Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2001 21:08:58 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: brett@lariat.org (Brett Glass) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in (Rahul Siddharthan), reg@FreeBSD.ORG (Jeremy Lea), kris@catonic.net (Kris Kirby), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why did NetBSD and FreeBSD diverge? Message-ID: <200101192108.OAA15735@usr08.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010119111143.049ff8a0@localhost> from "Brett Glass" at Jan 19, 2001 11:25:03 AM
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> >Think "blanket party", as punishment for a members violation > >of the rules established by the controlling membership. > > I haven't encountered the term "blanket party" since I read > the book Don Quixote years ago. What is a good definition of > it? (I'd assumed, from context, that it involved public > humiliation and/or suppression of an individual.) Supression of an individual. The most common modern occurance of "blanket party" behaviour occurs in the military. It is a common psychological technique in team-building in the military to make the authority figure (a drill sergent, in the "boot camp" phase of training), the object of antipathy, in an attempt to create a mutual enemy that's non-theoretical for the others to band against. The military can't be effective on pure idealism, moreso if it is involuntary for any reason. A common technique for punishment, if individual punishment (e.g. pushups, marches with heavy packs, and so on) do not cause a person to conform, is to punish the subgroup on behalf of the persons transgression, leaving it to the subgroup to correct the persons behaviour. It's also common that this occurs naturally, as a result of an individual transgression, for which the individual is not willing to accept the consequences. This happens, since it's also an offence against the team to betray the transgressor to the teams common enemy. Knowing this is part of why the military concentrates on requiting younger people who have not had psychological training. It's also why the military has such profound reactions to attempts by the larger society to change it to make it "more fair" or "more representitive of society". The stage set, a "blanket party" is where several members act, anonymously if there is official consequences threatened for such activity, with the sanction of the group. It should be noted that officialdom is well aware of the paractice, and tacitly encourages it as a behaviour modification technique, which they themselves are prohibited from employing. First, the participants throw a blanket over the person, usually late at night, in their bunk, while they are asleep, to prevent identification and official sanction of individuals. Then, they take the person, and beat them non-lethally, usually with socks weighted by filling them with some material. Then they leave the person where they were beaten (usually a bathroom, as that's the only private area in a military barracks, and it aids the pretense that other members of the group not actually engaged in the activity "saw nothing"). The official response is usually some token punishment on the group, which generally fits in as an unannounced training event, the type of which generally occur periodically anyway. If the problem persists, the person who is the target is usually thrown out of the group (discharged from the military); not an option for the Internet, or we'd have discharged the SPAM'mers a long time ago. The technology was simply not built with the idea of it being a basis for social evolution. This is actually part of what makes it so interesting to study, since non-virtual societies are capable of effective removal opf transgressing members, either temporarily or permanently. A "FreeBSD Blanket Party" includes threats of being banned, kill-filed (virtually banned by a powerful subset), and of what Brett calls "piling on". Brett actually tends to make this a lot easier by providing inflamatory rhetoric based on his history, which the participants can sieze on to drub him with, while ignoring his more threatening arguments entirely, making it about Brett's rhetoric, and not the issues. I've pointed this out to him a couple of times; I'm not sure if he cooperates involuntarily, or if he has a martyr complex that is being served by the behaviour. > And what > rule (or rules) set by TPTB do you think I have violated? Brett is more vocal about social reform in the FreeBSD society than is non-self-defeating in scope. "TPTB" fear social reform, as it can (and will, if they are not among the initiators) erode their power base. For example, in the recent core-team to committer accountability reform, a number of previous core team members were demoted from their control of power: FreeBSD is becoming more mature. Technically, FreeBSD is a stage 2 "cult", on the cusp of achieving legitimacy as a "religion" (I'll keep that analogy, since it's as apt as any). It's actually the first Open Source project that I'm aware of to reach this stage (it is at least the most visible to do so), and that makes it a very interesting subject of study. As historical comparison, many early disputes were handled by one of the parties involved hacking the servers involved, and removing the accounts, commit priviledges, etc., of the other party to the dispute. It's a truism that the drive to sieze power is ego-based, and so in any society where there isn't an effective negative feedback mechanism, ego will sieze the reins of power. This is not the distopian pronouncement that it seems that it might first appear, however. Just because you are driven by ego does not mean that you are incapable of good governance. But the institution of a feedback mechanism of the scope of the election of core team members by committers on a periodic basis is unprecedented in a virtual society. The closest approximation to an event of this magnitude would be the addition of partially effective moderation facilities to Usenet, and even so, it takes an act of "The Usenet Cabal" to remove a moderator. When I respond to Brett, I generally ignore his rhetoric, and try to concentrate on the issues, by paring off the rhetoric; I also use techniques, such as removing attribution, so that the chain has to be followed to recover it. I'm not destroying information when I do this, I'm just destroying bias linkages. I've been chewed out a number of times for doing this, by people who prefer to keep those linkages intact. Call me a closet anarchist, but you will notice that I am pretty balanced in the amount of times I agree vs. disagree with the parties involved, when I do this. If I had to state what I think are the interesting points of Brett's case for him, I'd say off the cuff that they were: o The society should value non-technical contributors, to the point of granting them full citizenship, and tolerating them as it does any current citizen. I agree with this one. I think that technical writing classes should use FreeBSD as a target, to permit a uniform performance evaluation field for students, as an example of mutual benefit to both parties. o The society is intolerant of outside pressure. I agree, but I disagree that this is bad. The economy involved uses small scale costs/payments. Unlike a "real world" software developement effort, people are not being paid "here" as much as they would be "out there" to work with people they dislike. The economics of tolerance are definitely different. o The "core team" concept is detrimental to the project. I agree with this, but less than I did. Now that an election process exists, it's much less dangerous to the long term survival of the society; they are no longer a "star chamber", since they are answerable. If I had to characterize the structure at all, I'd say that it's an artifact of a non-distributed source control system. Consider the idea of a source control system that could operatbased on a "flood-fill" basis, where you could inject changes at peering points. Right now, there is a "one true" source tree, which makes it vulnerable to outside agencies, like tactical nukes, star chambers, and lawyers. o The society should quit picking on Brett or people like him which are attempting to benefit the society. Well, there's a certain amount of herd-animal level of intelligence to the society itself here, so that might be a somewhat valid criticism. But to say that it is aggregiously and counciously, with malice aforethought, targeting these people is to take it too personally. It's a machine, even if a near-biologically complex one. If you are feeling "picked upon", you are probably attaching a hell of a lot more importance to yourself than the society is (my two cents). o The core team is the elected leadership, it should _lead_. I agree with this one, too. I'd like to see architectural roadmaps, policy statements, meeting minutes, and other things coming from it. Even if they end up being wrong, in the long run, it's better to point to a goal; it won't make you any less of a leader, if the goal is never achieved. Right now, they appear to be paralyzed by the idea that "it's a volunteer organization, so it has no steering wheel". That's not the point. A leadership must galvanize people into action. The galvanization, not the eventual action taken, is the purvue of a leader. All this may be wrong, but if so, then a diferent crime, one of failure to communicate these things, exists. A good start might be to have a "core team" mailing list, and to make its archives completely public and keept up to date. Non-core user postings would be sent to the core team member list, and could result in core team discussion, which would then be public record. I'd probably add that limiting voting to "commiters" is probably too narrow, but without a better definition of "citizenship" that isn't vulnerable to luddistic attack by external agencies, it's as good a ruler as any, for now. A society _should_ protect itself: there are other societies in this same competition domain. I think that this will take care of itself, if the first point is addressed. In any case, I think social reform is interesting, since we are now evolving completely new societies, the likes of which have not existed before; you have to admit this, even if you think the only difference in the medium is that it has the enforced egalitarianism of a lack of enforced removal from self-selection (e.g. prisons, exile, or the death penalty). It is literally impossible to kick someone out, at least without an appeal to a real-world method. FreeBSD as a society would probably have reached equilibrium as a much less complex entity, had it been possible to send all our Brett's to Coventry or Australia or the block. I'm quite happy that it hasn't. I'm also quite happy that the evolutionary pressures, of which Brett is only a tiny example, continue to force FreeBSD away from equilibrium, and therefore stagnation. I'm rather ecstatic that I able to watch. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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