🚀 go-pugleaf

Someone likened Usenet to a democracy.

In article <1992Dec11.003402.20832@clarinet.com> brad@clarinet.com (Brad Templeton) writes:
>
>Afraid not.  Only the creation of new newsgroups even resembles democracy.
>All the really interesting and useful things on USENET have been done by
>means that are not democratic.
>
>The reason that the new newsgroup process resembles democracy is that it
>was created as a deliberate mock-up of democracy, to keep people happy and
>to make people who want a group and don't get it shut up.  You see,
...
>
>This is false.  The truth of usenet is this:
>
>	o) The way to do things on the net is quite simply ... to do them.
>	It's pretty much all volunteer.  You want to change something, change
>	it and do the work and convince othe people to come along.
>
>	o) The pretend votes are not votes, but rather surveys which can
>	help you to convince others that you have support, which is
>	sometimes necessary to convince other people to follow you.
>
>Whatever this is, it's not democracy.
>-- 
>Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Sunnyvale, CA 408/296-0366

I see Usenet as a minimally self-regulated anarchy.  Every user _can_ do
anything (If they know how.)  But there is a set of social norms that
constricts them.  They do not want to be punished (by flames, mail-spamming,
ridicule or, worst of all, being ignored) so they tend to do the Right Thing.
There are discussions held on what to do (create a newsgroup, how to use
expiry dates, proper subject labelling etc.), but the decisions are only
recommendations - they are not mandatory.  Some of these decisions are
more rigidly adhered to than other decisions.  In the extreme, there is a
sanctioned way to ignore the decisions (do it in the alt.* hierarchy),
or one can go ahead and do it anyway - eg. forge newgroup messages and so
forth.  The latter course is generally unsuccessful because other people
use the same techniques to undo whatever you do.

	The integrity of the net is protected by equality (everyone is able
to stuff things up as well as everyone else), openess (most things can,
with effort, be traced) and a lack of central control (it is close to 
impossible to hijack the net.  Reminds me of "0-power" groups in Illuminati
[tm Steve Jacson Games] :-).

	Enforce your freedoms!  Vote for anarchy today! ;-)

Ashtray
-- 
When I say a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean, no more and no less
 [Humpty Dumpty to Alice (Lewis Carroll)]
Vogt's commentary on the theory of Morphic Resonance:
  There is no god!  The universe just got into bad habits. (Marcus Voght)