1 2 3 4 5 6

dominate; then those who want to can talk to them and those who don't can easily avoid them. Some people do enjoy roiling tar pits of violent electronic discussion, just as some people like to watch car crashes or burning buildings. Areas for just that type of mentality exist in cyberspace already--on Usenet, you have newsgroups like alt.flame and alt.tasteless; on London's CIX you have the abuse conference. The thing is, the welding torches who frequent alt.tasteless and alt.flame are not loose screws or unable to function in cyberspace: like all subcultures, they have their own rules, even if the workings of these aren't clear to outsiders. It wouldn't have worked with our psycho, who seemed to like having rules to chafe against. How can you make nuts stay where they're put? If what they want is attention, sooner or later they're going to come out and bother someone: even alt.tasteless did that when it invaded rec.pets.cats.

The mature thing is to ignore them, either by humanly controlling your reactions or by using a killfile. Deprived of the attention, cyberwackos are as likely as anyone else to get bored and go away or adopt more acceptable behavior. This approach requires a lot of discipline, mutual support, and trust on the part of the other local residents, and is therefore most likely to work only in older forums full of experienced onliners. In an area full of newcomers that hasn't cohered yet in any significant way, people are likely to feel that they deserve to have their temper tantrums, too.

But a killfile won't help you if the misfit is destructive enough. In September 1996, some nut unleashed a cancelbot (an automated software robot message-canceller) one weekend that probably wiped out about 25,000 postings on newsgroups relating to Asian and Jewish topics. The newsgroups were completely disrupted for a couple of days, until Chris Lewis, the best-known active canceler of spam and other mass postings, was able to resurrect the canceled postings. This kind of thing--and there have been other cases--is not something that can be handled by individual restraint or peer pressure; it's the online equivalent of trashing a public space, and the answer is likely to lie in technical improvements and traditional policing.

The problems posed by electronic misfits will only become more acute as the Net increasingly becomes the dominant medium for social interaction and general communications. We can help those without access to computers by creating public terminals. We can help those unable to operate computers by giving them better systems and human aid. We can even teach caution and the use of X-no-archive headers on Usenet postings to keep truly personal material from being permanently searchable on services like Deja News.[6] But how will we handle those whose self- destructive instincts make them a danger to any online community in which they operate?

My own feeling is that at least some of the answer lies in fostering the survival of diverse, smaller communities. The more diversity there is, the more likely it is that everyone will find some area where they fit in. It's a waste of the infinite flexibility of the medium if everything is global; we have something like that, and it's called CNN. One suggestion posted in late 1996 to the main newsgroup for discussing spam and related issues, news.admin.net-abuse.misc, was that Usenet spam could be defeated if we abandoned Usenet's hierarchical structure entirely and just threw articles into a massive pool, which users would search by keyword using an engine like Deja News to bring up articles of interest. This is a massively wrong-headed idea, because the current structure helps foster a sense of community across the world among those who share specific interests. Besides, it would be hugely inefficient, since computer searching just isn't that good yet, and it would cut out of Usenet smaller sites that can afford only a partial feed.

Smaller communities also tend to allow people to get to know each other better, just as it's much easier to be anonymous in a large city than in a small town. This can make a big difference. I've seen several cases where people's bizarre behavior turned out to be completely understandable and even tolerable when their offline circumstances were explained by someone who knew them. That kind of personal knowledge only comes over time with regular contact in a familiar environment.