From: Dale Thorn <dthorn@gte.net>
Date: Thu, 6 Feb 1997 07:09:11 -0800 (PST)
To: Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>
Subject: Re: Deloitte-Touche, e$pam plug, Moderation, Cypherpunks as a  cresote bush
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19970206001154.006c8e48@mail.io.com>
Message-ID: <32F9F3C2.5922@gte.net>
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Greg Broiles wrote:
> At 09:09 PM 2/5/97 -0500, Robert Hettinga wrote:

> I've been meaning to write up a long message explaining why I think I'm about
> to drop off of the list. It's peculiar to spend a lot of time discussing
> things with a group of people over the course of several years and then
> disappear without saying why. But I'm having trouble coming up with anything
> more profound than "it's not interesting any more." Philosophically, I agree
> with Lucky - it looks to me like it's time to kill the list and move on to
> other things. But that's not my choice to make, and perhaps other people can
> still extract something useful from this. More power to them if they can.
> I'm starting to think that cpunks may be similar to college, in that it's a
> good thing for a few years, but if you stick around too long you just get
> bitter and cranky and frustrated because the new people keep talking about
> the same old problems. Don't they know we've already talked about that?

But college continues because it wasn't designed for just one group
of people of one time period.  It was designed for everyone, and to
evolve to meet future need. If the c-punks list were to survive, it
too would have to evolve to meet future needs, and that evolution
would be sure to disappoint a lot of the older crowd.

The big difference here is that college is far from cutting edge in
anything, and the list is (or could be) cutting edge.  But nearly
everyone so far has acknowledged that, despite improvement in signal-
to-noise on the moderated list, the factor of external control has
also removed much of what was interesting.  Remove the control and
incorporate the best of the suggestions that have been made so far,
and some of that interest may return.  Perhaps more importantly, if
the principals could see their way to mend some fences along the way,
that would restore even more confidence in the list.