Digital Media Perspective 950103
January 3, 1995
Table of Contents
- The Mad Trappers of the High Internet
- I/O: Readers Respond
- Inside the January Issue of Digital Media: A Seybold Report
- Who We Are, Where to Reach Us
- How To Subscribe to DMP and Get Back Issues
The Mad Trappers of the High Internet
by Mitch Ratcliffe
Back in the 1870s and 1880s, pioneers talked up frontier legends about mad trappers who stalked the various mountain ranges, the Sierra, the Uintas, and the northern Rockies. These woodsmen had come west when there were just bison, beaver and Indians to hunt; but the passing of the frontier and their staple prey supposedly had driven them to stalking humans. There may have been one or two old mountain men who, if they stumbled onto a group separated from their wagon train, would skin the whole family, mother, father, grandma and the kids, and hang them on his wall like trophies. But for the people who made up the fat, Conestoga-borne underbelly of pioneer society, there was little reason to actually fear the skinning knife, which made the stories about slaughter all the more fun.
The mad trappers on today's vanishing digital frontier are forging their legends themselves. They don't do much actual harm. However, they set the tone for debate -- or lack of debate -- about the mores of the technosystem by acting without clearly defined rules for good conduct on the information frontier. The function they serve, as boogie men and bomb throwers on behalf of the digital revolution, is important to note.
The Net has given birth to a species of cranky old-timer who claims to battle the insidious forces of corporatism and spamming from their mountain hide-outs. The Internet Liberation Front sent email-bombs to Josh Quittner, a writer whose repeated exposes on the Legion of Doom and Masters of Deception probably invited the attacks, and WIRED, which has published several of Quittner's stories. The ILF claim they can defeat the minions of corporate America through hacking systems and by stealing source code. If this were actually the case, nuPrometheus would have had the power to make Macintosh the dominant computer platform, and AT&T would be providing long distance phone service to the Seychelles and almost nowhere else. Arnt Gulbrandsen, who canceled the spamming posts of attorneys Canter and Siegel last spring, is now running an anonymous remailer that shields the recently notorious Cancelmoose[tm], who erased what he called "off-topic" messages in a variety of Usenet newsgroups.
The rationale for vigilantism is laid down by Alex Boldt, who maintains a black list of Internet users he believes should be singled out for punishment by the community because of their use of the Net for blatantly commercial purposes. "In a nutshell: the Internet is probably as close to an anarchy as we can get," Boldt writes in a FAQ file about his list. "This is good. Therefore, punishing of unwelcome behavior should be done following the same grass roots philosophy that governs the rest of the net."
Frankly, looking back at the attacks launched in recent years by defenders of the Internet credo, it seems that the victims often fare better than the attackers. The press coverage of Canter and Siegel made the couple famous, attracted clients and earned them a book contract. When Phiber Optic uploaded John Perry Barlow's credit history to a WELL discussion, he helped catapult Barlow into the stratosphere of Net notoriety. Brock Meeks, who was a victim of a very analog lawsuit based on his Cyberwire Dispatch reporting distributed via the Internet, was featured in the Wall Street Journal, landed a better job and a regular column a short time later. Quittner, it turns out, is leaving Newsday, where he broke into cyber-reporting, to join Time Magazine this month. I've got a good job already, but I can't help wondering what offers would come in if only I could get attacked by the Internet Liberation Front!
Absolute rule?
To find out a little more about the psychology of these much-feared arbiters of good taste in electronic society, we queried Cancelmoose[tm], who found fame (in the Wall Street Journal, among other places) when he initiated a cancelbot that erased messages sent by publisher Michael Wolff to a variety of newsgroups. Among the Moose's other targets were several advertising messages and a rant against the Clinton administration (the Moose did not reveal a party affiliation in our email discussion).
We asked the Moose if he was a revolutionary.
"Nope," the Moose responded. "This is an old issue, and I'm not the first person to do this. I've just been doing a lot of it lately."
His answer sounds populist, like an evocation of the common man called from the masses to do what's necessary, a Gary Cooperesque man of action. A populist stand is founded on an understanding of what the community wants. In this vein, Cancelmoose[tm], cites several rules that guide his cancelbot actions, but told us that he does not read the calls for votes that are used to establish the scope of a particular newsgroup. In other words, the Moose feels justified in judging the content of messages without knowing the specific rules of the newsgroup vis-a-vis acceptable content.
Granted, the Moose is acting on principles accepted by many of the Internet old guard when he erases a message. It's not clear the newcomers to network communications share these beliefs. Michael Wolff's pitch for his latest Internet book consisted of excerpts about a target newsgroup and a longish pitch for the book sent to the newsgroups about which he wrote. It clogged the newsgroups with a lot of needless marketing blather. But anyone encountering his messages was only a keystroke from freedom -- it wasn't like Wolff forced people to read his postings.
"Annoying has *NOTHING* to do with it," the Moose wrote to Digital Media Perspective. "To cancel messages that are only annoying is CENSORSHIP, which I am strongly against. If any message was only *crossposted* to 5 groups, and someone canceled it, I would complain LOUDLY that this was unfair." After canceling the rant against President Clinton's firing of Jocelyn Elders, the Moose contacted the author to explain the appropriate way to post messages.
Taking a closer look at the Moose's criteria for cancelbotting, though, one finds that it is a highly relativist stance: "I cancelled (sic) those postings because they were spam," the Moose wrote, "See below for more information on what that is, and why it damages the net.
To be clear:
- The messages were not cancelled (sic) because they were ads.
- The messages were not cancelled (sic) because they were off-topic.
- The messages would have been cancelled (sic) if they were free recipes for chocolate-chip cookies.
- The messages were cancelled (sic) because the poster used a method of posting that is very damaging to the net, in an attempt to get more readers.
- The poster knew this, and made a thinly veiled attempt to try to hide the messages. They were found anyway.
"Spam" is a very loosely interpreted word (except by Hormel, which is probably less than pleased about its use in this context), but here's Cancelmoose[tm] making law of it. I suspect the Moose cannot actually see inside the mind of posters; he admits as much when he wrote that he contacts some spammers after canceling their messages to help them find an appropriate way to post.
The decision to cancel messages, ultimately, is based on machine criteria, not human ones: "Some messages were posted in an inappropriate manner, thereby wasting 150 times the storage space necessary, on every machine on usenet in the world."
So, the only relatively firm criterion for the cancelbot treatment here is the desire to gain more readers by posting messages to many, or all, of the newsgroups on the Net -- it comes down to wasting space. But, isn't that one of the saving graces of the Internet, that it allows individuals to communicate on a very wide scale? Isn't storage all but free these days, selling for less than a dollar a megabyte? The difference between cross-posting a 5K message on five and 150 newsgroups is just 725K on any given machine, about 75 cents worth of storage. Even if a drive allocates a larger block of storage than the message requires, I'm still not more than a dollar or two off the total cost per posting. Granted, the cost per kilobyte of a news feed varies from place to place in the world, so spammings can raise the price of participation. The news provider has the choice of how much of the news feed they will buy, just like any publisher does. Within each newsgroup, though, the impact of spamming on cost is very small.
What were talking about is the cost of free expression, a human phenomenon that doesn't conform to the efficiencies of machinery. Whether the total cost per message is actually 75 cents or two dollars, that's the price of Net citizenship, and it's a good deal.
Granted, we still have to establish some guidelines for posting messages. Likewise, individual countries will have to come to grips with the intrusion of foreign posters -- for example the Canter and Siegel spam quite blatantly flaunts German law, which prohibits lawyers from advertising in any way. These are just natural consequences of people coming together. On the frontier, your neighbors would have been very concerned about where you dug the hole for an outhouse. There's just no escaping the consequences of our actions, whether microbiotic or cybernetic.
The question is, how should neighbors respond to inappropriate behavior? The Moose and his colleagues in the cancelbot and mailbomb movement say the answer is vigilantism.
Public debate, not private action
I've been involved in several on-going discussions of whether a particular person deserved to send messages to email-lists of people whom they annoy with constant, excessive and abusive language. These discussions are carried on in public, on the lists in question. Even "defendants" get their say. Ultimately, the offender is not barred, but added to people's bozo filters. Their messages are still stored on the server, but eliminated from my mailbox as the day's postings are downloaded to my PowerBook.
Some measure of network storage and transmission capacity is wasted by this process, but it ensures that if someone does want to speak and another person wants to listen, communication can occur. This is an egalitarian approach to network policy. If we can't live with a little waste, we're not admitting our humanity. Life is messy and inefficient, after all; that's what makes it interesting.
Contrariwise, Alex Boldt's citation of anarchy as the driving force of Internet dynamics is dangerous and misinformed, in my opinion, because Boldt's conception of anarchy is founded on the idea that the people should act as vigilantes against any form of order; other, that is, than the one he insists they protect through blacklist action. This is the ugly side of anarchic philosophy, the kind of hyperbole that Mikhail Bakunin spouted when he justified murder with the riotous quip: "[Revolutionary anarchists] recognize no other activity but the work of extermination.... In this struggle revolution sanctifies everything."
Or consider Cancelmoose[tm]'s revolutionary vanguard approach to the problem. When challenged by this writer, he responded that he follows the postings in newsgroup of news administrators when selecting targets for his cancelbots. "Cancelmoose[tm] is enforcing that law, and would not do so, without such strong support on the net," the Moose wrote.
It's all a little too 20th Century for me. Weren't we supposed to be growing up, getting past the megalomaniacal philosophies that gave us a bloody 100 years? Is it a real improvement now that we kill each other's ideas and not our actual selves? If destruction and conflict are to be the overriding philosophical weapons of the Internet, Boldt is doomed to play the role of Stalin or that of Trotsky. He's going to wield the axe or find it in his head. Listen to me, Alex, this is going to back-fire on you, either way.
A more humane approach might be to consider what the principles of electronic commerce and society will be, now that the era of the digital frontier is passing. We should talk more about people and who will have an opportunity to thrive in the future, and a lot less about machines.
Credo: Youth?
One wonders how long Cancelmoose[tm] will justify his actions with the judgments of a small cadre of net veterans. This method fails to acknowledge that the net is ever changing. Thankfully, it is an ever-changing dialog that should be able to accommodate discussion of its evolving rules of conduct.
Revolution is a mature person's game. The Net-bred revolutionaries are on their way to forging a kind of ill will that results in very restricted social environments. The rest of the world is quite sure to be arriving on information networks at various levels, whether through the use of electronic transactions or as full-fledged participants in online dialogs, in the next few years. Rather than welcoming them with an attitude of maturity and willingness to participate in a reasonable discourse about the future of the virtual village, these electronic mountain men who see their wild frontier criss-crossed by the fences of capitalism and socially-conservative mores are choosing to attack.
The hijinks of the Internet Liberation Front and cancelbots are hardly the great tests the Net vigilantes insist. Big corporations and lone users alike will endure mail bombs and even wiped hard discs or stolen source code with only a moment's pause. They'll simply build better firewalls, change their access method to isolate system software from attack or some other relatively trivial answer to the pests they find. That's because most people don't think of their computers in terms of their lives -- you don't die in cyberspace, you just take a few insults and carry on. The stakes in the analog world, and at the intersection of the analog and digital worlds, are much higher, because it's there that we will decide who can actually earn a livelihood in the electronic realm (and how). The more difficult vigilantes make life on the net, the higher the barriers to entry to a life of digital prosperity.
What one quickly realizes is, just like the trappers who were pushed out of the west by their own absolutists views (they hunted their cash crops to extinction, then got upset when others showed up in their valleys and mountains to farm and mine), the Net vigilantes are fighting a lost battle. They are simply earlier iterations of the acquisitive pioneers who follow them. What's needed is not a barricade against the forces of change, but a reasonable dialog on the meaning of the electronic discourse, commerce and society.
"Time," wrote Thomas Paine, "makes more converts than reason." Except for the vigilantes who believe that the lines of battle must be drawn here and now in the most dramatic terms, most participants in the settling of cyberspace know that there's all the time in the world for fireworks, because it distracts from the more mundane events that draw the limits of the future. The longer we waste on vigilantism, the more time will be given to the organizations prepared to weather the storm in anticipation of their ultimate victory through attrition. Paine's position won the day in the Revolutionary Era, because he understood that resorting to reason early on lays the foundation for deliberate action and victory for all.
I/O: Readers Respond
The editorial in our last issue, "A Red Line in Cyberspace" drew considerable comment, including this:
From: Mike Roberts - Vice President, Networking - EDUCOM
Now that the Internet is really big-time instead of just ordinary big-time, as we always knew it would be, our usual apolitical instincts may have to give way to an occasional fit of lobbying.... A case in point is the "redlining" item concerning Time Warner's plans for its full service broadband network. Like a number of recent network related developments, this one has been rapidly politicized. Two groups of left and right types who richly deserve each other are both completely wrong in their views on the matter.
On the right, we have the New York and Hollywood media barons who see nothing but copyrighted content on the network, and have visions of sugar plums at $125/month from upper-middle class homes.
On the left, we have champions of the downtrodden and oppressed who rail at the greed of the media and call for the government to step in and democratize the net through a variety of subsidies, large and small. These are the people behind last year's Inouye bill (S.2195), which was going to expropriate 20 percent of all the fiber optic nets in the country to the federal government for use by worthy non-profit groups.
The fact of the matter is that it is eminently feasible technically and economically for 80 percent of the homes in America to have two-way switched broadband (i.e., at least 10 Mbps) network service for a sum between $20 and $30 per month within the next decade, and to be able to acquire a demuxing and distribution gadget to go inside the home for less than $500 in the same time frame. These dollars are not additive to the current $10 to $15 per month paid for local dialtone, or the $20 to $30 per month paid by 60 percent of homes for cable, they are inclusive of at least 75 percent of those dollars. In other words, it's damn near free if we play our cards right and have aggressive deployment of new technology.
Assume we are costing the residential bit transport service, using best commercial practice broadband technology, scaled and engineered for a minimum of fifty million homes in the first five years, starting a couple of years out from now.... Then use a three level architecture, with the lowest level hub in the home, the next level in the "neighborhood" and the third level at the "network" level.
There is a lot of debate about the switching protocols. Despite the warts, the choice is likely to be ATM. Cable people, bless their inferior engineering hearts, have embraced it and Grand Alliance people assume compatibility between the compressed HDTV video packet spec and ATM. As for the second level, or neighborhood hub, the best information is in filings that the RBOCs are making for video dialtone. PacBell told the California Public Utilities Commission they would provide video dialtone for $337 per home, with technology they can deploy now.
My rule of thumb for turning capital investment into operating costs is to divide by ten for useful life, and multiply by three to pick up maintenance, overhead and profit. At $300, that's $8 (rounded) in operating costs each month. At $500, it's $12 a month. And these are today's costs, not year 2000 costs, midway into my ten year deployment window.
At the third level, transport costs/prices get dicier to predict because we don't yet have broadband service competition in a form usable to the residential customer. But I'm optimistic, based on the history of narrowband enhanced (i.e. IP) services providers in the last several years, that there will be a competitive market for broadband transport that isn't inextricably bundled with content. So, on the assumption that a competitive market will exist, the question becomes how fast can the best broadband technology be deployed in the market?
Adding up the above, we'll take the midpoint of the second level cost, $10 a month, add it to the $10 to $20 third-level cost to arrive at a monthly cost $20 to $30 a month for broadband services. And we haven't had to use any of the overlapped costs from existing cable or voice. AND, we've leaped a lot of tall buildings at a single bound. But I think these numbers are close enough to the mark to demonstrate that the barriers to realizing an economical broadband network market are largely political and not technological.
I won't badger you with more particulars, but there is a great fraud being foisted upon the public with these grandiose claims of how expensive broadband deployment "has to be." The large dollars are in anticipated returns to CONTENT providers, not to TRANSPORT providers. It's more an issue of how to get to a socially useful outcome for the net, rather than an issue of whether we should.
-- Mike Roberts
Inside the January Issue of Digital Media
Part two of "Hollyweb Babylon," where we sort out the spaghetti plate of alliances, mergers, acquisitions and interests that are Hollywood and Silicon Valley. This installment looks at the telephone industry from Hollywood's perspective;
An extended examination of the gender politics in the on-line world, where women by all measures compose a slim percentage of connected folks and thus face serious marginality in the information age;
Analysis on the transition from the regulated telecommunications environment to the open market and who's going to be calling the shots, federal or state regulatory bodies;
An up-front investigation that we will get flamed but not fired for: the "adult" title industry and its relationship to high technology markets;
A first-hand report on Time Warner's Full Service Network launch in Orlando, which, after a year of delays, looked like the Michael Huffington of ITV: hyped, ballyhooed, and not really there;
Scrutiny of home gaming systems' hardware and prospects for 95;
A review of Nickelodeon's Director's Lab CD-ROM, a truly interactive title that lets kids make their own fun;
A futuristic view of an "on-line personality" in the Note from the Chief;
The Good Stuff: A list of Things Digital Medians Should Know.
Digital Media: A Seybold Report, the monthly paper newsletter that sponsors Digital Media Perspective, brings its readers the most provocative analysis of the developing industry for interactive titles, smart networks and broadband applications. We turn an eclectic eye to the stories of the day to provide a more informed perspective with which readers can judge new technologies, new competitors and the assumptions driving the growth of the electronic economy. We question everything, and bring back the hard facts.
Digital Media: A Seybold Report is available monthly for $395 a year; individual issues are $40. Call 800.325.3830/610.565.6864 (voice), 610.565.1858 (fax), or send email to info@digmedia.com for information on how to subscribe.
Who We Are, Where to Reach Us
Digital Media Perspective is a twice-monthly electronic newsletter produced by Digital Media: A Seybold Report.
- Publisher: Jonathan Seybold
- Editor in Chief: Mitch Ratcliffe (godsdog@netcom.com)
- Editor: Neil McManus (neilm@netcom.com)
- Managing Editor: Margie Wylie (zeke@digmedia.com)
- Senior Editor: Stephan Somogyi (somogyi@digmedia.com)
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