Having discovered these forms of communication and the community that built up around them, I dove in -- only to discover the beginnings of the end of the usenet community. Though young and inexperienced and generally lacking in perspective, I joined that fight...and, obviously, we lost.

Beginning later but overlapping in time, e-mail spam was staring up -- and I found myself already on the front lines, with both Sanford Wallace and Walt Rines hosted downstream of the ISP I worked for. I have the dubious honor of being one of the first people to ask one of the first spammers "why don't you just send mail to people who asked for it?"

It turned out that I could write a bit, and was pretty good at describing consensus. I also became outspoken against using abusive methods in the name of stopping abuse -- so maybe I did have a sense of persective after all.

CAUCE was formed in 1997, just in time to fight the first round of horribly short-sighted "anti-spam" bills in the U.S. Congress. I moved to California, started speaking at conferences, and was interviewed for TV (ironic given my previous career path.)

In all that time, though, I never wanted anti-spam work to be my only job. I made an exception in 2000, going to work for MAPS. I started to become even more of an optimist, which is difficult to correlate with a job telling people not to do things all the time. Somewhere in there I think I became a leader in the anti-spam community.

2001. The tech boom crashed. MAPS had to fire half the staff. I accepted a 32% pay cut and went to work for Microsoft, helping to handle abuse for MSN Hotmail (I don't think I need to link to either of those, hm?) and continued trying to balance my work with the idea that everyone is basically good.

Working for Microsoft gave me a more mature perspective, more realistic, and turned out to be one of the best career moves I could possibly have made -- the other "best career move" being to quit, go to Yahoo!, and get involved with MAAWG.

But this was an article about why, not where -- and much as my career has progressed and become more defined, so has my reason for doing this work. I'm now thinking less about protecting the medium as a goal in itself, and more about protecting what the user expects and wants and will be excited to do with the medium -- a subtle difference, but very important.

I'd already (long ago) stopped thinking I was fighting individual messages -- or individual spammers. Again, an important difference.

Spam is as solved as it's going to get -- so long as we look at it purely as spam. The next things we'll need to do still fit easily into the same two categories: technical, where the focus clearly has to be on improving computer security; and social/societal/political, reducing the perceived "need" to advertise ever more incessantly (it's a more complex idea than just that; I'm still working on it.)

So...I'm not a spam fighter anymore. Haven't been for a while. I'm something else, now...still an activist, sort of...something still being defined.

I've been thinking about my next move for a while, and it feels like it's coming soon. In the past I'd dream of a future and not think so much about the necessary steps to getting there...this time I'm trying to think more rationally about those steps, and what I should be doing now to develop the skills and stability and perspective and connections and friendships I'll need.