"Go away! The Internet is full!" a loud complaint by Mike Sugimoto

I've had it. I've really, really, really had it. I'm sick and tired of watching my net go to the dogs. This isn't a new complaint for me, but it is perhaps the most recurrent, and goddamn it, I'm fucking sick and tired of watching all these assholes show up on the net - the net hard-working hackers built - and turn it into their own playground.

This week has been a doozy. I've had people stealing content off my Web pages and accusing me of censoring their viewpoints. I've tried to convince people that the Web is a multiple-truth universe and that there's lots of room for disagreement or other ideas -- no such luck.

I've gotten my first real death threat. And when I tried to point out to the person who made that threat that maybe it wasn't a smart idea (since the FBI tends to get a little edgy when you do stuff like that), he accused me of trying to censor him and then went off on some bizarre tangent, which ultimately ended in him calling me stupid, which would have been funny if not for the threat -- he couldn't spell, he couldn't punctuate, and he certainly didn't understand what and where his First Amendment rights began and ended. (Anyone else think it's ironic as hell that a Canadian has to give an American a civics lesson?) I tried to be civil, I tried to be nice, but he was too much of a nut -- which is what made the death threat so scary. (I eventually got him kicked off his ISP for making said threats and violating my explicit request to never e-mail me or post to any of my Web-based fora again.)

I had an e-mail exchange with a 14 year-old kid. She'd been posting to my Web board with her caps lock key stuck down, and I'd been deleting her posts because they were obnoxious and badly formatted. I told her that it was probably not a good idea to do this because we longer term netters found it irritating, and she accused me of being rude and of not understanding that it was her signature style and that I should maybe just go to hell. Later, she told me that I didn't understand because I'd never used a computer as a kid. Um, yeah. I've been on the net longer almost as long as you've been alive. What's your point?

The last two weeks have shown a positive explosion in the number of fuckheads and idiots showing up on my Web site and the sites that I read, on the newsgroups I read, on the mailing lists I belong to. Almost universally they are anonymous or pseudonomous, almost universally their return addresses are from places like yahoo.com, hotmail.com, webtv.net, and -- unsurprisingly -- my-deja.com. There's a smattering of AOL too, but no more than we've been seeing for the past two or three years. The incidence of substantiative discussion on Usenet, while never high even in the olden days, has dropped even lower than it was around the time of Cantor and Siegel. Opposition to moderated groups is up on the grounds of censorship and, predictably, the people opposing the moderated groups are trotting out the First Amendment argument again (I really should write a primer on the rights of free speech on the net, or perhaps the EFF's actually done one) and don't seem to understand why that argument doesn't even begin to hold water. Spam is back up, or at least I'm noticing it again so I think it's up. People replying to spam is back up.

Ironically, it's not Usenet that's causing the most headaches right now. It's my Web site. I run a big Web site devoted to the TV show ER. I get mail. I have collaborative services installed so readers can comment on the material and talk to each other. The past few weeks, the comments have been insipid, the discussion has been pathetic, and I've found my impression of the average Internet user dropping lower and lower and lower as the days go on.

The death threat was the last straw. I've had it with these assholes who think the net is their personal playground or that they're entitled to play with my or anyone else's equipment without consequences. These are, typically, the same people who assume unwarranted moral or intellectual superiority over others simply because they got their first or because they can "yell" louder. The Jim Cowling quote at the top of this page is particularly apt, but they're all appropriate for the Internet today.

Welcome to the Internet, home of the Incosiderate Asshole.

And that's really what it boils down to -- people are being incosiderate to their fellow network users and essentially wrecking it for the rest of us. The script kiddies and the 'l33t b0z0s are running denial-of-service attacks against Web site operators making it impossible for other people to use those sites. Spammers, cascaders, and rampant cross-posters clutter up newsgroups and make them difficult to use. People steal bandwidth and try to pervert resources into doing things they're not designed to do, rendering them inoperative. (Compare and contrast the size and content of a "full" Usenet news feed ten years ago with the size and content of a "full" Usenet news feed, allowing for growth, of course. Free hint: Usenet is not designed to handle 8-bit data.)

Because things are open to abuse, they're no longer free. Because companies are busy grabbing market share for themselves, bandwidth isn't significantly cheaper than it was ten years ago -- and routing has gotten much, much worse in the past couple of years because nobody's willing to put up the resources to build dedicated local links. I tried to get a high speed network connection this past week. I couldn't get real technical information out of anyone; it was like trying to perform acupuncture on a rock. Let me get this straight: I'm buying bandwidth and you can't tell me what the bitrate is like?

I want my old net back. I want to be able to have a conversation on Usenet without being interrupted by inconsiderate pricks who think the First Amendment of the United States Constitution applies to them and gives them the right to cross-post shit to hell and gone. I want to be able to set up an internationally accessable and world-writeable ftp server so my friends and I can share software without being worried that the feds or the SPA or someone is going to come kicking my door down for "copyright violations." I don't want to have to worry about my privacy, the security of my information, or the likelyhood someone is going to steal the content off my Web site. I don't want to have to pay to access Web sites that contain important data, like back issues of the Washington Post. (What the fuck? I could go to my library and dig up the article on dead trees or microfilm, but if I want an electronic copy I have to cough up $2.25 per article?)

Nobody wants to share, and nobody wants to cooperate. It's not about "what can we do for our community members," it's all about "what's in it for me." If you've been on the net for less than ten years and/or the idea of making things publically available for everyone to use is antithetical to you, consider this: The server that just handed you this page is free. The software that allows the bits to get from my computer to your computer is free, or very nearly so. Just about every fundamental component to the Internet is free. SO WHAT THE FUCK MAKES YOU THINK YOU HAVE SOME KIND OF RIGHT TO COME IN, TAKE OUR FREE RESOURCES, AND START TRYING TO MAKE MONEY OFF IT, HUH? I think Dave Clark ought to go out and sue the shit out of anyone who's using a TCP/IP network as the core foundation for their business. What? You don't know who Dave Clark is? I'm not surprised. Get off my net.

The net was built on cooperation, trust, and collaboration. We did this for ourselves. If you want to play along, fine, but you'd better learn to play by our rules because we are still, for better or worse, the masters of this domain. And we can get right pissy if we want to.

If this rant struck you as being fractured and disconnected, that's because it probably was. A more structured and directed version of this rant might be Matthew Skala's First Nations of the Net article. You can flame the shit out of Mike by adding your 11 cents to the "discussion." Freedom Knights need not apply.