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