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March 17, 1996
Hate Knows No Virtual Bounds
SURF & TURF / By ASHLEY DUNN
t's not easy working race into a discussion about operating systems. After all, the most passionate questions of color in OS chatter have to do with screen savers and wallpaper.
But a few weeks ago one person posting in the newsgroup comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips proved once again that hate knows no boundaries.
"Yeah, a proper OS would signal e.g. a IRQ conflict at startup,'' a user had posted in a thread titled, Windows 96 Beta. "Just crashing randomly is a sign of BAD programming." The posting went on to urge, "Destroy your copies and buy Win95!''
"No,'' came a response from a person using the pseudonym of Ned Kelly, the 19th Century Australian horse thief, bank robber and anti-British folk hero who fought with a steel bucket on his head. "Get Linux'' -- -- followed by a characterization of Windows 95 that was both vulgar and racist.
Translation: I'm a bigot and I'm not afraid to flaunt it.
We have arrived at the Brave New World only to discover that it's not a great improvement over the bad old one. In some ways it's worse.
In the real world, it's a rarity to hear racial or sexual epithets on the streets these days. They have become unacceptable terms that as even the worst bigots know, can carry serious social, legal and physical consequences when used in public.
But the overt racism that has been suppressed in the physical world has been liberated in the virtual universe thanks to the anonymity, detachment and laissez-fare traditions of the Net.
The latter-day Ned Kelly knows that he can hurl all the insults he wants. What's the worst that can happen to him? Would a spam attack force him to think hard about changing his ways? Not a chance.
The Net is becoming the best home hate ever had.
It's no surprise that neo-Nazis and white supremacists have already put up dozens of web sites to peddle their views to the masses. Hate loves attention, and the Internet is the cheapest attention one can buy. For the paltry cost of an Internet connection, groups like the National Alliance and Aryan Nations have managed to trade up from cheap newsletters and vanity books to Web sites and the potential to reach as many people as, say, IBM or The New York Times.
But while the emergence of hate groups on the Net is a problem, in the end, it's a small one. They will always be on the fringe, whether in the real world or in the virtual.
At best, all the hate groups combined amount to a few dozen Web sites out of a total of a few hundred thousand around the world. They may be easy enough to find through Yahoo! or other search engines, but the truth is, even a diehard Aryan skinhead would have to be pretty bored to bother visiting one. I mean, how many images of der Furher can any one person have the patience to download?
A far more disturbing phenomena is how open and uninhibited racism has become in mainstream parts of the Net. One can understand people like Ned Kelly hanging out in places like alt.politics.white-power. Denizens of such swamps love calling people names. But comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips?
Take a look at the messages in soc.culture.african.american. A day doesn't go by without someone telling blacks to go back to Africa or thanking long- dead white slavers for bringing Africans to America in chains.
Racism and sexual bigotry are alive and well in discussion groups ranging in topics from jokes to game machines to erotica. Some are intended to be funny, others overtly hate-filled. All share the commonality of being offensive not only to targeted groups but to anyone of good taste.
In fact, considering the amount of traffic on the Net each day, such messages are not that common. Their sentiments are certainly not shared by the majority of people on the Net either, judging by the fact that most hate messages inspire weeks of flames from other users. Even the Klan site doesn't use the kinds of racial slurs one finds scattered through mainstream cyberspace.
The problem is that these types of messages, strewn about in an almost casual way, stick around for weeks in newsgroups, making it seem as if they are acceptable terms that are worthy of debate.
Flaming these bigots seems to do no good, and in a world where words are reality, rebuttals often only attach undo importance to those seeking to incite and insult.
What is missing is a sense of real-world accountability that would make people at least consider the effects of their actions. There is simply no penalty now for being socially unacceptable in cyberspace. In this new frontier, where identity and morality can be so easily unhitched, the mentality is: I'll say anything I want. Spam me if you dare. Flame me, please.
It is time to inject some accountability into the system. Although people easily slip into the mentality that cyberspace is a separate universe, it is not. It is still intrinsically tied to the real world -- a fact demonstrated by the very presence of racist language in a universe where color has no meaning.
Some Internet Service providers like to see themselves as mere conduits for communications as opposed to hall monitors. Michael Hakimi, the head of American Information Services in Chicago, which provides service for Ned Kelly, said: "We just provide the medium. We don't have anything to do with what people do with it.''
But there is nothing that stops the providers from saying "Enough!" if they want. Any printer in the country can refuse to print Nazi newsletters or even NAACP flyers if they want. It's their business.
Crown Books won't carry white supremacist books on its shelves. No company in the country would tolerate employees sending out racist newsletters on its letterhead. No daily newspaper would allow anyone to place an advertisement containing racial or sexual slurs. Why? Because these things are offensive, and customers would scream.
It's now time for cyberspace to scream a little. I'm not talking about censorship, message monitoring or finding out people's real identities, just a slight nudge to dampen the thoughtless, casual and public use of derogatory terms that make parts of the Net sound like they're stuck in a time warp.
When someone uses racially offensive terms, let their school, company, Internet service provider or, if serious and threatening enough, local law enforcement agencies know about it. It's no different than if someone publicly used those terms in the real world. Consider it the cyber equivalent of a demonstration.
Let those service providers who are hosting Web sites for hate groups know that you find such sites offensive.
Certainly anyone can get another e-mail address or find another service provider to host them. Fine. Let them switch providers a few times and see which is easier: being decent or arguing netiquette with a gatekeeper to the on-line world.
The truly persistent bigot will figure out that the ultimate way to avoid public action is to buy his own server, but any system administrator will tell you that such a solution is serious punishment in itself.
In the end, there is no stopping hate, public or private, on the Net, which after all, is only a reflection of the real world. No one is na‹ve enough to believe that racism stops just because people don't shout epithets in the street.
But in a strange way there is a benefit in seeing these terms in permanent black-and-white on the Net. Like the videotape of Rodney G. King being beaten by Los Angeles police officers, bigotry on the Net is proof of the divisions in this nation and helps to dispel the illusions of harmony and security that can make it difficult to grapple with issues of race.
There are many things to fear in the Brave New World and the bad old one, and everyone should know that.
Oh, and by the way, you can e-mail the service provider for Ned Kelly at dave@ais.net.
Ashley Dunn, at asdunn@nytimes.com, welcomes your comments and suggestions.
