Articles

Dear Editorbeing,

This column is lashed together by Doc Logger (163/110) in deference to Art Lee who needs email fodder to complain about. As usual, Logger was winning major stuffed armadillo bets on the evolution of Fidonet.

Roll da flic, Henk.....

Dear Reverend Visage,

I'd like to start off by thanking Zorch for being the Snoozlord. It takes a great deal of effort and commitment to put out this organ week after week, and it must have been doubly difficult for Zorch when quite often the submission cupboard contained nothing but my cheesy ravings. There is very little that Zorch wrote that I agreed with, but I appreciate the fact that he was willing to say it. If future Snoozlords take as seriously the concept of a free press, then we will be well served, as we were by Zorch during his tenure.

We are still lingering in the summer doldrums waiting patiently for the fall netwar season to start so there isn't much to report. David Bowerman and I played musical chairs for a few days over the rights of admin moderators. This might have focused the issue of whether admin moderators should be able to shut down debate, but the issue of contention didn't provide enough illumination on that theme.

I notice that Ward Dossche is asking for more than a brief word from Satti in the ZCC echo. I think I even detected a hint of sarcasm in the references to the long list of achievements that Satti has completed since he clawed his way into the IC position. If anyone does have a list of Satti's achievements and they don't mind sparing the matchbook cover they must be written on, they could shoot some netmail to Swamp Swine Magazine, care of myself.

For my pithy quote to lead into the Chautauqua, I've chosen Eldridge Cleaver who wrote in "Soul on Ice" while raging about how the social revolution had been usurped, wrote:

"..all of this in a nation where the so-called molders of public opinion, the writers, politicians, teachers, and cab drivers, are willful euphoric liars or zip-dam ostriches and owls, a clique of undercover ghosts... a lot of coffee drinking, cigarette smoking, sly suck-assing, status seeking, cheating, nervous, dry-balled, tranquilizer gulched, countdown minded, out of style, slithering snakes.

No wonder that many 'innocent people', the manipulated and the stimulated, some of whom were game for a reasonable amount of mystery and even adventure, had their minds scrambled"

I happen to like that quote because it certainly is a passionate statement. I also think that it crystallizes the despair of anyone who has watched a hopeful dream get trashed in the mixmaster of popular culture. We have become a great deal more efficient and mercantile since 1968 when Cleaver was writing and now it takes very little time at all for legitimate social protest to become just another advertising vehicle for something...selling beer, or designer clothing, or simply selling the ideas. (Surely the very concept could be marketed as "Cleaver's Angst" - a designer cologne or at the very least a television series sponsored by an obliging bathroom cleanser.)

I watch with trepidation as various souls propose New & Improved visual sensations for Fidoland styled after the eye candy of Internet. My fear springs from the fact that it will quickly become a medium where words don't matter except as graphic text boxes, and communication will hit the gutter of factoid style discourse.

I recently read through the entire collection of Fidonews issues and I must say that it presents an interesting picture of an evolving Fidonet. For the most part, it also paints a disheartening picture of a good idea gone wrong. On the plus side, I believe that the original spirit of Fidonet is salvageable and there remain a few minor impediments to restoring it.

As conceived, Fidonet was to be a militantly public domain network for communication between consenting sysops. What few rules there were operated at the level of addressing and connectivity. The concept was designed to be self-regulating and self-adjusting - an anarchist's compact in an emerging technology. In the good old days there was a genuine concern that the world of modem to modem communication would be dominated by commercial interests and also regulated by governments in order to serve the interests of those corporations. Fidonet owes much to the software developers who made the system functional, and still owes a great debt of thanks to those who move the mail.

In general when people talk reverently about rights or freedoms they speak as though they possessed those things. The "inalienable rights" referred to in a number of national constitutions are in fact very alien when it comes to practice. The gulf between the good idea, and the desire to short-circuit the concept by those in power tends to raise the ugly specter of expediency as an excuse for chiseling at the dream. Fidonet started out with a practical application of "inalienable rights" and was hijacked along the way. From the self-imposed hari-kari of the International Fidonet Association (IFNA) through to the brigands who proclaimed Peefour, the route has gone from a free association of sysops to a series of fiefdoms and private domains of those who want control over others.

There are a myriad of arguments for having rules and rulers in Fidonet, some of them are even valid. The adherents of rigid structure speak of the horrors of mob rule leading to chaos. The presupposition of their arguments assumes that the mob would be armed with anything, unlike the current batch of *Cs who wield the blunt stick of Peefour. I think that the people who assert that we have to have rules don't see themselves as capable of accepting responsibility. They lack optimism.

The lonely beacon of hope that has remained through Fidonet's history has been the Fidonews. Despite the frequent attempts to curtail the content, it has survived as a medium of free exchange. With any sort of luck, an editor can be found who can energize sysops to contribute articles and expand the common experience of us all.

I must go Visage, I have sent the teenmonsters off to torment their obliging uncles and can't pass up this golden opportunity presented by an empty house... which is to fall asleep without the banshee whine of bad punk rock music reverberating the walls.

Regards,
Doc Logger,
Furlang Island,
South Pacific