239: Blagofaire

Blagofaire

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Title text: Things were better before the Structuring and the Levels.

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Explanation

Facts become distorted as time moves forward. What do we know about the Elizabethan times? They spoke strange English. What will 400 years from now think of the first twenty years of the Internet? Crazy people said crazy things online. Will we even say "online" 400 years from now? Won't the internet be everywhere, and everyone on it all the time in their retinal implants that being "offline" will seem absurd? Particular facts that this reenactor seems to have confused are:

• "battling roving bands of trolls." Trolls in fantasy refer to monstrous creatures that are often antagonists who do battle with heroes. However, online trolls refer to disruptive members of discussion boards.
• "The generation's finest minds meeting on comment threads, […] and holding the great dialogues of the age!" As Randall has pointed out in other comics (202: YouTube, 301: Limerick, and 481: Listen to Yourself), the discussions that take place online are often very poor examples of intellectual discourse.

"Ren Faire" is short for "Renaissance Faire", described as "an outdoor weekend gathering, usually held in the United States, open to the public and typically commercial in nature, which emulates a historic period for the amusement of its guests." While Cory Doctorow is not in this comic, the character is cosplaying him. This comic inspired several xkcd readers to give Cory Doctorow a red cape and goggles when he won the 2007 EFF Pioneer Award. Cory Doctorow's balloon is featured in 482: Height. The title "Blagofaire" might be an amalgamation between Blogosphere, Medieval Faire, and Blag, Randall's way of referencing his blog. The same topic is mentioned in the title text of the second image of the what if? article Facebook of the Dead, which say: "An elderly Cory Doctorow cosplaying by wearing what the future thinks he wore in the past.". The "festival" the cosplayer references is later referenced in 771: Period Speech.

The title text is probably the future cosplayer referring to the state of the future internet, indicating some organizational structure that constrains and stratifies it, and his preference for what he perceives as the wild and unfettered internet of the past. It might be analogous to various prior changes to the Internet or Internet-based services, such as the Great Renaming of Usenet in 1987, significant changes applied to the Domain Name System over the years or the various rises, falls and reworkings of various platforms (e.g. Geocities, MySpace, Skype, the transition of Twitter/X, etc) that may have been at times seen as practically synonymous to the Internet itself.

Transcript

Man in Red Cape and Goggles: Hey, it worked!

Cueball: What? Who are you?

Man in Red Cape and Goggles: I'm from the distant future.

Cueball: Wow. Hi!

Man in Red Cape and Goggles: Are you a blogger? I play one of you at our festivals!

Cueball: Huh?

Man in Red Cape and Goggles: Like the Ren faires of your time — I do reenactments.

Man in Red Cape and Goggles: We relive the days when the internet was new and free. The days of risky sharing, Slashdot, the Myspace music renaissance. The generation's finest minds meeting on comment threads, battling roving bands of trolls, and holding the great dialogues of the age!

Cueball: Is that how you—

Man in Red Cape and Goggles: We're fuzzy on some details. Did bloggers really wear red capes and goggles and blog from high-altitude balloons?

Cueball: No!

Cueball: Well, Cory Doctorow does. But nobody else.

Trivia

This is the first xkcd comic featuring Cory Doctorow.

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Discussion

Offline would mean dead. 173.245.54.47 13:35, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Structuring and levels?

I still don't understand the title text. Structuring, levels? Can it be explained more thoroughly?141.101.81.220 15:52, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

I can't figure out how to word well enough to add it in, but my interpretation is that's it's a joke about the way that we organize time, with the Structuring and the Levels being like the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment. Someone living through both wouldn't notice a sudden difference between them, while someone looking at them as past events can think of things in terms of decades and centuries, and choose a point at the start, middle or end of the gradual changes which brought about the later time period. 108.162.246.209 22:16, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

I have no other explanation, yet I wonder if there was a time before people tended to simplify past events or things in general. The title text sounds like a reminescence, maybe of how Munroe perceived the early internet. 141.101.105.42 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

No-one else thought that Structuring and Levels referred to some kind of event that restructured the internet of the future? I mean, the future cosplayer speaks of the modern internet as some wild and adventurous place, free of rules and responsibility. The future internet could be strictly regulated, where bloggers can only speak to bloggers of their "level" and a talk thread digressing out of it's place in the Structure would be ruthlessly persecuted!

Or something like that. In fact, the "wizard" explanation is dumb, so I'm gonna change it. -Pennpenn 162.158.2.221 03:51, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

Levels would be the amount companies are going to force people to pay to keep the same Internet that they have now with the end of Net Neutrality and the ability to go to any website without restriction because it does not help pad the pockets of today Government/Corporate overlords162.158.62.231 11:20, 6 July 2017 (UTC)

i think the struckiring and lvls is 1 a refrence 2 video game levels and the sturcking like capcha but more

Randall also seems to have likened Internet trolls to fantasy ones in this comic: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/591:_Troll_Slayer162.158.30.86 03:42, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

As someone who missed this era of the internet by a few years, whilst this is only slightly related to the comic, I have to ask, was it genuinely like the wildwest? Part of me feels like you guys play it up slightly. RG (talk) 02:26, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

I can only speak of my own experiences, starting with pre-web Internet (Usenet discussions, also telnetted-to BBSs, IRC, FTP servers/Kermitting for shareware, etc) when I first realised that the (already well over a decade old) Internet existed due to getting an academic opportunity. Interesting and more innocent times (even with the likes of given anon.penet.fi being used in capacities even less regulated than 4chan or the darkweb currently is), because you just didn't have everybody-and-their-LOLcat around. Geeks ruled, and subsets of geeks with other ulterior motives and aims were more disperate.

Then, at some point, there was Gopher and after that the World Wide Web, which was a 'novelty' for us geeks. (I set up my first personal web-page... It was a long list of interesting links to other web-pages I'd found, which I then started to classify. If I'd have put a bit more effort in I could have eventually been Yahoo (and/or Google) before they did...) Still nice, still geeky. Still very family-friendly (with a cautious nod about the existence of a.s.s(.m) and the a.p.b.e(.*), of course), though there were practically no families, per se. ("TANGOTI", in fact. Though of course I knew a few actual ones who were, being academically present in the same place as me, it just wasn't 'a thing'. And naturally I'm skipping over such as "the GIFfy Girls".) Still a fairly innocent and idealised time.

Then came The Eternal September. Can't recall if it was AOL or webTV, or possibly somewhere else, that caused the greatest influx, but this was the start of "everybody is on the Internet" (or at least, as far as I was concerned, Usenet, which was still my go-to 'social space', mostly under the 'better' groups of the alt.fan.* hierarchy). Imagine, by today's standards, that you're on a nice forum/messageboard and some other (less salubrious) 'collective' decides to 'Raid' your domain for shitz'n'giggles (except mostly this was being done without conscious ill-intent, just really a nearly unmanagable flood of n00bs treading on toee, etc). For me, this is the "Wild Wild West" era, with naive prospectors and wild bandits clashing with indiginous natives (though the latter had been the ones to have created the townships with the previously friendly saloon-bar, rather than the 'native encampment' analogue, so my analogy breaks down somewhat).

Then I 'took a break' for a year or two, leaving academe and my first job (though technical) with Internet access was basically email-only for all practical purposes. In that time, I think Internet Explorer shifted from being the free 'hero' vs. the mercenary Netscape Navigator (at least amongst those of us who were used to the freedom of NCSA Mosaic, and designed "Netscape Incompatible" web pages to protest that) to becoming the 'establishment' standard-setter, having soured the deal. Anyway, things eventually switched around, and I'm very much a fan of some of the Netscape-family's descendent browsers, and try to avoid Edge as much as I can.

But I digress. When I 'got back on the Internet', it was basically synonymous with "the Web" for various reasons, though I was still primarily more interested in alt.fan.* socialising... It wasn't full on Web 2.0 (i.e. forums). Not sure when Geocities came about (without checking) to fill the niche that I suppose in current ("Web 3.0"?) times is filled with wiki-style contributions, at least in the "fandom.com" vein. For me, that was post-Wild West. Not so much Dodge City/Tombstone era as Las Vegas (with or without the 'mob-connections').

"Social Media", as it is now, was still not here, but perhaps only because it wasn't "one click to take a photo and upload it immediately" yet, for various reasons (web-connected cameras weren't in your pocket yet, for starters; though at least you no longer had to know how to use Uuencode (or have a handy anon-FTP server at hand) for any digitised pictures you wanted to share publically). It was 'on the way'. Though I, personally, was already beyond the stage of online life where I might have joined in on 'Facespace/Mybook'-like platforms, even if it would these days have boosted my "geek-cred" to have been (even fairly inactively) in on these places from nearly the beginning. But I didn't see the rise in that as important, when it was starting to happen, and since then this whole Web3.0/App-based thing has igone over-popular and it'd be like moving into a big city after being used to being in a small village out well beyond any urban suburbs.

Now, this is just my (extended) review of things. Exactly where it is 'most Wild West' will depend upon individual perspectives, with some doubtless considering (and having been there to witness) the early DARPANet times as fulfilling this, others may indeed consider today (or at least the comic's own era) as like this, at least potentially for the hypothetical time-traveller's perspective from who-knows-what future conversion of the online ecosystem they in turn inhabit.

But, mainly, I think that way of imagining the Time Traveller's 'impressions', of the era that he is describing, should be framed also more as of a 771: Period Speech-type mish-mash of misconceptions than a historically accurate reduction into a definite 'Wild West'-like period as a direct comparison. (Also, the Wild West was pretty amorphous with not so clear start and end points, I'm sure historians of the era will agree.)

Also, among my fellow Interneteers, Gopherists and Webscrapers of old, I think we very rarely wore both the red cap and the goggles at the same time, so that's just plain wrong! 82.132.222.140 10:32, 12 May 2026 (UTC)
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