The future is the past…
That computer is the Toshiba T-1000. I bought one as an undergrad at Alabama, with its whopping 512k RAM (which I promptly upgraded to 1.2 Meg!) When connected by a phone jack to a portable 2400 baud modem, I could dial into the university mainframe and hit TELNET, giving me access to discussion boards and groups. Pretty damned cool for 1987, to be sitting on the floor at ten Hoor and plugged into the wall — and the world.
(we all know that I was playing a lot of Rogue)
Some of you recall the dial-up noises of AOL, and the various groups and forums it allowed you to explore. But it took the wider web and the evolution of the browser to take us into fresher possibilities. The structure of the old BBS-style message boards was still a thing, but LiveJournal and Typepad and Blogger and WordPress brought us ever-better ways of telling the stories of our fandom.
Alas — those platforms gave us a lot of freedom, but only for those who knew how to code and create from scratch. At scale, you needed multi-user experiences, simplified and aggregated. And thus large collectives of fandoms would share spaces. Each with their own unit in the digital condominium space.
Then the HOA fees started to climb, and the only way to keep the lawns trimmed and the leaks plugged was to let advertisers slap billboards everywhere. And I mean everywhere. And now the fandom wasn’t about what we collectively treasured, nor our shared experiences. Nope. The properties that we all built through our expressions and our comments and our camaraderie became tools of private equity. Our value traded based upon the economy of our attention. Eyeballs to be rented, souls to be sold.
TRL isn’t part of a conglomerate. There is no school-marm overlord to patrol your language, to prevent you from scaring the ad agencies away. There is only what we — the greater We — can do together. Watching each other’s backs. Pitching the coins and ducats into the wishing well. Value for Value. You see things you like? Are you not entertained? Your pennies nickels do indeed add up, and we can keep this thing rolling.
The future is here. Thin Red Line. And it is a throwback, to people writing for people, and not for algorithms or reach or ad targets. It is for fans who want to touch other fans, especially at a time when the in-person experience is out of reach for so many. This is our communal ground… virtual sidelines and bleachers where we can cheer and celebrate and cry together. This is our beachhead in the fight for our identity as a fan base. This is where The Tide comes in.
Roll Tide, my friends.
