together or they borrowed from Native American concepts and practices from pagans from ancient goddess. Rituals and wisdom from all over the place to create a new world basically a woman identified world Joan is donating some of the artifacts of her coven including the crystal to the Smithsonian Museum of American history as part of a collection on spirituality Here's Catherine again people know about Stonewall Riots often as being really important and often pointed to as the beginning of the gay liberation movement but I would say that what's happening in the seventy's with queer women is just as important there is history of people that is undocumented or hidden and invisible and there are populations that have never been given respect or recorded and when you don't have the evidence people can say it never happened as a museum if we have archival materials we have letters we have objects that show no it did happen these are things that real people used and this is how they use them in this is what they thought they were doing so it's not only important as evidence but it's people's lives that we're collecting we can't collect them. Well I'd like to through community culture and religion lesbians help create new ways to talk about identity particularly queer identity and with her photographs lesbians a visual identity a photographic history that gives powerful roots to a formerly heading community. Some identities are ones we consciously choose but in many ways our cultural identity creates us were shaped by the art and architecture and music that make up our heritage so what do you do when the cornerstones of your identity are destroyed that's what Syrians and Iraqis are facing today as militants from the Islamic state . Known as ISIS and wipe out their heritage sites. One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world from his home town of . He's here to learn how to protect his country's heritage that heritage he says is in crisis. Who are. The greatest threat to our cultural heritage and destruction that Iraq is currently suffering from and as ever suffered from in its entire history is ISIS. Thought it up thankfully Mustafa isn't alone in the last 9 years the Iraqi Institute for the conservation of heritage and Antiquities has trained over 300 museum staff and archaeologists like with Staffa Jessica Johnson who is now the head of conservation at the Smithsonian's Museum services center has been working with the institute since it opened Jessica says we may think of heritage sites as crucial parts of our in history but ISIS sees them as perfect targets right now and I saw are a big threat because they're using heritage for political reasons they're going in and destroying sites or museums because those represent something about the history of the people of the country Islamic militants have attack some of the best preserved archaeological sites in the region they've bulldozed engine capitals dynamited ruins and rampage through Iraq's 2nd largest museum in Mosul and they are being driven by ideology alone archaeological looting has likely earned ISIS millions of dollars but it's not just Iraqis history that's being destroyed it's ours to history of Iraq is some of the earliest civilizations in the world so the 1st people who learned to write in the same way we write now the 1st people to tell stories some of which are still told now come from that region it's so important to the understanding of civilization across the world now that's why Jessica is overseeing a course on emergency conservation The goal is to help Iraqi archaeologists catch up on the tools and knowledge that they couldn't access during the rule of Saddam Hussein and the war that followed it the students are learning methods to restore heritage sites that are purposefully damaged but they're also being taught how to protect these places and collections from Natural Disasters Emergency concerts. It is responding to crisis really so it might be an earthquake or the crisis might be looting and war and destruction there stabilizing buildings using satellite mapping to learn the precise scales and locations of sites and documenting existing antiquities all to create recovery plans. More of. The work that goes on in that kind of conservation is just trying to minimize the damage that's happening and as a student at the Institute who works as a surveyor at archaeological sites but it was only ever mean. Even if we aren't in danger of an attack from the Islamic state or the economic crisis we face losing them. So it's very important for us to document everything. That way if things are taken in the future we can identify everything that's been stolen we have it already. So you know Iraq is home to numerous languages and religions and the students here represent almost all of them the class lets them collaborate and create networks of support they can take back home but otherwise with this building. Actually. Jessica says those ties and the tangible symbols of a shared heritage can help unify their country their heritage brings us together in different ways so that we don't just see ourselves as isolated people or isolated families we have a broader understanding of what's important in the world in the way we look at the world protecting heritage even in conflict is important not only for the identity of Iraqis but for the knowledge that lives with that in the legacy of our ancestors . The podcast side door is produced for the Smithsonian by Megan de tree and Tony Cowen see their full team and listen to the entire 1st season of the show at Sci edu. Your tunes to the spot k l w is weekly showcase of the best stories from India Radio producers and podcasts I'm your host actually and Craig bomb. Our final story this afternoon comes from the history podcast The Memory Palace in this episode host Nate Di Maio introduces us to the identities within and out of this world family this is The Memory Palace and they demand 'd. Charles Duke was 25 that spring when man 1st went to space he was 26 when he met daughter he was on leave from the Air Force and mit he went there to get his degree in aeronautics and found out they also had something called astronautics and it sounded cool so we do that too Dotty was a secretary at Harvard Business School they were both from the south and they fell in love and complain together about the winter and were married in the spring he got his master's got into Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California Donny like the son of California. Didn't think of the desert when she thought of California though soon her husband was never around in her days were all heat in dust and dashed dreams 'd 'd 'd. Charlie was 29 when their 1st son was born you know when he saw this thing in the Sunday Times front page said NASA was looking for more astronauts for the Apollo program 'd for the moon and that sounded cool sounded cool learned Dotty who thought lugging a baby around Houston would be an upgrade over the Mojave Desert. Charlie was 31 when their 2nd son was born. And Charlie was never around he was training to be an astronaut he loved all of it love learning love the long hours the weeks away studying geology in Oregon in Hawaii in Iceland in Alaska jungle survival in Panama learning how to troubleshoot the far alter of Violet spectrograph how to perform a trans lunar injection while his sons were learning to walk how to make sure their lowercase J.s didn't beneath the line like a fish hook while his wife was learning to do everything everything at the house because her husband was never around because her husband was an astronaut. Charlie Duke was 33 that summer when man 1st went to the moon. He was in mission control his South Carolina lilt was the voice of Houston. As men men he knew coworkers buddies bounded on the moon. That was how things went for astronauts. You were assigned a mission in a role and it meant that one man talked into a microphone while another walked on the moon. It meant that some families got the cover of Life magazine got to meet the president got that at least in exchange for being without their father their husband for days and weeks at a time days in weeks that amounted to years. Dottie was in her early thirty's when she started searching for something of her own some sort of meaning outside of her marriage. And work and smoking weed and flirting with other men. She was a travel agent for a while she liked that she was good at that to trips to London Africa even when it was lonely and there was a home to keep and kids who needed help getting the chain back on their bike finding the stuffed animal that got tangled up in the covers and there was a husband who dreamt of the moon Charlie Duke was 34 when he knew he was going he was back up in Apollo 13 that meant he would pilot the landing module on Apollo 16 and that meant the moon he was $36.00 when his turn came around and his sons were old enough to notice that their dad was never around and had seen enough rockets lift off seen enough smoke and fire and fathers and capsules catching the light as they shrank in the distance and disappeared into the black they were told Lay just beyond the blue sky to know to be scared. In such Charlie said he would take them with him. And so they got dressed for a family photograph. Charlie and Dottie sit on a bench in the lawn he's in a yellow button down his pants matches tie they're both that color that Crayola calls burnt sienna she is in a sea foam green pant suit in a blue curve at night in $72.00 and there are the boys big smiles who knows how many takes it took to get those smiles. The oldest Charles like his dad and his grandfather is 7 years old a big boy hands in his pockets standing tall in front the youngest 5 year old Thomas leans on both his parents one hands on his dad's thigh one's on his mom's who knows how much longer he'll still reach for them like that in a moment like this there in the snapshot. Charlie was 36 years 6 months old when he spent 71 hours on the moon he collected rocks that was the bulk of the mission of a policy in learning about the moon and that's basically what there is to learn about the moon its composition and origins that in what it feels like to be there to leap 4 feet off the ground like it was nothing to see the earth moon sized At one point Charlie asked his partner John Young the Neil Armstrong to his buzz buzz to reveal the pending how long he figured there footprints would be there on the surface no wind no weather Young thought about it factored in all the things he knew about the moon and he knew lots about the moon and figured 4000000000 years. 71 hours out of a life then 36 years and 6 months along. Now 18 change. After all those hours in the classroom in the simulator in the field in the office in line at the cafeteria. Away from his family. In one of those hours 240000 nautical miles from home. One of the last hours on his business trip to the moon. Charlie took that family photo wrapped in clear plastic bent a little bit from the journey and placed it in the dust near the lip of the crater you like the idea that someone would find it someday probably pretty soon maybe even come back or maybe on one of the next missions maybe one of the scientists on the moon base they hope to build in the eighty's would find it. Maybe a colonist maybe one of his own sons on some vacation someday. He didn't know then that he wasn't going back to the moon. He didn't know then that we don't go to the moon anymore. But he liked the idea that his family was there. Where they are still. And will be for something close to forever. Snapshot. 2 boys a man and woman. The moment in their lives. Buy more stories from Nate de Mayo at the memory palace us. That's it for today's episode of the spot you can find this episode or more accurately l.w. Dot org and you'll find a spot under the Programs tab and tell me what you want to hear on the spot do you have a suggestion for a hot cast Mission Beach or just drop me a line at the spa at k l w dot org And thanks for listening I'm Ashley and Chris tune in next week same day same time for another episode of the spot only on $91.00. Features remarkable artists and thinkers who've spoken at the Jewish community center of San Francisco on the next snap judgments Glynn Washington 99 percent Invisibles Roman Mars and cartoonist Abel examine how radio producers construct some of today's most exciting and innovative storytelling here these new masters of radio on Thursday at noon 1.7 f.m. . U.s. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that Donald Trump plans to end DACA the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy this would affect almost $800000.00 young immigrants many were brought to the u.s. As children politicians now have 6 months to act 2 bipartisan bills could grant docker recipients legal status or create a pathway to citizenship will politicians act in time join a conversation on the next your call with me Rose Aguilar and you I'm Alex critter and discovery for the b.b.c. World Service We're explaining the history of the Internet why is the world's most important communications medium not governed by anyone it can serve up laughs tears and horror in the same instant and today we learn that it's all because of one decision made in the 1960 s. That's in discovery with me Alex Krycek asked. B.b.c. News if you own a McDonald hurrican near my eyes battering the islands of Barbuda and Antigua as it makes its way through the Caribbean in Antigua the electricity grid has been disconnected as a precaution the storm is projected to move west through the Leeward Islands and on to Puerto Rico Hispania Ola Cuba and Florida meteorologists warn it may have catastrophic consequences the de facto leader of Myanmar own son's hoochie is claimed that the crisis in Rakhine state is being distorted by what she called misinformation she said tensions between communities were being fanned by feet news promoting the interests of terrorists but she didn't mention the 10s of thousands of minority or injure people who recently fled Iraq on into Bangladesh a judge in Australia has approved the payment of more than $55000000.00 in compensation to past and present detainees of the offshore detention center on minus Island is the largest human rights settlement in Australian history. In the United States there's been widespread condemnation of President Trump's decision to rescind the protection given to young undocumented migrants who were brought to the u.s. As children the top prosecutor in Brazil is formally charged 2 of the country's former presidents Luis Inacio Lula da Silva and Huma Rousseff with corruption but the Workers' Party to which they both belong calls the charges baseless European Court of Justice is due to rule on a legal challenge brought by hungry and survive against accepting compulsory quotas of asylum seekers the leaders of Russia South Korea and Japan are meeting to discuss a defense crisis surrounding North Korea and scientists in Britain have recorded one of the highest ever flight paths taken by ducks the ruddy shell duck has been seen to fly at altitudes of nearly 7000 meters to cross the Himalayas b.b.c. News I'm Alex critter This is discovery from the b.b.c. World Service. He would eventually receive the National Medal for technology and co-found the most successful company in the world but in 1971 Steve was up to no good one time I called the Pope I got to the Vatican and I asked for the pope I said this is Henry Kissinger calling on behalf with Richard Nixon at the summit meeting in Moscow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak prank called the pope pretending to be Henry Kissinger he made his way into the Vatican by phone phreaking or hacking through several phone systems it was a pastime that was all the rage but the young gates of the sixties and seventies Brinker's discovered that they could get into the phone system by blowing a toy whistle that emitted a sound at $2600.00 hertz it would trip the wires and put them through to any phone system in the world they had control of satellites and cables from any phone they freaked from. It was completely untraceable and totally free of charge and of course illegal officials were terrified of this dark telephone network that couldn't be traced because no one knew what the freak or is were up to where they tying up the lines to stop access or were they tapping other people's phones for their own purposes some familiar. I'm Alex Pitofsky And in this series we want to know why it's possible for people to do bad things on Mars why isn't there a technological solution Where's the government in all this but our responsibility of things gone too far. Efforts are continuing to tackle a cyber attack described as unprecedented in scale which has hit the n.h.s. In England and Scotland and hundreds of other organizations around the world. What is the policy to anybody with any device can access hundreds of millions of people instantly anonymous. But it also is a perfect formula for the docs are to network some tional in the basement can reach out to a 1000000 people they don't know it's him or her and do bad things militants from Islamic state top posted a video online purporting to show the beheading of an American journalist a large scale cyber attack that started in Ukraine is continuing to spread across the world care tax cuts are saying that this is a version of the difference in what could pass which apparently we're being told is readily available in these online forums where half the school by this topic for less than $30.00 early days with no idea that people would misuse it why would anybody want to misuse it and dollars more still being given to help avoid malware and avoid people reading your messages and of course as fast as you invent a way of preventing them to do it they'll find a way of getting around it all it goes we are in the thrall of a contradictory uncontrollable network that is now as important to us as running water and electricity and rather than to rip the whole thing up and start again we want to find out what bits actually named reputed. To have any hope in understanding the nature of the problem we have to understand a little bit about where the Internet came from what drove it was the magnificent funding profile and culture of the Advanced Research Projects Agency this group was formed as a result of Sputnik in 1967 President Eisenhower said we're no longer a leader in science technology engineering and math let's change that he created was an agency of the department of friends and said let's support science technology let's get the United States back up to speed this is Leonard Kleinrock professor of computer science at u.c.l.a. In the USA He is the man responsible in 1969 for literally turning on the Internet and they would go to some very good scientist I say look he's a pile of money for a long. Go do something good when I can tell you what failure is Ok we're not going to watch you go do it this kind of carte blanche government funding is the stuff of fantasies but the 1960 s. Was a fantastical time in the us also given a boost by Eisenhower Sputnik paranoia was not and they were going to send a man to the moon so this initiative and the freedom that scientists like Kleinrock had to direct their own agenda set the culture of collaboration invention and problem solving and that is what gave birth to the very 1st networked computing system it was also developed amidst the prosperity in the big dreams of the postwar period when people were seeing news being done to their living rooms projected live via satellite from across the globe the future was now and Len and his colleagues were helping to create it but it was also the era of the Cold War and that created requirements that both produced success and sowed the seeds for malicious uses today here's why at the time u.s. Military communications would pass through hubs and networks that looked like wheels and spokes but the worry was that if one of those hubs was destroyed in a nuclear attack for example the smaller bases connected to it would be forever cut off. So what the network needed to do then was 2 things one move information quickly and to be resilient to attacks from the Soviets even in the case of mass devastation the surviving few should still be able to talk to each other now to understand how they did this and why it matters today we need to know how data moves around at its fundamental core it's actually based on a British invention in the early 1960 s. a Man named David Davies at the U.K.'s National Physical Laboratory had a bright idea here is Roger Scantlebury one of his colleagues to explain it so he came up with this idea of using small computers in fact as switching centers linking them up with high speed lines and creating a network where the computers could communicate with each other he came up with this technique which he called packet switching had been into name for it and the idea was that you take a message moving from one place to another and instead of sending it off as a complete big vestige which meant it would be queuing behind other big messages to get through the network you chop a message up into little packets of a few 1000 bits and you send them with a header on the front it's a bit like taking a book and sending each page separately through the post and the reassemble it in the fall rings using the page numbers to put it back into the same order so the idea was you take a large message and you chop it up into pieces and transmit the pieces of people came over the ends of 68 beginning 69 and of course they then went away and built a practicing network based on the same ideas and then of course it just grew from there and they had lines all over the whole of America people connected to it in various university campuses and military establishments as well to continue the analogy of receiving a book. Page at a time in the post it doesn't matter to you how those individual pages travel to get to you as long as they all arrive and unlike earlier communication networks there's no center all the computers are connected to a few others who are connected to a few others in turn and so on until every computer is only a few hops from any other a network that if you drop out actually looks like a net not because of the shape if one bit of the network is attacked or breaks the pages of the proverbial book can still make it to the destination by going another way they route around the damage as an added bonus the network was built to not care what it is that you're sending because it's all broken up into tiny packets of ones and zeros Anyway what the scientists created was an architecture that was designed to resist attack but unfortunately that's exactly what's made it vulnerable to attack we didn't put any security controls in this because we should have put in at least 2 we should have been in strong usual authentication so if you communicate with me over the net you can prove it's you who should have been strong file authentication you sent me a file I know what you sent me nobody changes its editor and had we done that we should have turned it off immediately and waited until a time when we needed it which is certainly now. We didn't do that again because we we didn't anticipate it would permeate the consumer world which is where a lot of the problem started to come from now it's more than the consumer world it's a nation state an organized crime we made it very easy on purpose and now we're living with that we have billions of machines out there and we can't forklift them all up it's a real problem but why what led to this total oversight I know everybody on the early Internet I could name them I knew them they would not misbehave because the community wouldn't allow it to happen so it was open and free encourage you to come join come join now that change as time went on but that openness persisted in the internals of the Internet in the early days of course it was not regarded as being serious you know these are computer scientists for doing around the edge and amusing themselves doing these things and it isn't until somebody realizes that actually is a pretty powerful technique by that time of course we've established personal connections between all the workers and of course once you've got that on the International Brotherhood the cat's out of the bag and never to be put back in again nobody worried about security in those days it was an open system and you expected of what he to be gentlemanly and behave in a proper manner. You saw days upon the shaky but deeply stable foundation our global communication system invented itself it was open so anyone could join it and make it their own it was agnostic so anyone could do what they wanted online and it was resilient so no one could tear it down and no one had any idea what they'd just done over here we've got the b.b.c. Computer connected to Telecom gold through very secret accounts that we won't tell you about and it's connected through this modem Amanda miracles modem which is very nice one because it will run 31200 by. So you can get into the bulletin boards as well as getting into pressed all services if you've got the right terminal emulation software that's the right software to enable the computer to display the right messages on the screen how do you get information from all this how do you find bulletin boards How do you find out how to get it right there are a lot of published lists and once for example magazines like personal computer world or a couple pages devoted to telephone numbers once you get on to one board you'll find indexes of other boards and as I say the thousands and thousands there's a few places in the us that we could get to by hopping by or some intermediary to Imperial and then or you see which of it was and over to some place in the u.s. And then from there we could look to the other places for us the top one function was just logging in and seeing what was that was exploration it was like you have your hacking away through the dense undergrowth of a jungle and who was on the other side you break through into a clearing and there's all these different programs or what do they do that's run them and find out this is Richard Bartle professor of computer games at the University of Essex and many years ago I and a friend co-wrote the world's 1st virtual world which was called Mud multi-user dungeon and what Richard did was to create one of these places where people landed but people found and they shared in the backs of magazines mud was a popular place an interesting place a destination we built the world but we made the world shareable so that when you were walking around interacting with the objects in the world the other players were also walking around and they were possibly interacting with you interacting with each other they were communicating but they'll also be attacking human things that it was a shared world and it's the world from which pretty well all today's massively multiplayer games directly descended World of Warcraft genealogy which goes right the way back to to mud but at this time at the end of the seventy's there were no visuals everything was described in terms of words so. If you wanted to go forward you typed forward if you wanted to pick something up you typed pick up stick each person had an individual experience going through the game except for one feature everyone started in exactly the same place the 1st room that you derive in would say narrow road between lams that was a short name that would give a long description you are stood on a narrow long ass got to remember this is nearly 40 years ago you were still on a narrow road between the London when she came to the north and south are a pair of majestic mountains which under strata of Mr obscures the path by which you entered the land so that's pretty well it except that wasn't just what it was a multi-user dungeon if it had just been a game probably would have been lost in the mists of time but it was a solution to a problem that Richard had that it turns out was shared by the other people who were online at the time the real world sucks really badly for people like us we didn't like the way the real world worked because we were bottom of the pile pretty well people who study other subjects look down on us because you know we were engineers and engineers a climate pulse and victuals and things but resented it moved like the fact that we were trapped. Based on other people's views other people treat others as if we were . Stupid northerners and I turn English audience are going to northern accent if I was a speak in full broad Yorkshire where I come from then you'd pretty well think I was a peasant and road trips or comes from the West Midlands when you hear him speak it sounds like yours is a factory worker but because we all have this attitude that everyone was people we treated each other as individuals as people and that's how the world should be what not actually was like so much of the Internet and the sites that were out there populating this loosely based network was a political act it was not to defiance we thought that people deserve the right to be able to be themselves not be your short your fat your black your female your gay you've got a big nose and none of that stuff your poor you've got a strange accent you're in a wheelchair we just want to be able to get to be themselves and find out who they were to be able to reinvent themselves or experiment with themselves and we built a world for that purpose and they found enormous success so the people who worked on computers in the very early days they needed a particular world view which was to do with technology being very good technology is the way of the future technology is going to liberate us or free us from these terrible parts of the real world which meant that they also tended to have liberal or the very open minded let's put it that way when you get lots of people with the same worldview attracted to the same technology and in the same places Well it isn't a case of there's a culture develops around them it's that they all got there because they all had the same culture it was necessary in order to find computers fascinating that you had this particular worldview so you got here and I know why Ruby else isn't in the same way as me that's that's wonderful. And in fact for our purposes but it's a great example of how the network was policed at this early time I mean I logged in a term and I t. And all it wanted to know is what my username was and for whom I was hacking it didn't even ask a password you need a password you just loved him because the only people who could log in were people who were going to be jerks but then if somebody was acting like a jerk well you just get back onto the people given the privileges to get there in the 1st place and that they don't. Check into a room unlock them and not let them out. Yeah basically that they revoke your privileges so if you did misbehave then you didn't do it Norm whims and so it was a self policing social system but what Richard and Roy also did was to create a technological facility to stop bad behavior but in a very public kind of way when you played the game you accumulated points went up levels got more points went up more levels got killed lost everything started again kept on going to but when you got to the final level you reached a rank called ways short for Wizard or which the players who made it to the end would then get executive powers over the other players so that if anybody did misbehave than they could react to it they could evaporate and there was a command Finger of Death fault and did what it said if somebody was playing and started swearing profanities or doing I think as a matter of lost as our access to the computer then fault Pollie that's but I poly these were powers that we gave people not so much because we had expected them to use it but because that every so often when they did use it the other players would know it had been used and would moderate their behavior knowing that if they did step out of line then that's what was going to happen we never had a written constitution it was always if you do something that we don't like then we're going to find you it's classics. Social engineering imagine you lived in a village with 200 people and you stole a pig everyone would know you stole the pig and you would forever be known as the pig stealer no one would trust you with their pigs again and possibly not even their daughters the one thing about computers that very topic at the moment is it seems very easy to break ins in a computer secret similar that we really have to know you can actually sort of talk and get to know the password and find it secret so once you can get into the telephone network you can in theory dial it computers all over the world and of course people believe you can do that if the security is lax you get enforces amazing secrets now the problem was that the Internet was beginning to develop a following in the 1980 s. Pop culture caught up with the scientists and we started seeing science fiction grappling with our computerized future the b.b.c. Micro was launched in 1981 and it was responsible for teaching a generation how to hack into the mainframes of at the very least there schools people were starting to get into the online space and the problem with self policing systems is they don't really scale these were games that didn't have vast numbers of people playing at once per instantiation of mud we'd have $36.00 players because a mainframe of $36.00 bits nazirite implemented it doesn't really scale up the amount of customer service and if you imagine Facebook having one person in charge of every 50 users who is reading everything they say and as soon as I step out of line they're going to zap them well how many uses Facebook have to point a 1000000000 monthly active users divide that by 50 and that's how many people that have to employ some and it's inconceivable you couldn't do that the network success again became meticulous he'll I'm wondering if I can have Mrs Barker here in the front row stand up and show off the t. Shirt that she has on whether the Internet is full go away. One of our more popular t. Shirts the Internet full go. Always sold a lot of them you know what year what year was the Internet full and when should apply to Anyway about a year after the eternal September began as are but if you will you wrote that the eternal September the turning point in Internet history because like Richard's mud the scale of the online world changed and it happened because of the growth of Internet service providers companies like America Online made and ready for the game I'm just finishing up here with many friends kayaking friends under computer guy just got America Online sounds great Listen I can't go to the game see every September a new influx of students arrive to university and on mass they logged into the network very few of those people had previous internet experience so they had to be schooled in the ticket some universities and colleges like my own actually taught classes in it but most newbies as they were called were let loose on the community and the old guard of the online world was responsible for slapping them into shape . Things usually calm down by the end of November and everybody would settle politely into their interest groups and would participate in the most popular social activity at a time posting and chatting in Usenet it was the social media of its day but more and more people around 1900 to 1993 were trickling in to usenet via their home Internet service providers which means the influx didn't just come at once every September but throughout the year and the previous amount of like Ok will educate you will will bring you through is completely lost because now literally hundreds of thousands of people are showing up everywhere and they're nuts from then on that fateful September the Internet's population with more than double every year 1st of all every say that I've been accused of doing many things some of them I did some I didn't this is Lawrence Cantor speaking at a conference in 2. 1010 is a lawyer or rather a former immigration lawyer who holds a dubious position in Internet history the Usenet was widely subscribed to outside the United States in a lot of people had an interest in perhaps coming to the United States I thought this would be a perfect place to promote immigration services and one thing led to another and all the sudden one night we were posting to pretty much every single Usenet group in existence which at the time was missing maybe 6000 or 8000 so in the course of one evening managed to get a message I wanted out to the pretty much the entire Internet world and April of 1904 Lawrence and his partner Martha Segal were working at their law firm in Arizona now Lawrence was an Internet user and he and thousands of others would dial in and so Lawrence had subscribed to a bunch of usenet groups about immigration he would occasionally let people know there that he was an immigration lawyer but that wasn't really enough to pay the bills what happened with his posting which is thought of as the 1st commercial spam is very bizarre the mainstream media was just waiting for some reason to start talking about the Internet because they really weren't much the New York Times probably gets the most credit for this a few days after this event they ran a large story in the front of the business section and the headline on it was something like gasp an ad in cyberspace now up until this point the Internet was relatively free of commercial interests there wasn't any advertising and no direct marketing and people were using the Usenet more than the e-mail coming so soon after the eternal September this gross breach of netiquette it was the final straw for the internet old guard the sink started taking a life on his own and we learned something that I guess we should have known but the Internet allowed for this mass communication it allowed for. When assembling of mobs and there was like a mob mentality and all of a sudden thousands or was would appear to be thousands of individuals started emailing and contacting all the media and complaining they contacted the Internet service providers to get us cut off and I have the honor of having having been called by Time magazine no less than a cover story actually mean my my former wife ex-wife at the time as the most hated couple in cyberspace Lawrence Kantor and Martha Segal where the 1st internet spammers and their Green Card spam was the undoing of the net the Internet at this point is showing many of the cultural features that we're familiar with now but the look is different however one man was about to change all that by creating a new communication system that would sit on top of the Internet this creation given away for free massively expands the horizons for what is possible online not just for coders and students but for people looking to make money both legally and illegally from this new and very powerful medium. I didn't invent the web just because I needed it because it was so frustrating that it didn't exist there were all these documentation systems and if you realized that it would just take a little program running on each to turn them into the web that were. Clearly going to be such a win and it certainly has proven to be. And in the next episode of Alex in Wonderland We'll find out what happens when you give tens of millions of people unshackled from traditional standards of behavior a tool that enables them to publish anything they want to the whole darn world. Thanks for joining me for this edition of discovery from the b.b.c. World Service the program was produced by Julian Siddle and me Alex script ascii. Some of them are worthless Some have infinite value and some will never know how much they are worth until you have to cash them in. On the next step just in once see probably present. Storytelling of the big. Miss. You know snap judgment tomorrow afternoon at one right here on 91.7 k l w San Francisco local public radio you could always find us online. That Archie will next at midnight we go live to London for the b.b.c. Overnight service and at 5 in the morning is Morning Edition from n.p.r. News host tomorrow morning by Kevin pants I'm Terry Kennedy screeching. Hello and welcome z. Nice day from the b.b.c. .