I need to ask your indulgance as I write this. I’m writing in part to help diffuse some frustration and perhaps even a little anger. Writing can be therapeutic sometimes, or so I’m told. If you don’t want to read something that’s mostly personal observations, please move along to the next item (maybe you’ll like the picture better).
I had an experience yesterday (which I’ll get to in a bit) that made me start to think about people on the Internet in general as oppposed to some of the big corporate executives we presently love to hate. For example, there may be times when we start to think of the big phone company executives and big cable company executives as though they are particularly evil people. That, perhaps, they got stuck with some sort of genetic package that makes them want to stomp on their customers and only think of themselves.
But here’s a scary thought: Maybe they are just people like us, who have been given a title and some authority.
I know we (or at least, most of us) would like to think that if WE were the CEO of AT&T or Verizon or Comcast or some similar company, we’d instruct all our employees to treat customers fairly and we’d create offers that represent fair deals for our customers. In particular, we think, we’d never force anyone to buy from us who doesn’t want to, because we hate monopolies so much. But would we, really? Think about it, have you ever been given even a little authority and misused it?
Quoting from Wikipedia:
British historian philosopher Lord Acton famously said, “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Lord Acton argued that the concentration of power in any one place — individual, religious, secular, et al — is harmful for all persons involved. (Note that he did not say power corrupts, the more popular version.)
William Pitt the Elder said something similar more than a century earlier. “Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.” (The case of John Wilkes, speech in the House of Lords, 1770.) The entire speech can be found in Wikiquotes).
Of course, when we think of “absolute power”, we tend to think of kings and dictators (though at least some kings have been more benovelant than others). But I submit that this principle also holds on a micro scale. Give someone absolute power over ANYTHING and they are liable to abuse that power. You don’t have to be king, you could be a mayor. Or the head of a company – heck, not even the entire company, just one branch. Many of us have had abusive bosses that acted as though they own every aspect of our lives.
But we tend to think of the Internet as the great equalizer. Google will never in effect tell you, you didn’t pay me proper homage today, so go away. eBay allows everyone to make or break their own reputation; while there is some opportunity for unfair negative comments to be posted, as a general rule no one person can kill your reputation. Amazon will never tell you that you don’t have the right prerequisites (or the right connections), or that you just aren’t smart enough, to buy a patrticular book.
But that doesn’t mean that there are no enclaves where a “tin pot dictator” can terrorize people.
The first time I ran into this was back in the days when I was on Fidonet. Without giving a complete history of Fidonet, which would take far too long and bore many of you to tears, the biggest problem Fidonet had was their system of coordinators. It seldom failed – give some guy a “coordinator” title, and pretty soon he’d piss off somebody (and far too often, a whole bunch of people) by throwing his weight around. Often it was someone outside of the local area – for example, a Regional Coordinator would often get along just great with the people in his home Net, while those in Nets in other states within his region (at quite some distance from his home net) often wanted his head on a pole. Fidonet was sometimes derisively referred to as “Fight-O-Net” because it always seemed like somebody was picking a fight with somebody, and often it was the Coordinators that were starting the disputes. Unfortunately, since they were also in effect judge and jury, whichever hapless node they decided to pick on at any given time often wound up being kicked out of the net entirely, that is if they didn’t leave in disgust first.
I’ve seen something similar happen to a lesser degree on the Internet too, particularly in moderated mailing lists. The problem with most moderated lists is that the moderators self-select – that is, a guy who has an interest in something starts a list (or as they’re known on Yahoo, a group) and in the initial stages, he wants his list to become popular enough so that he’s not talking to himself, so he allows anyone to join (and, indeed, most lists don’t give moderators much of a way to pre-qualify list members). But the problem is that not everyone will share his views, either about the topic matter of the list, or (and this is where the sparks really fly), how the list should be run.
Too often the list moderator succumbs to the temptation to say, “this is my list, do it my way or hit the highway!” If he does this publicly, on the list itself, very often some number (maybe a few, maybe a higher percentage) of the list members will rise up in opposition and, if necessary, form a splinter group where they can be free of the moderator’s dictictorial ways. But what very often happens is that the moderator will deal with each “problem” member privately via e-mail, usually telling them that they are the only person he’s ever had a problem with (this should be on those lists of Great American Lies, right up there with “the check is in the mail.” Trust me, when someone tells you you’re the only person he’s ever had a problem with, more often than not he’s said the same thing to a lot of other people). And if they don’t get with the moderator’s program right then and there, the moderator will in effect “chop them off at the knees”, usually removing and banning them from the list before anyone else notices, much less has an opportunity to object.
Now, since I have moderated more than a couple of lists myself from time to time, I know that there really are problem users that are intent upon destroying the harmony of a list or group. But a larger problem is when the moderator starts to view everyone who disagrees with him that way. Sometimes it’s hard to draw the line between putting out fires, and drowning the freedom of the group, but it really shouldn’t be. Usually, a group member that’s really intent on destroying the group will be so outrageous in their behavior that there’s no doubt they need to go. But a simple disagreement does not mean the member is out to cause trouble, and unfortunately a lot of moderators don’t seem to get that distinction.
But then again, there are those moderators that start a group for their own, personal, selfish reasons. Remember the Fidonet coordinators I spoke of earlier – well, one of the things they did to oppress the nodes in their nets was to enforce strict geographic routing even when it made no sense on an economic basis. Not all coordinators did that, but some did. In other words, nodes that could get a free feed from some other Fidonet node were sometimes told they could not accept that feed because it was “out of region”, and that instead they would would have to make long distance calls at their own expense to get their feeds (expen$ive in those days given the much higher toll charges and the much slower speed of most then-available modems). The most outrageous example that I remember was when a node on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba was told they were not permitted to get their feed from a Fidonet node in Washington, D.C. over the government’s free tie lines (which effectively made any Fidonet node in the D.C. area a local call), but that they would instead have to make a costly international call to some node in Central America (you can just about imagine how THAT went over).
You might wonder why the Fidonet dictators coordinators were so inflexible. Well, one reason was because many of the mid-level nodes were started by guys who wanted to either get their feeds for free at the expense of everyone underneath them (some mid-level nodes demanded that the lower-level nodes pay for their phone expenses as well as the node’s own phone expenses) or to have a sense of power. If nodes could go around them, it broke their “power” and it meant they could not collect any money from those nodes. Of course, what really happened was that a lot of connections took place that the Fidonet coordinators knew nothing about, and “alternative” Fidonet technology networks were started that were completely outside of the Coordinators’ influence. And several of the nodes on the Fidonet nodelist were NOT really in the places the nodelist said they were.
Well, the moderators of today’s mailing lists and groups sometimes have the same mindset. They figure if they own the list or group, they can control the conversation, and if there are any benefits to be had from the group, they can be first in line to get them.
I recently (as in, yesterday) had a run-in with a Yahoo Group moderator who, by the time it was all over, totally lost it and resorted to profanity and childish name-calling. The main reason was because I elected to unsubscribe from his group rather than submit to his abuse, which was clearly not what he had intended. Even after I unsubscribed, he sent a rather infantile message (actually a couple of them) which I just ignored.
The background was that it was one of those groups (I won’t name which one) where people offer things to give away. I had offered an item I no longer needed, and he had said he’d come and get it – on two occasions – and never showed, then announced he was coming on the weekend, which was not convenient for me. When I let him know that I was frustrated at being jerked around, that is when he decided to bring up the fact that he was the group moderator (which I actually hadn’t known, not that it would have made any difference) and more or less implied that I’d better let him have the item or I could just leave the group. As I say, I elected to leave (and not let him have the item!), but not without letting him know that I did not think much of the way he ran his group – still, I did not use profanity or call him juvenile names, which is more than I can say about his response (which, if I may say so, bordered on the insane).
And I think that brings me to the point of this post…. if there is one thing I have noticed about the Internet, far too many people seem to leave their manners and good sense behind when they sit down at the keyboard. In fact, I daresay we’ve just about all done it at one time or another (to those of you who’ve never done this, welcome to the Internet! What took you so long to get online?). The Eudora e-mail program didn’t introduce its “moodwatch” feature (which basically tries to rate outgoing emails using a scale of chili peppers – the more peppers [the "hotter" the e-mail], the more you should probably re-think how you’ve phrased the message, or maybe think about not sending it at all) because people always write e-mails with the same politeness they’d use if they were writing a letter to their grandchildren. No, it’s because too many of us, when we get an e-mail that rubs us the wrong way, sit down at the keyboard and let fly.
The problem with that is that we may feel good about doing it at the time, but we don’t see the result. We don’t see the facial reactions, we don’t know if we’ve hurt someone terribly. We are, in effect, just like those big phone company executives who base all their decisions on profit and don’t see the effects on the people who may not be able to afford to make a call to a loved one, or the cable company executive who doesn’t see the senior citizen staring at a fuzzy TV picture because the lowest tier of decent cable service is beyond her means.
Here’s another observation: In a day when talk is truly cheap (or at least much cheaper than it used to be), I find that even in situations where I could call someone without any extra cost, I’ll sometimes send them an e-mail, which is much colder and less personal. One reason is because, so often nowadays when I do call I just get someone’s voicemail or answering machine (more wonders of technology), and I know I’m far more articulate in writing than when suddenly faced with the prospect of trying to stammer out a message (I hate voicemail systems that don’t let you review and, if necessary, re-record your message, because far too often I sound totally disoriented on the first “take”). In the days before answering machines, we talked to people live on the phone or in person, and it was very seldom that misunderstandings led to harsh words that could not be retracted (it happened, of course, but not nearly as frequently). Now the Internet has made everything impersonal, and we sometimes write as though we are talking to machines (or maybe to a dog we’re annoyed with) rather than to another human being.
Once in a while, when I happen to be on the wrong end of someone who’s obviously losing it online, it makes me wonder if they would act that way in person or over the phone. The bottom line is, the Internet, and indeed, technology in general seems to have made it easier to be rude to people. And there are times when I wonder, but only for a few moments, if we are really better off with all this new technology.
Then I go back to surfing the web…
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I went out on a walk the other day and was rather surprised to find this relic from the past near my home. I don’t recall exactly when they switched from “General System” to GTE but I’m pretty sure it happened while I was still in my teens, which would mean this rusting relic is at least 30 to 35 years old. I’m not going to say exactly where it is located, but I wonder what sort of shape the buried cable beneath the sign is in, or if it’s even still in use!
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