AnarchoCyphertopian technologies (wasRE:[extropy-chat]Reccommendations for a mailing list)

[spike]

> --- "kevinfreels.com" <kevin at kevinfreels.com> wrote:
> > I agree that viruses are vandalism, but I never
> > recall anyone referring to
> > physical junk mail in the mailbox as theft. How is
> > SPAM any different?


Spam has stolen something from us that many 
extropians are likely completely unaware.  Since
we tend to be techno-geeks and all our friends
and acquaintances often are techno-geeky, we
keep our computers going thru the spam
deluge.  We set up our firewalls and filters, 
we do what it takes.

However.

Do you have friends and acquaintances who once
used the internet but fell away?  I do: I have
an antique motorcycle club that specializes in
a particular bike in which I (and several others
independently) discovered a design flaw which
could cause the rear wheel to lock up suddenly.
We know of at least two fatalities, plus a 
number of injuries.  My mission was to find
all the people that had these bikes and warn
them, then teach them how to fix the problem.
By email of course.

But many, if not most, of that community are
not computer geeks, but rather just use it
as a communications tool.

In the past couple years, many bikers got so frustrated
with the virus storm and spam flood, they finally
tossed in the towel.  The computer went into the
trash can.  It was a bigger and more difficult
job to keep the computer running than to keep
the old bike going (which is a lot).  If I can't
contact these people by email, I can't contact
them.

Other than sending out christmas cards, when is 
the last time you took out a piece of paper and
wrote to an old friend who has no email?  Can
you even remember?  Me neither.  My youngest 
postage stamps are from three price increases
ago.  We stopped using that form of communication
a decade ago.  Im not totally sure I even know how
to use a pen anymore, and I conjecture that some
of the younger people here never even learned how.  
Consequently, when an old friend unplugs her 
internet/email connection, she is effectively gone, 
in another parallel universe, missing in action, no
practical communication possible, and pretty soon
she isn't that close a friend anymore.  Spam and 
virii have taken her away from us.

But here's the point: you didn't even realize that
we had a mass exodus from email in the past couple
years.  Your friends and acquaintances kept their 
machines going.  A lot of mine didn't.

spike