Nothing quite like Slashdot.org — experience it!

Jon Katz
First Amendment Center scholar

11.06.98

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At 5:21 p.m. Monday, Nov. 2, ESR, a contributor of the Internet geeksite Slashdot.org, published the triumphant news that The Wall Street Journal had just called him to quiz him about the instantly famous "Halloween Document" — the internal Microsoft memorandum warning of the threat to the company posed by the burgeoning Open Source Software (OSS) movement.

ESR couldn't help but gloat, as he had been one of the first reporters on the Web to break the Halloween Document story, and also one of the most ignored.

"As you peruse your WSJ tommorrow," ESR pointed out, "the distant noise you hear will be me, laughing my butt off at the people who leapt to accuse me of having been hoaxed, or even of perpetrating the hoax myself."

The next day, the Halloween Document was all over the Internet. Slashdot's owner and founder "Commander Taco" (Rob Malda) was alerting Slashdot readers to other sites covering the Microsoft story, and also urging a global "Planet of the Apes"-style welcome for John Glenn when he returns to earth: "Everybody dress in ape suits," he implored. "We have nine days to bury the Statute of Liberty up to her chest."

It was another news day for Slashdot, a teeming, intensely interactive new generation Website. A passionate advocate for the free software movement, Slashdot.org members make their own media every day. They write code, submit book and movie reviews, respond to button polls (how many cables are coming out of the back of your computer?) test software, pass along the results and man the frontiers of the Digital World for encroaching enemies: CDA-sponsoring members of Congress, memo-writing Microsoft engineers.

Last week was a good week.

To really understand the Web and the way in which it might possibly transform what we used to call journalism, the curious should check out Slashdot. This site is much more telling about the future of media than, for instance, the much-hyped Microsoft Web site Slate.

Slashdot is one of the radical new media environments that are transforming the content and nature of information, showing us in the process what the new information world might look like.

Sites like Slashdot.org are different from Slate and Salon, but worlds apart from The New York Times, Time magazine, The Washington Post, or CNN.

They are bottom-up, rather than top-down, for one thing. Readers are encouraged to submit news, columns and columns, so the daily information agenda is amazingly diverse and unpredictable — crackers advancing human rights in China, Serb efforts to curb human rights appeals on the Web, and a blizzard of up-to-the-minute technical information. Their discussion areas are buzzing hives, racking up scores of arguments, opinions, wry observations and new information almost continuously. People can avoid posting under their own names, using instead names like "Anonymous Coward." (That's not one person; it's the name given to all posters who don't wish to identify themselves.)

Unlike traditional journalism, Slashdot.org is informal and to the point: "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." It's contributors are not the ponderous gasbags of many newspaper op-ed pages, but people who would never be published on one: founder and owner Malda, "Hemos," "Mojoksi" and "Sengan."

Slashdot's mascots are Wilbur the Gimp and the Tux Linux Penguin. The site is not only casual and self-deprecating but — surprisingly — sometimes intensely political, keeping an eye on rights and free speech issues, and especially devoted to the free software movement, one of the most revolutionary and influential political movements in modern media. This movement — more than 7 million people are believed to be using freely distributed OSS software like Linux and Apache — holds that the Web should not be commercialized and gobbled up alive by the same greedy, mass-marketed kinds of companies that have nearly devoured American journalism.

This software is becoming so pervasive that a Microsoft engineeer wrote an internal memorandum, leaked over the Internet this week, warning that the movement posed a direct and serious threat to companies like Microsoft. The numbers of users are estimated to be growing at 40% a year. The OSS movement believes that the software that runs the Internet and links tens of millions of people to one another on the World Wide Web should be and remain free; that advances, developments and information should be shared and made available to everyone, regardless of income or marketing desirability.

Whatever its values and ethical concerns, the American press seems increasingly faint-hearted about freedom. It supports invasions of privacy, the spread of censorship technology like blocking software, and sometimes even noxious federal censorship legislation like the Communications Decency Act. Slashdot and its members ferociously oppose all of those things. The young citizens of the World Wide Web were raised in one of the freest information environments in history, are intensely communicative and well organized, and eager to fight to keep their bristling new medium free.

Media has become one of America's greediest and most rapacious businesses, the cost of information going up all the time. Largely uncovered and remarked upon in the mainstream press, the free software movement's impact is already profound, creating a political movement and technical structure that is close to making commercial or political domination of the Web impossible.

Thus, Linux is a big and continuing story on sites like Slashdot.org, its applications, features and evolution covered in much the same way the Washington press corps obsesses on President Clinton's sex life. There, every new Linux user is a victory and cause for celebration, any curious newcomer bombarded with help and information.

Sites like Slashdot.org are sometimes intimidating, because of the technical terms and chatter that permeates them. But that's deceptive. They are profoundly libertarian, passionately devoted to free speech and tolerance. And often great fun.

Last week on Slashdot, contributor Commander Taco posted news from Houston that a company called Walden Internet Villages was building an apartment complex targeting geeks as residents, offering cheap bandwidth, computer game servers, Linux mirrors, static IP addresses, and 10 megabit Internet Access.

Walden Internet Villages was essentially constructing geek information communities, according to spokesman Alan LeFort. "Our goal is not to make money with this service," he wrote, "but to provide a special community for hackers to share knowledge and ideas. Currently of 200 apartments, 100 of them are filled with hackers and computer enthusiasts, most running Linux."

Walden said it was considering developing three more properties in Houston. They expected their Internet service to cost between $45 and $75 as connection, and they allow residents to put their own computer hubs in their apartments, as many DNS (domain name) entries as they need, and all kinds of operating systems.

"Best of all," announced Walden," we don't care what you do with your computers as long as it's not adult-xxx Website stuff, a poor use of our bandwidth." The company, said LeFort, "is run by geeks for geeks." The announcement instantly provoked more than a hundred enthusiastic responses, including "Oh yes, Lord, yes!," from Peat and "Oooh, I like," from Anonymous Coward.

The geek complex was interesting enough in its own right, but it was revealing in other ways. Imagine any other kind of media community being invited to live together in a free-spirited information commune. The next day, a contributor named Arturo Aldama wrote to Slashdot's gnome-list, announcing a project in Mexico called Scholar Net that has decided to install Linux workstations in every elementary and mid-level school in Mexico — about 140,000 centers in the next five years. Despite many pronouncements from President Clinton and the federal government about building techno-bridges to the future, no such program exists in America, the birthplace of the Internet, and the wealthiest country on earth.

On Slashdot, the equitable distribution of technology is always embraced: "I don't know about you, but this made my day!" posted Justin, one of Slashdot's contributors. Anonymous Coward was quick to grasp the implications of distributing new technology to children rather than curbing it with unenforceable "decency" laws and blocking software. "This is rich," he posted. "Within a decade, Mexico will boast a large community of technically competent Linux developers and administrators, while in the U.S., dumbed-down "NT" (commercial operating software from Microsoft) administrators will probably still be struggling with BSOD's, "hot fixes," "constant reboots," and paying the ever-escalating Microsoft fees.

Sounds like Mexico will be the hot place to work."

Maybe so.

For journalism, the growth of grassroots sites like Slashdot has profound significance. Slashdot shows how information can move up as well as down, and how an editorial entity with a strong sense of identity can still make room for different voices and points of view. How young college students like Malda can almost overnight create influential media outlets that reach thousands of people and send information all over the Internet.

In addition, sites like Slashdot celebrate the informality of young information users, their ingrained experience with interactive media, and their embrace of very powerful political notions like the sharing of technology and information — ideas politicians give lip service to but rarely do anything to help bring about.

Slashdot's contributors will probably never be asked to submit op-ed pieces to The New York Times, or invited on Washington talk shows. They are not safe and accessible sites for most journalists. That's too bad. Nobody knows more than they do about the future of journalism, and nobody can teach us more about it. Here are the real pioneers of new media, the people who will actually be taking us across that bridge to the future.