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.