Wednesday, 25 May 1994 3:25:18 AM
CyberForum Item
From: Tom Evans
Subject: Re: What is USENET?
To: CyberForum
Cc: alt.activism
Politics Room
Peter Pawlyschyn
Internet Café
alt.censorship
alt.cyberpunk.movement
ont.general
In a previous article Peter_Pawlyschyn@magic-bbs.corp.apple.com writes:
Tom Evans wrote:
>> That statement is nonsense! Most vital works of literature and art have
>> been created outside your suggested [parameters or definitions]. - TE
> If you had studied Art history on your way to earning your Doctorate,
> you would have appreciated that all artist's works are biased.
Peter, it's the way art history is taught that is biased. Titian's thunder
and muscle were the yearnings of his soul, not some idealogical conspiracy.
What artist hasn't met the identical censorship beast you're referring to.
It's an artist's job to render your "parameters and definitions" obsolete.
Censorship is not a newborn dilemma. Art historically defies censorship
and CONSENSUS bias. The Italian masters met horrid opposition to their
nude portrayal of the classical human form. The modernist painters
intentionally defied this classical vision and met their own.
Countless pieces of literature have been banned for centuries.
To this day, you can't see "A Clockwork Orange" in the UK.
In spite of your intellectualisation of this problem, it's plain and
simple censorship, imposed by a CONSENSUS of moralistic administrators.
Robert A. Johnson, author of a series of books dealing with men and women
and the the relationships they create writes the following.
Quote
[We are surrounded by a universe that is awesome and beautiful, but it's
forces behave in a way that is amoral. They are not concerned, as we are,
with specifically human values of justice, fairness, protection of the
defensless, service to our fellow humans and the keeping intact of the
fabric of practical life. And since the creatures who arise in our active
imagination are often for all practical purposes personifications of
the impersonal forces of that universe. It is us who must bring in the
ethical and practical elements.]
Endquote
The difference between your vision and mine is this. I contend that the
the 'forces of the universe' must not be filtered out or discouraged
_before_ they are experienced. By your previous writings,
one could only assume that you would have a CONSENSUS decide what makes
it to the public. Through this you would stifle our culture in a conformity
that would only represent your CONSENSUS. We'd live in your 'porridge' from
that point on, similar to any controlled culture. (ie. Iran or the FreeNET)
> we settle for the dominant discourse [a consensus] because we
> are not designed to constantly resample all that we know.
Rubbish! We are not "designed" AT ALL.
> the alphabet we use to communicate with is the same and
> there is a CONSENSUS between the languages that we use? If not,
> we may as well be uttering nonsense ...
Try reading Finnegan's Wake. Joyce will prove you wrong.
Jamaican slaves developed their own language to elude their English
slave masters.[another CONSENSUS] Language is constantly transforming
and will never be contained by a CONSENSUS, 'rap' music is an example.
To refer to this potent ethnic music as "uttering nonsense" would be rascist,
which I _must_ add, is another offspring of the "CONSENSUS. "
> That's why we choose moderators to prevent any one person from ambushing
> the mechanism we use to facilitate free speech.
Power corrupts, that is a given. All moderators share in this murky bog.
You'd have us replace one form of "ambush" for another. People must be allowed
the dignity to choose for _themselves_. This is the crux!
> It gives everyone access, but does not make them accountable for how they
> access the pipeline to the benefit or disbenefit of most users [a consensus].
Technology makes us all accountable Peter. The "Doctors" are accountable for all
of their activities. We include phone numbers and net addresses in all our
communications with government and the media. Though we may be controversial,
we are not beyond accountability. The CS Law incident is the most contentious
USENET incident to date. The lawyers maintain they will use the net for advertising,
a form of communication I'm not interested in. But I'll fight for their being
allowed to do what they see fit to do. After they do it, I can choose how to
best react to their communication.
> What I want is NO dominant position of privilege outside a consensus
> whereas you want no position of privilege period. My position can only be
> achieved by consensus, whereas your position can only be achieved by force.
> Who's position shall we take?
Our own.
*-----------------------------------------------------*
"Look at that Miss Jesus! Get _herrrr_." "But can she do it in heels?"
evans@planet.org Tom_Evans@tvo.org
*-----------------------------------------------------*
Saturday, 28 May 1994 11:16:10 AM
Message
From: John Stevenson
Subject: Doctor.wars over.
To: Internet Café
CyberForum
Tom Evans
Cory Doctorow
Cc: Magic Merlin - Admin
For the past several weeks, I have been watching the amazing waste of
bandwidth which has surrounded the inflammatory posts by Tom Evans.
Frankly, I'm sick of it, and it stops now.
I am very used to USENET netnews and the high level of noise and flaming
which you can find there. I am willing to pick through the Tom Evans and
Doctor-inspired trash here. However, many users are not. They have
gotten sucked into a war of words with Tom which they will never win.
Tom preaches free speech and open discussion, but it is obvious by now
that his posts do the exact opposite - the quantity and the content of
his messages are silencing other users. He is insulting, inflammatory,
and dishonest. He has co-opted the conversation, yelling other people
down and driving many good voices away from the discussion. Well, Tom's
censorship is over.
Tom, I'm asking you to stop being a jerkoff about this. You know exactly
what you are doing. You can either tone it down, or I'll fry the posts.
It's simple. Yell censorship if you want. Post anything you want about
this on netnews. I don't care. I have worked all my adult life at trying
to help people get access to media and information. I believe in free
speech and open discussion. But I also know that people have to agree to
follow some riles so that everyone's voice can be heard. And if you
can't accept that, well, there's the door.
As far as flames directed at Tom... move them to email. Again, flames
around this will be fried.
--
John S
Sunday, 29 May 1994 3:26:04 AM
Message
From: Tom Evans
Subject: Re: Doctor.wars over.
To: John Stevenson
Cc: Internet Café
CyberForum
Cory Doctorow
Magic Merlin - Admin
John, you've got to be joking...you're going to FRY posts.
And Merlin, what's he got to say?
It's very evident this has been more than a wit show/flame for the past
few weeks.
There has also been an unparallelled number of threads generating an
enormous amount of valuable information exchanged intertwined the non-
equation bickering that is after all human nature. I for one have a deep
respect for all of the participants in these forums, I can't believe a
man who has worked as long as you would raise or lower your finger to
hit the delete key for something you percieve to be useless, yet many
percieve to be entertaining and informative.
As a result of all this I have a far greater understanding of myself and
everyone involved than I would ever have received talking about 'nice-
pretty' things.
Do what you like, your guidelines, you apparently decide...and that's
it.
Enjoy
Sunday, 29 May 1994 9:52:14 AM
Message
From: Magic Merlin - Admin
Subject: Re(2): Doctor.wars over.
To: Tom Evans
Cc: John Stevenson
Internet Café
CyberForum
Cory Doctorow
Tom,
I don't remember getting the impression that you had a deep amount of
respect for the users in these conferences. From your posts, I would get
exactly the opposite idea.
I haven't received any notes of support for the flaming that has been
going on. I have received quite the opposite. I can think of many people
that do not even bother to read these areas due to the flaming that has
been going on.
This area of the system is moderated by John. If you do not agree with
his decision, then please discuss it directly with him. He has always
been open to discuss his position on topics, and I'm sure that you'll
find him just as open to discuss this issue.
Sunday, 29 May 1994 10:23:57 AM
Message
From: Cory Doctorow
Subject: Re(2): Doctor.wars over.
To: Tom Evans
Cc: John Stevenson
Magic Merlin - Admin
John, I agree. I'm done with Evans-baiting, here and on TVOnline.
Hear, Tom? It was (marginally) fun, but that's all. This ain't about
free speech and you know it -- never was. Online communication is a
new medium for most folks, one whose protocols are just developing. You
want to do this, take it to alt.flame, man. Plenty of bandwidth there
for it. I will do something for NET.SCANDAL, soonish -- I'm working on
a thesis proposal, a literature survey of online extremism, I'll be
starting a listserv in a few weeks for it, NET.SCANDAL and doctornet
will have their place there.
Lemme tell you a story, homes.
I used to be involved with a co-op, called Grindstone. Grindstone owned
an island in eastern Ontario, the old summer home of Lord Admiral
Kingsmill, first Admiral of the Royal Canadian Navy. His daughter,
Diana Wright-Kingsmill, dontated it to the Quakers as a peace and social
justice education centre (it ended up being owned by a co-op after the
Quakers found they couldn't afford the upkeep and the people who'd
fallen in love with the place over the years all kicked in a c-note to
buy it).
In the sixties, at the height of the peace movement, the island was
famed as a centre for non-violent resistance training. Every summer,
participants from all over the world gathered for conferences to discuss
nonviolent resistance and to participate in psychodramas (lots of
important stuff happened there. IPPNW was solidified there, and those
crazies who go into warzones, totally unarmed, and talk to both sides
about laying down their arms, were founded there). These psychodramas,
usually lasting about 48 hours, involved an "invasion force" of
participants taking over the island for a few days and the other
participants having to organise tactics of resistance that were
effective and nonviolent. Participants, both invaders and defenders,
were international and multi lingual, and there were people there for
whom this had happened before, for real. These were incredible
workshops, man, three or four books have been written about 'em and the
participants still get a gleam in their eyes when they talk about it,
more than 25 years later.
But after one particularily intense year, when a Kingston biker gang
acted as invaders and people really got hurt, they decided to take a
year off and focus on more traditional workshops. This was a decision
made by the organising committee, the people who donated time all year
to getting it together, the people whose names were on the liability
insurance, the people who paid and put up and made a committment other
than taking some time off to go to a retreat. The people who owned the
fucking thing, not in a monetary sense, but in the only sense that
really matters: they put up.
And of course, a couple of guys, knowing that there was to be no
psychodrama that year, they still paid up and showed and then bitched.
Bitched and bitched and bitched and bitched. They wanted their little
psychodrama, and the big bad organisers were taking ti away from them.
Those nazi pigfuckers.
And so these two guys decided to do their own little psychodrama. They
put on dark glasses and shut their mouths and just showed up to every
workshop during the conference and sat there, completely silent. Get
it? Nonviolent resistance. They resisted the hell out of those nazis,
and blew the whole conference. It turned into a conference about the
two wqhite boys in shades who invaded all of the workshops and refused
to participate.
And so these two assholes, these pencildick wankers, they pissed all
over the work that the organisers had done. They didn't put up, man,
they didn't say, "Shit, we can do a better job of this, we'll start up
our own conference or we'll jopin the organising committee and take time
away from our lives and families and fun and do it right." They just
parasited off the work that others put up. They were movement leeches,
and it was the same group of wankers who later shut down the co-op in
1990, losing the island because they didn't like the way the baord of
directors had been doing things but didn't want to volunteer to do a
better job, so they just voted out the board and left the island to be
sold to a fucking optometrist from Kingston as a summer cottage. You
follow me?
See the parallels? Bottom line. Mark has put up. He's put time and
money and sweat and blood into making a system that works. Betcha MAGIC
has put more people online than just about anything else. Mark invented
FirstClass BBSs! It was just supposed to be an internal email system.
Instead, Mark pushed and deformed the goddamn envelope and put together
literally the very best BBS software I have ever seen. It's a system
that you can put total neos on and get them going.
You put up yet? Doctornet sounds nice. But it ain't 5000+ users and
millions of calls and 13 years of free systems! I've never done
anything to compare with it. I want people online too. John does, you
do I do Mark does the cyberforum we've got this vision...
We've got this vision.
Text communication. No race, no class, no sex, government in the hands
of the people and power in the hands of anyone with an old PCjr and a
1200 baud modem.
We've got this goddamn vision. We're utopians and early adopters and
we're seeing it come true for chrissakes! It's fucking happening. I've
dreamed of it all my life and here it comes, and maybe jackasses like
Bill Gates and Al Gore are riding along with it, but who gives a shit?
It's coming and we all see it!
How many people have FirstClass BBSs wired? Tell you what, homeboy --
chekc out NYNET and SCRIBE, FCBBSs run by the North york and Scarb
Boards of Ed respectively. Holy shit! EIGHT YEAR OLDS are using them!
Tell you what number two: I pioneered a writer-in-electronic-residence
programme in about 1989, with a class of working-class grade three kids
in a west-end school. We used Macs and Microsoft Works to transfer
files. It was hell. We spent all our time trying to get our systems to
talk, and almost no time just making electronics part of the norms of
our communications. FC boards are full of the same kids, and they're
using it no probs.
Mark did that.
If Mark wants an alt.flame forum on his system, more power to him. But
that's not why CyberForum's there.
Why monkeywrench a good thing? Hell, I can trash, too! I've done it!
I've gotten busted while sitting in, providing a front-line for a bunch
of crazies who were slapping kryptonite locks around the gates of an
international arms bazaar to close it up for the day. I was there,
sitting in a the Littons plant, a 12 year old and the cops didn't have a
fucking clue how to arrest some kid and they were so distracted that
they hardly noticed the babybottles filled with blood that were being
hurled by the back lines at the gates of the plant.
Why monkeywrench a good thing? Why trash for the sake of trashing?
That's not political activism, man, that's just vandalism. That's
spraypainting a big circle-A over the Mona Lisa. That's having a huge
riot for justice in front of a mental hospital at 3AM and waking up all
the patients and screwing up the lives of a bunch of hard working
doctors and nurses and interns and orderlies. That's just TRASHING, and
it's shit.
People can talk about radical ideas without flaming. It's the only wya
to can integrate the average net.user into the debate. You sure as shit
don't do it by calling them net.virgins and slagging them all over the
place.
See you on Doctornet.
Cory
Freedom of Expression ...
like any other freedom, can NEVER be our absolute right. It can only be
a PRIVILEGE granted by those societies which have attempted to enshrine
such a principle in their founding principles. Out from constraint comes
freedom.
If we as a consensus sanction "Free Expression", we are granting this
concept a biased privilege. By it's fundamental nature we are assigning
a POWER to this bias above and beyond those others. Power is synonymous
to FORCE. Force by decree, force by law, force by consensus, force by
will ... but FORCE none-the-less.
This force needs to prevail or rule by umpiring the PROCESS which made
it so. IMHO, it's incumbent upon all those who respect free speech to
respect this rule, lest we violate the very process which allows us to
share our CONTENT or speak our minds.
This force must moderate between the freedom to input content and the
freedom to share the process. When they're at odds with one another, the
process must prevail for without it all content ceases to be EQUAL.
Discourse is dominated by content which bullies, intimidates, or
OVERPOWERS every other subscribers right to access this privilege.
Therefore "Free Expression" can only be sustained if we as a society
apply forceful biases that makes it so. This is the paradox of "Free
Speech".
On the other hand, anti-forces also threatens to collapse the this
privilege from within. ANTI-FORCES are where the silent populace fail to
re-affirm their commitment to the consensus. Just how do we as a society
propagate our privileges unless we choose to actively assume or support
them? This is one point the cyberbullies demonstrate clearly. If you
don't care about your privileges to convey content, who will care in
your place? How will that shape your privileges? Will it enhance or
erode them?
Any extraneous perspective adds value to our society by making us more
accountable to the values we hold. This is as true for the Dr. Doom's as
it is for Vegetarians, Animal Rights activists, Poverty Coalitionists or
The Nuclear Arms industry. We must know why we are supporting or
disagreeing with a particular point of view. Indifference breeds
contempt. Contempt erodes the very basis of our founding values and
principles.
For these reasons, I fully support the right to convey content over the
net, as long as it is superseded by the right to enFORCE free access to
the process which makes it so. On this bulletin board, a set of "rules"
has been proposed to protect this process from wonton anarchy. They are
as follows:
·> (1) Personal attacks will not be tolerated. The offending posts
·> will be deleted and the conference advised of the deletion. If you want
·> to call each other names, you are advised to do so in private.
·>
·> (1a) We enter a grey area in cases where people cleverly sprinkle
·> their insults among some valid points. You can test my tolerance, or how
·> about not doing it at all? If you do have valid points, you'll probably
·> find they get across better without the vitriol.
·>
·> (2) In addition to personal namecalling, I'd also like to
·> discourage that of the political variety. Calling the NDP, for instance,
·> a bunch of Pinkos or the members of the Reform Party a bunch of Fascists
·> is lazy and ignorant.
·>
·> (3) Posts that do not pertain to the theme of the conference will
·> either be deleted or have their expiry date adjusted accordingly. I
·> generally do not like deleting items that people have posted to a single
·> conference, and so I will generally give the regulars a chance to read
·> them and then get rid of them before they start clogging things up.
·>
·> (3a) Posts that add little or nothing to the discussion will also
·> be slotted for early retirement. Included in this category are posts of
·> the 'I agree with you 100%' variety.
·>
·> -··
Personally, I like the soft time elapse feature. It allows everyone to
state their case, but balances it's significance to the forum's bias.
The hard elapse feature is appropriate for tactical postings who's sole
intent is to disrupt the process. IMHO, that's fair game.
However, as a caveat it is my suggestion that as any input must be
considered GOODWILL, the MODERATOR is made ACCOUNTABLE for their
actions. That is they should :
1) notify subscribers [by way of the forum] that a moderation was
enforced,
2) inform subscribers as to the reason such force needed to be invoked,
3) have an interactive relief mechanism to review reasons behind such
force and overturn any poorly reasoned force.
With these safeguards in place, not only the process but the content and
the custodianship of power over the process can be reviewed by the
forums subscribers. Without it, we are agreeing to erode the very rights
we seek to practice.
I hope others may take the time to constructively contribute their
thoughts regarding this very important issue. Thanks.
© Peter _··
Peter_Pawlyschyn@magic-bbs.corp.apple.com
nunatak@intacc.web.net