alt.culture

» see altculture.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

This was a reference work about the 1990s, written during the 1990s, for Americans who were in them. The entries define slang and bands in the present tense, which is a strange thing to read now and was a stranger thing to attempt then. I came online in 1998 from Turkey on a dial-up modem, and the decade I was finishing was not the one being catalogued here. There was no route to this site from where I sat and no reason to look for one.

It started as a book. Steven Daly and Nathaniel Wice wrote alt.culture: An A-to-Z Guide to the '90s for HarperCollins, published in the United States in March 1996, with a UK edition from Fourth Estate. The website arrived later the same year, and the authors' own description of why is the best line in the whole archive: it began, they wrote, as a promotional device and an irresponsible prank.

The prank outgrew the book. Each of the nine hundred-plus entries carried a web address where one existed, which in 1996 was a laborious editorial act and the thing that made the site more useful than the paper version. Entries lived at addresses of the form /aentries/c/cyberpunk.html, one letter folder per initial, and they cross-linked to each other. Klosterman, in The Nineties, quotes the entry for *69: a relationship-altering phone feature, also a 1994 song by R.E.M.

~ the dossier ~

~ the time warner year ~

In 1997 the site joined Time Warner's Pathfinder portal, which bought it an audience and an obligation. It committed to five new entries a week plus a weekly column, and the navigation grew the apparatus of a real publication: alphabetical indexes, category indexes along the lines of alt.music and alt.politics, previous and next links, outside research links. Wired ran a piece that April asking whether it was time for alt.culture to alter its name, the joke being that the decade was starting to date.

Pathfinder itself was dead by 1999, which is the risk of being hosted inside somebody else's strategy.

~ bought by the wrong people at the wrong time ~

At some point after that, alt.culture was acquired by Automatic Media, the holding company behind Feed and Suck. English Wikipedia's article on Automatic Media calls alt.culture its first acquisition and gives no date and no account of what happened to it afterwards. Automatic Media was incorporated in July 2000 and stopped on 8 June 2001, which gave it less than a year to own anything.

You can watch the consequence in the archive without needing a source for it. The homepage capture of 18 September 2001 is three thousand bytes with a javascript line bolted on top sending visitors to plastic.com, Automatic Media's one surviving property, at a section address built for alt.culture. The last captures of actual entries sit in late November 2001. After that the record goes quiet for years, and by 6 February 2006 the domain answers with a registrar page reading that altculture.com is coming soon. From March 2006 to 2011 it returns an authorization error. Today it has no DNS record at all.

~ what it was five years early for ~

Wikipedia went live in January 2001, in the last months alt.culture was being updated, and English Wikipedia now files alt.culture under defunct online encyclopedias. The two projects wanted similar things from a hyperlink and arrived at them from opposite directions: two named authors with a book contract and a house style, against an anonymous crowd with no style at all. One of those models can be abandoned when its owner goes under.

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