we've all heard about cyberpunk and cipherpunk, but here's something new:

textpunk.

That's right. Textpunk

Newspaper articles, BBSs (like this one), IRC, ASCII art, Kopipe, program source code, Novels, View HTML source, Google search engine, Mathematics, Hieroglyphics, The Rosetta Stone, Gutenberg Bible...

A textpunk doesn't sit there waiting for information to be slowly fed to him drip at a time by the gogglebox. A textpunk is thirsty for knowledge and 100% focused - they read old school hacker textfile zines. They don't waste their time with lame imageboarders: instead they're doing crazy abstract shitposting on /prog/ with thoughts and concepts twisted up so with many levels of irony that it becomes an art form.

Textpunks recognize and understand the true power of kopipe - how a well crafted piece of text can be so damn powerful that it alone can trigger thousands of replies with so much veracity within days. They see through things down into the core of what really counts, everything in the computer is built of text, ascii, strings of bits - They don't care about the latest 3D GUI environment fads. No, that's just a distraction. 7-bit clean ascii program source code. That's textpunk.

Look at how text has shaped humanity: The birth of writing systems was correlated with some of fastest advances of science and technology in early human history. Mass production of the Bible took power away from a few select monks and democratized paving the way for people to start thinking for themselves. Programming is text and it's the closest thing there is in the world to true wizardy and spell casting. Talking about real SICP-type programming here, not that modern garbage.

Today textpunks build up digital libraries of books and stick it to the copyright cartel. Schwarz, lib gen, the gentoomen library, and so many anonymous sources that tireless scan and collect books.. Textpunks are the people in tune with modern digital society of ultrafast cost-free transmission of text, they're the ones rethinking and revolutionizing publishing mixing it with open rights and making works available online.

Gentoomen library

RIP

How do LLMs fit into this old copypasta?

This makes me think about a bunch of crust punks talking about prose styles or something.
I do think this is very cool though

>>3
I'd probably say LLMs are the enemy of the textpunk, generating gigabytes of believable nonsense against megabytes of worthwhile text, making it harder for the textpunk to sift through the noise to find the truth that they seek.
Even if one can find a use for them, they're a double edged sword where you're more likely to get cut when trying to use them.

Did social media kill the netpunk?

>>6
What is a netpunk?

textpunk

we used to call that "reading"

In an age where content consumption in the form of clickbait videos is encouraged, simply reading a physical book feels like a truly radical thing to do. I don’t mean in the punk sense of sticking it to the man, but the sense of “I’m not going to part of this system and instead of speed and productivity I’m going to live a slow and contemplative life.”

>>9

Queue monkey smugly rubbing chin at angry tigress.

>>8
Lmao your right

so I figured I may as well be terminally ironic and ask deepseek to analyze this thread give it's rundown of the culture portrayed and what "textpunk" is in this context.
See text is like any other medium and has the same bloat problems. So it is quite difficult to just eschew other forms of media in favor of text, or to raise text to some pedestal above the others. It's ease of access allows any retard with a pen to create it, so ya. lots of shit to dig through. It's possible local llms may be usable to help sort through that shit tho. I do agree with >5 that the predominate usage of LLMs is a huge problem. it's probably better to just not read most texts produced from 2023 onward as a general rule. but putting aside text generation being used by spammers and ad agencies (who have always existed shitting up everything they can), do any denpas have experience with (LOCALLY RUN) LLMs for text analysis and discovery?

p.s. I could post what deepseek says, but I don't really want to shit up this place with AI drivel apropos of nothing.

can we stop tryna make "punk" an aesthetic can we like get off our asses and actually do something for once

I didn't know there was a name for this. Did you make this up or is it a real thing?

I like it. I do or did many of these things.

this thread makes me want to disable my display server

>>15
Give it a go. I ran a machine like that, ages ago.

I spent a while just using a Pi Zero purely in the framebuffer terminal.
This was admittedly more of an attempt to keep it from simply being stuffed in a drawer than any attempt to go all-in on text-only use, but it was fun.
tmux is a wonderful piece of software. links is also a wonderful piece of software.
I have never been super-particular about text editors, so I would simply do any text editing in nano.

I did have a handful of concessions for non-text content.
I found a script to convert images to colored ascii art, mostly for a handful of things where I absolutely needed to see a picture since it's not really useful enough to use outside of desperation. There were certainly ways to just blit the image to the framebuffer, but I considered that cheating.
I naturally was still able to listen to music, since the Zero was plugged into my TV and thus I could get sound over HDMI
PDF files were a pain. I had a script that would strip out the text from most, but things weren't ideal at the best of times.
I don't think I really encountered .doc/.docx/.odt/.abw/whatever word processor files, so that wasn't an issue. There was probably an easy way to grab the text out of them, anyway.

Web browsing via Links wasn't so bad back when I did it. This was maybe like 2016, 2017?
Websites didn't have straight up JS access gates like Anubis, and websites had way less JS for key features in general. Lots of stuff was broken, yes, but only a few sites were outright useless with JS off.
I was able to use Links relatively often on ordinary pages, even if less and less of the web was useful from it over time, and sites still made concessions to particularly bad mobile browsers, so I usually still had options.

Eventually, I did just install X and used it as a (still weak) desktop, then moved to faster Pi models since I ended up using the machine as an actual computer.

tl;dr: try it lol, I had fun; the modern web might be your biggest hurdle doing it in the current day

>>16

straight up JS access gates

yeah this change is really annoying

I’ve gone command line only to help with my ADD and it does work but can be really inconvenient for everyday normal people tasks I’m forced to do.