and alt.binaries.e-book

Wars are fought because of things like this.

A popular analogy in chaos theory says something along the lines of: if a butterfly flaps it’s wings in Africa, there will be a tornado in Kansas. The point is not that every butterfly can cause tornados, but rather that small ripples appropriately placed in a big pond can have very big effects. So a butterfly flapping it’s wings — perhaps only manipulating a few thousand molecules of nitogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide — could theoretically set off a chain of events that through compounding chain reactions of events turn out to be the root cause of some larger, grander, more significant movement of other nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide molecules.

I was trolling. (defined as lurking electronically without your precence being known in a public forum such as a chat room or newsgroup.) Usenet makes this easy, as one can simply click a button and download the equivalent of a few thousand public emails, reading them privately offline.

One of the things about Usenet is the types of people who visit there. One of the oldest fragments of the Internet, a step apart from the old standards such as the web or email — and distant precursors to IM and and P2P — discovering Usenet is like being an avid music fan and discovering a dark alley where people still talk about and trade 8-tracks. It is also a place where most everyone is on the more savy side of techno-bility. They know how to log in, decode binary files, rar and zip, and they are — more often than not — folks with very large collections of recordable compact discs brimming with deeper and deeper stacks of data in the form of media, software, and electronic books.

They can also be less than responsible when dealing with their international counterparts a click away, faceless, nameless, and with little or no reprocussions for their keystrokes beyond a flood of texts prompting them ever onwards. They are butterflies.

I was trolling the mediocre hallways of alt.binaries.e-book a place where — if nothing else — I can at least see what people are reading these days. It also happens to be a place where numerous people (butterflies) take the opportunity for apparent anonymity to “share” their collections of electronic tomes, legal or otherwise, irregardless of copyright.

I know. I know. The last thing you want is another treatise on copyright law. So, I’ll oblige and skip that lecture.

Among the heaps of digitales, someone had been uploading german ebooks. Not one or two — but thousands. Someone — unnamed — had / has.been / will.probably.continue.to post thousands of files, each prefixed with the tag “GERMAN” and followed by the title of said file. (On a side note, still studying the language, I was rather impressed by this sudden flux of learning material, and unable to buy the like here in Canada, I figured no one would complain too much if I borrowed a few for my own collection…)

But, alas. Throw a dash of international politics into the mix, add a sprinkle of post-Iraq-war xenophobia from a handful of angry Americans, gently stir in some defensible European positions on peace and war-time accountability, and blend thoroughly in a cauldron of unchecked electronic free speech. One would imagine the result would be an elegant international debate on current events and the appropriateness of posting international text in a primarily English-based forum. What instead results is some angry flaps of a hundred scattered butterflies.

One wonders how many other places micro-wars are erupting from the normalcy of ideological clashes. One also wonders how often those butterflies are in the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time. I’m not really a fan of tornados.