Re: Good Bye Cypherpunks!
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
At 3:07 PM -0500 2/14/97, Vin McLellan wrote:
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.)
Well, Vin, your understanding was flawed. Many thoughtful, "non-sludge" posts were filtered out. Some never made it to either the "main" list nor the "flames" list, as all posts were supposed to do. (John Gilmore acknowledged this in his message. Anyone subscribing to only the Flames list, as I was for a while, would see some posts not making it to the Main list (viewable via the archive sites) nor to the Flames list.) Even my very long and thoughtful (I think, and others have said as much) essay on why I had been off the list for several weeks was _almost_ censored by Sandy, by his own words. Because he disliked some turn of phrase I used in describing the ramblings of Toto, Dale Thorn, and Vulis, he said he almost killed the entire piece, ultimately letting it through as a "judgment call." This is what I call a "chilling effect." Never knowing whether one's essays will pass muster with the Chief Censor is not exactly a reason to spend a lot of time composing a long piece. And was my article the kind of "sludge of spam" and "countless name-calling" you thought the Moderation experiment was all about? And what of the four or five of my posts a week ago which never made it to either the Main list or the Flames list? The contained no "sludge of spam" nor "countless name-calling." What they dealt with was a claim (like this one) that some posts were not being passed on to either of the two lists, and that perhaps a conflict of interest was developing. Does this still match your "understanding of Sandy's effort"? By the way, I can forward to those who are interested these four or five posts which got "Meta-Censored." (Unless too many people request them...I'll promise to forward them to the first five people who request them...then some of you can repost them to the list and see if they make it through.)
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.
The list was not destroyed when S. Boxx/Pablo Escobar/anon12054/Detweiler/vznuri was blasting us with dozens of messages a day screaming that "tentacles were eating his brain" and that Cypherpunks were out to destroy him. Believe me, for those who were there, that was a topic of much greater daily discussion than the insult-a-day stuff is today. (And yet, because journalists now frequent the CP list in greater numbers than 2-3 years ago, at least two journalists are sniffing around for a story on the current situation, where essentially none were very interested in the Detweiler episode a couple of years ago, which was good. I recall John Markoff asking me about it at Hackers, in 1993, but he didn't see it as an especially significant story. I agree with this.)
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.
On this I agree with Vin. The "censorship" episodes were the predictable outcome of such attacks, and this "psy-ops" experiment is a victory by whoever it was who was attacking. Detweiler failed to get the list to start censorship and "limitations of anarchic freedoms," but the current attacker has succeeded. --Tim May Just say "No" to "Big Brother Inside" We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
Tim May <tcmay@got.net> writes:
[...] By the way, I can forward to those who are interested these four or five posts which got "Meta-Censored." (Unless too many people request them...I'll promise to forward them to the first five people who request them...then some of you can repost them to the list and see if they make it through.)
I'd like to see them. In fact I'd like to collect the posts which slipped through the crack and didn't make it to either cp-flames or cp, on the assumption that these are the posts which tell the story. In particular I'd like to see the post that John Gilmore refered to as `Mr Nemesis' post, wherein someone allegedly slanders/libels C2, to the extent that Sandy dropped it from both lists, if anyone who was subscribed to cypherpunks-unedited at the time has it still. Unfortunately I was subscribed to only cypherpuks-flames and cypherpunks (the edited list) at the time, so didn't get to see it. I'm on Lance Cottrell's cypherpunks@cyberpass.net now, which is subscribed to the cypherpunks-unedited list. At the moment Lance is setting Reply-To: to cypherpunks@toad.com, but I presume he'll drop that when John Gilmore drops cypherpunks@toad.com. The moderation decisions that I saw prior to moving to cypherpunks-unedited after Sandy's return, and change of policy, were even more arbitrary. I figured I wasn't even interested to see what they were any more, given that the cypherpunks@toad.com was shortly being closed anyway, so just subscribed to cypherpunks-unedited. Adam -- print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`
Vin McLellan wrote:
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.)
May I ask you, what is the basis of "your understanding"? Did you form your impression upon reading only the materials from the list that was filtered by Sandy? Or you also read the flames and unedited lists? In the latter case, you have no basis for any claims regarding Sandy's policy. I do have a list of subscribers to the unedited list, and you were not on it.
I, for one, was appreciative.
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.
But of course.
I'm glad they never realized how vulnerable we were; I've enjoyed this Community greatly in its current manifestation.
Maybe they realized it and were not really bothered by this list because of this lameness. What if all these anti-government rants were just feeding the illusion of grandeur.
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.
It is because you wanted to take everything from them.
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.
It is a question of what you think is manipulation.
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.
Yes, if moderation created a new place in cyberspace, it would have been less controversial. - Igor.
Vin McLellan wrote:
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.)
Tim May writes that the disruptors "won". I say they didn't "win" anything. Truth is, the old, feeble, senile, stupid, and generally ignorant Gilmore/Sandfort team just gave up, because they're too much in bed with the establishment now to rock any more boats.
participants (5)
-
Adam Back -
Dale Thorn -
ichudov＠algebra.com -
Timothy C. May -
Vin McLellan