I don't remember how I found my way to UnderWorld Industries, but on one of my many wanderings across the old net, I stumbled upon this fascinating site. UnderWorld Industries sounds like the name of an evil corporation in a superhero cartoon. It is not easy to describe what UnderWorld Industries precisely is. UWI oozes early internet fringe culture and its main page can lead you surfing many interesting waves like an online zine called Stream of Consciousness, a page called Off World which is a collection of reviews, essays and other writings about the movie Blade Runner and a page titled All That Noise containing a list of links to many Noise and Experimental bands active in the mid-nineties. Not to be missed is the Hot and Cool page that is a link hub to some fascinating websites, mainly focused on art and fringe culture. Needless to say you can easily spend a day discovering all the nooks and crannies of UnderWorld Industries.
On the UWI Info page we find the following definition for UnderWorld Industries:
UnderWorld Industries (UWI) is to serve as a common name and reference for all locations ("nodes") that wish to share information with other UWI nodes. UWI is not a business, corporation, or entity. Each UWI node can be as different as it pleases, as long as it agrees (or at least tries) to adhere to the fundamental "purposes" described below.
UWI exists, in simplest terms, to spread information and encourage free thinking. Other than this loose guideline, each UWI node can carry on with its own "business". The rest of this document lays out some guidelines which each UWI will hopefully follow to make the exchange of information somewhat standardized."
At the very end of UnderWorld Industries main page, we find a link titled jon.scribble.com. Before we can proceed to a page titled "Jon's Inner Child" we are warned that we are about to enter a very personal page, followed by an Oscar Wilde quote. Clicking the link will give you a homepage you are immedeately greeted by two pictures of Jon. Jon seems to enjoy being a drag queen from time to time. His three words to describe himself are "neurotic, cross-dressing, mathematician". In the mid-nineties Jon worked for the online magazine Hotwired, then part of the Wired media group. It claims to have been the first commerical online magazine at the time. Below you see a photo of the hotwired crew as they protest against the Communications Decency Act, which would limit free and open discussion on the net about topics that were seen as indecent. Jon is standing in the back with his hands over his mouth. Around the turn of the century Jon seems to have taken the leap to being an IT freelancer. His business was called Scribble and the website has the very OG handle scribble.com. If you type scribble.com on your web browser today you will find that Jon still owns the URL and makes it clear that his domain is not for sale. Being the good guy that he is he coded a little whiteboard upon which visitors can, well, scribble!
A 1998 archived copy of Scribble.com will give you an online portfolio of projects Jon had been working on. For instance, he helped create the page athand.com which was a sort of virtual yellow pages for the state of California. It was one of the many attempts of people to make the internet navigable before search engines became dominant and seems to have been online until 2004. He also helped build the website jumpcity.com. Now this is an interesting story. Does anyone remember the "What's on the Web" guidebooks that you could buy in bookstores in the nineties? They were these thick magazines that were essentially listings of interesting sites on the internet, usually divided by category. Each listing was connected to a four digit code and if an owner of a guidebook went to the website jumpcity.com and filled in the code, you would jump straight to the listed page. Jumpcodes can be considered a very early variant of the present day QR code.
You may wonder what is the point of buying a book that would tell you what was on the internet, but you have to bear in mind two things. First of all the early internet did not have very good search engines until Google came around, so searching for anything online was not an easy feat. Second of all, slow internet speed made surfing the web a rather ardouous, time consuming task if you did not know exactly where you wanted to go. Author Richard O. Mann explains the value of the "What's on the web" guidebooks clearly in this article from 1997. If you are interested in reading a copy of What's on the Web, you can borrow a digital one from the internet archive. On a trivial note, the author of these guidebooks, Eric Gagnon, is currently a local politician for his town of Warrington, Virginia where he was elected last year. He ran a campaign where he objected to a huge amazon data center being built in their town. Go Eric!
Further down the portfolio page of scribble.com, we see a mention of a site called SITO. SITO is a fascinating project where artists can upload their digital artworks to share it with each other and the public. It was likely one of the first online art sharing communities and one of its pillars seems to have been inclusivity. The internet was seen as a place where each artist has an equal opportunity for their works to be seen. SITO originally started as a subsite of UnderWorld Industries, but grew into a separate entity over the nineties. SITO is still online today and while it has had its popularity peak, new art is still being uploaded daily, resulting a huge archive of digital art you can explore for hours. The website is still managed by founder Ed Stastny and Jon van Oast. Jon also uploaded some of his own artworks on SITO, below you can see one of them from 2006 called "made of circles".
On his personal pages, we get to know Jon as a smart, witty and sincere person who was in many ways a product of his time, but in some ways far ahead of it. Jon has a way of using his own person as a funnel for his creativity. Take for example this page where he wrote a Perl script that takes all the e-mails in this mailbox and publishes all the titles underneath one another, creating a sort of spontaneous poem. Jon also cares a lot about the people around him, like his sister Jules, for whom he made a dedicated page. His sister suffers from a chronic liver disease and from his writings it is clear that worrying about her took a toll on Jon. Jules' site functioned in part as a way for Jon to process his thoughts and emotions of having to deal with this and in part as a way to raise awareness about her condition to whoever was willing to read. Jon impressively maintained a diary about her health condition all the way up until 2005, when Jules received a liver transplant. No further updates after that but I hope that Jules is doing well today.
As much as Jon cared for the people around him. He had more difficulty dealing with society. On his humanity rant page, Jon was quick to point out the danger of reality shows by pointing out "The Real World", one the pioneers in the genre, as a symptom of the crumbling fabric of society. Jon had a sincere distaste for American mainstream culture and frat boys acting selfishly. Looking at his writings I feel like Jon was always trying to find the balance between optimism and pessimism for the human race, between opening up to the people around you and isolating yourself, posting angry rants online. The balance between wanting to be there for others, without being taken advantage of.
I found this quote particularly interesting because it reminded me of the situation in the United States right now:
I like people. Or, rather, I like people that I like. I love those types of people. The "cool" ones. Ones that just do their thing and make you smile and maybe help you out. However, as for society as a whole -- as for the generic, pulsating mass that is "people" -- I have written this group off as hopeless. Hopeless in the sense that, even if "they" represent 51% of the population, that is just enough to mess things up for the 49% of "us".
The internet was very much home for Jon in the nineties. On his website he describes his hopes, fears, goals and daily irritations in great detail. Reading it in the present day it feels almost a bit too personal. In 2025 everyone shares their lives online, but in the mid-nineties the internet was paradoxically both a more open and a more private place for the simple reason that there were less people online. In addition the structure of web 1.0 with its personal sites made it much harder for any website to be found by masses of people. Back then the internet was a place where people like Jon could unapologetically be themselves.
In 2001 UWI was decommisioned after almost 10 years. Jon's personal page remained up under the scribble.com umbrella, but updates became less frequent over the years. His website seems to have gone offline in 2009. Also in 2001, Jon founded the company Apparent Inc where he worked with big retail names such as Adidas, Reebok and Dr. Martens. More idealistically he started working for "Wild Me" in 2014 as a programmer. Wild Me is an open source wildlife conservation project. The project started back in 2002 trying to identify the spot patterns on whale sharks to track their migration patterns in the ocean. Today Wild Me is helping wildlife conservation projects by using AI technology to process research data faster and in larger amounts. There is a great interview with the people behind Wild Me, including Jon, for National Geographic in 2018. Last year Wild Me merged with Conservation X Labs.
I could go on and on about Jon's goings on. I could write about his pamphlet Coffeeshop Crushes, which you can buy on Amazon. Or his IMDB listing for appearing in a 2004 documentary on zine culture. In spite of my sincere effort, I feel like this article hardly does justice to the man Jon van Oast and his legacy. A legacy that is still in the making with his important contributions to using AI technology for good rather than greed. A legacy, however, that I believe has gone largely unnoticed up until now. I hope this article will help to shed light on his achievements, his endearing personality and his drive to make the world a better place.