MindVox Resurrection

Welcome to Vox -- We LOVE You!

/* Internal Company Documentation -- Not For Release */

-=/[ MindVox Resurrection (End of 2000) ]/=-

MindVox is the exciting rebirth of one of the oldest communities in cyberspace. Far more than a collection of features and services, Vox is a "Place" much like Juarez, La Perla, or Bangkok. Here you will find a diverse variety of people from all over the world, discussing important topical issues and subjects which effect the future of all humanity. On more than one occasion during the past several years I found myself nodding out in some hotel room; thinking, "gosh, I really hope that clueless newbies from AOL are not in the process of destroying the pristine, untouched beauty of all that is the Usenet. I should detox and do something about this right away, if not sooner!"

You can download BiLlYunz of pikToors of nekkid chicks, doing THINGS and STUFF . . . plus, also, Steal Copyrighted Music on Napster -- all at the same time.

You can login to MindVox 24 hours a day, from anywhere in the world and immediately connect with like-minded, pretentious, pseudo-intellectual poseurs, from the privacy of your own home. Our members enjoy engaging in witty banter, and exchanging MANY amusing anecdotes about almost anything imaginable. It's just like an eternity of nonstop coffee talk! And it never, *EVER* ends, because keep in mind; it's ALWAYS 3am SOMEWHERE on the planet!

Please kill me.
Whatever BAD THINGS I've done, I don't deserve THIS.

FAR MORE than just a "system," MindVox is a Community, it nearly RADIATES [PLACE] and has [PlAcE] STAMPED ALL OVER IT. Have we mentioned that Vox is a Place within Cyberspace? Well it is! It's RIGHT THERE on the Cutting Edge of the frontier. When you grow weary of surfing the myriad highways and byways of The Net, you can always come home to Vox. It's pretty darn exciting! On occasion you might even want to leave the keyboard and VoxMeat (TM) In Real Life, where you can make a restaurant selection from our online directory of fine-dining establishments!

Go to a McDonald's, eat grease,
choke on the fucking plastic and DIE.

Look, I'm becoming physically ill. I can't do this.

No dude, it's excellent. Just, tone it down a little. Go the gym, then get fucked for like 2 weeks straight, and when you're highly mellow just -- you know -- pretend like you give a shit about all that crap.

Why am I being punished? My head hurts. I am NOT the tour-guide for THIS particular level of hell, I fucking quit.

Okay, look, I can see you have some reservations. Let's just take a little break and get back to it later.

Fables of the Reconstruction

Information TOO SECRET to be Printed Here.
Weighty ISSUES affecting the Whole Entire Future of MindVox

Selected excerpts from the first, millennial
Board of Directors meeting for NewVox.
All changes have been named.

Okay, well, this is highly unexpected. I think this is the first time in recorded history that all of us have made it into the same room, at the same time, on something approaching a schedule.

Huh?

Nevermind. All right. MindVox, we have this thing . . . it's all right there. Should we put it back online?

Look, I WAS paying attention, I am NOT nodding out, I'm just very tired . . . I was resting my eyes. What are you ACCUSING me of?

Vox, what the fuck do we do with it. Do we put it back online?

Uhm . . . is it off-line?

I am NOT doing this again. You don't seem to understand, I'm vested, my company goes to an IPO momentarily and I intend to spend a lotta time picking out new Ferrari's. I am never again dealing with, "hello, I um, my modem, it's 19.2k, and it's only getting 17.6k throughput. Could you check your terminal server?" I hate ISP's, I hate stupid people, I am not dealing with this.

Just, like, well, ya know . . . say something helpful. For instance, "why don't you stick the goddamn modem up your fucking ass and see if your download rate improves."

I was just making a point. People have DSL and dial-up access isn't our problem.

Oh . . . I thought the whole thing was hypothetical, did we used to have modems?

Uhm . . . no.

The room, it had cables, servers, hardware, racks of modems.

Sorry, I'm spacing it.

THE ROOM where you always met your dealers before you drifted out of the offices altogether.

Oh, okay . . . THAT room. Gotcha.

Why are we doing this? What do we like about it?

I like wandering the earth, I'm interested in drugs, human potentials, pretty lights in my head . . . I am NOT interested in all this shit on the Internet. It's just all that crap, it's worse than anything I ever imagined possible . . . it's like all the boring levels of the astral planes, wedged together and overlapping. I, uhm, strongly dislike it for the most part.

I'm interested in playing golf. Then, I'm interested in hitting a few strip clubs. I am also highly interested in hedge funds. I am very at peace with the fact that I like hanging out finding new ways to entertain myself, and blowing money. It makes me happy.

This isn't working. Let's try it another way.
What did we NOT like about MindVox?

Our customers / Our customers / Our customers

Why was that?

Well, because, they always WANTED and EXPECTED things. I mean, they acted like they were giving us money or something and we owed them. What a bunch of whiny, annoying, fucking--

Yeah, what he said. I mean, take your goddamn, lousy $15 bucks and smoke it for all I fucking care.

Is that why we went down?

I don't know why WE went down. WE never went down. The machines, the domains, the software has all been sitting there for years. The annoying people got sold to RCN. But then I noticed that there were a whole lotta other annoying people who wanted to harass me. "What did you do to Patrick?" "Where is Patrick," "You Killed Patrick!" Yeah, I fucking have his body under my floorboards, and let me tell you the people who live under me are not happy. I mean, I was left in the position of posting goddamn messages on my own system announcing, "If anybody has seen my partner in the last year or so, please tell him to give me a call."

I was, uhm, otherwise occupied.

Yeah I know. But so you understand, it's not that you do drugs, I could give a shit. Who wasn't high? It's when YOU do heroin, you just vanish. My dad put up with Norman Mailer, but at least he would call once in a while from jail and expect to get bailed out. You just fucking DISAPPEAR And that's not the heroin, that's YOU. When **** got all strung-out, I was highly aware of his every movement because he basically showed up on my doorstep, explained that he shot up his apartment and needed to move in under my sink, and asked if my mom had any interesting meds. You just FUCKING VANISHED leaving me the caretaker of your personal floating mausoleum in cyberspace, with a whole lotta unhappy people who blamed ME for it.

Look . . . shit happens, it wasn't me, it was my disease, try to get past it and --

I HAVE. Or we wouldn't all be here. I mean in retrospect it was funny, in a surreal kind of way. Where's Patrick? I don't know, but every 9-12 months I will get a phone call that goes something like, "Hey dude, I'm on a sat-phone, sitting in this shack in some third-world country, I have 3 passports, a gun, and a fucking pile of drugs. How're you doing, can you Western Union me $800 bucks in the next 12 minutes, I hafta bounce immediately."

And that is much, much worse than just showing up every day, loaded on pills, and getting drunk for 4 years straight. I --

You know, between the both of you, you make my parents seem to have a completely perfect, non-dysfunctional relationship.

Fuck off.

Uhm . . . okay.
So, through a careful process of elimination,
we can isolate the root of all problems with OldVox:

Our Customers

Everything was entirely their fault.

Now then, how do we FIX THIS and
MAKE IT ALL BETTER for the NewVox?

Guys, I don't want to do this at all. As I may have mentioned a few hundred times, I'm THIS CLOSE to being very wealthy; besides that, this is a really stupid idea. A much better idea would be to just sell weird books over the internet, or install a lot of fiber-optic cameras in women's bathrooms. Those are real moneymaking opportunities just waiting to happen, re-happen, and happen again summore. Of course, that's only if you want to make small change. For the big money, just write up a business plan, explain why you expect to hemorrhage at least 50 million a year for the next 10 years, and then start pricing yachts.

Uhm, I don't actually need any money. I made money the old fashioned way, I inherited it, I don't give a shit.

If I felt inclined to MAKE money, I can work for one week out of the year, making materials and stuff, available to those who desire it, and then coast. For that matter, the MindVox Escort Agency, coming soon to a city near you, would also make cash. No lack of materials, no lack of clients. And--

Why don't we just rent a couple of suites at the Waldorf -- the most expensive ones -- mount those fiber-optic cameras ALL OVER THE PLACE, and then plaster compromising video of visiting dignitaries, celebrities, and a variety of EuroTrash, all over the Internet. Nobody has done that before, and it seems like a great idea.

I have no argument. I think that would be wonderful.

Logistically that would be a nightmare though. Legally, I mean --

Look, it has been my life's experience that there is no situation, no series of events, no position that you find yourself in, which cannot be resolved by pointing a gun at some asshole's fucking head -- I meant to say, the application of logic, and reasoned discourse.

Okay, MindVox, customers. What did they pay us, $15, $20 bucks, something like that? Let's presuppose we can accumulate 1,000 of 'em pretty fast, move it up to 4 or 5,000. So let's see, that's roughly $15K a month to start, split multiple ways, hiring staff, support, equipment . . . as the clients escalate, all this shit escalates, same story, old story.

No . . . this ain't happening, you cannot pay me enough money to put up with this crap. It is NOT worth it. No . . . there is no way to add this up that makes it worth my time and the headache involved. Aside from that, I thought we agreed that the problem WAS our customers.

Yeah.

So why do we want to put Vox back online?

Because it was cool / Because it was cool / Because it was cool

Okay, so, we're doing this because MindVox was cool. The problem was all our customers, and our business plan would be?

Why do we need a business plan?

Build it and they will come.

Excellent. I'd say we've made great progress.

Well hey, this has been highly special. What now?

Ok, just write another one of those introduction/essay things. You know, fill it up with a bunch of crazy shit and try to radiate sincerity, you're great at that, you're not dead or in jail yet.

Look, obviously you JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND. How many different ways can I explain this: I DON'T LIKE the Internet. It's highly lame. VR is NOT right around the corner, having actually learned a whole helluva lotta stuff 'bout neuroanatomy, I can tell ya, that Jacking In is NOT happening Any Minute Now. When it does start to happen, you are NOT going to want shit grafted into your head, because, as complex, fucked-up and dysfunctional human beings can be, the brain mostly just works -- computers, mostly DO NOT; until they revise the drivers 85 times and come out with 6 new versions of the hardware. Furthermore...

Okay, what DO you like?

I like stealing music on Napster and downloading at T1 speed to a 80gb disk in my laptop. It makes me happy.

Fine, so just, you know, write about that.

Yeah well, okay, maybe . . . when I get around to it. Ya see, my immediate plans entail going to Machu Picchu and doing a lotta Ayahuasca to COMPLETE my Collection of Molecules, and then running around with the Shining White Big Daddy Light of Total Allness that is Ibogaine; I have a very large collection of Words n Things, and oddly enough, in all of them, there is not one mention of Cyber-anything, and...

Look at the software, you're gonna love it.

Guys, uhm, this is great and all, but why don't we just reboot it? I mean it's there, it works for the most part, it would take minimal effort to just make it work 99% of the time and--

Dude, what's up with the software?

Okay, it's running Server8 as the back-end, WebObjects in the middle, it is multithreaded, multitasking, and completely integrated with encapsulated instantiations of fully motile and self-replicating Objects, which dance around at night and are rearranged by elves, CONTROLLED BY DAEMONS, and plugs-inTO the Power Computer every morning at 3:13am. You can connect with browsers, telnets, ssh, it is fully themeable, highly unstable, completely Open Source, and FLYING out of Everything.

That's EXACTLY what we need. When will it all work?

By next Tuesday for sure.

Uhm, hello? Are you hearing yourselves, why am I struck with this weird feeling of deja-vu. This is nuts, it's a terrible idea, and I still think we should go with the fiber-optic cameras. Failing all that, JUST REBOOT THE FUCKING THING. It's all sitting right there, what are you, completely fucking stupid?

Sorry, what? I wasn't listening.

Fully excellent, so we are in absolute agreement.

Of course.

In conclusion,
what have we learned from our past mistakes?

Nothing.

What mistakes?

Uhm, absolutely nothing. I didn't make any mistakes, I am afflicted with the Mysterious Disease of Addiction and cannot be held accountable for... anything, ever, actually... And everything else was the fault of THOSE PEOPLE.

Well obviously.

Okay, let's get high and go catch Charlie's Angels 2000 and then hit some bars -- I meant to say, go to some meetings and complain a lot about not being high-- err, I meant to say: SHARE!

A "Frustrating Mess with Tremendous Potential"
Just waiting for half an excuse,
to self-destruct in a REALLY BIG way!

We HATE our Customers
(But then, haven't we ALWAYS made that Perfectly Obvious?)

Disposition: