The Internet’s World Wide Web, it turns out, is an excellent place to hold a lynching.
As the guest of honor for a recently conducted on-line necktie party, this writer is back from the front lines with figurative rope burns, a crick in his cyberneck and a cautionary tale about virtual vigilantes.
I’ve emerged bloodied and, I fear, just a little bit bowed and beaten from yet another object lesson that the great global rush into the Internet’s hitherto unknown precincts is displaying many of the same growing pains as have accompanied the civilizing of other frontiers.
The Internet, as my recent lynching at the hands of irate Macintosh boosters will illustrate, can be a wild place where a riled-up mob can quickly be galvanized into action by those who know how to work the crowds and where justice is always as close as the end of the nearest rope.
“A lot of people on the Internet see themselves as cowboys and they see cyberspace as the closest thing we have to the Old West,” says Constance Hale, editor of Hardwired, the newly created publishing arm of Wired Magazine, a massively successful publication devoted to Internet issues.
There is, she says, “a real shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later ethic on-line.”
The Net, Hale noted, is a place where there often is scant concern paid to legal niceties like copyright, libel, slander, accuracy in reportage, etc.
Hale was chief of the copy desk at Wired when it was founded in 1994, and has written a book to chart the wild and woolly on-line ethos in the form of an Internet-oriented stylebook called “Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age.”
The book is patterned after the Associated Press stylebook and The Chicago Manual of Style, and tries to capture the flavor of the Internet by dealing with technoterms and I-way issues by establishing things like definitions and rules for usage.
For example, Hale noted, the book discusses phenomena like on-line lynchings by trying to define such uniquely Internet terms as “spamming” and “flaming,” which are terms used to describe how mobs and individuals attack one another on-line where real rope and shooting irons are out of reach.
Flames are simply angry e-mail messages or angry postings on Internet newsgroups. They can consist of a few well-chosen expletives or can be lengthy and insulting tracts.
Spamming, says Hale, can either refer to the process of one person distributing large amounts of unsolicited information to huge numbers of people over the Internet or of huge numbers of people sending e-mail to one person who displeases them.
It is in the form of these outbreaks of spamming and flaming that Internet frontier-style justice takes place.
My electronic lynching came after I wrote a news story that has drawn unusually harsh criticism from a very large number of people who are supporters of Apple Computer Inc.’s Macintosh line of personal computers.
The offending piece of journalism, published on the front page of the Chicago Tribune on Dec. 27, dealt with confusion surrounding Apple’s decision to acquire a new operating system called Next for its Macintoshes.
Within hours of publication, the e-mail started to pour in.
In the first day I got more than 500 angry letters from people all over the globe telling me that my story was riddled with errors and worse.
They included unkind words about the moral character of my poor late mother, suggestions that I perform mechanically impossible actions with my new IBM ThinkPad laptop computer, and, sadly, a few death threats.
“Come visit Texas,” wrote one. “We haven’t shot a tourist in a car since 1963.”
The second day brought a similar torrent of e-mail, and the spamming has continued ever since.
But on that second day I at least discovered why I was getting such massive attention to what was, after all, just another newspaper story about Apple’s turbulent business affairs that have become legion of late.
One of Apple’s most controversial executives, Guy Kawasaki, who claims the titles of Apple fellow and “Apple Evangelist,” had urged participants in one of the Internet’s most active newsgroups, called the Evangelist, to deluge me with e-mail complaining about my story.
I responded to maybe 100 of the e-mailers with the explanation that my facts were all correct and I noted that Apple Computer Inc., whose staff denounced my story for its tone and its analysis when I talked to them afterward, didn’t see fit to complain about any factual errors.
I was whistling on the gallows.
No reprieve
More than two weeks have passed, and the angry e-mail still comes in at a rate that makes it impossible to use my e-mail account on America Online for anything else than reading hate letters.
“Coates Must Die!” “Arrogant Ass,” “Spam you, Pal,” and much worse read the subject lines as the torrent of spam cascades down my computer screen every time I log on.
Other tales of on-line mob psychology abound.
Pierre Salinger, who went public late last autumn with false reports of a conspiracy behind the downing of TWA Flight 800 and wound up the target of global ridicule, is among the more recent examples.
Salinger was one of uncounted thousands of people who were spammed on the Internet by receiving a thoroughly discredited document claiming to show that a U.S. military missile attack brought down the Paris-bound jetliner last summer.
Discredited or not, the document was news to Salinger, and the veteran journalist and one-time press secretary in the Kennedy White House went public with the bogus document, claiming that he got it from top-secret sources on the Internet.
As a result, once again the allegation of a huge cover-up was circulated all over the planet even though it had been dismissed by virtually all responsible investigators after careful review weeks before Salinger came along.
No matter how often the FBI puts down the missile attack rumor, people on the Net bring it back to life. And each time, they find mobs of people to send still more Net postings claiming that a conspiracy is being hidden by the Establishment.
A similar plaint about Internet-riled mob behavior was sounded in late December by Guy Quigley, the owner of Quigley Corp., maker of the highly publicized Cold-Eeze zinc lozenges widely reputed to curtail the length and intensity of the common cold.
Reports of positive tests of his product became the topic of hot rumors circulated all across the Internet, with the happy result that Quigley stock soared in price. Much of this stock excitement was stirred by speculation that unsubstantiated claims of the effectiveness of the product were getting such attention that sales would go up.
The great bulk of this stock speculation started on an Internet version of a global stock club called the Motley Fool, which has become one of the most popular areas of the America Online service.
But after the spamming with good news drove prices through the ceiling, detractors, who possibly include so-called short sellers who benefit by buying stock under conditions where they show a profit if it drops in value, started spreading false bad news about the company to Motley Fool Internet users just as they once had spread good news.
The company’s shares went into decline, the shorts made killings and Quigley complained to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Spam vs. spam
Internet lore holds a special place for yet another case where mobs formed on modems and worked their will through a kilobyte kangaroo court.
It started when Laurence A. Canter and Martha S. Siegel, two Scottsdale, Ariz., immigration attorneys, made the fatal mistake–at least fatal for their own ability to use e-mail–of sending unsolicited e-mail to all the members of more than 9,000 Internet news groups advertising their legal services.
The two lawyers provoked what widely is considered as the most massive outbreak of spamming in Information Age history.
Uncounted thousands of angry netizens responded to the two hapless barristers by inundating them with e-mail complaining about the unsolicited e-mail.
This, say experts specializing in Internet usage, is an instance of spammers receiving retaliation by yet other spammers. Spam, at least in the Internet sense, it turns out, is a double-edged sword as well as a popular breakfast meat.
Hardwired editor Hale said that my case, too, fits the definition of spamming since the huge outpouring of e-mail I have received was unsolicited and since it all was targeted at a single person.
However you define it, my reputation has been sullied before thousands of the best and brightest people in the computer industry. Newbies to the Apple world can only assume I am Satan personified. My own colleagues have every right to wonder if I have lost it. Or maybe they should wonder if I ever had it.
What could I have done to get into such trouble? What happened?
Hardwired editor Hale said the word “lynched” isn’t in “Wired Style.”
But, she added with a laugh, “You definitely got spammed.”
I’ve got the crick in my neck and the dent in my reputation to prove it.
I hope that you’ll pardon me if I don’t close with my e-mail address today.
YOU NEEDN’T BE DEFENSELESS
Sadly, not much can be done when under spam attack or while being flamed, other than to take comfort that the spammers/flamers eventually will go away and your e-mail crisis will pass.
Meanwhile, Internet veterans guard against being utterly cut off from Net communications by making sure they have at least two e-mail accounts or, at the very least, at least two different screen names wherever they get on-line connectivity.
The idea is to go public with one name and zealously guard another, giving it only to closest friends and important business contacts.
If the spam hits the fan, you can then e-mail those you want to hear from with a fallback address.
The major on-line services offer these extra e-mail names as part of family packages, where the idea is to let parents have a master account and children their own e-mail, etc. One can co-opt little Johnny or Suzie’s sign-on in a pinch.
There also are free e-mail services typified by the Juno service that lets you set up an account free of charge at any time in exchange for giving the sponsor demographic data and viewing ads while on-line.
Finally, some software such as Claris E-Mailer for Mac, Eudora Pro fro PCs and Macs, and the e-mailer built in to the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser let you filter e-mail to remove notes with key words like “idiot” and “journalistic street walker.”
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James Coates will participate in an AOL on-line chat on these issues (keyword: colchat) at 7 p.m. Thursday.
