NEWSLETTER

by vice staff
illustrations by rick froberg



If you’re among the lucky 25 percent of Americans who own a PC in 1994, chances are you’ve graduated from futzing with crude drawings of human and animal genitals in Microsoft Paint to sidling up beside your screechy modem armed with one of those internet trial offers America Online delivers in the mail. Five hours and three dozen chat rooms later, you discovered you have a real knack for trolling screen names in search of lonely souls who’ll help you practice your one-handed typing technique and play along as you try to convince some guy pretending to be a girl to stick a marker up his/her ass. And you want more.

We’re guessing cybersex wasn’t the first thing alpha nerd J.C.R. Licklider had in mind when he envisioned his Intergalactic Computer Network (the theoretical underpinnings of the internet before the internet became the internet as we know it). And yet here we are. But was it so hard to predict? Even the most pit-stained, obnoxiously optimistic Radio Shack hobbyist had to expect that the internet would evolve from a crummy, inaccessible collection of wires and plastic chips into a clearinghouse for all of humanity’s basest and most inane activities. In fact, the only question left to answer is: How long before we can watch a virtual Sharpie slide into a polygonal asshole? We believe people will have to exhaust all the different ways of getting their rocks off online before realizing the internet’s potential to spread and share information, unite the world in peace, and bleed serious cash out of the grandest invention since the melon-baller. It will be possible soon through a little development called Virtual Reality (VR).

In the future, everyone will be stationed at personalized home internet terminals for eight to 14 hours a day. Each individual will wear a special helmet that mimics and supersedes at least three senses. Our VR stations will have the capacity to digitally teleport us to Tel Aviv for hummus or to the middle of the Amazon for a mass orgy. Laugh it up, but the Japanese are already moving forward with this business. At the Second Industrial Virtual Reality Show & Conference, held outside Tokyo in late June of this year, they prophesied electronic life in 4-D. That’s an extra fucking dimension we didn’t even know about!

Which brings us to downsides we’ll have to put up with before things get wonderful: Currently, the internet is an abomination of design and aesthetics. It doesn’t really work or have that “Holy shit!” factor we expect from life-changing technology. Mostly it’s a jumble of words, logos, and terrible pictures affixed to solid-colored backgrounds. When do we get it to actually do stuff, like, say, buy a one-eyed Chinese baby? Following the Computer Security Act, the power to develop internet standards shifted from the National Security Agency to the National Institute for Standards and Technology, a division of the Department of Commerce. So let’s do some commerce! We want to, in ascending order of priority: shop, talk to people without fees, read news, research dinosaur bones found in Fiji, bank, read books, date, have VR sex, day-trade, converse with people who can’t speak our language, partake in fun quizzes, eat, and listen to all our favorite music for free without either of our cheeks leaving the seat cushion.

Why are we not doing these things yet? It’s practically the year 2000 already, and lots of sci-fi authors and filmmakers think some big shit should be happening really soon. Perhaps the policy-making overlords who are trying to figure out how to control this thing are simultaneously gumming up the works. After all, this unregulated place where anything is possible sounds like kind of a nightmare for people who get richer when things are controlled.

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Comments

	gayfag, on Oct 27, 2009 wrote: My parents IBM took me to whitehouse.com and beyond.
	duck duck goose, on Oct 27, 2009 wrote: "The Road Ahead is now in the rear view mirror. " Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.
Anonymous, on Oct 27, 2009 wrote: The Road Ahead is now in the rear view mirror.
Anonymous, on Oct 27, 2009 wrote: I actually have a magazine like PC World from like 1994 and it is almost exactly like this. I found it @ a raymour & flanigans, and it was being used as a display on a coffee table for sale.
Anonymous, on Oct 27, 2009 wrote: yes, fuck comcast
	tallywacker, on Oct 27, 2009 wrote: who would have thought then that cities would propose having citywide wifi, only to be shot down by a company like comcast that claims it would be against the antitrust laws, when actually, they are the only company that provides citywide service anyways? fuck comcast.
	The Host, on Oct 27, 2009 wrote: People had laptops in 1994? I don’t remember any.
Anonymous, on Oct 27, 2009 wrote: Geocities!
	enstigator, on Oct 16, 2009 wrote: back when reality in graphics was only a dream.
Anonymous, on Oct 15, 2009 wrote: He must be a mouth breather.
Anonymous, on Oct 15, 2009 wrote: Everyone get’s the joke you idiots. It’s called sarcasm.
	tammy faye, on Oct 14, 2009 wrote: i remember trading .gifs over dial-up 9600 baud or whatever and it would take minutes to load the image. you’d send over a topless girl and sometimes the person would send you a headshot of kirk cameron. it was the original rick roll.
Anonymous, on Oct 14, 2009 wrote: HINT: comments that start with ’HINT:’ and purport to tell the reader something which they couldn’t guess at themselves are 99% bullshit. This one being included in the remaining 1%.
Anonymous, on Oct 14, 2009 wrote: As if the style of writing hasn’t changed at all since ’94
Anonymous, on Oct 14, 2009 wrote: Hahahahahahaha Virtual Reality!
Anonymous, on Oct 13, 2009 wrote: back then google was only a word that no one had made up yet.
Anonymous, on Oct 13, 2009 wrote: Hint: this whole issue is a ’lost issue’ themed issue. It’s not really a lost issue of Vice at all.
Anonymous, on Oct 12, 2009 wrote: sweet jesus. i just remembered that i read bill gates’ book "the road ahead" and it was full of predictions that have come true. looking back, they were all pretty fucking obvious but i was young, dumb, and full of what would eventually turn into come.
Anonymous, on Oct 12, 2009 wrote: it’s a seriez of tubez
	luxisabandit, on Oct 12, 2009 wrote: who would of thought that shit would take over like it did
Anonymous, on Oct 12, 2009 wrote: ok, this did it. the sharpie-in-pooper reference made me sure of my hunch, that this issue is a joke. still prettyd rad though
Anonymous, on Oct 11, 2009 wrote: this whole issue is too fucking cool!! time machine
Anonymous, on Oct 8, 2009 wrote: i remember the days of aol start up discs that were on floppies.
Anonymous, on Oct 8, 2009 wrote: just wait until icq comes out. it’s going to blow mindzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.