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\twelvepointconcreteroman

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Bay Guardian Letters
}
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{\it I don't think you realize just how damaging and incorrect
the article in this weeks paper, ``Organizing Cyberspace'' is.
I am probably going to organize a flood of letters and phone calls
to the BG in response. In this day and age of right-wing, law-and-order
attacks on all electronic media, especially grass-roots Bulletin
Board Systems (BBS's), the article was especially irresponsible.

I am the author and architect of the computer network ``FidoNet''
mentioned or should I say slandered in the above article.
The article implies, most likely through simply bad writing, that there
is some connection between the FidoNet and these Aryan idiots.
I am a gay activist and not a goddamn nazi. Thanks for not checking.

Don't be surprised if you get threats of legal action from other
quarters (not mine). Many people take FidoNet quite seriously,
as it deserves. You can't toss off cheap-shot grandstanding like
this without a reaction.

I hope you print my letter in it's entirety, and if you have any
questions, please contact me at any time.

If you doubt the veracity of my claims, simply call any of the
experts you can dig up: the EFF (mentioned below), Computer Professionals
for Social responsibility, Bay Area Macintosh Users Group, people
at The WELL, whatever.

I am still angry now, five hours after reading that crappy article.

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Tom Jennings
55 Rondel Place, San Francisco CA 94103
voice: 415-552-8156
}
}
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The letter starts on the next page.

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You have done me and a few million others grave harm and great insult with 
the ``Organizing Cyberspace'' (sic) article in Vol 27 No 42. I hope you 
will allow me to try to undo some of the damage. 

With the slightest bit of research the author would
have stumbled upon the grass-roots nature of FidoNet, which is home 
to more progressive support, social, hobby and professional organizations 
than you can count; from AIDS support to zoology. As well as conservative
and downright reactionary groups. And relays for the deaf, disaster relief, 
game playing, sex talk, dating.  K12 Net, a network for kids and schools, 
began as a FidoNet conference started by some El Paso school teachers 
out of their own pockets, is now a nationally-recognized network that 
now has it's own infrastructure. And of course, born-again fascists, Holocaust
revisionists, and every and any idiot who can manage to type a few words.

This is what happens when you allow easily-accessible, uncensored
communication. While I'm sure the author would claim to favor ``free speech'' 
she does not seem to get the subtleties. To be somewhat brief -- it means 
that people whose very existence you utterly oppose, may speak outside 
of your control. It works both ways. While we may all agree that ``Nazis are 
evil'' or whatever, at one time it was popularly supported that ``homosexuals 
are evil'' and routinely prevented from speaking, etc. The process/laws used 
to control one control all, and attempts at defining special cases 
are idiotic, or naive at best.

As the queer anarcho-weirdo technologist activist who
in 1984 designed and built FidoNet and it's underlying social mechanisms, 
I am keenly sensitive to how suppression of speech really works, and how
the suffocation of dissent is carried out. As the editor of a now-defunct
gay/punk zine called HOMOCORE, I heard every excuse possible to ``just not
talk about some things''. FidoNet was designed to allow complete autonomy, 
in fact and in practice, and not rely on the ``tolerance'' or lack thereof 
your neighbors. The {\it unstoppable physical ability to communicate 
unfettered} is what allows real freedom. 

The author of one of the more popular FidoNet programs, Wynn Wagner III, 
is also gay. Rather than accept money for his program, called Opus, Wynn 
required that every user to donate \$50 to Shanti. Opus generated over 
\$50,000 in donations, last I knew.

FidoNet was for a few years the only non-governmental network connection
to the continent of Africa, and was operated by individuals who jeopardized
their own safety to operate it. It connects anti-apartheid S.~African universities
to the outside world, and still provides clandestine connections to outlying
communities, sharing party-line community telephones with their human users.

The history of the FidoNet is intensely interesting, and just not for it's 
pioneering technologies. We learned about large-scale truly decentralized
social structures, and what a healthy human organization looks like (not
always pretty). This is largely ignored by traditional armchair-anarchists.
We've also made many terrible mistakes. And we've had many 
split-off networks, both good and bad.

FidoNet is fundamentally different from the other ``networks'' mentioned.
FidoNet consists of personal computers on five continents, inter-linked
by running special programs that use modems and ordinary phone lines as
the ``wires'' between them. Each of these (at present) 22,000 computers acts
as a combination library and post office; FidoNet users (at present, 
about two million of them) use their home computers to dial into the FidoNet
systems to access hundreds of public ``conferences'' on any imaginable subject;
create new private and public conferences, and share files and suchlike
things. (FidoNet in no way relies on the Internet as stated, though there
are ``gateways'' between them.) FidoNet is completely decentralized, and very
much like amateur radio (the one correct fact in the article); each
post office/library in FidoNet is run by a person or group who determines
what is read or published there.
FidoNet is the largest privately-owned computer network in the world, and
is today larger than the UUCP network and IBM's BITNET combined. It is
run by and for individuals, not corporations, and is quite militantly
anti-commercial. FidoNet approximately doubles in size every 18 months.


I have to wonder at the motives of the author, who panders to popular 
sensationalism instead of doing any research. And in doing so reducing a 
complex, new and important social mechanism into nothing but an imagined 
venue for criminal activity.

I think the Bay Guardian owes its readers as well as the FidoNet an apology,
and I hope it will consider setting things right by doing a feature story on 
a world-wide, grassroots computer network started right here in the 
Bay Area.

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Tom Jennings
tomj@wps.com
San Francisco CA
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PS: How anyone could write about electronic communication, freedom and activism
without mentioning the Electronic Frontier Foundation (666 Pennsylvania
Ave SE, Washington DC 20003, phone (202)-544-9237, Internet eff@eff.org)
is beyond me. They work in part to undo damage caused by ignorance, fear
and sensationalism.

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Not for publication:
55 Rondel Place, San Francisco CA 94103
voice: 415-552-8156
}

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