btw,i had dinner with steve cisler again tonight and we came up with a really funny idea for a PGO, like those adopt-a-poor-child campaigns, but bigger: adopt a weapons designer. "for only $75 a month, you can keep this poor scientist from selling his skills in developing biological weapons to a rogue state..." (and given the cost of living in novosibirsk, it's not necessarily a joke.)

The Digital Free Masonry lodge

Given its central conspiratorial role in the bourgeois revolution and in the anarchist movement, I think that we should float the idea of a new rite of Free Masonry for the digital age. Maybe it could be called the Thomas Jefferson/Mikhail Bakunin lodge with suitably wacky symbolism, ranks of membership and (on-line) rituals. We could even claim that the Temple of Jerusalem can be rebuilt in cyberspace!!

Richard Barbrook adds: Excellent. I also suggest that the first Grand Hierophant of the new lodge should be Geert! This suggestion was inspired by reading some biogs of Bakunin who loved all the masonic mummery of conspiracies and secrecy. It would all be very funny if this tradition hadn't eventually ended up as Stalinism...