Other Writing

A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.

— John Ciardi

A Rant About Usenet

A post that I made to news.admin.net-abuse.usenet and net.subculture.usenet in the early morning of March 31st, 1998, coming out of the frustration of the current state of Usenet, the massive occurrence of net-abuse, and more fundamentally the lack of understanding on the part of many of precisely why those of us who fight for Usenet care so much. I wrote this post angry, and it shows. This is likely also why it is as popular as it is; there's a lot of anger on Usenet right now about this subject. Please read the introduction.

On Community

A post that I made to net.subculture.usenet in the early morning of February 26, 2005, trying to capture some of what I felt about Usenet and how it was changing. It's long. I don't think I can say what I feel about Usenet and how it and on-line communities have changed any more briefly.

Comments on Homesteading the Noosphere

Homesteading the Noosphere is an interesting paper analyzing the open source movement. About how it works, what drives it, what those involved in it believe, and why. This is a letter that I sent the author reading the paper for the first time. I agree with most of it, but one of the initial principles struck me differently.

Terrorism and War

I wrote this essay after the news in early 2006 that Hamas had swept the Palistinian elections, followed by the general condemnation of Hamas in US politics and the hand-wringing over the fact that an organization that supported terrorism won an apparently democratic election. This is not an essay on the relative merits of the Israeli or Palestinian positions. Rather, it's an attempt to dig into the underpinnings of the US attitude towards terrorism and an attempt to understand what the other side of that feeling might look like.

Defiantly Free

I wrote this shortly after the original passage of the Communications Decency Act in the United States and it was linked to from the top eyrie page as an anti-censorship statement for a while. It's rather more strident than I normally prefer to express my opinions these days, but is preserved here as-is for whatever it's worth.