Trolltalk was relative small, starting with 80md and osm and ending up with about a dozen regulars when it died and everyone moved to k22320inchfan, which probably had a good 20 or 30 regular contributors.
The GNAA was a good four years or so after the start of sid=trolltalk and its subsequent successors, sid=k22320inchfan and sid=10gramspoppylatex, which served as a place for trolls to link to their accomplishments and talk crap with each other. Sadly after a couple of years crapflooding started, and proper trolling became much more difficult and pretty much died out.
This is my third account, the first has an id of just over 90K and I registered in 2000 I think. Couldn't be bothered to log out and in again though, haven't used my original account in a couple of years:)
I don't think the post of doom was anything to do with Signal11, it was after his time. Signal11 certainly did make a post about the fact that he'd been intentionally gaming the moderation system to amass as many mod points as possible (he was up to 1300+ I think) which started a long off-topic thread at one point. The post of doom was one flaming the editor Michael in which dozens of posters got bitchslapped down to negative karma and lost moderation and metamod privileges permanently, that was a few years later.
Actually I'm sure there was another one, a slightly more notorious/.er at the time. As I recall, CmdrTaco responded by randomising the poster's Karma every five minutes or something.
Yeah we lost like 3-4 months worth of stories... like 300-400 of them iirc. Back then I never really considered that we'd still be here a decade later and actually CARE about them;) How long after/. became/. did nested comments and moderation start? I seem to remember signing up about a week before then.
Anyway, despite all the stick and trolling I've done here over the years, this is still the only site I still read every day, and it was the first forum I ever read. Must be doing something right;)
2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators' heads.
100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.
10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.
3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.
2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.
1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.
490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks "get it".
399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.
336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.
4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.
A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.
A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.
A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by andover.net.
A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland. A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.
A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.
A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy's power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)
A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the church's intellectual property.
A.D. 1429: Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).
A.D. 1478: The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.
A.D. 1492: Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be "India", but which RMS informs him is actually "GNU/India".
A.D. 1508-12: Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the "Lameness Filter."
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
A.D. 1553: "Bloody" Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words. A.D. 1588: The "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy meets the Spanish Armada.
A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.
A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.
A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that mayn of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.
A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.
A.D. 1776: Trolls, angered by CmdrTaco's passage of the Moderation Act, rebel. After a several-year
Facebook claim 60% of their users log in at least once per day. That wouldn't surprise me, I only joined relatively recently and only about 3 out of approx 150 of my friends are from uni, the rest are people I've met over the years since, and of those about half seem to update their status at least regularly. The Newsfeed is a genuine innovation which hooks people into checking back regularly.
The numbers can be twisted, obviously, but I'd imagine potential investors/partners would want to see something more concrete than self-reported stats. Not to mention services like Netcraft et al which provide at least some level of independent reporting.
Actually the London network is the largest in the world with over 1 million users, and the UK is just behind Canada with 5.5 billion users. From here at least 12 billion users are outside the US.
Yeah, I figured that as soon as they made it possible to send emails from the Compose Message page. It's about the one major method of communication on the net they've not got their fingers in.
Note - I've only read the Hobbit and LOTR. Well, I gave up on LOTR about a third of the way through the third book after I just couldn't care about what happened next and couldn't read another page of endless travelling through Mordor. The Hobbit is a good book though.
While I enjoyed every one of Jordan's books, I found the characters all quite similar and very shallow, and though the world was definitely interesting, I found the cultures much less vibrant and distinctive than Tolkien's.
What cultures? Tolkien's world is largely empty, and the cultures in it to me seem to be obvious stereotypes with no real depth - you've got the rural England of the Shire, various cookie-cutter medieval kingdoms, the odd non-human enclave and then the Kingdoms Of EEEEVIL. None of the them are particularly dynamic or vibrant, and there's precious little insight into the details which make Jordan's cultures vibrant and distinctive. Looking here it doesn't seem as though there's much more in the rest of the books.
I seem to recall there's more attention paid to elven cultures than any other, but it's easier to provide depth when you can define what it's like without it having to mesh with human nature. Jordan (and Martin, although his world is less varied) have come up with worlds which don't have other races or obvious fantasy religions to allow easy labelling of what makes each culture "different".
His characters are all so similar that he had to come up with some particular peculiar mannerism of some kind to try to make them unique. But they basically all think and act the same way.
Tolkien's characters are 99% mythical stereotypes who conform to their roles and rarely change - the king without a kingdom, the ancient wizard who guides the heroes, the young farmboys thrust into saving the world. Now Jordan starts with this as well (and said it was intentionally so to draw people in who'd read LOTR) but over the story the characters roles change as they deal with new situations, and not always positively, just like in real life. The only vaguely decent characterisation in LOTR is Sam and Boromir, although even in the latter case it's hardly the most convincing piece of realisation. Still, it is about the only real character conflict in the books, which I guess is to be expected when most of your characters remain rigidly the same throughout the story.
I won't even mention Tolkien's female characters...
Not as badly so as with Dave Eddings (his became so stale after about two books I couldn't take it any more) but still bad nonetheless.
Eddings and Tolkien are similar in a lot of ways. Both relied heavily on classic mythic stereotypes, both had very distinct good and evil without much in the way of shades of grey, and neither had much in the way of character development. Eddings first few books were good, it's just that then he wrote the same story again and again, getting more and more shallow every time. Tolkien at least told different stories.
To sum up my opinion, Jordan had a great imagination. He just flat sucked at writing.
My opinion is different, but that's opinion for you. Jordan's books are some of the few where certain scenes can make me shiver.
Actually I'd recommend Stephen Erikson's Malazan series if you like vast, intricate worlds. His training as an archaeologist really does show in the way his world conveys the hundreds of thousands of years of history that have taken place before even humans arose in his world, and that cultures are built on the ruins of those before them. There's very little in the way of mythic or fantasy stereotypes in the series, with highly distinct races, types of magic, and meddling gods and immortals that aren't the lofty abstractions of most fantasy. And, not only is he still quite young and healthy, but each book is mostly self-contained in that it tells a distinct part of the whole, and you only have to wait a year between book
Great characters? Sure, if you like genocidal madmen who is happy to condemn men, women and children to rape, torture and death whilst spouting Objectivist platitudes and somehow being amazing good at absolutely everything.
A lot of people seem to find it hard to deal with that the main characters don't give each other infodumps every time they meet up. Whereas I think one of the things Jordan captures well is that his characters don't always trust each other fully, and don't know what information the other would find important.
Basically, avoid anything after the end of the Tamuli and you'll avoid having your memories of Eddings anally raped. Redemption of Althalus was pretty poor, and I only got about 100 pages in the first of the Elder Gods - it seems the trend is for the heroes to get smugger and more caricatured and their enemies to get dumber.
Tolkien may have created a whole history for his world and filled it in with stories here and there, but stories of mythic gods and elves don't match up to the dozens of vibrant, distinctive cultures that exist in the WoT. Tolkiens' societies, much like his characters, are very shallow.
It's the Void Trilogy and it's set about 1000 years on from Judas Unchained. The first book is out here in the UK, and now that you've reminded me of it I'm going to go and get it in a bit:)
Nice to see someone else who agrees with my thoughts on it. What I love about Jordan is the sheer scope and intricacy of the story, how there are so many disparate plot threads that weave in, out and around each other. I can't think of another series which has so many different characters as part of the story.
And yet Tolkien can drag out travelling in the middle of bloody nowhere into an endless drear-fest. LoTR is one of the few fantasy series I've started and given up on, after getting through the first two books because I thought it had to be better than it was. I just didn't care what happened.
Amen to that. I tried, I really did, but the turgid prose, rambling travelogues and poor characterisation got me in the end. I just didn't care what happened, unless it was possibly Sam throwing Frodo off of a cliff, and I was guessing that wasn't going to be the case.
What I'm saying is that we should be able to codify this.
There has been work by anthropologists and philosophers of ethics on universal moral rules - consider such principles as The Golden Rule and other principles linked to from that page.
Yet, as far as I'm aware, we break down too often into preferences, usually religious, on defining morality, rather than attempting to discover what is most helpful and why. (Yes, that last sentence was awful, sorry about that.)
Because religion is another system for social unity, and so it's not surprising that underlying ethical behaviours get subsumed into religious frameworks when they arise. But religions are also a power structure, and once rules are codified they become subject to change and interpretation (even if the underlying basis for them remains constant).
Also, why, if it is evolutionary in nature (I'm not saying it's not), why do so many people not follow it? Because as something that has evolved to enable social living, we naturally only naturally apply it our social group, ending up with "us and them". Better social cohesiveness makes for better warfare, and one of the things leaders always do in wartime is to make the enemy seem less than human, outside of our "moral circle" as it is sometimes called.
Over history we've expanded our moral circle to the point where we now abhor sexism, racism and other such "us and them" prejudices. But if you don't consider someone as part of your "moral circle" then it's easier to behave badly towards them.
OTOH the vast majority of people do follow these rules, and lead lives largely free of cheating, rape, murder and the like. It's easy to read the papers and think otherwise though *rolls eyes*
Maybe I'm asking for the impossible. It certainly seems so, judging by this thread.
The trick is in this expanding of the moral circle, and in realising that today's society makes it hard to have the kind of natural social group that we evolved under. Things like mobile technology and the internet are both enablers here, allowing people to form communities and keep in touch with each other, making them feel less alienated.
Slashdot Mirror
I do believe this preceeded CmdrTaco's wonderous piece of prediction :)
Trolltalk was relative small, starting with 80md and osm and ending up with about a dozen regulars when it died and everyone moved to k22320inchfan, which probably had a good 20 or 30 regular contributors.
The GNAA was a good four years or so after the start of sid=trolltalk and its subsequent successors, sid=k22320inchfan and sid=10gramspoppylatex, which served as a place for trolls to link to their accomplishments and talk crap with each other. Sadly after a couple of years crapflooding started, and proper trolling became much more difficult and pretty much died out.
/. trolling HOWTO is still online though :)
I did just find that my
Sadly, not one I wrote :) But I figured such a classic was for once on-topic and appropriate!
Ah, trolltalk. I miss the old /. trolling community, damn crapflooders killing it. Still meet up with a couple of them for drinks every so often :)
This is my third account, the first has an id of just over 90K and I registered in 2000 I think. Couldn't be bothered to log out and in again though, haven't used my original account in a couple of years :)
I don't think the post of doom was anything to do with Signal11, it was after his time. Signal11 certainly did make a post about the fact that he'd been intentionally gaming the moderation system to amass as many mod points as possible (he was up to 1300+ I think) which started a long off-topic thread at one point. The post of doom was one flaming the editor Michael in which dozens of posters got bitchslapped down to negative karma and lost moderation and metamod privileges permanently, that was a few years later.
Actually I'm sure there was another one, a slightly more notorious /.er at the time. As I recall, CmdrTaco responded by randomising the poster's Karma every five minutes or something.
And of course OOG the open source caveman, the "IF I EVER MEET YOU I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy and other old school luminaries?
Anyway, despite all the stick and trolling I've done here over the years, this is still the only site I still read every day, and it was the first forum I ever read. Must be doing something right
2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators' heads.
100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.
10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.
3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.
2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.
1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.
490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks "get it".
399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.
336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.
4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.
A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.
A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.
A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by andover.net.
A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland.
A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.
A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.
A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy's power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)
A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the church's intellectual property.
A.D. 1429: Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).
A.D. 1478: The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.
A.D. 1492: Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be "India", but which RMS informs him is actually "GNU/India".
A.D. 1508-12: Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the "Lameness Filter."
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
A.D. 1553: "Bloody" Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words. A.D. 1588: The "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy meets the Spanish Armada.
A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.
A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.
A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that mayn of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.
A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.
A.D. 1776: Trolls, angered by CmdrTaco's passage of the Moderation Act, rebel. After a several-year
Yes, millions, my mistake :)
Facebook claim 60% of their users log in at least once per day. That wouldn't surprise me, I only joined relatively recently and only about 3 out of approx 150 of my friends are from uni, the rest are people I've met over the years since, and of those about half seem to update their status at least regularly. The Newsfeed is a genuine innovation which hooks people into checking back regularly.
The numbers can be twisted, obviously, but I'd imagine potential investors/partners would want to see something more concrete than self-reported stats. Not to mention services like Netcraft et al which provide at least some level of independent reporting.
Actually the London network is the largest in the world with over 1 million users, and the UK is just behind Canada with 5.5 billion users. From here at least 12 billion users are outside the US.
Yeah, I figured that as soon as they made it possible to send emails from the Compose Message page. It's about the one major method of communication on the net they've not got their fingers in.
Note - I've only read the Hobbit and LOTR. Well, I gave up on LOTR about a third of the way through the third book after I just couldn't care about what happened next and couldn't read another page of endless travelling through Mordor. The Hobbit is a good book though.
While I enjoyed every one of Jordan's books, I found the characters all quite similar and very shallow, and though the world was definitely interesting, I found the cultures much less vibrant and distinctive than Tolkien's.
What cultures? Tolkien's world is largely empty, and the cultures in it to me seem to be obvious stereotypes with no real depth - you've got the rural England of the Shire, various cookie-cutter medieval kingdoms, the odd non-human enclave and then the Kingdoms Of EEEEVIL. None of the them are particularly dynamic or vibrant, and there's precious little insight into the details which make Jordan's cultures vibrant and distinctive. Looking here it doesn't seem as though there's much more in the rest of the books.
I seem to recall there's more attention paid to elven cultures than any other, but it's easier to provide depth when you can define what it's like without it having to mesh with human nature. Jordan (and Martin, although his world is less varied) have come up with worlds which don't have other races or obvious fantasy religions to allow easy labelling of what makes each culture "different".
His characters are all so similar that he had to come up with some particular peculiar mannerism of some kind to try to make them unique. But they basically all think and act the same way.
Tolkien's characters are 99% mythical stereotypes who conform to their roles and rarely change - the king without a kingdom, the ancient wizard who guides the heroes, the young farmboys thrust into saving the world. Now Jordan starts with this as well (and said it was intentionally so to draw people in who'd read LOTR) but over the story the characters roles change as they deal with new situations, and not always positively, just like in real life. The only vaguely decent characterisation in LOTR is Sam and Boromir, although even in the latter case it's hardly the most convincing piece of realisation. Still, it is about the only real character conflict in the books, which I guess is to be expected when most of your characters remain rigidly the same throughout the story.
I won't even mention Tolkien's female characters...
Not as badly so as with Dave Eddings (his became so stale after about two books I couldn't take it any more) but still bad nonetheless.
Eddings and Tolkien are similar in a lot of ways. Both relied heavily on classic mythic stereotypes, both had very distinct good and evil without much in the way of shades of grey, and neither had much in the way of character development. Eddings first few books were good, it's just that then he wrote the same story again and again, getting more and more shallow every time. Tolkien at least told different stories.
To sum up my opinion, Jordan had a great imagination. He just flat sucked at writing.
My opinion is different, but that's opinion for you. Jordan's books are some of the few where certain scenes can make me shiver.
Actually I'd recommend Stephen Erikson's Malazan series if you like vast, intricate worlds. His training as an archaeologist really does show in the way his world conveys the hundreds of thousands of years of history that have taken place before even humans arose in his world, and that cultures are built on the ruins of those before them. There's very little in the way of mythic or fantasy stereotypes in the series, with highly distinct races, types of magic, and meddling gods and immortals that aren't the lofty abstractions of most fantasy. And, not only is he still quite young and healthy, but each book is mostly self-contained in that it tells a distinct part of the whole, and you only have to wait a year between book
Great characters? Sure, if you like genocidal madmen who is happy to condemn men, women and children to rape, torture and death whilst spouting Objectivist platitudes and somehow being amazing good at absolutely everything.
A lot of people seem to find it hard to deal with that the main characters don't give each other infodumps every time they meet up. Whereas I think one of the things Jordan captures well is that his characters don't always trust each other fully, and don't know what information the other would find important.
Basically, avoid anything after the end of the Tamuli and you'll avoid having your memories of Eddings anally raped. Redemption of Althalus was pretty poor, and I only got about 100 pages in the first of the Elder Gods - it seems the trend is for the heroes to get smugger and more caricatured and their enemies to get dumber.
Tolkien may have created a whole history for his world and filled it in with stories here and there, but stories of mythic gods and elves don't match up to the dozens of vibrant, distinctive cultures that exist in the WoT. Tolkiens' societies, much like his characters, are very shallow.
It's the Void Trilogy and it's set about 1000 years on from Judas Unchained. The first book is out here in the UK, and now that you've reminded me of it I'm going to go and get it in a bit :)
Nice to see someone else who agrees with my thoughts on it. What I love about Jordan is the sheer scope and intricacy of the story, how there are so many disparate plot threads that weave in, out and around each other. I can't think of another series which has so many different characters as part of the story.
And yet Tolkien can drag out travelling in the middle of bloody nowhere into an endless drear-fest. LoTR is one of the few fantasy series I've started and given up on, after getting through the first two books because I thought it had to be better than it was. I just didn't care what happened.
Amen to that. I tried, I really did, but the turgid prose, rambling travelogues and poor characterisation got me in the end. I just didn't care what happened, unless it was possibly Sam throwing Frodo off of a cliff, and I was guessing that wasn't going to be the case.
So true, as three and a half years in my last relationship proved. Without attraction, you're mates.
What I'm saying is that we should be able to codify this.
There has been work by anthropologists and philosophers of ethics on universal moral rules - consider such principles as The Golden Rule and other principles linked to from that page.
Yet, as far as I'm aware, we break down too often into preferences, usually religious, on defining morality, rather than attempting to discover what is most helpful and why. (Yes, that last sentence was awful, sorry about that.)
Because religion is another system for social unity, and so it's not surprising that underlying ethical behaviours get subsumed into religious frameworks when they arise. But religions are also a power structure, and once rules are codified they become subject to change and interpretation (even if the underlying basis for them remains constant).
Also, why, if it is evolutionary in nature (I'm not saying it's not), why do so many people not follow it?
Because as something that has evolved to enable social living, we naturally only naturally apply it our social group, ending up with "us and them". Better social cohesiveness makes for better warfare, and one of the things leaders always do in wartime is to make the enemy seem less than human, outside of our "moral circle" as it is sometimes called.
Over history we've expanded our moral circle to the point where we now abhor sexism, racism and other such "us and them" prejudices. But if you don't consider someone as part of your "moral circle" then it's easier to behave badly towards them.
OTOH the vast majority of people do follow these rules, and lead lives largely free of cheating, rape, murder and the like. It's easy to read the papers and think otherwise though *rolls eyes*
Maybe I'm asking for the impossible. It certainly seems so, judging by this thread.
The trick is in this expanding of the moral circle, and in realising that today's society makes it hard to have the kind of natural social group that we evolved under. Things like mobile technology and the internet are both enablers here, allowing people to form communities and keep in touch with each other, making them feel less alienated.