Welcome to the Asylum!

[Cathal Garvey]

> The experience (experiment?) did, however, confirm my personal conviction
> that privacy and anonymity are expensive, and we as a society generally
> have to pay that cost for others, and the cost continues to spiral out of
> control as surveillance capabilities spiral out of control.

Two thoughts on this. Firstly, that this mailing list certainly does
have well resourced enemies known to employ tactics like "persona
management" and COINTELPRO, etc. etc.; I would actually find it
implausible to assume they don't stir shit up to ruin the signal/noise
ratio on the most overtly political applied-cryptography mailing list
out there.

Secondly, it's true that cheap ano/pseudo/nymity seems to permit people
to express personality traits they would moderate if they had a
reputation to maintain. This has often made me wonder about just why
Anonymous seems *vaguely* stable despite the whole, (er, membership?)
being anons.

But of course, they're not Anons, they're Pseudons. Most of the active
and influential membership go by names they've built reputational
capital upon. They can't afford to throw that capital away by being
dicks all the time. If they want to be dicks, they have to sock-puppet,
and Anon discussion format is usually chat-based on moderated servers
like IRC, so flames can get put out if the mod feels like it.. or
high-signal people can migrate to a private room trivially.

All of this makes pointless trolling like we're seeing on this list
pretty expensive compared to a mailing list with little moderation. You
can't afford to burn a 'nym because making a new 'nym is expensive
(socially, if not computationally; nobody listens to a newfag), and
there's simply no way to prevent high-signals from discussing things
without you because Chat just works better that way.

All very navel-gaze-y way of saying that Mailing lists are far more
prone to the tragedy of the commons, and that if bloody Anonymous can do
a better job of keeping the Signal ratio high then perhaps things need
further thought.

On 20/01/14 04:43, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 06:54:03PM -0600, J.A. Terranson wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, 19 Jan 2014, Cathal Garvey wrote:
>>
>>> Does anybody happen to curate this list into a more signal>noise form? I
>>> filter the noisier trolls, but everyone else then takes the troll-bait
>>> and things continue to spiral downwards.
>>
>> Rian Wahby is our "Curator".
>>
>>> Who's actually here to discuss privacy and crypto?
>>>
>>> On 19/01/14 20:45, Anonymous Remailer (austria) wrote:
>>>> Hi All, I would add its NOT just a mailing list, it IS instead an
>>>> insane asylum and experiment in social darwinism where reputation
>>>> capitol has replaced wealth in the currency of the group.
>>>>
>>>> just my .02
>>
>> In the past, the list almost destroyed itself over the question of whether 
>> moderation equalls censorship, and a distributed list was created, where 
>> each feed was shared, but the moderation of what came in was decided by 
>> each node operator.  I personally dont care about th S/N ratio too much, 
>> and as such, tend towards extremely light moderation of the silent 
>> variety. Obviously, Riad believes in open skies.  As long as there is just 
>> one node, we really need an anything goes, each person needs to 
>> learn to control themselves approach.
>>
>> Me and Riad will be trying to hack mailmain inot a CDR system soon (the 
>> old one used the now long deprecated Majordomo scripting system).
> 
> I want to apologize to everyone else for having to put up with me taking
> up the troll-bait and having a nice shit-wrestle.
> 
> The experience (experiment?) did, however, confirm my personal conviction
> that privacy and anonymity are expensive, and we as a society generally 
> have to pay that cost for others, and the cost continues to spiral out of
> control as surveillance capabilities spiral out of control.
> 
> See subject {}coin for what I hope might be part of a solution.
> 
> 
> -- Troy 
> 
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