Eternal October and the End of Cyberspace

According to its best-known history, drafted in the mid-1990s, USENET's governing structure was open, and it opened new doors to direct democracy. By the end of the 1990s, USENET was overrun with spam, and by the mid-2000s, it was widely reported as “dead.” But in USENET mythology, its fall occurs earlier, in September 1993, in an “Eternal September.” Prior to 1993, the month of September marked a wave of new university students, connected through their campus. Eternal September was caused by a flood of users who gained USENET access as part of a new America Online (AOL) offering and, unlike previous USENET freshman cohorts, they could not be resocialized. This assimilation and acculturation was described as a matter of observing network etiquette. “Netiquette,” as it was called, was much like the etiquette of court ceremony or professional ritual in that it was inextricably bound to place. In other words, the newbies could not be forced to accept what we now understand as a central tenet of cyberlibertarianism: that cyberspace, too, was a place, separate from the world, and thus free. The article considers Eternal October, the successor to Eternal September, when it is no longer possible to pretend that cyberspace can circumvent the politics of civilization. Just as Eternal September ushered in a new reality, October 2016 is never going to end.