On Sat, 23 Mar 1996, Anonymous wrote:
imho the lesson of detweiler has nothing to do with detweiler, but in fact more to do with his targets. effective "detweiling" would be impossible if it were not for the large egos of his quarry. he
This is true. Without realizing it (until I took a look a the alleged Detweiler web pages), I've been Detweiling on a number of Neo-Nazi lists for a while. This type of psychological warfare is pretty interesting.
detweiler took a lot of pride in how much reaction he could get with just a few posts or barbs. he is not really apparently responsible for ever actually mailbombing the cpunk list from what I can tell. he believed he was perfecting the art of playing with people's egos. a sort of depraved cyberspatial psychology experiment.
It's not an art. It's just being an asshole, and there's nothing new about it. the alleged Detweiler had a few interesting observations, but most of them were cypherpunk-specific. I do see a real tension between the norms of anonymity and full disclosure, though, which I'll have to think about a bit more before committing it to Tim May's eternal data haven with my name atached.
the amusing thing about "detweiling" is the way that it is something like a bad, self-perpetuating virus among those with big egos.
I should have a good example of this on the Stormfront list shortly.
there is nothing new about detweiler's approach. there was a classic greek who was put to death for the same reason: not provoking people by calling them names, so much as asking them questions that embarrassly exposed all their ego problems. his name was called "socrates" and he was put to death for refining his art beyond that which was tolerated by a power structure largely populated by those with the ego problems (power structures are always dominated by these types, it is like flies and dead meat, or moths and flames).
I'm not so sure. I'd say that these types are more concentrated in political activism (where I would place many political cypherpunks) nad in mid-level politics and bureaucracies, not in high-level power structures. The people who come to power, and stay in power, have learned to transcend ego and paranoia. Nixon, who had been very good at this, lost it. Clinton seems to be holding up quite well. (This is not to say anything about their politics or characters, just their temperaments.)
the joke of course may be that detweiler could have been dead for a long time, and people here would still be blaming him for their problems.
Read Milan Kundera's _The Joke_ for an interesting twist on this. Or maybe _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead_. -rich