This afternoon I proposed a new Usenet newsgroup: alt.fan.john-c-dvorak, an unmoderated group for the life and work of John C. Dvorak, his columns, his books, and his broadcasts. The proposal is posted in alt.config, which is where Usenet decides these things, and the discussion runs about two weeks. The charter, the rationale, and the FAQ live at the group's permanent home, afjcd.org. If the discussion goes the way these things usually go, I will issue the newgroup control message when it closes, and the group will exist on news servers all over the world. Owned by nobody. Run by nobody. That is the announcement. The rest of this post is why, and then the map, because the map is the part nobody writes down anymore: how a normal person gets onto Usenet in 2026, possibly for the first and only time, to visit one memorial newsgroup.
The anchor
I found Adam Curry the way you found things in 2005: by accident, at exactly the right moment. I had just moved to Berlin to live there, and the Daily Source Code was the sound of my new life, a man in a studio talking to whoever would listen, inventing podcasting out loud, day by day. I heard Adam lose his mother on that podcast. I heard him piss in his garage, because the show stopped for nothing. Then, in 2007, Adam and some tech journalist started a podcast together, and I was there for episode one of No Agenda, in a flat at Lehrterstrasse 5d in Tiergarten, living the life, with no idea I was signing up for nineteen years.
I listened to No Agenda from episode one through all of Adam's homes and wives and beliefs, through every era and every reinvention, and through all of it there was one constant. Adam was the weather. John C. Dvorak was the climate. The anchor. The dad. The husband. The stalwart. Somewhere along the way the show dubbed me a Knight of the No Agenda order. I don't know that I ever held a title above Knight, and I never needed one. I never even ordered the ring.
John died on July 20, 2026. I did not know how much I would miss him. I am still mourning, which surprised me; you are not supposed to grieve a voice in your earbuds the way you grieve family, except that nineteen years of Thursdays and Sundays is its own kind of family, and the grief does not ask permission. A while ago, out of pure nostalgia, I got back onto Usenet, the public square of the computing world John helped build. And I found the alt.fan hierarchy full of the writers and broadcasters of his era, and his name not in it. That absence is what this is about.
Why Usenet, of all places
Because of what Usenet is. I think the people who love John would really cotton to a place where nobody controls this, nobody owns this, and nobody will really find this. Yes, there will be haters; there are haters everywhere, and an unmoderated group makes no promise to protect you from them. What it promises is different. No platform can sunset it. No company can demonetize it, fold it, redesign it, or sell it. No algorithm decides whether a memory of John is engaging enough to surface. A newsgroup just sits there, on servers run by strangers who peer with each other out of conviction, in plain text, forever, or as close to forever as anything on the internet gets. It is a memorial with no landlord.
John C. Dvorak never got his. The columns got their retrospectives and the show got its tributes, and then the feeds moved on, the way feeds do. A memorial and memoriam to him on the medium he came up in is long, long, long, long overdue, and posthumous, which is the worst kind of overdue there is. So: olly olly oxen free. Come out, come out. Here is how.
The road in (not Google)
First, what the road is not. It is not Google. Google Groups stopped accepting Usenet posts in February 2024, and what is left there is an archive behind glass. Usenet itself never went anywhere; you just cannot reach it through Google anymore. You reach it the old way, which turns out to be two small things: an account on a news server, and a newsreader to read it with. Ten minutes, total, and it costs nothing.
Step one: a free account at Eternal September
The server is called Eternal September, a free, text-only Usenet service run as a labor of love, and it carries the whole alt hierarchy, some eight thousand groups. Register at eternal-september.org. Two things to know before you start. It is free, completely, no card, no trial. And your email address has to be a real one: they ban the disposable and throwaway address providers outright, because of abuse, so a garbage address will not get you through the door. For the record, neither of my modern addresses got me through it either. What worked was cja@well.com, an address I have had since 1996. My only OG receipts. Use the oldest, realest email address you have.
Step two: a newsreader
I read Usenet in Alpine, a text-mode newsreader that runs in a terminal, free, older than podcasting and better mannered than most of what came after; the screenshot at the top of this post is my actual screen. If you want the friendly on-ramp instead, Mozilla Thunderbird, the email program, reads newsgroups natively and will feel like home in about ninety seconds. Beyond those two there is a whole shelf: Pan for a graphical reader on Linux, slrn and tin for the terminal romantics, Gnus inside Emacs for the truly committed. And if you refuse to install anything at all, Newsgrouper reads Eternal September in a browser window; you can read as a guest and register when you want to post. Whichever you pick, the settings are the same three lines:
Server: news.eternal-september.org
Port: 563 with SSL on (or 119 without)
Sign in with the username and password Eternal September gives you at registration.
Step three: subscribe
Subscribe first to alt.config. That is where my proposal is being discussed right now, and where you can watch Usenet govern itself in the open, which is a show in its own right. When the group is created, subscribe to alt.fan.john-c-dvorak. That is the whole road. If you only ever visit the one memorial group, the road was still worth paving, and now you have it under your feet for good.
Make it happen, and make it stick
A proposal lives or dies in its discussion thread, so if John mattered to you, say so in alt.config while the window is open: a short post in the thread, on the name, the charter, and the need, is exactly what the hierarchy weighs. When the group exists, ask any news provider you use to carry it; providers add groups their readers ask for. And then the part that actually decides everything: post. A column that argued you out of a position. A prediction that came embarrassingly true. A memory of meeting him, hearing him, reading him across forty years. A newsgroup is a room that stays a room only while people talk in it, and this one's subject spent his whole career starting arguments worth having.
The longer and ruder version of why I did this, including the answer to who the fuck I am to do it, is on the site itself: afjcd.org/why. The short version is on this page. The group, with your help, is everywhere Usenet is carried, starting in about two weeks. Olly olly oxen free.