Cybercultural Capital: ASCII's Preservation of the Digital Underground

In my conference presentation, “Cybercultural Capital: ASCII’s Preservation of the Digital Underground,”
I will examine independent electronic magazines
published in the American Standard Code for Information
Interchange, between the years of 1984 and 1993. This period begins with the emergence of the first organized ASCII magazines and ends with the creation of Mosaic, the WWW browser that incorporated HTML and put an end to ASCII’s reign as the most widely-used electronic file-type. This nine-year span saw the creation of many independent ASCII magazines, 288 of which can still be accessed through the textfiles.com archives, currently
storing over ten thousand issues from the era. These
magazines include fiction, poetry, articles, and a plethora of subversive technical manuals on topics such as hacking,
virii, and sabotage. Just as Russian Samizdat publishers attempted to undermine the hegemony of the Soviet state through subversive literature, ASCII publishers of North America attempted to undermine Corporate hegemony. In my presentation, I will examine the ruling ethos in ASCII literature, considering cybercultural resistance to corporate paradigms, the cultural need for cyberwriters, and the influence of hacking, sabotage, and computer
culture on ASCII fiction and poetry. In an age
before the World Wide Web, ASCII text files were a powerful medium for independent publishing, offering disenfranchised suburban cyberpunks easy access to the means of textual production and distribution. While
thousands of ASCII texts are currently archived on
websites like etext.org and textfiles.com, these websites are maintained by amateurs with no formal training as
archivists. As the Internet continues to grow, websites are updated, websites become defunct, and old files are often overwritten by new files. Internet archives are unstable and their documents are at risk of becoming corrupted
or erased. My presentation will highlight the literary
importance of ASCII texts and explain why an archival project must be undertaken immediately to ensure that the writings of this movement are not entirely lost.
Biography
Ihave been active in the Canadian independent
publishing scene since 1995. In the past decade I have
published nearly 400 issues of various ASCII zines,
maintained “The Current Text Scene” (a website
dedicated to tracking contemporary ASCII zines), and published an ASCII-related article with Broken Pencil. My other areas of interest include creative writing and experimental fiction.