The Golden Age of the Internet

I have a question for the older lainons around: Did the internet golden age really exist? Particularly on chan sites, primordially 4chan but others as well, there's this general tendency of claiming the current era of said site is one of decadence compared to a much better past. But it's not only on chan sites, the other day I saw a meme that half-jokingly claimed MySpace was THE social media website, as opposed to the corrupted and decadent Facebook. Now, this general sentiment of the golden past and the decadent present has been around since the beginnings of civilization (Hesiod's Theogony, Garden of Eden and Original Sin, a general feeling of having fallen from a perfect world). What was the general sentiment among internet users during the internet's years of expansion? I mean late-90s and early-10s. Is this "internet's golden age" just another myth/meme?

Back then, the internet wasn't really anything to take seriously until the late 00s. This was because there was a clear division between reality and online life, and one rarely, if ever, had an effect on the other. It was very much possible to escape the torment from daily life online and go and pretend to be someone or something else, or conversely, whatever retarded soykaf that happened to you online would have almost no effect on reality. The internet is very different now because it is essentially an extension of reality. If anything, the internet now has reality (society, I mean) molding around it. That may sound laughable but think if the entirety of the internet just completely shut down for a week, or forever. We would lose a lot of things and we probably would have to go back to how we used to live in the 1980s/90s. Perhaps what I have said is not entirely accurate but the Internet is indeed a very different thing from what it used to be. I personally don't like it; it is boring and has brought on some very negative social trends.

I feel like the web was a lot more fun as few as 10 years ago. Nowadays it's all politics, clickbait and people throwing soykaf at each other. Not that there wasn't a lot of that before too, but I feel there's now this crappy global culture that leaks everywhere, even little niche communities.

Everything's better now. The fun, zany web still exists and the niche communities still exist, except everything's faster and more convenient now. I'm active in a certain fandom that's been around since the 90s. It started with mailing lists, then we moved to forums (still alive and active) and blogs, now we're on social media as well. The mediums change but it's still mostly the same core group of people communicating with each other almost every day. If the internet shuts down we'll just be mailing/faxing each other. There are thousands of communities like that on the internet.

Only poor and dumb people complain. It is better than ever.

>>13894 >Is this "internet's golden age" just another myth/meme? Indeed it did, child. Most of the people reading here seem too young to remember it. Most people on the internet these days can't figure out how to use a command line. There was a time when it was more required knowledge. Very high signal to noise ratio. You knew everyone you talked to was above a certain level of intelligence. Then came eternal September. It was the turning point. The moment when tech bros in Silicon Valley began to gradually destroy the decentralized, cyberpunk, real internet. They brought with them graphical installers, dial up service, and worst of all, SSL web browsers. If it were not for SSL, there would be no e-commerce, no industry full of marketers drowning our beloved internet in spam and advertising. Who would buy anything on an unencrypted system of nntp and smtp relays? Nobody who understood how the network worked, that's for sure. Before "protection" of SSL arrived, it was open and free and beautiful. Now, with exception of a few sites like this one, it's fully of brainless twits who are being brainwashed 24/7 by marketers, political ideologies, and crisis actors. www is the bastardization of the original internet. It called itself "the web" which seems appropriate in hindsight. Google/facebook/etc are the spiders who sit at the center of vast webs of trapped users. Each silo being the most successful spider in a category.

>>13903 >If it were not for SSL, there would be no e-commerce, no industry full of marketers drowning our beloved internet in spam and advertising Oh my god. I think you just convinced me it is in my best interest for the NSA to break all encryption.

>>13906 Encryption means nothing if only encrypted channel is between you and NSA. With today's monopolies on DDoS protection, this is a reality.

>Did the internet golden age really exist? That is a complex question. **dumb examples ahead: Let imagine you have a magic lunchbox, anon. Inside there had all kind of food. You are smart kind so you enjoy every kind healthily around the world. But after time some fuarrrking malnourished dumb poor kids show up and start to use that. To kill their hungry and use powers of that magic lunchbox in the best way they know, they start to take mcbullsoykaf from that. With time that food starts to kill them by diabetes instead of hungry.** **You can even compare small online community with the small rural community and biggest services/websites with metropolises. ** For me, the golden age was between 2003-08. For others was before the Web or even the Internet. For most of humanity connected to the Internet, now is the golden age. They can find a job online with nearly zero cost, they can buy things cheaper online, they can have free entertainment online, they can even have education for free.

>>13894 A week ago someone shared online a 20+GB drawing course, complete with videos and reference images, from an amazingly good artist. completely for free Isn't that just incredible? The fact that I can, from the comfort of my home, get so much quality information and instruction? Maybe it's not exactly what your talking about OP, but those are my thoughts on the topic

Websites in the 90s were fewer but more creative, and were the labour of smaller groups or even a single person. Now there are larger information authorities and people just assume that the first link they read is a source of indisputable fact when before, you took everything under consideration based on the source but didn't assume the first thing you read was correct or click through a few links until you found the one that provided the "alternative facts" that made you most comfortable. As for chans, they used to be fun and now they aren't. No one has a sense of humour, not even a lousy one. The sites are flooded with people trying to push their politics into everything so you can't discuss movies or music anymore without someone turning the subject to the correlation between IQ and crime in minority communities or some conspiracy involving Jewish feminist transexuals trying to take away your video games or something and to tell you one more time that climate change isn't real. Overall there is more useful information online than ever but average people didn't magically evolve to some future point where they can process it effectively and separate the wheat from the chaff. As far as anything fun or social, the good old days are definitely behind us too.

>>13912 >Overall there is more useful information online than ever but average people didn't magically evolve to some future point where they can process it effectively and separate the wheat from the chaff. sigh Is it time to post Sons of Liberty again already?

>>13910 The entire works of Shakespeare are available for free as well. Now think about the percentage of internet users globally that have read them. It doesn't matter if the works are free when "the web" is only full of users who are conditioned to soykafpost for ad impressions. All valuable information is wasted because the little rats are looking for the next dopamine hit.

>>13920 I forgot to add, it's not enough that the information is available and even that some people might make use of it. The overall trend is the smart are dragged down by the dumb. As a concrete example, look at the case of Dr William M Gray. He was the world's preeminent hurricane prediction specialist. Along comes the climate change dept of brewing soykaf inc. They claimed climate change was causing more/stronger hurricanes, and when he said that wasn't the case, they attacked him for disagreeing with their baseless statements. People with no education on the matter claimed the person with the best track record in the world on the subject didn't know what he was talking about. He took personal offense. He quit his specialty to engage in counterbrewing soykaf instead. There's no more netiquette. Most users today have never even heard that term. The internet devolves into a dumpster fire further and further and it's taking pleasant society down with it.

>>13921 >He took personal offense. He quit his specialty doesn't that say more about him than others?

>>13922 I'd watch you have your every relevant post thrown soykaf at by 30 angry idiots every day and keep your cool

>>13896 >neurosuggesting it wasn't always like that The internet has always been like that, it wasn't until recently that it extended to many more people and it became much more aggressive and widespread.

>>13913 The patriots are here already and there's nothing we can do about it.

>>13925 I was under the impression that Sons of Liberty was never about taking down the Patriots and always about declaring your own personal "liberty" by realizing the memetic nature of constructed realities and making the most of your powers of free thought. You can "do something about" the Patriots by refusing to buy in to ready-made narratives. Maybe I misinterpreted it.

>>13910 >Isn't that just incredible? The fact that I can, from the comfort of my home, get so much quality information and instruction? Yeah, but have you done even a single exercise from it? The Internet gave us all the information we could possibly need, but stole the attention to make use of it.

>>13924 Jesus Christ read your post, then read mine again. You basically repeated what I said.

>>13929 I am, it's really great and the artist is a great teacher >>13920 I guess we're not really talking about the same thing then. I don't really consume much if the internet besides browsing art-related topics. I was just saying that, at this point of time, there is so much good information right qt your fingertips it's incredible. Even if the masses aren't using it to it's full potential, I'm thankful for the fact that it's out there for those who want it

>>13931 I fully understand your position, but look at it from Dr Gray's point of view. The "good information" that is freely available is really just nuclear energy industry agitprop. The people who consume it only have passing knowledge on the topic, but truly believe they're experts. They read/watched some stuff on the internet, after all. That information was really persuasive. Now that they're "experts" they feel entitled to challenge the world's leading authority for upboats. To Dr. Gray, he's facing a swarm of brainwashed twits who are insider trading internet points and have taken command of Wikipedia to lock pages that support their false narratives and bury the real facts of the matter.

>>13920 >All valuable information is wasted because the little rats are looking for the next dopamine hit. Youtube is full of educational videos in every niche you can imagine, from car repairs to audio production to baking, woodwork, electronics - literally anything. People are absolutely using them to learn new stuff.

Whilst I would say that the concept of a 'golden age' is mostly subjective, I would say that the increasing global user-base and societal reliance on the internet has amplified what were previously considered negative quirks (trolling, flame wars etc) into major breeding grounds for toxic discourse. Most of these issues have existed since the nets inception, but it was usually relegated to a single forum or niche group, but as the prevalence of the internet in society has continued to increase it is only natural to see things come to a head. If I were to try and find a golden age period for myself, I would have to say the period of 2003 - 2011 would represent a general rise and fall associated with the concept. 2012 onward is where I personally begin to see a major shift from an isolated internet culture to one intermingled with real life (kinda like Lain heh).

>>13936 More than learning, people want the "news". And dear God, how soykaf is the tech news channels are for me. Most of the videos in my native languages are about new smartphones and their features. I understand that important for other people but is pretty hard to find a good channel about basic news in tech.

>>13927 What I was saying with that, is that the system to control all of our thoughts, minds, and knowledge (Like the patriots) is already in place and there's little we can do to stop it.

>>13940 > Most of the videos in my native languages are about new smartphones and their features. don't think that's a universal experience

>>13932 I get your point anon, quality information is hard to come by in a flood of data. But I can tell you it's possible to set up filters and just get what you want. The course I was talking about is Ilya Mirochnik's NMA course, I know it's good. How? He's been teaching for decades and is an accomplished artist himself. I've also snagged Glenn Vilppu's figure drawing course, which I plan to do after Ilya's. Villpu is an amazing teacher with a world of knowledge to give, and I have it all at my fingertips. All I'm saying anon is that it's all about how you make use of the web.

Reminds me of a blogpost that talked about what made myspace a good example for a profile page. https://jarredsumner.com/codeblog/ tl;dr anyone could use css to create a tiny homepage instead the bare minimum we have now. Something that certainly changed over the past decade is that people used to be more responsible for what they put on the internet. Not just parents but also websites themselves would sometimes say, don't use real information, it's the internet. Now the first thing that pops up is a question if the page can use my cookies and spy on everything for personalized ads and some people demanding by law that everyone uses their real identity when posting on social media platforms. Personally I have the feeling that the hivemind that used to be on chans expanded on the entire net. In a bad way. It's difficult to avoid the noise I'm trying to avoid in the first place.

>>13968 you should make an account into cgpeers, you are going to flip out. Try looking for the cgma courses as well, the schoolism ones are amazing but hard to find a torrent for them.

>>13920 Yeah but those who want it have it, is specially crucial for those of us who don´t have acces to that information at all in our home countries (no money, no good academic bg) . I´ve gone over like a dozen courses of The teaching company that i have pirated in topics i would never ever see a irl lecture off here. Same with software i have learned and just daily questions i have. If i dont know how to cook something it takes me minutes to find out, my life is massively improved by access to this information, the fact that some people choose to remain dumb or simply use the tool for more wasteful purposes like gossiping can do so, its their problem. Doesnt mean is not a net positive to have the resource.

the golden age of earth was 1999-2002. give or take 03 and a few below 99 if you're picky

>>13998 It's a great thing I was too young to remember those times.

I remember when webpages were less than 1MB in size, and they didn't use 1GB of memory per tab.

There's this really good animated series about kids in the 90s starting a warez crew where the main theme is about how then 'PC lamers' came to ruin everything. A good part of it is subtitled in english and the animation is done by this demoscene dude it is really unique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S7vYMUWqg8

Hot opinion but I think that as far as community and freedom it was much better yet as far as information it was worse: Things were mostly decentralized and there was a greater barrier of entry to the internet for normal people while CorpoNet 5.0 was still in progress. Most people had skills to get a website up or at least had invested a bunch of time to find bbses, usenet etc. They were also a particular type of people (often outcasts for whatever reasons) in my exp. Nobody usually talked about internets stuff offline unless it was nerd to nerd. Also the nets was so incredibly insecure that people could take down pretty much anything they hated. Not everyone was trying to harvest every little analytical thing about your life online and off either unless you were getting raided. I think even the myspacians were smarter than average facebook/instagrammarians now. It was more of a niche culture, youtube was too for its first 3 or 4 years.

>>14360 The only good thing about that era was the lack of invasive advertising, the rest is a muh secret club tirade that not only you can still reproduce easily with a private group anywhere, if you did it you would notice how badly is nostalgia afecting your view.

>>14366 I beg to differ, environment and context seeps into everything. Even if I created 'muh secret clubhouse' it would be hard to control for people i.e. posting stupid filthyfrank youtube videos or links to websites using the latest bloated angular framework with a bunch of popups, or n^y other contextually specific things. Sure there were annoying things during those times, but the zeitgeist was still completely different then. I liked it better, I feel it was better.

You should know that we live in the wrong timeline by the fact we got the WWW instead of Project Xanadu. I’m sorry you were born at the wrong time like me, OP. The truth is the cost of hardware used to be a decent barrier to entry, and now you have people who are not only thieves but proud of it.

: (

>>13896 It's in relation to this argument that once a subculture goes mainstream, it turns to soykaf. The internet is no different.

yes, it was when only nerds used the net

>>14377 Why would you do this to me....

>>13909 >For most of humanity connected to the Internet, now is the golden age. They can find a job online with nearly zero cost, they can buy things cheaper online, they can have free entertainment online, they can even have education for free. I can't believe that perspective hadn't even crossed my mind. Indeed. Like this anon here >>13895 commented, when thinking of a so called golden age of the internet, we would imagine a golden age that were so for us, the outcasts. But, as you have pointed out, the benefits regular people can get from the internet nowadays makes it much better for them than it could have ever been in the 00s. And again, like this anon said >>13895, the internet is now an extension of reality, rather than an escape from it. We miss when the internet was a place were we could be on the edge on society, nowadays it is not the edge but, the center itself, and we lost our haven, but society at large gained one of it's most important tools to date.

The internet goldenage was great then AOL happened and it went to soykaf. Though can still find interesting places and it's a lot faster.

Maybe the reason the internet feels so corporate now is pretty much the same reason videogames these days feel so monetized. Either things are so fuarrrked that we've turned art and entertainment into tools to squeeze productivity and money out of everything in order to bring home the bacon, or people have just gotten greedier these days. I don't know.

>>13894 Old days had 3 things. 1. no full commercialization. You could find legit information directly because the web wasn't infested by scammers trying to make a buck. Nowadays every topic is contaminated. In same line you still had complete freedom instead of crippling regulations. 2. no security awareness. People would cruise on secret agency servers because they had no concept of security and would even let files sit in the open. This was a time where dedicated hobbyist were on equal ground to secret services. It's virtually impossible today. What's more everything today is made to track you down to the ipv6 protocol itself. 3. no unwashed masses. The hurdle to get a pc&internet acted as a natural filter. The easier it got the dumber the people who came in were. To sum it up: The people that inhabited and owned the net more or less became outcasts with little to no influence as a flood of new consumers came in. As for the matter of chan - the picture is on point.

What I find frustrating about the internet in this decade is people who weren't born yet trying to educate me about things I lived through and participated in because they looked it up a minute ago. I don't mean online phenomena of the past either but real life. They don't seem to understand that the sources they use are incomplete at best and often inaccurate, and they take as gospel certain convenient observations and categorizations that were made after the fact and now immortalized online. I can't stand hearing the "but I was there" defense when it can't be verified so I bow out of the discussion before resorting to it myself. I know. Historical revisionism has always existed. Maybe I'm just old enough to see it happening now. >>15275 Video were always a mass market commodity though. The homebrew ones that weren't were in a pretty small minority.

>>15279 every product has a adaption cycle. The entire industry was fringe at some point. And with this comes also always a shift in consumer type. Strong simple contrast: everyone has a smartphone that doubles as a handheld console today but not everyone had a gameboy. And the gameboy was kid exclusive, you wouldn't carry a gameboy around to play in breaks as an adult as you do now with a smartphone.

>>13895 I just played on funbrain as a kid in the pre social media era

I think there really was a golden era. I know perfectly well that it's a human tendency to color anything in the hazy past with nostalgia, but that doesn't mean it's all due to that effect everywhere; that nothing was actually better before than it is now. The internet used to have a lot higher bar of entry. It used to be a community of fairly like-minded people in at least some respect--they had the technical skills and drive necessary to get online and find communities before social media and incredibly convenient networking. They were also a lot younger. I think young, lonely, creative, passionate people are the root of any good community. Now they've all gotten a bit older and twisted, kind of gone a bit crazy. The loneliness kind of went bitter and gave us all a bunch of weird ideologies. There's still young people of course, but I don't know if they're making communities in quite the same medium or in the same way as they used to. Now a lot of it has been platformed and very few young kids are going to bother to make their own website; they'll just put their stuff on twitter or whatever. And even the ones that do make their own way aren't going to attract a following like they used to. The digital world is more saturated, filled with trivia, peppered with paths of less resistance. There were still some things that sucked about the old internet, but it was a lot more bottom-up and less corporate. It wasn't a cacophony of noise and paranoia and triviality. Now it's like this dense fog of memes (in the original Dawkins sense of the term) that you can't really cut through. You can't hollow out a home in it anymore. Everything's too widely broadcast, too efficiently connected, too constantly surveyed and surveilled. The chans are full of insane neuroses and crackpots, and not in the cute way they used to be. In a way that's too real. Everything's glazed with so many layers of reference and self-reference and meta-reference and irony and sincerity diguised as irony and all that postmodern sophist sleekness that's supposed to convey sophistication of some kind but in reality it's just incredibly neurotic and tiring. All right I'm gonna stop. That's my opinion, I probably won't be able to elaborate on it any better than this and I'll just run the risk of repeating myself. I'm getting old and neurotic too.

>>13894 I don't really have anything to add to the conversation. Just wanted to share a subject related music video. https://invidio.us/watch?v=b4taIpALfAo

>>15281 I'm not arguing with your point or anything but I did in fact take my Game Boy to work with me in the late '90s and have never owned a smartphone. But I guess we're not "everyone" here.

We are certainly living in the dark ages after 8chan went down.

>>15469 Yep, It's like the bronze age collapse. Luckily internet eras move much faster

>>15469 If it means every other site in existence gets flooded with 8tard refugees then I guess you're right.

>>15472 >>15470 They have been. I've been on a handful of chans and I enjoyed 8ch more than 4chan, but I think I like Lainchan the most. >>15455 I agree with your post. It's one of the reasons I've deleted so many accounts online and reduced my footprint a ton. I don't feel at home or native anymore, not that I ever was. It's an endless pit of noise and everything is a "dank" meme. I've moved to more niche platforms and, to be honest, I am very tired of smartphones as well. I killed my IMDB account, a website I found back in 2004 when I was barely 14. It may have been earlier, I can't really remember. It used to be an interesting place, then they axed forums. That was my favorite part: the forums. Toward the end it filled up with trolls and meme-posters from The_Donald and other places. I miss them but I understand why IMDB did what they did. I just nuked Reddit, as well, which I had already deleted a couple years ago. I only got an account back because of some groups on there I was interested in keeping up-to-date with. Tired of that now, too. We have to make the most of ourselves. I don't know if you're like me, but I make tacos at Taco Bell, a crappy minimum wage job. At the least, I have the ability to publish books and music I want to make and have made, and that option was significantly more difficult before. We need not concern ourselves with the noise and madness being generated today; I almost think the kind of hottake style babble is what's polluting our minds. It's a distraction, and a way to easily get off course and forget whatever it is you truly want to do or grow as a person. If anything, now is a time when we can make our own niche community again, away from the chaos. New tools aren't perfect (ZeroNet, I2P, Tor, etc) but they're much better than what's available to the average person and possibly a place we can seek a sort of refuge.

When talking about the barriers to entry I always feel like people get too elitist. One of the things I liked about the Geocities era of the web (not exactly the cyberpunk golden age, but definitely better than Facebook.) was that your mother could make a homepage after skimreading some HTML tags. My disappointment with the modern internet has always been the ways in which it fails to empower normal people. Instead, it exploits them and in doing so it hurts all of us with lowest common denominator trash. I'd simplify it to viewing the medium as the message. If we consider personal websites and web browsing as a distinct kind of media to centralized social media sites, we can see that the content or the userbase isn't actually that important - the big thing shaping communities and discussions at the macro scale is the structure of the sites themselves. If you could sort that, we could easily have better places for facebook boomers and better places for outcasts.

>>15552 Spot on, that high entry barrier nonsense people keep harping around here irks me a lot. Having more people has never been the problem and "skill" was just a matter of if you were lucky enough to have computers around or someone who got you into it, else there would be tons of secret clubs out there thriving instead of them dying after a month or two. Think is more like a consequence of the amount of information available and newfound expectatives related to it. If we take your geocities example (or current neocities) the expectation is seeing personal stuff, diaries, drawings, fun html and so on, but when joining a community, we now expect enough added value that justifies not going to the usual places that dominate the landscape (and most of the time, it fails because it can't provide it) Even here, a decent site that has really good stuff sometimes, you get the usual complaints when compared to 4chan, calling that the golden age. Using 4chan back then certainly didn't require skill and those were really dumber times for the internet, but I guess it had that special something that made people cherish their piss poor original content and consider it a great time for the place. Making original, non profit driven content and creating that community feeling is what seems harder nowadays, not because there are more normal people or whatever, but because our expectations have changed

>>15552 >>15558 Well I guess the difference between Geocities where everyone's mother could make a homepage and today's social media pages is that one actually encouraged you to take control (with often hilariously awful consequences, but it was a culture at least) whereas current social media just makes you into an ad mule to be squeezed and minmaxed and manipulated as much as possible--as you kind of said. It went from being something you worked a little at and could make your own into something totally walled off, nailed down, curated, and optimized to best exploit a mostly-passive userbase. Which I suppose isn't the same as a barrier to entry at all. It's a top-down problem, not a bottom-up problem. The problem is that today the internet is owned. It's a corporate property, at least in a more explicit and obvious way than it used to be.

>>13902 Educated high-class opinion right here I feel like internet wasn't that fuarrrking serious business back then if you want to think about myspace and social media like that; people actually posted funny things and real things. Nowadays people are stressed about posting - is this nice happening important enough to be posted which in turn results feeds turning into polished personal ads. They even talk about personal branding, which sounds just about as disgusting as what it is. About other sites - I'm a new user so I might not be the real person to answer that. I still have to mention that at least finnish imageboards were more intelligent places, if you saw something super retarded you could trust that it was just a troll or a way of speaking ironically. Nowadays it is more often the other way around. There is this one caricature about the degradation of a fanbase, which is sort of provocative but I have to admit that seems to have truth in it.

>>15561 >Nowadays people are stressed about posting Because now everything is under surveillance with robots crawling the net to document everything meaning any small thing you do leaves a footprint meaning any fleeting expression of emotion can have serious lasting impacts on your life offline. In contrast, oldnet as cyberspace was largely untainted by corporate consolidation and everything was decentralized and transient. Things came and went and people were largely anonymous unless they chose not to be. Very few things were connected to your legal identity so you could be and act according to your imagination. As to whether an internet golden age existed - yes. Now it's nothing like it was. Everything is consolidated and most things are connected in some way to the same few corporations. I would trade broadband speeds for the quality and community of oldnet any day.

>>15561 The stress, the burning out and trying to make everything meaningful or important enough is a staple of society nowadays, the megacorps didn't turn internet into a serious business, because it isn't and there's no good reason to yet (if anything, it would improve becoming serious business at this point) Don't think I've read about a case where nostalgia can't be argued. The places I spent my childhood on were certainly dumb as fuarrrk, it's just that I felt part of something I guess.

>>15565 >>15567 Neuroticism is rampant in this culture recently. Well, it's always been there--but the last couple of decades it's become the norm rather than the exception. Wonder what that says about a people, a culture. Maybe deep down we know we're profoundly doomed. We're acting like a bunch of individually-caged rats going nuts and pulling out their hair with their teeth.

The only thing I hate now is people aren't very good at thinking critically and the internet and reality have blurred together so much. You have forces that want to amp everything up to 11 for more engagement and people get incredibly toxic and srs business about everything. So many things on the internet now are just tabloid outrage soykaf designed to get people pissed off because it gives clicks. There's very little escape from it.

>>15540 Curious why you don't get literally any other job. Warehouse work is like kicking dead whales down the beach, but at least it's better than Taco Bell.

The internet would be much improved if we could somehow ban all mobile devices from accessing it.