reid@Glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid) (10/20/85)
I keep making the mistake of thinking that USENET matters; events like this remind me that it's only a game, like Dungeons and Dragons. The whole "fa-mod" event is so wonderfully surrealistic: USENET is built, almost as its founding principle, on the premise of distributed control. There are other networks that are more satisfactory, but which have central control and are therefore less worthwhile politically. Over the last couple of years, more and more centralist thinking has crept into USENET. One manifestation of centralist thinking is name control: people who believe in domains believe that it is possible to achieve the level of control needed for name authority. (Whether I believe it possible or not is completely separate from whether I believe it desirable). This bit of changing the name of the newsgroups seems so wonderfully Russian. I fantasize the following conversation, somewhere in Moscow: "Comrade! Is finally ready for bringing New York Times to the Russian people! Is glorious day for Revolution!" "Good work, Comrade! Peoples' edition of Capitalist tool newspaper will be valuable to our countrymen! But we must purge the name! Cannot call it `New York Times'. Peasant comrades will think is about clocks!" "Ah, comrade! Is already ahead of you! Peoples' title for capitalist dog scandal sheet will be `News of crime and capitalism in the decadent city of Niew Amsterdam'. `Rmtitle' messages already poised in press room." "Great work. I see your worksheet of other name purges!!: USENET becomes ``forum.worldwide.revenue-enhancing.ATT'' Public Television becomes ``broadcast.blackmail.pay-money-or-we-keep-running-pledge-week'' Prairie Home Companion becomes ``humor.dry-and-silly.minnesota'' Olympics become ``mod.contest.physical.ski'', ``mod.contest.physical.track.sprint.440'' ``mod.contest.physical.track.hurdles.high.880'' etc. "Is lucky that mod.contest.physical will be held in a country with a big enough peoples' police force to enforce this change!'' -- Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA