Not so long ago, I would have said, "and so the story ends", imagining that it could get no worse than this. And how wrong I would have been. A few years ago, a pair of lawyers (named Cantor and Siegel) had the brilliant revelation that if they posted their advertisements on Usenet, in many, many groups, they could gain a lot of visibility for very little money. Well, and waste the time of a lot of people who had no interest in their services, but that was their problem. Soon, other people followed suit. The ISPs, unable to keep up with all of the "spam" being posted (off topic advertisements, like those of Cantor, et al.), decided to let their subscribers help out with the effort. It was a censor's dream come true.

Soon, legitimate, albeit unpopular posts were disappearing right and left, and the opposition on many newsgroups could no longer be heard at all. The Cabals had taken total control, over what still had the illusion of being free and public forums. So little opposition remained, and there was such a sense of absolute control on the part of the petty dictators who had taken the groups over (and their friends) that the flamewars cooled, for a while, though they still spark up, now and again, when a lone dissenter appears.

But, now almost completely devoid of content and controversy alike, the groups became dull even to the Cabal members. Participation in the newsgroups has dwindled until we reach the point we are at, today, in which many glance at the groups, but few take part in them or linger for long. This has provided serious posting on Usenet with its final deathstroke. If one takes the time to put serious effort into writing a post, who will ever read it? It is now seen as being an utter waste of good writing. Usenet, right now, is mostly dead. A handful of people post on a few groups, and some people wander in and make a token effort on each group. But it isn't the scholarly forum it was once intended to be, or the core of a subculture as it later became, any more. Its' story is now at a close.

But it is not irrelevant. As some look at the strangely forced "civility" (read conformity) on a number of newsgroups, one may gain the illusion that the abandonment of earlier concepts of decency and common sense that these groups fostered was the result of reasoned discussion and revolutionary insights. Certainly, the people there, while putting on a show of humility ("aw, shucks, we're just regular people, don't exaggerate"), won't work that hard to dispell your illusions. But illusions they are.

Reasoned discussion is the one thing that didn't happen, as these tightly controlled forums reshaped public opinion in some very questionable ways that never were seriously scrutinised before being adopted. It is this forum that shaped our decade to a large extent. As we, as a people, look out at this facade of peaceful acceptance that has descended over the absurd consenses that now define our society, being accepted with an almost bovine complacency by the masses, now, we forget how uncivil the process by which they were made, really was. Maybe if we remembered, we might question them a little more, and find our way to a real social peace and not just an uneasy submission to the status quo, that we half remember that we once made.

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