Thursday, September 27, 2012

Look What I found!

Way back in 1998 I was involved in a project Called Newstrolls, an early blog created by a few people moving from the old Hotwired threads as it died away. I participated in many of the threads, as well as writing a few articles.

I long thought that those articles had vanished in the ether, but it turns out a project called The Wayback Machine had archived Newstrolls several times. There is a complete collection of the articles I wrote, from September 1, 1998 to January 7, 1999. After that, disagreements with the management led me to stop writing them, as I was very busy with my work and didn't consider it a rewarding use of my free time.

Here's a listing of the articles, as archived by http://archive.org.

Bricks and Mortar January 7, 1999.

Just Say No! December 12, 1998.

Everything Looks Like a Nail December 4, 1998.

Counterparty Surveillance November 14, 1998.

Fools and Their Money October 13, 1998.

After the Near Miss October 3, 1998.

Cultural Engineering September 25, 1998.

The Potemkin Economy September 17, 1998.

Culture And Chaos September 10, 1998.

Margin Call for Crony Capitalism September 1, 1998.

Of course, it was a long time ago, and some of the subjects were sort of immediate: the Russian default, the Microsoft Anti-Trust Suit, Long-Term Capital Management, Internet development, and the contemporary state of political interference with the economy.

Many of the links are broken, and I've learned a lot about how humans work that I didn't know then. And, of course, it didn't have the sort of references my work from 2009 on did. But I put a lot of work into those articles, and readers who remember those times might enjoy them. Read more!