Oath of fealty
(Back cover) A few years after tomorrow, above a ruined Los Angeles where crime, violence, pollution and poverty still rule the streets, a Utopia rises. Todos Santos. A thousand-foot-high single-structured city. The perfect blend of technology and humanism, offering its privileged dwellers everything they could want in exchange for their oath of allegiance and their constant surveillance. But there are those who would see Utopia destroyed. Those who would tear down the hope of tomorrow in violent act after violent act. And they have just entered Todos Santos.
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What Hacker News says
- Larry Niven - Ringworld (+ Ringworld Engineers), The long Arm of Gil Hamilton, Oath of Fealty (Oh man! They had instant messaging wetware! ...And a diving board!).
Robert Heinlein, Joe Haldeman, and Issac Asimov are some other heavy hitters in this space.
- It's odd that Bradford DeLong copied my original file of email that I put together without giving any attribution or provenance where it came from, and stripped the introduction I wrote that contextualized it, then omitted the first email from Chris Stacy to 11 different people including Pournelle, which established the actual context.
DeLong is a UC Berkeley economics professor, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Clinton, and prominent blogger who should know better than to strip attribution from the compiled primary sources he's plagiarizing and posting to his blog.
Here is the original file he copied without credit (without his unreadable css):
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/copyleft/pourne-smut.html
DeLong's copy:
- Removes my authorial framing without attribution
- Omits the January 1984 email which provides crucial administrative context
- Strips formatting that helps establish authenticity
- Presents it as his own curation on his blog
The missing 1984 email is particularly important because it shows the guest account policies were already being tightened before the Pournelle incident, making the eventual account termination part of a broader pattern rather than a purely personal vendetta.
The January 1984 email he omitted was sent to 11 recipients including Pournelle himself, which shows he was directly informed of the TACACS policies over a year before the incident.
I wrote about the MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy here:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73b...
Regarding ylee's post and the filfre.net discussion: I was there, I personally know the primary actors, and I'm the one who compiled the original document that DeLong plagiarized. The interpretation in stepped_pyramids' comment and Yeechang Lee's defense of Pournelle in the filfre.net comments are both wrong.
It wasn't about "mentioning ARPANET in Byte" or politics. It was about behavior.
GUMBY (David Henkel-Wallace), an HN regular and old friend who founded Cygnus Support (the pioneering open source company that developed GCC, acquired by Red Hat in 1999), and the youngest hacker to have his own office at the MIT AI Lab, was in the original 1985 thread:
HN "Jerry Pournelle has died" discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15204772
Gumby's posts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15209243
>gumby on Sept 9, 2017 | root | parent | next [–]
>>I wonder if this is the first instance of politically motivated mobbing behavior to take place over a digital communications medium?
>It was not politically motivated (I am in that thread from 1985). Pournelle was a pain in the neck when drunk. And a blowhard (which is hardly a crime, but doesn't make people sympathetic when you call them assholes and then tell them to do things for you).
>As for the proxmiring: he was one of the common offenders; he loved to talk archly about how he was part of the insider elite, while claiming that that was proof of his democratic ideals.
>FWIW I did read some of his novels.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15212477
>gumby on Sept 10, 2017 | root | parent | next [–]
>I love that excerpt since it was classic Pournelle: included a nice extra bit of detail that showed he was "in the know" yet was not actually true (RMS was never a grad student). He used to boast he was part of Reagan's "Kitchen Cabinet" of space advisors, and talked about their EOB meetings -- but i knew folks on the NSC technical advisory committee and it was nothing like he described.
>I never let on that the person he "knew" online and the person he knew offline were the same me.
The irony of quoting Pournelle complaining about "a handful of people" causing "most of the irritation" on online forums is rich - Pournelle WAS that handful of people. He was widely known in SF fandom as a belligerent drunk at conventions, and he brought that behavior online.
Pournelle literally asked to be kicked off: "If you have some authority to order me off the net, do so. If not, leave me alone." They did. He got exactly what he demanded.
RMS personally wrote custom software for Pournelle and patiently tutored him. Pournelle's thanks? Telling John McCarthy that MIT was "run by a bunch of communists."
Pournelle violated the MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy on multiple counts: commercial use for his BYTE column, promoting his books on SF-LOVERS, and anti-social behavior. The policy explicitly stated: "Any use of the MIT ITS machines for personal gain, profit making enterprise, or political purposes is not a legitimate use of the Laboratories' computer resources."
His response to getting called out was threatening to sic his "Pentagon friends," "reporter friends," and "the House Armed Services Committee" on grad students running a free service he was abusing.
The poetic justice: JGA suggested the account termination message should read "Think of it as evolution in action" - Pournelle's own Social Darwinist catchphrase from Oath of Fealty.
KMP's assessment stands: "The man has learned nothing from his presence on MC and sets a bad example of what people might potentially accomplish there. I'd rather recycle his account for some bright 12-yr-old."
The real damage from DeLong's sloppy plagiarism (I won't link but you can google for proof): his stripped-down version has now propagated to places like Kiwi Farms, where trolls cite DeLong's copy as evidence that Pournelle was "the first person banned more or less for wrong think on DARPAnet." The exact opposite of reality. This is what happens when you strip context and attribution from compiled primary sources - bad-faith actors weaponize the gaps.
- There are tons of examples of course, but one that jumps to mind is Oath of Fealty by Jerry Pournelle where one of the plot points is an implant that gives the chosen few access to an encyclopedic database. Of course, today, a smartphone with cell access provides that (or at least a more chaotic version of same) to more or less everyone. You could also reasonably argue that the encyclopedia in Asimov's Foundation trilogy makes somewhat similar assumptions.
I do think some sort of AR interface is somewhere in the future but it's almost certainly a long way off for mainstream adoption.
- >Oath of Fealty by Jerry Pournelle
and Larry Niven!
- I was very much into BBSs. Never AOL, although CIS. 30 years ago? I don't think I had an Internet connection though. (Had been barely exposed to it in school in the late 70s.) Got things like competitive spec information as a product manager from requesting it from analysts we paid a lot of money to for faxing us data sheets. Pricing info was very fragmentary. There were cell phones--barely--not sure when I got my first one as a rarely-used backup device.
A mobile almost always connected world might have been something I might have imagined in some form as futurology but would probably have take different forms. See Pournelle's version of not-Wikipedia in Oath of Fealty for example.
- A character in Footfall (or was it Oath of Fealty?), by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, composted the inconvenient body of someone he had murdered. I've wondered if that was practical and this article says affirmative. But for purposes of hiding a corpse I'd think it would be painfully slow to decompose. The man-eating pigs in Hannibal or Deadwood seem like a better bet, converting it quickly into fertilizer. But then you have to keep pigs.
Is it legal to feed a human corpse to pigs? Maybe it should be. It would seem to be eco-friendly.
