The Whole Anarchy Quote
Here's the whole article from which I took the quote on the opening page....
"I don't think USENET is an anarchy. It isn't that well-organised.
USENET wouldn't exist without news hosts. News hosts are owned mostly by companies and academic institutions. 99% of the people rich enough to run an organisation which runs a news server are clueless about USENET, so they hire people to run their news server for them. These 'newsmasters' run USENET. They may do what they want to their own news server but that doesn't effect what happens to anyone else's server.
So you have local anarchy in a cooperative feudal system. If some issue comes up that the newsmasters don't particularly care about, they throw it open to their users, hence the serfs get to vote once in a while. Like every democracy, not /all/ the serfs get to vote -- on USENET, instead of the usual age cutoff, there's a 'clue' cutoff: to vote on something, you have to know where to find the list of issues and how to vote. If you don't have enough clues to find this out, you don't get to vote. I like this.
Interestingly, there's little dick-size respect amoung newsmasters. The size of your news-spool, the number of your links, etc. do not effect how much pull you have with the other newsmasters. Post enough informative and well-thought-out articles and you get a good reputation. When someone with a good reputation suggests something, it often gets done.
The way to get something done on USENET is to get a good reputation (so that people will bother to read your posts) and then request comments on a really good idea, being specific about how it should be implemented. The appropriate response is an beta-test version of a Perl script or some C code.
Simon. -- Simon Slavin -- Computer Contractor Ordinaire. Junk email not welcome here. Will administer ISO 9000 and year 2000 certification tests for food."
All comments within these pages are expressed as personal opinions only.
© 1997 Ken Lucke - all rights reserved
