a.s.h blossom: The Church of Euthanasia distributed self-consciously Dada literature over Usenet, and there was a ton of optimism about what the future of communication tech could hold. There was a lot of overlap between early hackers and the phone phreaker community.

TIL that the New Wave band DEVO was formed in response to the Kent State shootings. In 1970, co-founders Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis got serious about their idea of the "de-evolution" of the human race after Casale's friends Jeffrey Miller & Allison Krause were killed by OH national guards.

Reminds me of how almost all the French dadaists and surrealists were WWI veterans of the trenches seriously exploring alternatives to conventional thought and language.

Tolkien claims (in "A Secret Vice") that he wasn't the only soldier he knew who spent his time in the trenches constructing new languages.

Maybe that's why Dada and Neo-Dada was so popular during the Usenet and BBS days?

Was it? I just thought everyone was having fun being weird.

I mean, them having fun being weird was also probably what drew them to Dada and Neo-Dada, but there was some thought that went into how Dada could be used on new communication technologies.

The Church of Euthanasia distributed self-consciously Dada literature over Usenet, and there was a ton of optimism about what the future of communication tech could hold. There was a lot of overlap between early hackers and the phone phreaker community.

textfiles.com/magazines/EU... If any of this interests anyone, I recommend checking out textfiles.com. They've got a really cool 80's E-Zine section at textfiles.com/magazines/, lot of neat stuff in there.

textfiles.com

archives.textfiles.com/magazines.zip Here's the download link for the whole Zine section. It's only about 100Mb, plain text is tiny and compresses really easily.

archives.textfiles.com

Thanks, looking forward to checking it out.

Thanks!

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