Go read Ender's Game. They had a seriously electronic society. There were public message boards, and positive-reputation-based boards. Basically, if you demonstrated a clue on the public boards, then someone already reputable could recommend you for "membership" in the reputation-based boards. One of the characters did so anonymously. She even got paid for writing editorials, etc. Anybody could watch the proceeedings of the reputeable boards. In time, she was competing in debates with major politicians, et. al. Sci-fi? or Reality? I believe we could move from the former to the latter. (And I just avoided any sort of spoiler about the plot ;-) Imagine a system where spaf distributed the public key of the moderator(s) of a moderated newgroup. News servers would make sure that the message was signed by the moderator, or that the poster included some sort of certificate, signed by the moderator, indicating that he could post without having to go through the moderator first. Expirations and/or revocation lists would be needed to do things right, but these are problems with fairly good solutions. Marc