A historical inventory of threats to the Internet Relay Chat ecosystem

This talk is an attempt to take a long durée view of challenges to IRC in the context of the changing technology landscape and its political economy, with a conclusion that addresses the burning questions of the day: the widespread adoption of Slack on one hand; innovation in decentralised technologies on the other hand, as well as the acquisition of freenode.

IRC manifests a basic human desire to chat, hang out and collaborate in an informal manner. However, these activities have not always been valued too high by managers and gatekeepers of IP networks. At other times, they have been perceived as the potential basis for lucrative business models. Therefore, IRC communities and operators met various challenges through the history of the technology, ranging from outright ban to corporate takeover. Social conflicts unfolded in close interaction with industry actors, where sometimes users even reclaimed resources from employers. However, the very meaning and consequences of peer directed projects also shifted with the reorganisation of production during the recent decades of late capitalism.

Nonetheless, the story of IRC is an outstanding example of the self-organisation and self-management of users, showing how norms of organising and managing infrastructures prevalent in the early days of the Internet could persist through increasingly hostile historical circumstances.

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