MindVox

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

~ the goodbye ~

In july 1996, when MindVox stopped answering its modems, I was still two years away from owning one. This grave sits in the part of internet history I can read about at length but cannot remember. It was a Manhattan phone number before it was anything else. You had to be in the right area code for the call to be local, which kept the whole thing inside a few square miles of a city I had never been to.

It was founded in december 1991 by Bruce Fancher and Patrick K. Kroupa, who had known each other since the mid-eighties as Dead Lord and Lord Digital, both former members of the Legion of Doom. The domain phantom.com was registered on 14 february 1992. The system opened to invited users that march and to the public in november. Phiber Optik posted its first Usenet test message.

The subscriber list is the part that still reads strangely. Billy Idol was on it. So were John Perry Barlow, Douglas Rushkoff, Robert Altman and Kurt Cobain. About three thousand people had accounts by 1994, which is not a business, but the mix of who those three thousand were is the reason the name survived the company by thirty years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was for ~

MindVox sold internet access, but the access was not the product. What you paid for was the conferencing system on the other end, where the argument was already in progress and the people arguing were the ones writing the magazine pieces about all of this. The commercial ISPs of that moment sold a connection and expected you to go elsewhere with it. MindVox expected you to stay.

It was also unapologetically a hacker operation, run by two people whose reputations came from breaking into telephone systems in the previous decade. That was the marketing. In 1992 it was a genuinely strange thing to build a licensed business on, and for a few years it worked well enough that New York Magazine put it in the city's top three.

~ the afterlives ~

What went wrong is documented, at length, mostly by the people it happened to. Kroupa was a heroin addict through the years MindVox was supposed to be turning into a company, and the company was not being run by anyone else in the meantime. Dial-up access ended around july 1996 and the customer base was sold. The New York Times reported the closure that year while Wired was still writing about a system that appeared to be partly up in 1997, and nobody involved has ever nailed the date down.

Kroupa got clean on ibogaine and came back to write about it, and phantom.com carried an ibogaine archive from 2000 onward that had nothing to do with the original service. The mindvox.com name got reused for a social platform attempt around 2011 that also went quiet. The domain that started it now belongs to a payments app with no idea what used to be there.

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