Welcome to Slashdot

Welcome to Slashdot, wherein a technologically challenged media critic comes nose to nose with an army of Linux Geeks and lives to tell the tale...

Welcome to Slashdot

By 8 p.m. Friday, I?d gotten more than 300 posts in response to a column I wrote about Slashdot, on the website Free! Website, where I write regularly about media, and which was mentioned and linked to by Rob Malda (Cmdr Taco) Read the column at [http://www.freedomforum.org/]

The response went on all weekend - by Sunday morning more than 500 messages were cramming my Eudora e-mail program, the most I?d gotten since two years ago when I impulsively called for a boycott of Wal-Mart stores for helping to censor the music CD?s and lyrics they sell.

I was up to my neck in one of my happiest and most joyful experiences -- a great Webfest, a convergence of alternately combative, supportive, outspoken, generous nerds, techies, hackers, cypherpunks, students, Linux and other geeks, engineers, scientists, and Webheads.

From the moment I started writing about the Net and the Web and including my e-mail in everything I wrote, I learned one of the hard lessons of writing in this culture: if you screw-up, you will hear about it, and fast. In the other kind of journalism, which I practiced for 15 years, people who wanted to get at you had to write letters or fight their way through operators. Bothered. Online of course, I?m a click away.

Geeks love nothing more than to catch an error and point it out. They have access to all the information in the world and short fuses when it comes to carelessness, stupidity or fuzzy thinking. In the short run, this is humbling. In the long run, it makes for a better writer, since you really have no choice but to try and get it right.

The first 75 or so pointed out correctly that I?d confused a quote from ESR about the Halloween (Eric S. Raymond) with Sengan, and mis-attributed it. This was so.

I?d printed out the column, then misread the names at the top.

Another 50 or so pointed out to me that Anonymous Coward is not a single person but all anonymous posters.

I knew that, even if I didn?t make it clear. I?d spent some part of each day for the past two weeks on Slashdot (even joined) and the use of AC on Slashdot is obvious, and common to all other public website forums I?ve written for, including Hotwired.

Another score or so jeered cause I didn?t explicitly point out that that Malda and Cmdr Taco are one and the same. But I knew that too, having e-mailed Malda several times and gone through the "about" page on Slashdot. It just didn?t seem important to me to mention.

I appreciated being called out on the big mistake - the misattributed quote, and accepted the nit-picking as life-as-normal on the Web.

Slashdot e-mailers reminded me a bit of the early days of Hotwired - Netizens were being attacked so often by journalists and politicians they tended to be raw about things written about them. They expected to be mis-interpreted and misunderstood and were suspicious of outsiders. In the week after the publication of the Halloween Document, that was especially understandable here.

I pointed out in my replies that the column wasn?t written for geeks and Slashdot members, but for a different audience - journalists and others, and I hadn?t wanted to clutter it up with all of these explanations, not important to the central premise of the column - Slashdot is exciting, even revolutionary, and much more useful to people pondering the future future of new media than the much-hyped "Slate" or even "Salon," both of which are published in forms familiar to mainstream journalists and producers. Thus both are often quoted and read while sites like Slashdot - often much more exciting and revolutionary - aren?t taken as seriously.

Then there were the usual taunts, jeers, and muscle-flexing of any free and open Website.

"I?m sure you?re getting praised and flamed," wrote David. "Don?t let it bug you. It goes on here all the time." I assured him that after years of Web writing, I have an Asbestos hide. There isn?t much I haven?t been called, or learned how to deal with.

Flaming is a reflexive response on websites, usually a superficial, first impulse to the appearance of an intruder, sort of like how the body reacts when a foreign object is intruded into the bloodstream. Flaming is getting rarer on the Web, and I actually get very few flames.

And I get plenty of praise and support. I couldn?t even begin to count my online friends - vastly more numerous than my off-line ones.

I learned over three years of writing for Hotwired that if you can?t take being flamed, get out of the cyber-kitchen. For many people, flaming is the most intimidating thing about writing on the Web. Writing for Wired and Hotwired, I got an asbestos hide.

Once the hazing was over - maybe by midnight, then I started getting many messages of praise, thanks, education, questions and encouragement. "Great," wrote Paul. "Thanks," wrote Chris, offering to actually teach me how to understand Linux and Linux code (he has no idea what he?s risking there.)

"Well done, "wrote Simon the Linux Geek, a Hotwired reader.

"The revolution has just begun," e-mailed Petemolina from AOL. "Join in."

I got e-mail from engineers and programmers at NASA and Stanford and MIT and IBM too, reminding me that Slashdot wasn?t just a hangout for kid-geeks, but older ones too, with big jobs. And dozens from people praising Slashdot and proud to be on it.

My favored was from Karl, who got to what was, for me, the seminal question: "Neat article. But here?s a question I haven?t figured out. Do the people working on Linux do it for moral reasons. Or is it mostly just fun for them? You suggest the former, but I suspect the latter."

I don?t really know for sure. I?m technologically-challenged, as it obvious. Although I find writing about the Net and Web great fun, but writing about things like Linux is a struggle for me, and I?m and new both to Linux and Slashdot.

But in my media writings -Rolling Stone, GQ, New York Magazine, Wired and the Freedom Forum - I?ve argued often that media is most effective when it has a moral purpose, one reason mainstream journalism is struggling so much these days. If they have any sense of moral responsibility, it?s no longer obvious what it is.

America?s founding journalists - Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson - were the geeks and hackers of their time. They were advocating a profoundly radical idea at the time - freedom. And they believed information should be free, not the exclusive province of corporations and pundits, and should be shared. Small wonder I felt at home the first time I wandered onto Slashdot.

Sure, working on Linux looks like it would be fun. But the underlying ideology on sites like Slashdot is evident and powerful, especially in the context of media and morality. The moral purpose that gives sites like this power and excitement, the sense that something more is happening than the exchange of code or e-mail, is clear, even on the site.

"Note," wrote Jeff Hodges from Stanford, "that Malda gives away the software that makes Slashdot possible for him to produce and still has time to eat and sleep some. It is a subtle but profound point."

It is profound, and not even so subtle. The great scholars of technology - Langdon Winner, Albert Teich, Samuel Florman - all write about the need for media technology to be used in a moral way. Moral media are successful and influential. When Thomas Paine wrote "Common Sense," it sold 500,000 copies in a country of two million people and helped spark the American Revolution. Paine refused to take any royalties, as he said he?d rather people be able to afford "Common Sense" than that he get rich off it. Naturally, he died in extreme poverty.

Moral media are the ones that shape events, while amoral media sag and fade away. In the year of Monica Lewinsky, the power of this idea becomes more potent by the day.

This is what put Microsoft?s now mythic Halloween Document and the Open Source Software movement in such stark relief - here was a greedy, arrogant company struggling to figure out how to close down or control access to the freest culture in the world so they could make more billions, and here is one of many websites devoted to improving and giving away for free the systems that might run the Digital Age.

In the history of information, it?s hard to find a more dramatic or stark moral drama than that.

In "The Existential Pleasures of Engineering" (St. Martin?s Griffin, $17.50) a classic book on the moral and social responsibility of engineers (in our time, the geeks) responsible for operating new technology, Florman, an engineer, wrote that "consistence and common sense, competence and integrity" - plus a dash of what he called "astute sophisticaion? - are what the times demand of people responsible for making and distributing powerful new technologies.

This plaintive call for a new engineering morality is especially timely in the age of the media conglomerate, where mass-marketing is the only ideology and big profits the universal aspiration.

Florman?s wish was for engineers to return to a time when they fancied themselves "redeemers of mankind" and "priests of the new epoch."

In our time, when technology itself has become such a bitter political issue, from the Unabomber to the CDA to hordes of techno-phobic journalists, this will be hard to do.

"With the religion of Progress lying in ruins about us, we engineers will have to relinquish, once and for all, the dream of priest-hood and seek to define our lives in other terms," wrote Florman.

On sites like Slashdot , and in movements like OSS and Free Software, plenty of people are having great fun, as Karl suggested. But whether they know it or not, they?re also doing what Florman was pleading for. Defining our lives in new terms, and building a more moral kind of media.

Jon Katz can be e-mailed at [e-mail]