https://www.wired.com/story/the-weird-dark-history-8chan/
The Weird, Dark History of 8chan
08.06.19
Fredrick Brennan is a vivid dreamer, and toward the end of his time running the notorious website 8chan, one sequence would play out in his mind night after night as he slept.
Brennan, wheelchair-bound from a genetic disorder, dreamed that he was being hauled away by police and locked behind bars while dressed in an orange jumpsuit. “In my waking life, I could rationalize that that would never hapÂpen,” he says. But at night, in his dreams, denying the risks of operating the site he built and obsessively defended for years through a combination of slippery deflections, free-speech absolutism, and personal attacks was “getting harder and harder.”
Brennan, 25, is telling me about the days he spent running 8chan while living in a small studio apartment some 20 stories above the sprawl of Manila, far from New York where he began building the site as he came down from a psycheÂdelic mushroom trip in 2013.
Brennan was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, more commonly referred to as brittle bone disease. His arms and legs are severely bowed from the condition, which, he says, also afflicts his mother and younger brother. He has, by his own tally, suffered dozens of broken bones over his life.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060510064356/http://www.alicebot.org/style.pdf
What does all of this have to do with A. L. I. C. E. and AIML? People have often imagined that A. L. I. C. E. is like Netscape in 1995, poised to take off on the next great S-curve of growth. But I have argued it is more like Apple in 1975, or the whole PC industry at that time. We are mainly amateurs and hobbyists, with few real business applications we can point to. Yet we all have the same kind of "fever" that gripped an earlier generation of PC enthusiasts. We KNOW this is the Next Big Thing. We KNOW we are the vanguard of the revolution.