A Tribute To J R Mooneyham

This is a tribute to American science fiction author J R Mooneyham, creator of one of the most excellent websites on the early Internet. The eponymous jrmooneyham.com was (and is) a treasure trove of hyperlinks to all kind of futuristic and scientific advances, as well as the superb Future History Timeline, which showcased Mooneyham’s predictions for the future.

I discovered this website around 1996. At that time, only people with a special interest in technology had a personal computer with Internet access. If you were friends with such a person, it was possible to access a world of information many times larger than your local town library. For any true nerd such as myself, this was a thousand birthdays all happening at once.

Because the early Internet was populated only by people who could get their heads around the new technology, it was full of the kind of niche interests held by those people. Serial killers and Satanism were favourite topics, one of the highlights being a Richard Ramirez tribute page that said “Hail Satan” through the speakers once per minute – a terrifying experience to anyone discovering the site at night!

Another favourite topic was science fiction. The sort of person who was an early adopter of the Internet was often a science fiction fan. After all, the Internet was clearly the technology of the future, and science fiction deals with the future. Many early Internet users were either science fiction fans or even writers. One of them was J R Mooneyham, who created the website that bears his name.

Mooneyham’s webpage was the first one to really instill in me a sense of awe at what the Internet was capable of. Not only did the page consist of a number of pages all hyperlinked together, but many paragraphs were backed up with hyperlinks to other parts of the Internet. For a young person who had only previously been exposed to books, both of these things were incredible, an entirely new dimension of information arrangement.

On the Signposts of the Future pages, Mooneyham made a number of predictions, some of which I agreed with, and some of which I thought ridiculous but which ended up coming true. Apart from the usual cyberpunk-style predictions about ever-increasing surveillance technology and an ever more precarious geopolitical situation, there were more specific predictions

I scoffed at his prediction that technology would lead to child millionaires, reasoning that the new technologies would be so complicated that it would take many years to study them long enough to have mastered them. Mooneyham had the last laugh, however, as shown by the 8-year old YouTube star Ryan Kaji, who made $26,000,000 this year.

Mooneyham predicted that a major terrorist event would strike New York City near the beginning of the 21st Century. This may have not been too hard to predict, given that there had already been a Muslim attempt to destroy the World Trade Centre in 1993. In any case, Mooneyham was proven correct in spectacular fashion by the events of 9/11.

He also predicted that America would, at some point in the 2010s, start using their military and economic advantage to spark a trade war. This came true with the ascension to power of Donald Trump and the start of the trade war against China. This was part of a wider trend, foreseen by Mooneyham and discussed at length, of hard power giving way to soft power.

My favourite Mooneyham prediction, though, was the “Bounty Economy“. Today we call this the gig economy, but Mooneyham predicted in the 1990s that we would end up with an economy characterised by precarious working conditions, suppressed wages, the mass importation of cheap labour – and tremendous profits for those best positioned to take advantage.

All of this was found in a website that was nothing more than HTML. For a young scholar in the 1990s, the simple genius of this was astonishing. Here was a glimpse of the future of life on Planet Earth, in more than one sense. Although websites such as Mooneyham’s are out of fashion today, thanks to fat data pipes shifting the focus from text to images and then to video, the elegance of the site appeals to the same sort of person that it appealed to in the 1990s.

There will always be a niche, in informational space, for someone targeting the high-IQ sort of forward thinker that actively seeks out information (and who reads, as opposed to passive information seekers who watch YouTube videos). VJM Publishing has targeted this niche, and to that end we have modelled the organisation of our site on jrmooneyham.com.

Some people have criticised the VJM Publishing company page on the grounds that it looks like a Geocities page from the early 2000s. It is our contention, however, that this is what a website ought to look like. It is the excellence of J R Mooneyham’s page, discovered over two decades ago, that inspired the clean, text-heavy and massively hyperlinked look of our own company page.

J R Mooneyham is a pioneering figure in Internet culture, especially in the high Internet culture that has avoided the televisionisation process that has occurred since the coming of FaceBook and YouTube. He ought to be more widely known. Thus, this article is in tribute to him, and to the minds he expanded thanks to reaching people with his excellent website.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 is also available.

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Clown World Chronicles: Who is Wojak?

A simply-drawn MS Paint image of an expressionless man is one of the commonest memes seen today. Some know him as Feels Guy, but to most Internet denizens he is called Wojak. As this essay will show, Wojak and his many incarnations are a core part of the Clown World pantheon.

To many who see him for the first time, there is nothing special at all about Wojak. He is simply a generic-looking white face with a blank expression. Neither is he drawn with any great finesse – he is merely an MS Paint depection of a young adult male. This, however, is his great power. Wojak represents the common human spirit that is shared by all of us.

Wojak bears the brunt of the cruelties of Clown World. This is shown in his manifestation as Feels Man. As Feels Man, Wojak is the face that expresses the disappointment and crushing sadness that follows coming to terms with the reality of living in a Clown World. He is the expression of all kinds of sadness, disappointment and despair.

A common portrayal of Wojak is from behind as he stares out across an ocean towards a setting Sun. This meme speaks to the sense that one’s naivety has come to an end. As the Sun sets and leaves Wojak on the beach, so too do our conceptions of an ideal world disappear, leaving us in Clown World with all its insanity.

Another common portrayal of Wojak is as the Doomer (this concept is elaborated upon in another chapter). The Doomer is a man who has been worn down to near breaking point by the insanity of Clown World. He cannot see anything getting better – doom lurks just beyond every horizon. He is strung out, with bags under his eyes, stubble under his chin and a cigarette butt in his mouth.

Yet another is the Coomer (also elaborated upon elsewhere). The Coomer is a man who has become hopelessly addicted to pornography, to the point where he lives for nothing else. This incarnation of Wojak represents the potential sex addict inside each of us, and serves as a warning.

So Wojak, much like Pepe, represents another kind of everyman. Perhaps the essential difference is that Pepe is the masculine form, whereas Wojak is the feminine form. Whereas Pepe feels disgruntlement leading to rage, Wojak feels sorrow leading to despair.

Fundamentally, though, Wojak’s place in the Clown World pantheon is as a representative of the youthful idealism that is lost when a person realises that they live in Clown World. It’s natural to grow up thinking that one lives in a world of reason, where science and evidence weigh heavily. The realisation that only power matters and that logic is meaningless comes as a spiritual shock to many.

For those who have been through it, however (and most have), this spiritual shock is highly relatable. This relatability is the reason for the success of the Wojak meme and its descendants – the ubiquitous nature of Wojak means that he can serve as a kind of template upon which other memes are based.

NPC Wojak is a variant of the original that satirises the unthinking nature of the average pleb. NPC Wojak is similar to the original, only with a grey face and simplified features. The commonest meme to feature the NPC Wojak is a multipanel comic where he is presented with some inane political fact and becomes enraged – a satirisation of how the average NPC out there has no consciousness and simply responds to stimuli like any invertebrate would.

Brainlet Wojak is another common variant. This one involves the regular Wojak but with a variety of cranial deformities so that his brain is clearly much smaller than that of a normal person. The implication, of course, being that the idea associated with the Brainlet Wojak image is a stupid one.

There is also a female version of Wojak, identical to the male original but with long, coppery hair. This version is most commonly seen incarnated as Tradfem Wojak, wearing a flowery blue dress. In this incarnation she also represents a lost promise, in this case the promise of a loyal wife who was interested in raising a family – something that Clown World has made impossible.

Wojak and the various forms that he appears in could be described as an ur-meme and its memetic offspring. Wojak represents the grim, inescapable awareness that the world is really much, much worse that what it promised to be. His feels are our feels; his loss of innocence is ours too. Wojak represents the everyday citizen of Clown World: lost, confused, dismayed.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

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How and Why to Use the TOR Browser

Censorship in New Zealand is reaching levels that would be unbelievable to Kiwis a few years ago. The latest involves the New Zealand Chief Censor pressuring local Internet Service Providers to block access to sites that the Censor deems not to be in the public interest, such as 8chan. This article discusses how to circumvent censorship of online free expression.

New Zealand is not the first country whose Government has suppressed our natural right to free speech. Power trippers and control freaks all around the world have given in to the temptation to do so, reasoning that free speech is a potential risk to their authority. As Joseph Stalin once said: “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We do not let our enemies have guns, so why would we let them have ideas?”

Unfortunately for us Kiwis, the Sixth Labour Government has chosen to exploit the atmosphere of terror created by recent mass shootings both here and overseas. They have used this as an excuse to strip away our rights, in particular our firearms rights and our right to free expression. As this column has mentioned elsewhere, they simply don’t care about such things.

It’s not clear that the Labour Government directed the Chief Censor to pressure ISPs into banning 8chan, but they have shown no indication that they disapproved. In any case, the censorship fits neatly into the wider Labour Party goal of cracking down on free expression. It’s all but certain that the Chief Censor knew that his actions had the approval of the War Criminal’s Apprentice and her Cabinet.

Even though 8chan hosts orders of magnitude less violence and hate than any of FaceBook, Twitter or mainstream television news, and even though Section 14 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act establishes that all New Zealanders have the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form, 8chan has been targeted. They will not be the only ones. The day may come when VJM Publishing, despite being alt-centrist, gets banned.

Luckily for those who value free speech, there are technological ways around these governmental abuses. One of the foremost of these is the TOR browser.

TOR stands for The Onion Router. This isn’t the place for a technical description, but it’s enough to say that TOR confuses surveillance attempts so thoroughly that the user can surf the Internet anonymously. The purpose of it is to conceal the user’s identity and online activities from surveillance and data tracking. If someone is trying to spy on what websites you are visiting, all they will be able to see is that you are using TOR.

Another advantage of using TOR is that it’s possible to access sites that are censored. Although this currently applies to little other than 8chan, you could bet money on the fact that the Sixth Labour Government are going to censor everything they can, and anyone who disagrees will be labelled a white supremacist collaborator alongside Brenton Tarrant, Anders Breivik and Adolf Hitler.

Getting hold of the TOR browser is a simple matter of going to the TOR Project website at www.torproject.org and downloading the 54MB file. This is an install file, so double-click it once downloaded and follow the instructions like you would any other program. The installation isn’t difficult, it’s just a matter of running it and letting it do its thing.

Once installed, the purple TOR icon will be available. If you click on that, it will open the TOR browser, which is very similar to the Mozilla browser on which it is based. From there, it’s a simple matter of typing what you want to look for in the search bar, as you would any other browser. TOR is a bit slower than other browsers, owing to the methodology it uses to anonymise the traffic.

That’s about all there is to it – TOR is otherwise like a normal browser. While on the TOR network, it’s possible to find access to all kinds of illicit goods and services, not merely information. It’s not a good thing from the Government’s perspective that people become exposed to material of that nature, but that’s the risk they run when they violate our human right to free expression.

The Basics of VPN Use, And Why Every Kiwi Needs to Know Them

The aftermath of the Christchurch mosque shooting showed that the New Zealand Government is willing to give away all of our freedoms in its blind panic to clamp down on everything. We Kiwis are going to have to learn how to fight Internet censorship and how to share information despite a Government committed to banning free discussion. This article discusses the basics of VPN use.

‘VPN’ stands for Virtual Private Network. It serves to extend a private network across a public one, so that you virtually access a private network somewhere else in the world. Essentially, a computer somewhere else surfs the Internet on your behalf, and then sends the data directly to your computer. The point of this is primarily to circumvent government censorship and corporate geo-restrictions.

It’s like the diplomatic black bag of internet traffic – the Government can’t snoop in on it while its in transit and choose to block it.

VPNs are very popular in totalitarian countries such as China, because they allow their users to access websites that the government doesn’t wish them to access. As any reader of 1984 could tell you, the prime objective of any government is to stay in power, by whatever means necessary. One of the primary ways this can be achieved is by controlling information and discourse, so that rebellious ideas cannot flourish in the minds of the populace.

As Joseph Stalin put it: “Ideas are more dangerous than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?”

In the wake of the Christchurch mosque shootings, the New Zealand Government has taken a sharply totalitarian turn. They seem to have decided, without securing the consent of the people or even making an announcement, that it’s okay for them to censor whatever website they see fit, for any reason (or even none). Although they will not admit it, this is a totalitarian action that breaches fundamental human rights. For this reason, we citizens are forced to take counter measures.

When a country such as New Zealand tries to block the free flow of information to its citizens, those citizens have to turn to grey- or black-market solutions such as VPNs. Using a VPN will allow a person to access almost any website that the New Zealand Government may have decreed verboten, for the reason that the Great Firewall of New Zealand will consider the web traffic to be something else.

The Opera browser comes with a built-in VPN, which is probably the easiest way to get started for anyone new to the idea. The simplest way to get started is to just download and install the Opera browser (the download page can be found with a simple web search). If you then open that browser, you can see the Opera symbol up in the top left corner. Clicking on this will open a drop-down menu, on which you can select ‘Settings’ near the bottom.

This will take you to a separate Settings page, where you have a number of options. By default, you will come to the Basic panel. Towards the top-left corner of the screen, underneath the word ‘Settings’ you should be able to see the words ‘Basic’ and ‘Advanced’. ‘Advanced’ is a drop-down menu, itself consisting of three options: ‘Privacy & security’, ‘Features’ and ‘Browser’.

If you click on ‘Features’, a number of options will appear in the centre panel. At the top of these is one called ‘VPN’. Underneath this is the option to ‘Enable VPN’. From here, enabling the browser VPN is a simple matter of hitting the radio switch to the right.

Note that this may make your browsing a bit slower, because the VPN is an extra step between you and your data. However, this is a minor inconvenience, and may be your only easy option if you want to access forbidden websites.

Some people might say at this point “But the Government, in its omnibeneficence, only banned the really evil sites where hate speech flourished and I didn’t want to go there anyway.” Fair enough – but the Government could ban anything else in the future, and so you might as well learn how to circumvent that now while you still can.

Ask yourself, do you really believe that the Government is going to stop with 8chan and Zero Hedge? The Government probably regrets that the Internet ever came to exist. They would gladly switch to having a North Korea-style government news service with all alternatives banned if they thought they could get away with it.

So what we can expect is more of what David Icke calls the “Totalitarian Tiptoe”, in which the Government bans an ever-increasing number of websites, taking advantage of moral panics to do so. Because the Government’s appetite for power and control is unlimited, Kiwis ought to get to know the basics of VPN use immediately.