From: T0Morrow@aol.com
Date: Fri Jun 18 1999 - 10:53:54 MDT
Anders Sandberg wisely cautions us against wallowing in nostalgia, writing:
> Hmm, just a memetic thing. Maybe we should stop complaining about the
> lost golden age and instead focus on the coming golden age of the
> extropians list?
Nostalgia can better our future, I suppose, if it encourages us review
history for practices that we can implement now. But anyone who grieves for
a "lost golden age" of the Extropians list had better double-check their
facts.
The Extropians list in the early 90s had--*suprise!*--many of the problems
that plague the current list. It had, for instance, a bad infection of
argumentative and poorly-informed subscribers. Such problems impelled ExI to
set up a list governance process and resulted in the expulsion of at least
one subscriber--who thereafter apparently re-subscribed under various
pseudonyms so as to continue hogging bandwidth with irrelevant personal
screeds. The relative scarcity of bandwidth made such ignorant flaming all
the more irritating.
There were, of course, a good many intelligent, well-informed, civil, and
literate subscribers. But the current list has a good many of those, too.
Did the list formerly host "bigger names? Probably not. Many of those folks
were not yet well-known outside of our tight little circle. (I daresay that
ExI can boast having made their radical work more acceptable to the greater
public.) Furthermore, many other former subscribers, whose names never
surface in our comparisons of present and future lists, never rose to stardom.
I am not counselling inaction in the face of current problems. As I noted,
we took action in the past when faced with S/N problems. I mean merely to
caution against ancestor worship. We have brains and backbone enough right
here and now to tackle the current problems of the Extropians list.
T.0. Morrow
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