Welcome to the Kotke Ride Home for Monday, August 16th, 2021.

I'm Jackson Bird. Today, how one of the earliest bloggers predicted the dark side of the internet

and then went completely off-grid. Plus, the first tribally affiliated medical school on tribal land in the U.S. is bridging gaps,

and Yikyak is back.

Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

In the early 90s, one man predicted much of what would befall us today. In the early 90s, one man predicted much of what would befall us today, but pretty much

no one listened to him.

He wasn't just some dude who wrote a manifesto or something.

He was a sought-after academic, a computer scientist who had become a humanities professor.

His warnings about the direction

technology was headed were published in academic journals and outlets like Wired. He even ran an

internet mailing list, the Red Rock Eater News Service, which basically functioned like a newsletter

does today and is often considered a proto blog. His name is Philip Agra, and as far as we know, he's still

around, but his work remains unfinished, and his warnings about the future are only beginning

to be taken seriously, as that future has mostly already come to pass. Here are some of his

predictions summarized in a recent article in the Washington Post.

Quote,

In a 1994 paper published a year before the launches of Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay,

AgriFor saw that computers could facilitate the mass collection of data on everything in society,

and that people would overlook the privacy concerns because rather than

Big Brother collecting data to surveil citizens, it would be many different entities collecting

the data for lots of purposes, some good and some problematic. More profoundly, though,

...