The Data Back-Road has many meanings to many people. For
those who know me in the Real World, or those who read me, you’ve heard the
obscure reference to the Data Back-Road.
Some people ask me if it’s a bar, others ask me what city I found it in,
but most just chalk it up to my weird personality.
There are only a very few of us left who know about the Data
Back-Road. Where it is, how we found it, the things we found when we jumped on
the Road and just kept going…. Some followed a Data Trail, but it was the same
thing.
If you don’t know what I am talking about, it’s because you
were not part of the Internet during the Wild West phase. We, us – the Users –
created line after line after line of HTML code in the rush to give the
Internet content. There is a reason these sites were called Homestead and
GeoCities. We were, quite literally, populating the Internet. We liked the
Spiders, crawling the Internet and
webbing together pages and domains. But the notion that this was a Web soon
became inadequate and the idea of traveling from one web to another and another
gave us the feel of traveling a Highway.
In my case, I found the Data Back-Road in 1994, when the
search engines had names that are long since forgotten. Some focused on images,
some focused on regions. Only those of us who spent amazing amounts of wasted
time really knew where to go to find what. The internet was so small then, we
could literally email each other the places we liked. There was no streaming,
no RSS, no alerts. There were BBS Boards awkwardly transitioning from a
2-dimensional space to the 3 dimensional world of ICQ and Web Pages.
Many think the Data Back-Road went the way of GeoCities, but
long before Yahoo made the fatal decision to literally disconnect the servers
from the Internet.
I had been “tapping in code”, dialing the modem and “jacking
in” for about 2 years when I first heard the line. It was 1996, and I accidentally entered the
career path of my Father. I was pulling into the parking structure at the
Marina Del Rey shopping center. I had only heard one single from the artist Poe
“Hello”, and I bought the music. Back then I was a member of BMG, and so I just
selected Hello from the next order. I loved it instantly and had heard “Angry
Johnny”, but I hadn’t really listened.
I found the Angry Psychos on a mailing list off some random
BBS board. In a few months, my browsing led me to the Data Back-Road. Somehow,
that group of individuals, who jacked in on their MacBooks and Dells and HPs,
was a little different. They were Angry
in a very different way. My perspective shifted and I began running into the
same Elf, over and over again.
Over time, the Data Back-Road has led me to some strange
places. When Yahoo pulled the plug on Geocities, I lost my HomePage. By then, the Back-Road became something new
entirely. Now, the likes of Facebook
have posted neon billboards and expensive coffee shops along the Data Back-Road.
They offer a husband/wife/lover/friend if you just “Click Here”. There is a customized Neon sign just for you
timed exactly 2 weeks after you bought Charmin, to try Angel Soft when you go
to Vons, here, take this coupon!
I miss the Early Days when just a few inadvertent clicks resulted
in the familiar sites of the Data Back-Road, and falling right Down a Rabbit Hole.
