That's hard to say. It was really a pretty fluid group of folks that
included Rick Adams, Mark, Greg Woods, myself (when I wasn't off being
emotionally unstable or having one of my occasional hissy fits), Spaf and
various large sites. Different people took spiritual lead as they had time
and energy. Folks wandered in as their sites became well-connected, and
wandered back out again as they figured out how much work and resources
being well-connected involved.
It was not nearly as stable, dogmatic or unified as I think the outside
world thought. Mostly, it was a bunch of people who were unhappy with the
way the net was being run who decided that if they just pretended they were
in charge, enough people would follow that they would actually be in charge.
Smoke and mirrors. It worked. 95% of being a net.god is sounding persuasive
and convincing people you know what you're talking about, even when you're
making it up as you go along. The people on the net WANT an authority to do
the hard work, but they don't want an AUTHORITY. So you spend a lot of time
figuring out how to convince people it was their idea in the first place, and
hope they don't notice that you were always out in front of the parade
leading it down the street.
>Have they ever gotten together
>in one place to be photographed for posterity?
Very unlikely. Probably not a good idea, because not all of the Cabal was
necessarily talking to each other at any given time. (On the other hand, I
think one reason it did work was because it kept its fights private and
didn't factionalize the net very much).
>It's incredible to me that most or all of the information about
>the pioneers of the "new electronic frontier" (if I may be so
>sensationalistic) will be anecdotes which are gradually forgotten
>until just a few are recorded long after the fact.
As one of those pioneers, I'm not. A lot of things happened that at the time
I thought were for the good of the net that now I'm not so sure of. We took
things very seriously then (I took things far too seriously at times), when
in reality I think 98% of the time we could have gone to the beach and
usenet would have stumbled along without us, or someone else would have
muddled through instead of us.
At that point in time perhaps the youthful enthusiasm was necessary, but in
retrospect it was sometimes destructive, not constructive. I am generally
rather hesitant of discussing it too much because I came out of that era
rather burnt out and amazingly bitter about some things and I know that my
view of reality is somewhat skew of what real reality is, so I prefer to
keep quiet and let others talk about the past rather than either respew
things I'd rather let lie in the crypts of time or attempt to self-censor
myself to give a less emotionally biased recounting.
There's a lot from that time period that I'm not particularly proud of, and
I'd personally like to see it disappear into the mists of time. USENET,
also, is an organization without a history. it exists in a continuum, but
there is rather little connection between usenet then and usenet now. Some
software, a few people who travel through the net like timelords, but if you
try to tell folks that there was a time before moderated groups, or even
when all of the groups were in a single hierarchy, or even that alt is a
relative newcomer to the world, they'd look at you funny.
USENET is like Gene Wolfe's soldier in the mists. Every day, it wakes up and
sees everything as new.
This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16