backbone cabal

n. A group of large-site administrators who pushed through the Great
Renaming and reined in the chaos of Usenet during most of the 1980s. During
most of its lifetime, the Cabal (as it was sometimes capitalized)
steadfastly denied its own existence; it was almost obligatory for anyone
privy to their secrets to respond There is no Cabal whenever the existence
or activities of the group were speculated on in public. The result of this
policy was an attractive aura of mystery. Even a decade after the cabal
mailing list disbanded in late 1988 following a bitter internal catfight,
many people believed (or claimed to believe) that it had not actually
disbanded but only gone deeper underground with its power intact. This
belief became a model for various paranoid theories about various Cabals
with dark nefarious objectives beginning with taking over the Usenet or
Internet. These paranoias were later satirized in ways that took on a life
of their own. See Eric Conspiracy for one example. Part of the background
for this kind of humor is that many hackers cultivate a fondness for
conspiracy theory considered as a kind of surrealist art; see the
bibliography entry om Illuminatus! for the novel that launched this trend.
See NANA for the subsequent history of the Cabal.

