Backbone cabal
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The backbone cabal was a group (or cabal) of large-site administrators who pushed through the Great Renaming and reined in the chaos of Usenet during most of the 1980s.
Credit for organizing the backbone about 1983 is variously claimed for Mark Horton [1] or Gene "Spaf" Spafford [2], in an effort to stabilize the Usenet propagation. While many news servers operated during night time to save the cost of long distance communication, servers of the backbone were available 24 hours a day.
During most of its lifetime, the Cabal (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. Its common abbreviation, TINC, is used humorously to suggest that people should lighten up and not see a conspiracy around every corner, or alternatively as an ironic statement, indicating one who knows "the cabal" will inevitably deny there is a cabal.
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 conspiracy theories about various Cabals with dark nefarious objectives beginning with taking over Usenet or the Internet. These paranoias were later satirized in ways that took on a life of their own. Follow-ons include the "Eric Conspiracy" of mustached hackers named "Eric"; ex-members of the P.H.I.R.M.; and the Lumber Cartel putatively funding anti-spam efforts to support the paper industry.
As Usenet has few technologically or legally enforced hierarchies, just about the only ones that formed were social hierarchies. People exerted power through force of will (often via intimidating flames), garnering authority and respect by contributing to the community (by being a maintainer of a FAQ, for example), or through sheer persistence, spending more time and writing more posts than anyone else (see Kibo, etc.).
Thus groups of people with authority and power gained and maintained it by what in a traditional society would be considered extralegal means; they were, in some sense, cabals. In another sense they were not cabals, since their power did not extend beyond much more than social authority.
