Interview · moment 3 of 30
Usenet, Eternal September, and Burning Man's Radical Exclusion
from The Acid Story with Curtis Yarvin | The Tim Dillon Show #310 · #310
2 min
Guest
Curtis explains how Usenet was a decentralized, high-trust social network that worked because of an elitist filter, comparing it to Burning Man and Bohemian Grove, both of which rely on radical exclusion to create community trust.
- Tim attended Johns Hopkins CTY, which got rebranded as the Fire Festival of nerd camps after a catastrophe this summer.
- Advanced summer programs for smart kids involve intellectual boot camp—sitting alone doing algebra for six hours straight.
- Tim's daughter was supposed to attend CTY but it got canceled two days before the event this year.
- After graduating from Brown in 1992, Tim went to grad school in computer science at Berkeley for about a year and a half.
- Academia sucks even in computer science, and Berkeley had a bad run of systems professors specifically.
- Tim got into the early internet, which actually worked as a decentralized social network with no central government and no censorship.
- The early internet was called Usenet, and Tim is about to explain it before getting to acid.
University of California, BerkeleyBrown UniversityJohns HopkinsUsenet