Eternal September: When AOL Flooded Usenet and Net Culture Broke

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

I want you to do me a quick favor, just to check your calendar for a second. Yeah, take a quick look. What year does it actually say?

I mean, you are probably looking at a day in the 2020s, right?

SPEAKER_2 (0:11)

Most likely, yeah.

SPEAKER_1 (0:12)

Let's unpack this a bit, because what if I told you that in a very specific, fiercely guarded corner of the internet, you are completely wrong?

SPEAKER_2 (0:20)

Right, because in that particular corner of the digital world, the 2020s just haven't happened yet.

SPEAKER_1 (0:25)

Exactly.

SPEAKER_2 (0:26)

The 2010s didn't happen either. If you check the system clocks of certain legacy servers out there, the date is formatted as this unbounded number of days since a very specific month.

SPEAKER_1 (0:36)

Right. Today is actually a day in September 1993 Yep. Because for them, September 1993 just never ended. It is perpetually, stubbornly September.

SPEAKER_2 (0:47)

It really is.

SPEAKER_1 (0:48)

So welcome to our deep dive. Today our mission is to unpack a foundational piece of internet history known as Eternal September or the September that never ended.

SPEAKER_2 (0:56)

Which is such a great name.

SPEAKER_1 (0:57)

It is. We are taking a stack of historical data, encyclopedic sources and early internet lore to explore the exact cultural phenomenon and the precise timeframe between late 1993 and early 1994 when the internet forever lost its small town feel.

SPEAKER_2 (1:13)

And to really understand the gravity of that loss, we first have to establish what the digital landscape actually looked like before 1993

SPEAKER_1 (1:20)

Right. Set the scene for us.

SPEAKER_2 (1:22)

Because we tend to think of the internet as this massive, chaotic global metropolis, right? Accessible from a little slab of glass in our pockets.

SPEAKER_1 (1:30)

Yeah. But it definitely didn't start that way.

SPEAKER_2 (1:33)

No, not at all. The center of online social life back then was a network called Usenet.

SPEAKER_1 (1:39)

Usenet, which is a name you really don't hear every day anymore.

SPEAKER_2 (1:42)

You don't. But it was essentially this massive early network of discussion forums. They called them news groups.

SPEAKER_1 (1:47)

Okay, right.

SPEAKER_2 (1:49)

If you were online in the 1980s or the early 1990s, this was the absolute place to be. You'd go there to debate politics, share code or argue about Star Trek.

SPEAKER_1 (2:00)

Like an early Reddit, sort of.

SPEAKER_2 (2:02)

But the barrier to entry was incredibly high, wasn't it? I mean, you couldn't just go buy a subscription at Best Buy.

SPEAKER_1 (2:09)

Exactly.

SPEAKER_2 (2:10)

You usually needed institutional access. You had to be employed at a tech company or working at a research university or just be a very committed computer scientist.

SPEAKER_1 (2:19)

Right.

SPEAKER_2 (2:19)

And we really have to talk about the physical architecture of Usenet because that dictates the entire culture.

SPEAKER_1 (2:24)

Yeah, let's get into that.

SPEAKER_2 (2:26)

So Usenet wasn't the World Wide Web. There were no browsers.

It relied on a store and forward architecture, specifically something called UUCP.

SPEAKER_1 (2:35)

UUCP, Unix to Unix copy. Let's break that down for a second. This means servers weren't constantly connected like they are today, right?

SPEAKER_2 (2:43)

Correct. So instead of a live, always on connection, these massive institutional computers would literally dial each other over physical phone lines.

SPEAKER_1 (2:51)

Wow. Over regular phone lines.

SPEAKER_2 (2:53)

Yeah. Often late at night when the rates were cheaper, and they would sync their data. They would pass bundles of messages to each other, basically bucket brigade style all across the globe.

SPEAKER_1 (3:04)

Which means, and this is wild to think about now, every single byte of data being transferred was costing those universities and tech companies actual money in long distance phone bills.

SPEAKER_2 (3:14)

Exactly.

That economic reality is the absolute bedrock of early internet culture. Bandwidth was incredibly precious.

SPEAKER_1 (3:22)

Right.

SPEAKER_2 (3:22)

Because of that, the community developed a very strict set of unspoken social conventions. They called it netiquette.

SPEAKER_1 (3:29)

Netiquette. So that meant keeping your posts incredibly concise, right? Like if you were replying to a message, you didn't quote the entire 50 line post just to say, I agree.

SPEAKER_2 (3:40)

Absolutely not. That was a cardinal sin. Because you were literally forcing hundreds of servers around the world to pay to transmit your useless text.

SPEAKER_1 (3:48)

Right. And because new users joined the network very slowly and in very small numbers, the existing community had this robust capacity to absorb them.

SPEAKER_2 (3:58)

Yeah, they could teach them these rules organically. From a sociological standpoint, it functioned a lot like Dunbar's number.

SPEAKER_1 (4:03)

Remind me, that's the cognitive limit to social relationships?