Why I'd never make it as a libertarian

[I'd promised more on IP last time. Am still working on it; apologies.]

Ten years ago, the pundits were predicting the demise of the Internet. Too naïve, they said. The infrastructure is based on an `I'll carry your traffic if you carry mine' sort of plan, and the inherent assumption throughout is that everybody should have free access.

Naïvely, I thought these claims of `too naïve' were too cynical.

The first thing that changed my mind is referrer spam. It's one thing to put spam in a place where a human being is expected to see it, like an email inbox, but in a computer-generated log, mostly designed to be read by other computers? It's so much like those advertisements in elevators: everything is so plastered with crap already that they have to think real long and hard about where to put still more crap, and we all know that the elevator and the referrer log aren't the end of it.

[Yes, the reason is ostensibly because there are four blogs out there that still autopost their referrers, but I think even if those went away we'd still have referrer spam.

Another digression about spam: my Bayesian filter was smart enough to let all my mortgage info through when I was buying my house---and more about low! low! rates!. When I was heavy into writing my book about MSFT, all those emails got through, along with loads of ads for WinXP for cheap. The filter has turned indiscriminatory noise into the sort of perfectly focused and targeted advertising vendors pay top dollar for. Maybe it's just apophenia on my part.]

This week, I had my first personal experience with the Usenet. Usenet was around well before the World Wide Web. People post emails on a topic, and then your little text newsreader would pull down the posts. All very low-tech; just people writing to other people in a semistructured thread. Much of it is very helpful: person A posts a question, and person B wants to be helpful and posts a reply. Since it gets indexed by search engines, I can just copy an error message off the screen into the search box, and the first hit is very likely to be somebody who did the same on Usenet four years ago and the next hit will be the somebody explaining the solution. All very wonderful.

In addition to being so frequently helpful, the Usenet is the font of bad karma. The question is: why do people help others? There are a hundred answers, and most are virtuous, but the list includes such motivations as a need for incessant attention, a need to prove that you're smarter than everybody else, and even a desire to passive-agressively pick a fight.

I won't claim that there are more such malintentioned individuals on the Usenet or `Net in general than here in the real world. But the fact remains: it takes just one asshole to ruin the party. You've been to that party, and know the problem. You know that that one person has to get kicked out, but you need to do it in a way that doesn't kill the buzz, and in the end the party just winds up dissolving. You try not to invite the ass to the next party and hope they don't find out. Bars handle this by having a bouncer.

But the `Net is all-inclusive. Nobody is barred, and if they're barred, they can just change their IP address and try again. And so, using the Usenet is an exercise in suffering bad karma.

I announced Apophenia on the Usenet. Apophenia is exactly what I've needed in life: glue for the GSL and SQLite which I can easily call from my simulations. I want help and new contributions, and thought others may find it to be useful, so I announced it on the sci.stat.math newsgroup. My goal was to announce, explain my motivation, and maybe get one or two interested parties.

I knew that it would be karmically painful, and it was. At the moment, there are 32 posts on the thread. Most are individuals generally trying to be helpful, maybe with a snarky comment or two. Five are from me, explaining more about what I have in mind. Twelve (about every other post) are from one guy who is the harbinger of bad karma. I won't summarize his sins, but the malintentioned motivations are clearly there---this guy is there for himself, not to help. Minus him, this would have been pretty productive, with a lot of good references thrown my way, and clarification in my mind of how Apophenia should be shaped. With him, it is painful to read.

Now, there are two reasons why it's painful. The first is that the guy's an ass, and nobody likes to be around such people. It's like a pornographic pop-up ad: just annoying and æsthetically displeasing.

The other reason is that I too am an asshole. Reading this makes me want to rant back. The Usenet term is `flamebait'---he's just waiting for me to reply angrily so he can yell back louder, and there's a guy in a little red suit poking me with his pitchfork telling me to post back, that I can totally yell louder than this idiot and that I will be delighted when he's vanquished. Screw helping others, I want to hurt this loser. I want to be that asshole.

It's not just that bad karma is unfun to be around, it spreads. It takes all my effort to just write a little journal entry complaining about this guy instead of posting entry number six arguing back. The Usenet law says `don't feed the trolls', and it takes everything I have to not do so.

By the way, when somebody does take the bait (as one person did on this thread), when somebody does feed the troll and an all-out flamewar commences, it's not nearly as unpleasant because nothing about the bickering makes one want to join the fray. There are two losers being idiots, and you can peacefully observe as an uninvolved third person. But it still sucks relative to a world where people show some frigging restraint, and is still noise that you have to filter out. Who wants to be in a restaurant where the next booth is having an argument in all caps.

And that, dear reader, is why I'm not a libertarian. Places with a bare minimum of societal constraints exist, and it sucks to be there. Without social norms keeping the trolls under control, there's risk that assholedom will spread, and even if not, that one guy is still ruining the party. The only way to really enjoy being there is to either accept that you will constantly be stepping into something and constantly on your guard, or to take up arms, throw mutual aid to the wind, and jump into the fray.