On Sun, 11 Feb 2001, Aimee Farr wrote:
Yes. However, I've been here a while. The dynamics of this community is somewhat difficult to grasp, and I can only beg your understanding of the same.
One of the crucial things needed to understand what goes on cypherpunks is that about three-quarters of the people see half or less of the posts. Having set up spamfilters adequate to give the list a reasonable S/N, you wind up having cut out a substantial fraction of the signal. Another crucial thing needed to understand what goes on cypherpunks are that certain of the regulars are trolls and/or cranks, and will say utterly outrageous things simply in order to "tweak" the presumed eavesdroppers or scare away people whom they regard as too timid to be worth talking to anyhow. It's best interpreted as performance art after the style of Andy Kaufmann. Regarding the paper you referred us to: While the author has come up with a lot of references as quotes to cite, few or none of them bear directly on the central theme of his paper. He presents a number of people who have a number of interesting things to say, some of them even on topic, but NO research or study that supports his central point of electronic communications as a first cause for the development of mass hate. A vehicle, sure. But not a first cause. And there's nothing really unique about it as a vehicle. Television, in my opinion, is far more dangerous in that regard, due to having fewer available channels. With TV, it takes only a very few people to decide that the airwaves should all be saturated with the same lopsided viewpoints. The internet, by comparison, is chaos. People uninterested in hate will find no reason whatsoever to visit hate sites, and since virtually everything is available (see http://www.bonsaikitten.com/ or http://www.thecorporation.com/oneoffs/96/kittyporn/ for examples of how weird it can get out there) a call to hate can be made by anoyone, but will attract no attention outside the limited community that has self-selected as being a priori interested in it. Even the relatively small set of people who are interested in hate find themselves spoiled for choice; Name any group of people, and you can find dozens of hate-mongers calling for their extermination on the web. In this environment, it is virtually inconcievable that any *one* hate ideology should ever become the dominant hate ideology -- this breaks up the process described in the paper at the "identification of villains" stage. As to the "moral boundaries" issue, I'll have to ask my girlfriend's husband about that - his dissertation was about what musical styles evolve in cultures whose moral boundaries are in conflict or change. Bear