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The Personal Website Comeback
People are building personal websites again. Not for SEO, not for monetization, but for the simple act of owning a corner of the internet. The personal web is resurgent.
deadpacket :: April 12, 2026 :: 9 min read
deadpacket
Tech culture observer and late-night internet archaeologist. Writes about the weird corners of the web and the systems we built that built us.
~ cut by deadpacket / phreak.fm ~
tech cultureinternet historyplatform politicsweird internetdigital culture
Articles by deadpacket
STA
RSS Is Not Dead
Feed readers are experiencing a quiet renaissance. The people who never stopped using RSS are right. And phreak.fm itself is built on the bones of the open web.
deadpacket :: April 8, 2026 :: 7 min read
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The Last Social Network You Will Ever Join
Platform fatigue is real, but every year a new network launches promising to fix everything the last one broke. Why we keep signing up, and why we keep being disappointed.
deadpacket :: April 2, 2026 :: 6 min read
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The 3AM Frequency: Notes on Staying Up Too Late Online
There is a specific quality to the internet after midnight. The algorithms quiet down. The professionals go to sleep. What remains is stranger and more honest.
deadpacket :: March 30, 2026 :: 6 min read
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LAN Party Culture: The Physical Gathering for a Digital Ritual
deadpacket :: March 23, 2026 :: 7 min read
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Anonymous: From 4chan Trolls to Global Hacktivist Movement
deadpacket :: March 23, 2026 :: 7 min read
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The Death of the Forum
Web forums built the internet's most valuable knowledge bases. Platforms killed them. And we lost something essential when threaded discussion died.
deadpacket :: March 22, 2026 :: 9 min read
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Usenet: The Internet's First Social Network
deadpacket :: March 21, 2026 :: 5 min read
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Before Apple, There Were Blue Boxes
Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs built and sold illegal blue boxes at UC Berkeley before they ever dreamed of personal computers. The blue box was their first product, and without it, Apple might never have existed.
deadpacket :: March 19, 2026 :: 7 min read
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The BBS Era
Before the web, there were bulletin board systems. Dialing in at 2400 baud, ANSI art, message boards, and door games. The SysOps who built networks from their bedrooms shaped everything that came after.
deadpacket :: March 8, 2026 :: 10 min read
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The Wayback Machine: Why Big Tech Fears the Internet Archive
Brewster Kahle built a library to save the entire internet from disappearance. The work still matters, and the opposition proves it.
deadpacket :: February 15, 2026 :: 8 min read
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The IRC Channels That Built the Internet
EFnet, DALnet, Undernet. How real-time chat in the 1990s created social infrastructure for open source, hacking, and electronic music communities. The channel as gathering place.
deadpacket :: February 14, 2026 :: 10 min read
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Geocities as Digital Archaeology
The neighborhoods, the under-construction GIFs, the visitor counters. Geocities represented ordinary people building web pages because they wanted to. Its 2009 shutdown and the Archive Team rescue changed how we think about digital preservation.
deadpacket :: February 8, 2026 :: 10 min read
SIG
Bernie S and the Red Box Tapes
Red boxes generated the coin-drop tones that payphones used to signal the operator. Bernie S distributed cassette tapes loaded with those tones, turning every Walkman into a free-call machine.
deadpacket :: February 3, 2026 :: 8 min read
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The Dial-Up Sound: A Technical and Cultural History
What each screech actually means: carrier detection, protocol negotiation, training sequences. Why the modem handshake had to be audible and became a cultural touchstone.
deadpacket :: January 11, 2026 :: 8 min read
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The Jargon File: The Living Glossary That Defined Hacker Culture
deadpacket :: January 3, 2026 :: 7 min read
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Webrings and Guestbooks: Social Infrastructure of the Early Web
deadpacket :: December 30, 2025 :: 6 min read
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Joe Engressia: The Blind Phreaker Who Could Whistle
Born blind with absolute pitch, Joe Engressia could whistle a perfect 2600Hz tone with his lips alone. He became one of the earliest phone phreakers, and later reinvented himself as Joybubbles.
deadpacket :: November 30, 2025 :: 7 min read
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The Demoscene: Computer Art in Impossible Constraints
From the Amiga to the web: coding parties, size-limited competitions, and the purest form of creative hacking. The demoscene as UNESCO cultural heritage.
deadpacket :: November 15, 2025 :: 8 min read
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ANSI Art and the BBS Underground
ACiD Productions, iCE, and the art groups that turned 80-column terminals into galleries. The first digital art movement, sixteen colors and a blinking cursor.
deadpacket :: November 13, 2025 :: 8 min read
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Susan Thunder and the Art of Social Engineering
In the early 1980s Los Angeles hacker scene, Susan Thunder stood out as a pioneer of social engineering. She could talk her way past security that no technical exploit could breach.
deadpacket :: November 13, 2025 :: 7 min read
SIG
Dark Dante and the Porsche
Kevin Poulsen took over the phone lines of Los Angeles radio station KIIS-FM to guarantee he would be the 102nd caller, winning a Porsche 944 S2. The hack was elegant. The fallout was not.
deadpacket :: November 4, 2025 :: 6 min read
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The Command Line as Philosophy
deadpacket :: October 19, 2025 :: 5 min read
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The Text File
From Phrack e-zines to the Anarchist Cookbook to Cult of the Dead Cow's t-files. How plain ASCII text became the medium of the underground. No formatting, no images, just words.
deadpacket :: October 1, 2025 :: 9 min read