Alt.Many.Of.These.Newsgroups.Are.Repellent
BATES, STEPHEN
Alt.Many.OeThese. NewsgroupsAre.Repellent By Stephen Bates In September, President Clinton discovered a rare patch of common ground with the Speaker of the House. All public schools, the president...
...The alt.sex hierarchy includes groups devoted to enemas, spanking, water-sports, foot fetishes, necrophilia, and pedophilia...
...These critics will also argue that a medium partly funded with tax dollars, as the Net is (through state universities and state-funded networks as well as public schools), must reflect public sensibilities...
...According to alt.conspiracy, the Republicans have a secret plot for cracking down on illegal immigration: Every American citizen will be forced to have a computer chip implanted under the skin...
...Another critic complained that Gingrich's firing of House historian Christina Jeffrey is further proof that "all North American politicians must be cuddling lapdogs of the Zionist masters...
...So have those liberal parents who fret about subtle sexism and other outmoded stereotypes in schoolbooks...
...he asks in To Renew America...
...It's the same argument that's raised against the National Endowment for the Arts, but with a twist...
...On a thread about women and sports, one woman listed her many athletic accomplishments...
...Even alt.-fan.newt-gingrich turns out to feature a sprinkling of skeptics...
...Don't tell them...
...Any user can post to unmoderated newsgroups, and any sufficiently savvy user can create a newsgroup...
...Though a number of public schools are already online, there hasn't yet been much fuss...
...Yeah, baby," responded a male user, "but can you cook...
...A lot of these schools require students to pledge that they'll stay away from certain parts of the Net-perhaps as effective as posting the sign "Please don't look at these books" alongside a library shelf of sex guides...
...Just log onto the Net, the library where the books never leave the shelf...
...Offline politics, though, remains bogged down in the industrial-era Second Wave, where censorship disputes are commonplace and clamorous...
...More broadly, Gingrich's Information Age vision doesn't resonate with those evangelicals to whom the future means, above all else, the Second Coming...
...Talk.rumors reveals that Dan Quayle is gay...
...The Net isn't going to appeal to people who think computers are ushering in the Antichrist...
...Invariably, critics will be able to cite offline harms resulting from the Net...
...On alt.suicide.holiday, users suggest how those so inclined might painlessly kill themselves...
...Plenty of people will wince at what they find online...
...That's the sort of noise that plenty of people don't want in their public schools...
...A publicly accessible file-transfer site offers the notorious antisemitic forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion, thoughtfully compressed for speedier downloads...
...Sexist flamers now dominate alt.feminism, overloading the bulletin board with hostile jibes...
...Pending bills in Congress, a directory of ZIP codes, the Shoemaker-Levy photos of Jupiter-and quite a bit more...
...Newt Gingrich has been extolling the educational virtues of the Net for months...
...Somehow," Gingrich said at a Progress and Freedom Foundation symposium earlier this year, "there has to be a missionary spirit in America that says to the poor kid, 'The Internet's for you.'" Just what will the nation's schoolchildren, poor or otherwise, find in cyberspace...
...A year ago, I asked an ACLU official why conservative Christians, those traditional schoolbook flyspeckers, hadn't yet caught on to what this new medium was spewing...
...Maybe all these tragedies would have occurred without the Net, but that's tough to prove...
...A company with the easy-to-remember Net moniker x-rated.com, advertises "that kinky, sleazy, wild, depraved, incredibly hot-making stuff that you used to have to sneak into the house in plain, stained, brown-paper wrappings-now brought to you hygienically by the miracle of computing...
...The messages posted to the newsgroup rec.pyrotechnics, for instance, offer plans for constructing bombs...
...In his 1991 book The New World Order, Pat Robertson refers to supercomputers as an "alarming development" that, by moving us toward a cashless society, may be fulfilling the Revelation prophecy that "no man could buy or sell without the mark of the beast...
...Some insightful debates result, but so does lots of playground name-calling...
...Want to learn about batik craftsmanship...
...The pedophiles, in fact, populate four separate newsgroups, some of which feature digitized photos of naked children...
...The Net provides a wide-open forum for all sorts of raucousness...
...The Net aids thousands of them, and delivers them straight into the home and classroom...
...Gingrich is skeptical...
...Technological fixes, such as software to block out the raunchy neighborhoods of cyberspace, will help, but they'll never be airtight...
...This one is sure to be a beaut...
...Some discord has already arisen...
...Gingrich's GOP comes in for a good bit of online attention...
...She held her finger to her lips and said, "Shhh...
...The Internet, with its combination of near-absolute free speech, facelessness, and anonymity, naturally attracts people whom offline society stigmatizes...
...On line, in fact, everybody's sensitivities get trampled...
...the Christian Identity follower responded by asking how the questioner's beliefs differ from the Antichrist's...
...Pedophiles will abuse children they first met online, kids will blow off fingers with the Net's bomb recipes, despondent teens will poison themselves using recipes from alt.-suicide.holiday...
...In fact, a lot of conservative Christians aren't crazy about computers to start with...
...Alt.politics.white-power features all sorts of racist rants...
...Pedophiles, Holocaust-deniers, and bomb-makers represent only a tiny fraction of Net users, of course, but they generate a disproportionate amount of noise...
...The NEA has aided a handful of projects likely to appall the average American...
...Not long ago, Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Time groused that the Speaker's "much-heralded vision of cyberdemocracy" strikes him as merely "warmed-over Al Gore...
...All public schools, the president proclaimed, ought to be linked to the Internet by the year 2000...
...One recent addition to the family of online newsgroups is called alt.fuck.the.skull.-of.jesus...
...The Christian Coalition, which spent an estimated $1 million to push Gingrich's Contract with America, favors new laws regulating online pornography...
...On a religion newsgroup recently, a user asked a follower of the antisemitic Christian Identity movement how his beliefs differ from Hitler's...
...the average 14-year-old techno-nerd, after all, can out-hack most of his teachers and a fair number of software engineers...
...The day that alt.politics.usa.newt-gingrich opened for business, so did alt.sex.incest...
...Cyberpolitics may be quirkily Third Wave-at the Progress and Freedom Foundation conference, Gingrich shared the rostrum with Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder John Perry Barlow, a shaggy lyricist for the Grateful Dead...
...They'll clamor to make the Net safe for Middle America, especially its schoolchildren: Keep the Shoemaker-Levy photos, but oust the porn, pedophiles, and pyrotechnics...
...Then there's the new group alt.rush-limbaugh.die.a.flaming.death...
...Well, a lot of them have discovered the Net for themselves now...
Vol. 1 • October 1995 • No. 7
