...so much hate... (long)

[jorn@MCS.COM (Jorn Barger)]

Once upon a time... there was a weirdo named Jorn.  Jorn was an oddball.
He didn't fit in very well, most places.  He didn't do most things
the way everybody else did.

But he was generally friendly and polite, and the friends he made
tended to remember him affectionately... even if he made some of them a
bit uncomfortable when he was around.

Part of the reason he made people feel a little nervous was that he
thought very deeply about many things, and American culture has
little use for deep thinking.  And part of the reason he *acted*
different was that he had made a choice, very early on in his life:
he wanted to understand why people were so unkind to each other,
deeply enough that he could try to effect some serious changes,
and he felt that the only way to achieve this was to break away
from normal conventions, and explore what other directions humans
might choose to go.

In 1989, Jorn's explorations finally paid off when he was hired to
be an artificial intelligence programmer at Northwestern University.
Although a.i. sounds like a complicated and arcane subject, the
programming techniques that it requires can actually be taught in
a single semester.  What can't be so easily taught, though, is a
sort of *self-knowledge*, an awareness of one's mental states that
provides the background perspectives that makes one's a.i. work
*mature*.  Jorn's employers were amazed to find that Jorn had
brought a great deal of that level of understanding with him, without 
any formal a.i. training.

So, at first, Jorn was accepted into the community there, and found
himself able to discuss, for the first time in his life, many
insights that he'd previously had to keep to himself, simply
because they'd seemed meaningless to others-- topics about human
nature and the nature of the scientific psychology, especially.

But over the course of 1990, Jorn found himself becoming dramatically
alienated from the others there.  It seemed to Jorn that there
was a deep-rooted dishonesty in the air, and that he was being asked
to join in that dishonesty or be shunned socially, his feelings
and rights trampled by people eager to position themselves within a 
hypocritical social hierarchy.

So he withdrew, socially, at work, and sought consolation, among other
places, in the electronic community of Kate Bush fans.

The London convention of November 1990 was a turningpoint here.  Dozens
of fans met in an atmosphere of mutual enthusiasm and support, and
this warmth carried over into the newsgroup after they'd returned home.
It was in this atmosphere that Jorn wrote the first r.m.g faq, and 
produced an edition of 100 baseball caps, and championed Ron Hill's
undertaking of the compilation of interviews called "Cloudbusting".
These activities were an expression of the gratitude Jorn felt for
the kindness of other Katefans, in contrast to the status-jockeying
that poisoned the atmosphere at his work.

The first sign of trouble on r.m.g came in the fall of 1991, when Jorn
posted a message called "The Womanly Hours of Catherine Bush",
suggesting that The Sensual World might mark the end of Kate-the-rocker
and the difficult birth of Catherine-the-adult.  He felt he had
made himself particularly vulnerable in this post, so it was especially
painful when it was greeted with some exceedingly cruel sarcasm.

In the months that followed, Jorn found that there were a handful of
r.m.g posters who explicitly argued that flaming was desirable and fun,
so in January 1992 he proposed a vote to turn r.m.g into a *truly*
moderated group, where discussions could be held without flaming.
When this idea seemed impossible to implement, he announced that he
was starting a new mailinglist called "WarmRoom" to serve the same
purpose.

Over the course of this 'secession', Jorn began to experiment with
a strategy of *flaming back*, that baffled and alienated many who
had previously been sympathetic.  It may have been this cloud of
ill-feeling that kept WarmRoom from being a great success.  (Another
problem was that most WarmRoom subscribers continued to read and
post on r.m.g, so there was a dilution of the sense of community.)

Jorn's model in forming WarmRoom was Ecto, the Happy Rhodes
mailinglist, which had been formed in the midst of another flamewar,
and consequently dedicated to being flamefree.  Jorn had never really
felt at home on Ecto, though, and he thought a second group would make
good sense to the Ecto subscribers as well.  So he felt shocked and
betrayed when several of them posted fairly vicious attacks on him,
for carrying this out.  Wasn't Ecto supposed to be flame free?  Wasn't
it supposed to be dedicated to supportive electronic communities?  It
seemed that a sense of possessiveness and superiority had arisen on
Ecto, causing some subscribers to feel the new mailinglist as a
competitive threat rather that an extension of the abstract ideal of
community...

At the same time this electronic crisis was going on, Jorn was
suffering thru a parallel crisis at work: the last months of 1991
had been the most creative of Jorn's life.  In the course of analysing
a programming challenge for work, he had discovered a very simple and
elegant solution to an ancient and knotty problem of a.i.-- the
indexing problem.  Just as he was shocked to find that the denizens
of Ecto had little use for WarmRoom, so, even more, he was shocked 
to find that the status-jockeys at Northwestern were determined to
actively suppress his indexing discovery.

The sense of a supportive community of Kate fans was now dwindling,
and the battle at work became exceedingly burdensome.  Thru most of
1992, Jorn found solace in his researches into James Joyce's
manuscripts for Finnegans Wake.  (Part of the creative blessing of
late 1991 had been the blossoming of the electronic FW mailinglist,
under Jorn's leadership.  This had led to his acquisition of some
expensive manuscript facsimiles, and the realization that the study
of Joyce's FW notebooks had barely been begun, stymied by some
complicated puzzles regarding which notebooks were used when.)

In September, Jorn concluded that his only hope at work was to draw
public attention to the suppressions he was suffering under, which
he did at a public meeting, with a request for a forum to present his
idea.  Within days he was on official probation, on trumped-up charges,
and by December 31 he was dismissed, and faced the prospect of being
blacklisted for future employment in that field.

The challenge that faced him was to program a prototype of his a.i. idea,
working alone, before his money ran out-- perhaps a year, at most.
Among his closest friends at this time were Chris and Vickie, and he
felt they had established a fairly deep level of mutual trust, that
could withstand some friction, especially if that friction was dedicated 
to an honorable purpose.

The detailed story of the friction was posted to r.m.g in December 1993.
Briefly, I hoped that I could make things easier for Vickie in her
'recovery' process if I were able to open Chris's mind somewhat about
the spiritual dimension of life, and the nature of emotional healing.
So I proposed to him that we have a friendly debate on r.m.g, on this
topic (which was also highly relevant to Kate's philosophy).

I knew there'd be some flames, and I anticipated responding to them with
tit-for-tat flaming in response.  I didn't expect that Chris's response
would be to leap into massive flame attacks on me, and I was simply
puzzled when those attacks began *even before the debate began*, during
an apparently innocuous phone conversation in which I asked Chris for his
opinions about what might be involved in starting a new radio station
in Chicago.

Chris's reply to this question was that it was impossible, unthinkable...
but he didn't just state this, he *bellowed* it, he *demanded* that I
drop the idea, as if my dreaming of marshalling the millions of dollars
a new commercial station would require were somehow a *personal affront*
to him.

I assumed I'd caught him at a bad moment, and that he'd apologize... and
I went ahead and opened the spirituality debate, on March 28, 1993, by
presenting a "materialist absurdity" I'd thought up, about how emotions
might be captured on audio tape via a secondary mechanism involving
subtle fluctuations of electric-field strength.

My intention was that this simple, *hypothetical* physical mechanism
could serve as a launching-point for a broad range of discussions
about emotions and feelings and empathy and religion and prayer and
the sacred.  It never got anywhere near that point, though...

The way I see it (and I think the archives back me up on this), my
idea was immediately met with a lot of bitingly sarcastic personal
attacks, none of which really grasped the points I had made, except
in the most dismissive sort of caricature.  (What is it about the
idea of 'vibes' that makes flamers go incendiary?  It's like a deep
trigger of their greatest venom...)

I responded in kind, as I still think it was necessary to do.  (I've
gotten a lot of "Why didn't you just ignore them?" kind of criticism,
but I really don't think this is realistic under the circumstances, 
although over the last year, my tolerance for flame-pain has gone up 
enough that I can restrain myself much more than I used to.)  When
a response made an effort to be considerate, I was careful to be 
considerate in my reply.  At one point, a couple of readers wrote
that they were enjoying the fight, and at this point I may have let
go a little more than I should, though.

There were several signs that I was gaining ground, such as apologies
and more-measured replies from some combatants.  But then Chris posted
an 'anonymous' attack, whose viciousness seemed to make almost everyone
immediately wish for an abrupt end to the entire discussion.

I consider this anonymity ploy extremely cowardly and unfair, and the
level of viciousness totally unspeakable.  (I consider that the content
of the message was in fact a reflection of the author's self-loathing,
for nothing in it was in any way a true reflection of *me*.)

This set off a deluge of "Shut up, Jorn, you're stupid and insane"
messages, that finally wore me down and forced me to unsubscribe to
the group.  *No one* criticised Chris for posting the message, nor the
author for writing it.  All fingers pointed only, unfairly, at me.
This strange anomaly does not at all indicate that I was at fault--
it indicates that the attacks on me were so violent that people were
simply intimidated into a state of denial.  This, I think, is what
is meant by the 'big lie' technique in historical propaganda.

It was at this point that Chris began dropping hints that he'd found
a new rationalization for his fury against me, which turned out,
eventually, to involve a *single* comment I'd made to Vickie, at the end of
several hours of supportive listening to some of the painful traumas
of her growing up.  The comment, as Chris reported it, would have
been a bizarre, totally uncharacteristic moment of emotional predation, 
in the midst of a series of remarks that were otherwise entirely
supportive.  Given this, it's hard to understand why I was never
extended the opportunity to clarify the remark, neither the following
day when I phoned Vickie to make sure she felt okay about the sharing
she'd done, nor in the following weeks, before the blistering anonymous
attack (nor at any time since).

Another troubling aspect of this April flamewar was the very high
percentage of Ecto subscribers who attacked me.  Ecto claims to be
about support and responsibility-- why did they find it acceptable to
join in the mass lynching?  I wrote, at some point, an open message to
Ecto asking these questions-- and received not a peep of a reply.