Detweiler is really losing it...

[remail at tamsun.tamu.edu]

Question: has anybody actually had any contact with Detweiler recently?
I know he used to be a rational and respectable Usetter; keeper of
the Privacy FAQ, runner of an autoposter service for other people's
FAQs, etc. I'd like to think this is all somebody's research project
or piece of performance art, but otherwise... it's pretty ugly to
watch this disintegration happen.  The deterioration has been
marked even within the last few weeks. The RISKS posting was coherent
enough, and no more paranoid than say, the average talk.politics.guns
poster. 

My opinion is just from his language, logic, reaction to other
people - whether his conspiracy theories are true are not is pretty
irrelevant. Multiple identites mapping to one person is hardly
unusual in electronic spaces, but most people regard tracking them
down as a challenge or an entertainment, not as the cause  for
 desperate rage and paranoia. Cf. the netsport of hunting down
John Palmer identities.

Is he actually a student at Colorado State? If so, and he's genuinely
sending out death threats, the recipients might seriously consider
forwarding them there. Not to get him in trouble, but perhaps to get
someone to look into the situation before this accelerating downward
curve gets where ever it is going. There's plenty of nuts on the net,
but the level of their nuttiness is stable enough. I don't think I've
ever seen someone fall apart like this before.

Of course, maybe it *is* just performance art...

Laura
-- 
-------------- Laura Burchard  /  burchard at digex.net ---------------- 
"It didn't take very much reductio to get right down to absurdium
from where you started."


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