A group of large-site administrators who pushed through the
Great Renaming and reined in the chaos of
Usenet during most of the 1980s. During most of its
lifetime, the Cabal (as it was sometimes capitalized) steadfastly denied
its own existence; it was almost obligatory for anyone privy to their
secrets to respond “There is no Cabal” whenever the existence
or activities of the group were speculated on in public.
The result of this policy was an attractive aura of mystery. Even a
decade after the cabal mailing list disbanded in
late 1988 following a bitter internal catfight, many people believed (or
claimed to believe) that it had not actually disbanded but only gone deeper
underground with its power intact.
This belief became a model for various paranoid theories about
various Cabals with dark nefarious objectives beginning with taking over
the Usenet or Internet. These paranoias were later satirized in ways that
took on a life of their own. See Eric Conspiracy
for one example. Part of the background for this kind of humor is that
many hackers cultivate a fondness for conspiracy theory considered as a
kind of surrealist art; see the bibliography entry om
Illuminatus! for the novel that launched this
trend.
See NANA for the subsequent history of
“the Cabal”.
