December 7, 2008

You're looking at a page that is in the late stage before transformation. Transformation into what, is the question.

My own personal encounter with Mr. Skirvin took place quite briefly, well over a decade ago. Most of Tim's other targets - at least the ones if which I know - last dealt with him during that era or earlier, which might lead one to ask why any of this would be topical. My answer, up until about a year ago, would have been "because Mr. Skirvin persists in making it so". Like many people online, I've long since lost track of how many cranks, trolls and netloons I've dealt with, many of whom arguably were far crazier than Tim Skirvin and, in their moments, far more abrasive - and yet I wrote pages about almost none of them. What made Tim stand out in such a way as to be pageworthy, in part, was the not quite stalkeresque quality of the experience he offered. Offered? No, "pushed" might be a better word.

What made Skirvin memorable was that with Tim, the insanity was never over. One would get up, walk away from the man, and he would refuse to accept that. There were many people in that era who took the attitude that they were not going to be ignored, some going so far in their refusal as to follow those who wanted to be done with them from group to group, forum to forum, a practice that gave rise to the word "cyberstalking", but Tim always took that one step further. Pursuing his targets for years, Mr. Skirvin went on to create a site largely devoted to defaming those who, in one way or another, failed to feed his ego. Not much was needed to set him off - as we shall see, one of his targets, by his own admission, was a woman who simply turned him down for a date. Timothy, who had been very active in netpolitics, then went on to promote that site without mercy, creating the need for a response.

What changed? About a year ago, according to Mr. Skirvin's site, he took the so-called Killfile Dungeon down for unspecified renovations, and it hasn't been back up since. I don't know how to take that. My immediate thought was to take down my Tim Skirvin related pages. What happened back in the Nirvana era was relevant only because of what was happening today, so if Timothy wanted to let it die, why not let it die? Note that the "Victim of the Week" page has not been fleshed out in over a year. Yes, I have material downloaded for that, but I'm not going to bring back the bad mouthing of somebody else, that Skirvin got rid of, just to fill in a page. Tim might not deserve any better than that, but the third party affected by my actions probably would; abuse I quote is abuse I put back into the public eye.

So why not just get rid of it?





So far, the answer is "because I don't know what Skirvin is going to do". The search engines took a while to find these pages; suppose I deleted them, and Tim then "got around" to renovating the Dungeon? The subject material would again become topical, in the aggravating way it was before, and I would be back to square one when it came to telling the other side of the story. Also, even if the Killfile Dungeon were to stay down, Tim's rather lengthy and severely unprofessional history of personal abuse directed toward other users of the Internet would live on in the Googlegroups archives. Consider the way in which Fred Cherry, somebody of whom more will be said, having reportedly died in 2003, continues to attack his targets from beyond the grave, old material of his being quoted and reposted by new trolls. On the Net, the past sometimes has a way of becoming the present, and one has to deal with that.

To what degree does that describe the situation with Skirvin? At this point, I'm not sure and so am left with the uncertainty I referred to at the beginning. Personally, I (and I suspect the rest of those that Tim attacked) would like this to be over. I was ready for it to be over ten years ago, but whether it will be or not is really mostly up to Tim. In theory, it's completely up to him, as Google will delete one's old posts from the archives if one asks them to, as a matter of company policy, but we know he'll never do that, so the unanswered question there is how interested others will be in dredging up that old material.





When I'm sure this is really over, and this material no longer has anything to do with the present, it will be gone, because it will tell a story that you will no longer have any reason to want to hear, and none of us will have the need to tell. With the Fred Cherry material, itself, I think we might just about be there; the last time I checked, nobody had even quoted the guy for two years. What we're left with is the memory of a pitiful old crank who squandered far too much of his last years living for hate, and in the end, dying alone. Let him rest. In life, right up until the end, he had the freedom to change who he was, so one could find some humor in his story, but in death he is forever defined by his actions, and what would have brought laughter is now merely a cause for sorrow. If we can no longer hope that we might someday remember him well, having seen him come to his senses, then let us try to not remember him at all.

We can at least do that for him.

Sometime in the next few months, I'm going to remove as much of the Fred Cherry material as I can, and still put the material I absolutely must retain (the Tim Skirvin material, under the circumstances) in context, for as long as that material needs to be retained. How long that will be, as I've said, is something that I'm trying to determine, but expect to see new material before then. What kind of new material? That depends on whether or not the Skirvin pages stay or go. I get the impression that the Burning Man drama will probably, given certain actions, be over in a few years. Much of the earlier PC related nonsense is already dead, with all mention of it removed from my sites, so at such point as the incident ahead becomes a dead subject, I'll probably remove the Halls of Eternal Disbelief from my sites altogether. I get the feeling, perhaps mistakenly, that a lot of what is discussed in that section of my site takes us deeply into "dog bites man" territory at this point. Remove the Tara Ball and Skirvin material, and I have no cases left to discuss, anyway, so *poof* the whole thing will be gone.

I won't miss it. I'm sure you can tell that I was angry when I wrote much of that, and the feeling that leaks up out of the page is not a good one. It is a feeling that I would rather not have infect that which I do joyously, so if the fecal material has to stay, it will be followed with more of the same. New flamewars? Probably not. The Internet of the early 21st century is not the Internet of the 1990s. The rise of the Web has radically decentralised online activity to such a point that I wonder if there even could be anything akin to the self-named "Usenet Cabal" of the last century, especially given the change in how posting occurs. The great myth of Usenet is that it was a completely unmoderated environment in its heyday - a myth that tends to misinform debates about moderation in present day forums, as people half remember the bad old days, and try to avoid reliving them. But the truth is that Usenet was one of the most tightly controlled environments ever seen, just controlled in an insane manner, because it was controlled by the proverbial mob. In the old days, when one posted, one almost invariably did so from one's primary ISP account, because so many of us didn't have web access, yet, if the Web had even been invented, ruling out the use of webmail accounts, and anon servers were such a headache to make sense of, that relatively few of us ever bothered to sit down and read through the directions. This meant that any user could easily harass the company providing Internet access to another user, because the domain name for the company was right up on his screen, and if he should be well networked, he and his friends could easily make life miserable for the staff of the small local ISPs on which so many of us relied, until they deleted the intend target's account and sometimes his posts as well, just to make the harassment stop.

Mob moderation at its worst.

Compare that to today. Go into a forum, and one generally doesn't even know what the other user's e-mail address is, or even who his provider is, and even if a user loses his primary ISP account, he can easily reconnect to almost every account he uses to post material with, with no loss of postings. So the great tool of faction building that was mass harassment no longer works as it once did, leaving modern cabals comparatively toothless affairs, without the kind of clout that used to draw in participants and make those informal social networks grow to the incredible sizes that they used to attain. One can still find idiots in the forums, and experiences can still give one good cause for anger, but I'm definitely left with the impression that one doesn't see the kind of virtual brushfires one once did. One documents the occasional local headache for the benefit of the smaller, local online communities with which one deals, but new flamewars no longer seem to be a matter of general interest, and so as a topic, really aren't much worth writing about, especially in an era in which users seem to have almost all moved past the once fashionable naive faith in the truthfulness of whatever one sees popping up on a computer screen, and gossip is finally being seen as being just that ... gossip.

What would I write about, if the flame related material stays? Politics, maybe? National Politics, not Cyberpolitics. It's a nasty subject, anyway, one which isn't really going to be brought down by association with the lingering flamewar related material, and at least is a more interesting read. Expect to see little, if any, stirring rhetoric, and a lot of dissection of arguments from all sides, conducted with the merciless impartiality of a grader. If the ugliness can, however, be removed ... this site will probably focus far more on the arts and natural sciences and applications of each. Either way, a few hundred pages of material, probably.