Excerpt from Keynote given by Clay Shirky at ETech (April, 2003)

In the Seventies -- this is a pattern that's shown up on the network over and over again
-- in the Seventies, a BBS called Communitree launched, one of the very early dial-up
BBSes. This was launched when people didn't own computers, institutions owned computers.

Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue.
"Communitree" -- the name just says "California in the Seventies." And the notion was,
effectively, throw off structure and new and beautiful patterns will arise.

And, indeed, as anyone who has put discussion software into groups that were previously
disconnected has seen, that does happen. Incredible things happen. The early days of
Echo, the early days of usenet, the early days of Lucasfilms Habitat, over and over
again, you see all this incredible upwelling of people who suddenly are connected in
ways they weren't before.

And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties
was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was
a high school. And who, in 1978, was hanging out in the room with the computer and the
modems in it, but the boys of that high school. And the boys weren't terribly interested
in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were
interested in salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting
four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.

And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students.
The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness.
They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on
free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying "No, that's not the kind of
free speech we meant."

But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that
was something that they needed to have that they didn't have, and as a result, they
simply shut the site down.

Now you could ask whether or not the founders' inability to defend themselves from this
onslaught, from being overrun, was a technical or a social problem. Did the software not
allow the problem to be solved? Or was it the social configuration of the group that
founded it, where they simply couldn't stomach the idea of adding censorship to protect
their system. But in a way, it doesn't matter, because technical and social issues are
deeply intertwined. There's no way to completely separate them.

What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they'd set
up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from
within. And attack from within is what matters. Communitree wasn't shut down by people
trying to crash or syn-flood the server. It was shut down by people logging in and
posting, which is what the system was designed to allow. The technological pattern of
normal use and attack were identical at the machine level, so there was no way to
specify technologically what should and shouldn't happen. Some of the users wanted the
system to continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion. And other of the
users, the high school boys, either didn't care or were actively inimical. And the
system provided no way for the former group to defend itself from the latter.

Now, this story has been written many times. It's actually frustrating to see how many
times it's been written. You'd hope that at some point that someone would write it down,
and they often do, but what then doesn't happen is other people don't read it.