Ayale-com.661 net.news utzoo!decvax!yale-com!harley Wed Jan 6 03:31:43 1982 a vision i had a vision which i want to share with you now. ---------- on a cold windy day far in the future, i sit at my CRT watching the world go by. i am the ruler of the netwaves, & by implic- ation, of the world. how this came about is a long story ... i don't remember all of it. it began when networks were young & so was i. in those days the networks were used by computer professionals & academics. these people foresaw that soon most information would travel via data circuits, but in their excitement they did not recognize the changes this would bring to the patterns of society. therefore, like the opportunists who made a mess out of television, the early netusers depended on old ways of thinking to solve the problems of networking. in fact, as new problems arose, some were so confusing that the instinctive reaction became too strong to resist -- "hold on here, let's ORGANIZE so we know what's going on ..." fortunately, reactionism killed itself off as the networks which stuck to their hierarchies were left far behind. the frontrunners were those who took the incredible ease of commun- ication to heart, deciding that the right to be heard was as important as the right to speak. soon the networks gave rise to a functional anarchy ... ... so functional, in fact, that the example was taken up by many others. governments & big business found themselves usurped. there had been no overthrow, the establishment simply found itself outperformed in the way that big computer firms & the big record companies lost ground to their independent counterparts during the 1980's. at the time, i was a government agent. my mission: to infiltrate one of the numerous "underground" groups that existed on the networks. i took my work seriously; network activities threatened the stability of the world. i began to understand that no outside influences could stop the monster networks, so i changed my aim & shot singlemindedly for the top. of course, there was no top -- i had to create one. great reforms are always in danger of subversion, just as germany had been an example to the world's progressives until hitler stepped in ... well i stepped into the networks, & in ways that you can imagine, i have brought all the world's communi- cation under the sway of my thinking. within a few years, i will have repaired government sufficiently that it can resume benign control over a changed world. but until then, i must ensure that none of my nodes go astray ... ---------- sorry for the mixture of straight & satirical commentary, but i hope you all get my point, junior imperialists of USENET. - steve harley (harley!yale-comix) ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.