When eBay made their choice decades ago, it's fortunate for us that they chose to stay on the path of light. If they hadn't, there's a good chance that we'd staring down an Ebola-obsessed survivalist cult with a novel sideline in gym socks and haunted dolls.
Back in 1995, eBay.com was the personal homepage of its creator, Pierre Omidyar ... and just like most personal homepages, it was full of random bullshit. There were pages dedicated to an alumni group, a biotech company, something called "AuctionWeb" (foreshadowing!), and -- more disconcertingly -- a page titled "Ebola Information." Sadly, no one thought to screenshot this work of creepy magnificence, so we're only left with the description provided by one biographer. There was "a photograph of the virus that he had found on the Centers for Disease Control website," as well as "[links] to news stories and data about Ebola and Ebola outbreaks." Oh wait, shoot. This was 1995. There was probably a dancing baby somewhere in that mix.
Admittedly, Omidyar wasn't being a complete lunatic when he created this site. Everyone was terrified of Ebola at that time, thanks to movies such as Outbreak and Twelve Monkeys, books like The Hot Zone, and, oh right, that major fucking outbreak of Ebola. It made complete sense to have a page that collated this information together, and his concern about a virological apocalypse led to him proposing a messaging system to help people survive a mass pandemic as recently as 2007.
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