Re: Good Bye Cypherpunks!

[Vin McLellan <vin@shore.net>]

        It's always interesting  to see how another person, particularly a
writer, filters and reshapes an experience you shared with them .
Differences in the telling are inevitable -- but I perceived the recent
experience of the C'punks List quite differently than what Declan described
and implied in his column.

        My understanding of Sandy's effort, for instance, was that he was to
filter out the sludge of spam and contentless name-calling with which some
idiots were flooding the list.  My impression was that he was passing along
any posts with content (ideas, pro or con, on almost anything) but filtering
out the empty obscene name-calling and slurs (many of which seemed anon or
forged, with varied and misleading titles, to duck my kill-file filters.)

        I, for one, was appreciative.  I don't mind flames (and I expected
to still be able to recieve them, from whatever POV -- and it seemed that I
did!) but I also want a little meat somewhere amid the smoke.  

        Who did the filtering  (at the minimal level I expected) was almost
irrelevant. If the filtering was on content, I'd be unhappy -- but I was
eager to see some effort  to cut out the empty hate messages.  I even
suggested to Dale, off-list, that he take it on for awhile.  To me, the
issue was whether this community could develop some mechanism to defend
itself against a willful and intentional effort to destroy it.  I think we
failed to do so, despite the creative search for alternative venues -- and I
think the triumphant cackling I read on what's left of the List  is quite
out of place.  

        It may be that ideological purists were able to develop dynamic
local filters on their PCs  which satisfied them, but my filters just
could't do enough.  It was clear that the fecal-buckshot attacks on the List
were designed to evade them.   I'm still here, but it was more than a minor
annoyance. 

        (A year ago, I knew maybe five friends and acquaintances who
subscribed to C'punks, but they all ran out of patience with the unchecked
flow of sludge and unsubscribed...  months before John tried to introduce
his moderation experiment.)   If 700 dropped off right after the moderation
experiment was announced -- which I somehow doubt -- I wonder how many were
battered into unsubscribing in the six or eight months prior?

        And, of the fleeing 700, how many became bored with the obsession of
some (exhaustively prolific) writers with the "Moderation & Me" -- and went
off to find some discussion of cryptography, politics, and ideas elsewhere?
(Gawd knows, on the then-Moderated List  I never found any lack of
overwrought attacks on Sandy or John.  I even read them for a week or two;-)

        From this whole experience, I carry away something different than
those who gleefully celebrate Gilmore's surrender. I think something unusual
and valuable is being killed.  I'm now convinced that virtually all mailing
lists will soon be forced to either limit posts to authenticated subscribers
or introduce some sort of moderation -- just to deal with the spam threat
and the problem of concerned attacks by those who decide they hate or
dislike or simply want to destroy that particular List community .  

        By the logic of Tim and others, a clever and dedicated crusade
against Cypherpunks by any minimally-organized group, bir or small -- your
local coven, CoS, RC bishops, FBI, Romanian Govt, , whomever!  -- could have
destroyed the List at any time in the past.  I'm glad they never realized
how vulnerable we were;  I've enjoyed this Community greatly  in its current
manifestation. 

         I also hate to think of how gleeful the sociopaths who mail-bombed
us into the choice of submission or suicide must be today.  I think it is a
particularly henious crime to destroy a virtual community; something akin to
book-burning, but maybe more like arson -- like burning village schools.  

    There was a willful attempt to destroy C'punks, an attack of depth and
volume which led many of us (even those who had ignored at least three
earlier efforts to offer filtered subsets to the List)  to welcome the
Moderation Experiment. Unfortunately, the attempt at moderation just twisted
our own energies against ourselves.  We were, perhaps predictably, quite
easy to manipulate.

        If I have any criticism of John et al, it is that our List-Owner (a
statement of function, rather than property) never gave the List Community
an overt option to vote for  minimal moderation.  A tactical error.  That
that allowed the anarchists, nihlists, and others pure of heart to focus
their ire on toad.com and Sandy -- rather than on those of us who (when John
finally acted) might have gladly re-subscribed to another version of the
List in order to obtain minimal spam and slur filtration.  

        So now we ourselves burn the village in order to save it. 

        <nostalgic sigh>  

        How American!  

        Suerte,
                        _Vin



At 11:23 PM 2/13/97 -0800, you wrote:
>Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 21:24:37 -0800 (PST)
>From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
>To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu
>
>The Netly News Network
>http://netlynews.com/
>
>A List Goes Down In Flames
>by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com)
>February 12, 1997
>