CLOSURE

This reminds me of _why's final writing, where he discusses leaving his public persona in programming. He specifically cites the preservability of code as a reason for his disillusionment. https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE Beautiful piece of writing, very weird, very excellent.

A few weeks/months before _why published this book, this page appeared on his "public print queue" on his site, hinting that the print queue would become active on April 18: https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE/blob/master/PDF/DESO... A day or two before April 18, this page appeared containing a hand-written OCaml script you could use to hook up your own printer to _why's public print queue: https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE/blob/master/PDF/HOME... On April 18, a bunch of us gathered in an IRC chat room (https://viewsourcecode.org/why/CLOSURE/ircLog.html). A few of us got the script working on our machines, and so every 10-15 minutes our printers would suddenly start up and print the next page as _why slowly published them one at a time throughout the day. Steve Klabnik gathered all the pages into one PDF and gave it the name "CL

From: https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE/issues/3 -- vi commented on Sep 30, 2015 What is CLOSURE.PDF? Readme is not helpful. I don't even understand is it a scientific paper, a book, a program or a game. My first thought was "Fed up! I'm closing! Here is my closure manifesto." Along with Thanks, _why. there should be answer to What is CLOSURE? question in repository description. -- mikehenrty commented on Aug 13, 2016 I think the problem is that nobody except for _why and perhaps a few people close to him know the context of this material. It just showed up on his blog one day after years of online radio silence. These hacker news posts show some of the confusion and excitement from that time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5015087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5571387 Note that the link from Hacker News, _why's origina

It is assumed but not proven that _why's final thoughts about killing that pseudonym are captured in CLOSURE [1]. There's a lot of different takeaways from that and other contemporary writings of _why. Some of them are that _why wished to pursue the Right to Be Forgotten, not just in the GDPR terminology sense, but in a "Last Chance to See" existential way. Those impressions yield that _why watched the internet transition from "pseudonyms are fine and ephemeral" to "everyone knows your real name and pseudonyms are permanent fixtures in the modern internet" and tried as hard as possible to kill everything about that pseudonym as Performance Art. As a reminder of an internet long gone. As a reminder of a Right to be Forgotten. From that perspective, this archive is maybe a bit of putting a Banksy into the Louvre. It's out of context, it's m

I like to think he addressed this when he reappeared a few years later: "Now I want to make it perfectly clear that these papers and all my other works in life belong to the general public. In fact, I also would like to turn myself over to all of you as well. This was actually done several years ago, but in an embarrassingly disorganized manner." - https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE/blob/master/PDF/DISC...

As far as I understand, he quit his public life when someone hunted down and published his real name and address. He removed his website and github, which contained his various writings, some of which had names with "tutorial" or "guide" in them but all of which were at least 80% works of literature and at most 20% works of technical documentation. Not sure I would call it "ragequitting". Virtually all his works were archived by fans and can be read for example here: https://viewsourcecode.org/why/ A few years ago he published a sort of absurdist goodbye (as a live-updating printer spool) which Steve Klabnik collected into a 95-page PDF here: https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE His blog contained many small snippets of code that were definitely meant to be consumed as poetry, they are easy to spot because of all the colors and shapes

I'm sure you know much of this, but essentially: - August 2009, he died. (i.e. removed his entire estate and entity from the web after being doxxed) - He reappeared for one day in 2013, to release a 100 page document on a briefly live printer queue called "CLOSURE" (and a few other potentially unrelated posts such as youtube videos), which can be found here: https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE - His estate, preserved as much as it can be, is here: https://viewsourcecode.org/why/ - A few months after CLOSURE was released, Steve Klabnik gave a talk on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaWHVceDbFo