The reader looks at the post title and asks themselves "Who is Mike Huben?" Huben was the founder/editor of Critiques of Libertarianism, a website that had been around since the mid-1990s. The original version of the website was a simple all-text-and-hyperlinks affair, as were most sites in the Netscape Navigator era of the Internet; a few years ago Huben switched over to a Wiki-style site at another address....and then it all imploded. The site went blank a few years ago, and then went down. The original (now badly link-rotted) also vanished, though you can get to it via archive.org.
So why care about Huben? The guy knows his stuff; he was arguing with 'tarians and O-ists (what they were calling Libertarians and Objectivists in the '90s) on Usenet newsgroups back when The Internet was brand-new. He had actually written one of the first FAQs on the subject ("A Non-Libertarian FAQ", link here.) My understanding is that Mike Huben moved to Costa Rica (?) within the last decade and started a new life, which I think meant that he gave up doing math for a paycheck, and the English-language Internet stopped being so damn interesting.
As long as you are here, please check out Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature, which started off as a book of the same title by Greg S. Nyquist in 2001. I know I first found the blog via Huben's website, which I forgot to mention was a giant collection of links on top of being a series of critiques of Libertarian ideas; they had an entire section on Rand and Objectivism (her take on Libertarianism). It was here I first read the name "Murray Rothbard" in conjunction with his satirical play "Mozart Was a Red", which took pot-shots at Ayn Rand's group of fan-collaborators, "The Collective" which he was a part of for a period, alongside Allan "The Undertaker" Greenspan. In fact, the Rand stuff was the most interesting part of Critiques of Libertarianism; that woman was an utter nut. The ARCHN blog hammers that home if you read the posts from 2006 to 2014. Pass it along to friends who have fallen into the Rand rabbit-hole. And if anybody who reads this knows Mike Huben, please pass along that I would love to interview him on the subject, because of all the overlap with the early years of Wikipedia (he might have argued with Wales and Sanger in ancient times.)
Encyclopedia Dramatica has the basics on Snowolf; he's an Italian guy in Trieste who is a domain squatter, last we heard. An example of his dickery in English:
....In December 2014, three Wikipediocracy users set up a "#Wikipediocracy" channel on Freenode. They
were discussing unrelated items when showed up and destroyed the channel.
Capture:
• metasonix (misspelling intentional)
• Stierlitz I blame weird keyboard angles.
• metasonix Two-way radio ceased to be "magic" by the 1970s, really.
• comets (~xchat@wikimedia/Cometstyles) has joined
• Stierlitz Transistors made it too commonplace.
• Stierlitz Hello, comets.
• QueenOfFrance (~snowolf@wikimedia/Snowolf) has joined
• QueenOfFrance (~snowolf@wikimedia/Snowolf) has left ("We are leaving you peasants.")
• metasonix Ha ha, Wikipedians are showing up.....
• Snowolf (~quassel@wikimedia/Snowolf) has joined
• metasonix "Queenoffrance" is Maurizio "Snowolf" Lussetti.....
• ChanServ gives channel operator status to Snowolf
• metasonix Welcome back, Maurizio. I'm curious why you spent so much time trying to squat
domain names.
• Snowolf sets ban on *!~metasonix@*.sonic.net
• Snowolf has kicked metasonix from #wikipediocracy (Kindergarten is elsewhere!)
• Snowolf removes channel operator status from Snowolf
• ChanServ (ChanServ@services.) has joined
• services. gives channel operator status to ChanServ
• Stierlitz The hell?
• Stierlitz What is your deal, Snowolf?
• Snowolf hmm?
• comets o/
• comets ur chan snowy?:P
• Stierlitz He gave Metasonix the boot for no reason.
• Snowolf Actually, I've removed him for attempting to out me:)
And now to annoy the readers more, here is what these goobers were doing on what must have been Thanksgiving in 2009.
Session Start: Thu Nov 26 17:14:30 2009
Session Ident: #Wikipedia
[17:14] * Now talking in #Wikipedia
[17:14] * Topic is 'Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia | Status: Up | No public logging | Specific Wikipedias: #wikipedia-<lang> | Guidelines: http://bit.ly/OiAr | For channel operator assistance, join #wikimedia-ops or, in emergencies, type !op followed by your request'
[17:14] * Quagmire|GONE is now known as Quagmire
[17:14] * GrooveDog (n=GrooveDo@wikimedia/GrooveDog) has left #wikipedia
[17:15] * sj|| (n=sj@wikipedia/sj) has joined #wikipedia
[17:15] <eptalon> Fleetflame: I think I do.
[17:16] <Fleetflame> eptalon: never mind, thanks anyway
[17:17] <eptalon> Fleetflame: what would you need that for?
[17:17] <Fleetflame> eptalon: a report
[17:17] <eptalon> Fleetflame: you said you already got the pdf?
[17:57] <Schroeder> do I want to write my paper for Islamic History that's due Wednesday, or play NetHack and listen to Wolfmother and Shostakovich?
[17:57] <PeterSymonds> Fleetflame, yeah yeah. ;p
[17:58] <Fleetflame> :D
[17:58] <ceranthor> Fleetflame, have you told 'em yet?
[17:58] <ceranthor> On .help?
[17:58] <Fleetflame> huh?
[17:58] <ceranthor> nvm
[17:58] * mavhk is now known as mavhc
[17:58] <ceranthor> Wrong person I guess.
[17:58] * Ose (n=ose@wikia/Ose) Quit ("Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach a person to use the Internet and they won’t bother you for weeks")
[18:01] * Ajraddatz (n=Ajr@199.126.181.169) has joined #Wikipedia
[18:02] <Schroeder> hey, is anyone interested in a chess-by-email group?
[18:04] * dungodung is now known as dungodung|sleep
[18:06] <Fleetflame> Schroeder: tried it, doesn't work
[18:59] <BarkingFish> derenrich, When palm kernel oil is cold, it hardens, hence peanut butter being quite thick
[19:00] * maimai (n=Snail@p8194-ipad303hodogaya.kanagawa.ocn.ne.jp) has joined #wikipedia
[19:00] <derenrich> BarkingFish: what else could I add then?
[19:00] <derenrich> i want more dimension
[19:00] <derenrich> in my soup
[19:00] <BarkingFish> But when it's heated, it loses it's bonding properties, liquifies and you wind up with a mess of peanuts at the bottom, and PKO floating on top
[19:33] * engla_ (n=ulrik@90-229-231-23-no153.tbcn.telia.com) has joined #wikipedia
[19:33] Clones detected from 90-229-231-23-no153.tbcn.telia.com:8 engla engla_
Session Start: Thu Nov 26 22:30:12 2009
Session Ident: #Wikipedia
[22:30] * Now talking in #Wikipedia
[22:30] * Topic is 'Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia | Status: Up | No public logging | Specific Wikipedias: #wikipedia-<lang> | Guidelines: http://bit.ly/OiAr | For channel operator assistance, join #wikimedia-ops or, in emergencies, type !op followed by your request'
[22:30] * Quagmire|GONE is now known as Quagmire
[22:32] <DarkAudit> a bad precedent is about to be set in [[Brian Joseph Stone]]
[22:33] <DarkAudit> CSDs are being declined because the service medals awarded just for showing up are being considered an "assertion of notability"
[22:34] * Triplestop (n=asdfasdf@unaffiliated/idiot123) has left #wikipedia
[22:34] <Sky2042_afk> Checking out the medals, they aren't compellingly asserting notability.
[22:35] <harej> you're all dumbasses
[22:35] * harej (i=484c2f14@wikipedia/MessedRocker) has left #wikipedia
[22:35] <Sky2042_afk> Bye harej.
[22:35] <DarkAudit> That would lead to several hundred thousand articles on service members who do no more than their job, but cannot be considered for CSD
[22:36] <Schroeder> DarkAudit: speedy deletion is vandalism anyway
[22:36] * Sky2042_afk sighs.
[22:36] <Schroeder> anything that exists is a valid and proper subject for an article
[22:36] * dillange1 (n=dillange@94.76.229.70) has joined #wikipedia
[22:36] <Sky2042_afk> Schroeder: No. And no.
[22:36] <Sky2042_afk> DarkAudit: Indeed.
[22:36] <Schroeder> actually, yes and yes
[22:36] * Euphonium (i=desu@cpe-76-183-145-33.tx.res.rr.com) has joined #wikipedia
I've been following The Baffler since the Clinton years, though the magazine itself started off as a college hobby of Thomas Frank and Keith White in 1988. Issues started off sporadic and then went yearly by the early 1990s (after Frank had burned through grad school and graduated in 1990) and it chugged along as a yearly or bi-annual until a fire ravaged their Chicago offices in early May, 2001. Their archives were partially destroyed, and they started a literal "fire sale" of semi-smoke-damaged books and issues (I have some stuff from that). For the rest of the Aughts it mostly because a yearly again. In 2010 they moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and for a period were involved with the MIT Press, then became a non-profit foundation and are publishing as a bi-monthly. Since that MIT period, the website has been open for viewing....until late September this year, when the site got the "three views for a month" disease you see with the New York Times. So it's now, "pays ya money, sees our crap" when they don't even have the greatest series of stories they ever published, "I, Faker" by Paul Maliszewski. It only exists on archive.org, and I don't want to lose the blog copypasting it here.
Can we just admit that the Internet in the 2020s just sucks ass?
Above: David Graeber debates literal gay vampire Peter Thiel on technofutures and technofailure in 2014.
This was presented by The Baffler. Graeber is now deceased, and Peter Thiel is still bitter about college.
