The Secret History of Key 23 by Klint Finley

The Secret History of Key 23

by Klint Finley on 2007-06-04 11:35:37

As we celebrate the launch of Key 64, my tyrannous editor and neighbor Ulysses Lazarus has coerced me into recounting my telling of “The Key 23 story.“Key 23 launched in July of 2004 as a group blog collaboration between Lapo, LVX23, Michael Szul, Sauceruney, Wes Unruh,me. But before Key 23 there was another group blog: sTaRe/IncuBlogula. I believe this site started in 2002, and that I began contributing to it in 2003.

Through the sTaRe blog I met Saurceruney, who I eventually invited to be a guest blogger at my site Technoccult while I was at Burning Man in 2004. Not long after this, sTaRe shut down and I started thinking thinking out loud * about the possibility of a replacement of some sort. But before I got around to doing anything about it, I took off for Europe for 2 months. I decided to invite Wes and Michael, who frequently posted comments on Technoccult, to guest blog while I was away. There was a great dynamic between them and after I got back conversation about a group blog began again. Michael took the initiative to setup some server space and a private discussion blog, and eventually,
Key 23 was born.

Eventually we decided we needed to let some other people on the site in order to keep it updated regularly. Various other people joined up, and eventually, for some reason, someone let Ulysses Lazarus on board (under the assumed name of “Lucifer Benway”). Despite the overall success of the site, Michael took it down for reasons known only to him in late 2006 (I’m not sure if this has anything to do with News Corp’s purchase of Key 23 in the April Foolsverse).

So that, dear reader, brings us up to the present.

*John Fenderson talked with me briefly about this possibility and eventually started The Cabal, which aggregated the blogs of several former sTaRe contributors. I’ve always considered The Cabal as a sort of sibling site to Key 23.