Category Archives: Internet

Reflections After Watching the Terry Davis Documentary

I feel weirdly embarrassed about this, but I actually don’t watch that many Youtube videos. It wasn’t until the quarantine started that I became more and more interested in documentaries like TempleOS: Down the Rabbit Hole about the schizophrenic programmer Terry Davis. The internet is a gold mine of discovery for documentaries of this type because there are trillions of accounts and content that gets buried in the machine and you never know if you might be the first one to stumble across something.

All that being said, I was definitely far from the first one to discover TempleOS Down the Rabbit Hole documentary. Fredrik Knudsen‘s hour and a half long video on Youtube currently has over 4 million views. Terry Davis, the subject of the documentary, however, was a largely unknown figure for most of his life. For those who haven’t seen the documentary and want a brief summary, the next few paragraphs will hopefully offer a reasonable picture.

Terry suffered from schizophrenia and was unemployed for the majority of his life, confined to his parents home with little connection to the outside world aside from his computer. The people who did know of him probably knew his through his various handles on Reddit and programming forums such as Hacker News. This was because Terry would obsessively share links to his custom built operating system, which went by several different names but became more well known under the name TempleOS.

A screenshot of the Temple Operating System

This obsessive sharing along with his often incomprehensible messages would result in him getting shadow banned, so nobody would actually be seeing what he wrote. Few people were interested in using his operating system because it didn’t have a connection to the internet, and only supported 16 colors. He would also draw ridicule and even get pranked by people who found his strange and sometimes disturbing behavior amusing.

The pranking got especially bad when Terry began live streaming himself playing around with his operating system and demonstrating how he would communicate with God via one of the applications. At some point his condition became worse and he stopped taking his medication, which led to him attacking his father and being kicked out of his home. His life on the streets thereafter is harsh and unforgiving. He is arrested on several occasions and lives out of his car, then on the streets. Less than a few years later he is found dead, in what is described as a suicide as he is run over by a train.

One of Terry Davis’s live streams

I was deeply impressed by the amount of research and clips that Fredrik dug up from forums and live streaming sites to compose his documentary. Because Terry shared so much of his life online, the documentary ends up offering a pretty complete picture of the man. There are moments of heart breaking lucidness in between Terry’s racial slurs and rants about God. At one point he becomes very apologetic to his parents, admitting that he does not know why he has such a difficult time controlling himself. The most heart breaking is the last published video before his tragic suicide, where he describes himself as “a bizarre little man going back and forth.”

There is a lot to take away from TempleOS: Down the Rabbit Hole. First of all, there is the extreme loneliness that Terry must have felt throughout his life, having no one to interact with outside his immediate family. Second, the larger world of programmers like him who also suffer from mental illness and work alone. Third, the sad fact that mentally ill folks who turn to the internet are often faced with harassment that most likely makes their condition worse. Fourth, Terry had incredible skills that could have benefitted society but instead he was hidden away because of his mental illness.

I haven’t talked a whole lot about mental health on my blog but I believe that the mental health system in the United States is in need of total upheaval. This is in part because of the lack of coverage for mental health in many insurance plans but also the high cost of quality therapy. Certainly, programmers who work for profitable corporations might not have this problem. But we often forget that there are plenty of programmers who work on the margins of society. Not all programmers make huge salaries. Some of them have difficulty working with other people, whether because of social anxiety or other conditions. Some find the pressure from a corporate job to be unbearable. Does that mean they don’t deserve to receive help? Of course not.

The fact that Terry Davis built his own operating from scratch is astonishing. It takes a great deal of focus, commitment, and motivation to complete that kind of feat. In a different world where he had treatment who knows what else he could have accomplished. Terry could have offered training on how to build your own OS. He could have been a role model to other programmers who suffer from mental illness.

Outsider art by Wölfli. His father died when he was young, leaving their family in extreme poverty. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and sentenced to live in an asylum after molesting a 17 year old girl. Source

In a way I see Terry’s operating system as an example of outsider art. For those unfamiliar with the term, outsider art is art made by those who have never learned art in school and have no professional artistic training. Some of the most fascinating art I have ever seen was created by these “outsiders” because it is so far from anything I could have imagined myself. A fair amount of outsider art is also made by people who suffer from mental illness. Terry’s games and drawings like his pixel art elephant have an abstract quality to them that also reminds me of outsider art.

What happened to Terry Davis was a tragedy, and I hope that we can learn from it so that nothing like it ever happens again. I am grateful to Fredrik Knudsen and TempleOS: Down the Rabbit Hole for shedding light on this person that I otherwise might never had heard about.

If you enjoyed this article, consider following me on Twitter @nadyaprimak or if you need more tips on breaking into the tech industry, you can read my book “Foot in the Door”.

Net Art Resources | Why I Miss the Early Internet

Following up from my article “Why I Miss the Nineties Internet” here are some useful resources if you’re interested in getting involved with creative coding in the net art space or want to take a look at some old school websites for yourself.

https://archive.org/web/

The Wayback Machine allows you to search URL’s from the past and see screenshots of old websites. It’s an impressive archive.

http://oldweb.today

Similiar to the Wayback Machine but appears to retain some interactivity as opposed to simply a screenshot of an old webpage. Actually simulates the browser window.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org

Web Design Museum has screenshots of many of the early versions of major corporate sites like Paypal, Netflix, and Apple.. but it also has tons of lesser known websites that really show the range of design experimentation that was happening in the 90’s and early 2000’s. It’s a great source of inspiration for artists who want to draw on that sense of old internet nostalgia.

http://rhizome.org/program/

Rhizome is a hub for digital artists who work with the web. It was founded by Mark Tribe when artists were just beginning to experiment online and has an impressive archive. There are tons of creative coders featured on this website who combine art and technology in unique and fascinating ways.

http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/no-12-variant-analyses-interrogations-of-new-media-art-and-culture-patrick-lichty/

I had the pleasure of meeting Patrick Lichty in person when I was in college. Lichty has been practicing with digital media long before I was born and wrote these insightful essays on how digital art has evolved from the very early days.

http://www.teleportacia.org/war/

A classic piece of net art “My Boyfriend Came Back From The War” was made back in 1996 by Russian artist Olia Lilinia.

https://ristar.itch.io/secret-little-haven

Made by Victoria Dominowski, this is another game that draws on nineties internet nostalgia, but focused more on the AOL chatroom aesthetic. Even the name “safe little haven” reminds me of how I felt about my computer back then.

I hope you find these net art resources useful! Are you inspired to make an experimental game? What do you think of the internet of the nineties? Do you have a favorite artwork or game among those which I shared? Any ideas of your own about how to improve the internet and make it a better place? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

If you enjoyed this article, consider following me on Twitter @nadyaprimak or if you need more tips on breaking into the tech industry, you can read my book “Foot in the Door”.

Why I Miss the Early Internet: Part 2

This is a continuation of “Why I Miss the Early Internet: Part 1”.

What can we do to revive the experimental attitude that prevailed in the nineties internet? We can do is form our own community of web experimenters who draw upon the nineties internet for inspiration. There are artists today who leverage our nostalgia for the nineties internet and create experimental games and other media which bring back that sense of wonder and mystery that used to be all over the internet. Artists who capture magical moments where you stumble upon something that resonates with you completely unexpectedly, like an explorer in the wilderness. My personal favorite artist who makes work like this is Nathalie Lawhead.

You can find most of her work, which has been described both as art and as experimental games, at her itch.io page. Much of Nathalie’s work draws on the psychedelic, strange, and surprising aspects of the early internet. Her color palette is bright and minimalist, her characters cartoonish and bizarre. In some of her work, like “Everything is going to be OK,” Nathalie evokes the feeling of an nineties desktop computer display, with the low resolution application icons and abstract background.

A screenshot from Nathalie Lawhead’s game “Everything is going to be OK”

As you click on each application you are presented with little vignettes that are very personal to Nathalie’s life. The nineties internet aesthetic fits the subject matter perfectly, because it is fragmented, sometimes difficult to understand, and demands the full attention of the user. It is both mysterious and fascinating, and rewards users who take the time to explore the interface for hidden secrets, taking on the explorer mentality I mentioned earlier.

I don’t want to describe Nathalie’s work in too much detail because she does it better herself than I ever could, and she has plenty of content describing her work, both on her blog and on youtube. If you have any interest at all in making experimental games or interactive experiences, I highly recommend checking out her stuff.

Another screenshot from “Everything is going to be OK”

Hopefully by now it makes sense why learning about the early internet is not just for historians and nerds. Artists like Nathalie and others draw upon the nostalgia and use it to create fantastic experiences that are both unique and compelling. I hope this article motivates people to explore more digital content that draws upon old internet tropes.

If you’re interested in creating your own net art or experimental games and looking for some additional resources, check out my follow up article.

If you enjoyed this article, consider following me on Twitter @nadyaprimak or if you need more tips on breaking into the tech industry, you can read my book “Foot in the Door”.

Why I Miss the Early Internet: Part 1

I was born in 1991 so I feel like I got the tail-end of the wondrous, strange, and experimental world of the early internet. Yet even though I was a kid and even though the internet is a lot more accessible now than it used to be, I still long for the days of the nineties internet. It really felt like the wild wild west back then, with each new website I encountered like finding a unicorn while out on a stroll. I think even the inaccessibility made it feel like a more magical place. Let me explain why.

It wasn’t so simple as just turning on your computer and clicking on your browser icon. Maybe it was also because I was just a kid, but I imagined that awful dial-up tone as the sound of the data traveling thousands of miles and connecting to other computers in far-away places.

The most popular browser of the nineties was not the most glamorous

I visualized how the data would travel into the telephone and across all the poles I would see outside when my parents drove me to school, like a squirrel racing across the wires. At the time I really believed it to be a kind of magic, that if I broke apart the computer I would uncover some kind of little fairy behind the screen.

In some ways today’s internet is better, of course. The field of user experience did not even exist in the nineties, and there were no standards defining what made a site easy to use. Even worse, there were no screen reader tools or really any tools that allowed people with disabilities to use the internet.

A homepage for a game developer from 1996

Yet I think something was lost with the new era of user research and user experience, along with all of the CSS frameworks like Bootstrap which homogenized the web design landscape. These days most websites look very similiar, and people are afraid of straying from the popular styles. I think this is a bit tragic, because there is a lot less experimentation, almost like people have given up creating anything new on the web.

For artists I think the modern internet is especially challenging. Everyone is scrambling to share their work on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and that’s only the popular social websites. When you start factoring in blogs and portfolio sites and other creative communities the numbers become staggering. Creative types just getting started in their career have a hard time getting noticed unless they carve out a very specific niche for themselves. The problem with niches, just like the problem with the current homogenized web design of the modern web, is that it also takes away room for experimentation.

Geocities was a popular platform in the time period, with lots of moving images, background music, and general psychedelic vibes.

Sometimes I like to ask myself theoretical questions about where the internet might be today if things had gone differently. What would happen if Google was only one of several popular search engines? What if the internet had gone a totally different direction, or remained the domain of early adopters and academics rather than becoming a mainstream commodity? What would an internet that was not dominated by corporate entities look like? What would an internet made for digital artists look like?

While technically from 2001 and almost impossible to read, this website illustrates just how experimental people used to be on the web.

Of course, all of this might seem terribly pointless to ponder. Sure, you might be thinking again, it’s interesting to consider these questions, but what can we do with this information now? We cannot turn back the clock on all of the UX research nor can we persuade corporations to stop offering their services online. Most of us rightly wouldn’t want that to happen even if it was an option, because accessibility for disabled folks and shopping online are things that we appreciate.

This is Part 1 of a two part blog series. Check out Part 2 here where I talk about artist Nathalie Lawhead and how she leverages the nineties internet aesthetic today.

If you enjoyed this article, consider following me on Twitter @nadyaprimak or if you need more tips on breaking into the tech industry, you can read my book “Foot in the Door”.