1/29/02
The first 2 weeks after Tom's abrupt removal as Moderator for The LEF Forums were not easy ones for him, or for me. Although we had discussed it many months ago - the idea of being independent of LEF and all that would entail - one aspect of the actual break did not occur to me, if it did indeed occur to Tom.
For more than 4 years Tom has had most of his days dominated by the pressures of messages posted to The LEF Forums. Before I joined him in August 2000, except for rare occasions when he was travelling, Tom never let more than 2 days pass before putting a post (typically with his citation-laden comments) online. The delay lengthened to 3 days at most in these more recent 18 months, usually only when we took a couple of days off to spend at the cottage. (Those periodic breaks from the computer - Forums posts, MoreLife building, newsgroups, personal emails, and other ventures - were welcome and truly needed, we discovered, for physical and mental well-being.)
The shadow over him of the posts awaiting his response and the other obligations, prohibited Tom from spending more than a cursory amount of time on current events. Usually this was the news on the classical music radio station, since his email copies of NewsScan and other lists often went unread for days and even weeks at a time. (The thought of the 3 years of unread Scientific American in our apartment are painful to Tom, though it is a bright note to report that he is now only 1 month behind in his Science News copies.) The couple of days following the horror-filled attack on the World Trade Center were unusual in that, like most others, we were glued to our radio, the Internet news services, and what TV stations we can pick up without cable service. But this "obsession" with world events diminished quickly as the necessity of commenting and approving Forums posts took only a slight dip with the occurences of the time.
When the abrupt cut of Tom's moderator status occurred in the wee hours of 1/11/02, he was initially both disappointed in LEF and not surprised at the action. Almost immediately he began to use much of the time available catching up on his backlog of news related emails including NewsScan. When he came to the 1/11 issue on 1/14, he was considerably disturbed by the implications of the report about an 18 year old Norwegian teenager who was being prosecuted for writing and making available for free on the Internet 3 years ago software that allows individuals to copy DVDs. The fact that this young man, who in addition to accomplishing a formidable intellectually challenging technical feat, had done nothing morally wrong in making his creation available but was being charged with "crimes" others may have committed, was extremely troubling to Tom. It was an indication that the mindset of those attorneys general in several states who have indicted gun manufacturers for producing a product that others may use to commit crimes (and won unfortunately in some cases), and prosecuted Napster for CD copying software, has spread beyond the borders of the US. In all these circumstances - and others read and heard on the news reports - the long arm of the law had reached out to the easily available party, not the ones who had committed a wrong. The warping of justice through a lack of objective philosophy was again evident in the news; the state of the world was looking worse in the sense of basic fundamentals. Tom was discouraged that the promise of scientific advances now on the horizon would ever be allowed to come to pass in a society permeated with the philosophy represented by this NewsScan report. In fact, Tom became so overwhelmed with the magnitude of the possible outcome - no scientific advances and a slow return of an intellectual dark ages - that he considered whether there was any worth to his efforts with MoreLife. What effect could he have when virtually no change has occurred in either the US or Canada in their advance towards more statist societies, despite the efforts of numerous individual-rights organizations?
Tom wants to continue living - into a future where individuals trade value for value and reward is based on productivity, not need. Yes, there are people doing moral evil, some out of ignorance or complacency and others quite purposely; but with effort, determination, and co-operation from concurring others, an individual with a philosophically sound and well presented message on life can make a difference on the Internet.
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