Josh Wieder

Five years ago, someone by the name of Hacker Croll acquired a large amount of sensitive internal corporate documents from Twitter employees . Hacker Croll took 310 of these documents and sent them to the website Techcrunch . Techcrunch decided to use the information, publishing a series of stories based on the documents and the reactions of Twitter and Techcrunch's readers to the release of the documents. The documents themselves were not all that terrible. Twitter, it seems, is not an internet Enron. The release of the documents did not result in any serious consequences for Twitter - no flight of investment, no investigations, no indictments. Techcrunch summarized the contents of the documents as: "executive meeting notes, partner agreements and financial projections to the meal preferences, calendars and phone logs." For a crooked company such documents would be an absolute disaster. But few outside of the Internet and journalism industries noticed what happened.

Remember BBS? Remember the Well? The first BBS was the Community Memory BBS, and its first post is printed in memoriam below (this was posted in 1973, nearly 40 years ago), entered via a teletype machine stored inside a cardboard box with holes cut out for your hands and stored in the back of a record store. The moniker used by the typist, Dr Benway, is a recurring character in the novels of William S Burroughs - leading some of us to believe (with good humor and high spirits) that since its inception, the network as social medium has always veered a bit subversively. From here we have gone to Twitter and Facebook users coordinating the overthrow of governments, in sudden paroxysms of sweeping change and violence. Perhaps there is a bit of that encoded somewhere in this early missive. ***** IEF XQPRSTQXL SYSPRINT OFFSET INTERRUPT ***** APPLIESTO: ALL BOOGIES, BEANERS, BOLOS & BOZOS ...... DOC BENWAY HERE .......... NURSE, SLIP ME ANOTHER AMPULE OF LAUDANUM ....