On January 30, 1989, an article appeared in the student-run Stanford Daily under the headline “Racial slurs cause University to shut down bulletin board.” The bulletin board in question, rec.humor.funny, was one of hundreds of so-called newsgroups—glorified mass e-mails organized around specific interests—that streamed onto the school’s computer terminals via Usenet, an early precursor to today’s Internet forums. Rec.humor.funny was conceived as a place to share jokes, many of them crude and off-color, and one in particular, the Daily explained, had caught the eye of Stanford’s nascent I.T. department. Though decidedly stale and not nearly as offensive as some of the other material in the newsgroup, it relied on ethnic stereotypes: “A Jew and a Scotsman have dinner. At the end of the dinner the Scotsman is heard to say, ‘I’ll pay.’ The newspaper headline next morning says, ‘Jewish ventriloquist found dead in alley.’ ” Upon reading those words, a student at M.I.T. had complained, and the attention had led a Canadian university to stop hosting rec.humor.funny. Eventually—most likely thanks to Usenet—word reached Stanford.

I.T. administrators soon decided to block the group. “Jokes based on such stereotypes perpetuate racism, sexism, and intolerance,” they wrote in a note that appeared on terminals campus-wide. “They undermine an important University purpose: our collective search for a better way, for a truly pluralistic community in which every person is acknowledged an individual, not a caricature.” Carefully stressing the value of freedom of expression, the note nevertheless concluded that “our respect for the dignity and rights of every individual” was more important. This was a notably early attempt to clean up the Internet—occurring at Stanford, no less, the epicenter of Silicon Valley—and the reactions to it established a pattern of toxic rhetoric and hypocritical argumentation that, nearly three decades later, remains discouragingly familiar.

Even before the I.T. department announced its decision, the atmosphere at Stanford had been politically fraught. In many ways, it resembled America in 2017. Women and minority students, spurred on by the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s “rainbow coalition,” had been demanding new, more inclusive curriculum requirements and greater diversity, while a reactionary movement had sprung up among their conservative peers. One of the leaders of the right-wing insurrection was Peter Thiel, who would go on to co-found PayPal and the software company Palantir and make millions of dollars as an early investor in Facebook. At the time, he was an undergraduate philosophy major and the editor of the Stanford Review, a sort of collegiate Breitbart News for the late eighties, dedicated to bemoaning what it saw as political correctness run amok. The Review, with Thiel at its helm, yearned to make Stanford great again. As he observed in “The Diversity Myth,” his 1995 polemic co-written with David Sacks, another Review editor who later became a Silicon Valley bigwig, “Multiculturalism caused Stanford to resemble less a great university than a Third World country, with corrupt ideologues and unhappy underlings.”

Banning rec.humor.funny was the Stanford I.T. team’s attempt to calm campus nerves; only a few months earlier, there had been a polarizing case of two white freshmen drawing racist graffiti on a poster of Beethoven. But the backlash was immediate and extreme, and it went well above Thiel. When the team decided to act, they had sought technical advice from a graduate student, who, quite predictably, informed one of the eminences of the computer-science department, John McCarthy, what was going down. Before the ban had taken effect, McCarthy, a pioneer in programming and artificial intelligence, spearheaded a free-speech crusade. He took to the department’s own electronic bulletin board to make the case against what he saw as censorship, strengthened by his conviction that computers were destined to be crucial to how we lived. “Newsgroups are a new communication medium just as printed books were in the 15th century,” McCarthy wrote. “I believe they are one step towards universal access through everyone’s computer terminal to the whole of world literature.” In what must have been one of the first online petitions, McCarthy gathered a hundred digital signatures of support from his colleagues.

Throughout this campaign, McCarthy never acknowledged the racial tensions that had so clearly informed the university’s actions. Rather, he offered an engineer’s systemic analysis of how information ought to be distributed, without regard for cultural or political context—a species of reasoning that, decades later, has become ingrained in Silicon Valley. But context intruded on the bulletin board anyway, through the posts of William Augustus Brown, Jr., an African-American medical student who was participating in the department’s research on using A.I. to treat patients. Brown was the lone voice among Stanford’s computer scientists to support the ban.

“Even if I can’t force the presentation of other cultures—and I DO NOT assume this is impossible—I will ALWAYS protest the stereotyping of my culture,” he wrote. “For once the University acted with some modicum of maturity. I sincerely hope it maintains this status by refusing to reverse its decision.” Brown framed the debate in terms quite different from McCarthy’s. “Whether disguised as free speech or simply stated as racism or sexism, such humor IS hurtful,” he wrote. “It is a University’s right and RESPONSIBILITY to minimize such inflammatory correspondence in PUBLIC telecommunications.”

McCarthy never responded, directly or indirectly, to Brown, but others in his department did. Their rhetoric offers an early glimpse at how alternative opinions would be shouted down or patronized online from that point onward. (Terms such as “social-justice warrior” and “whitesplaining” had yet to be coined, but they would have been right at home.) One graduate student replied to Brown, “I am a white male, and I have never been offended by white male jokes. Either they are so off-base that they are meaningless, or, by having some basis in fact (but being highly exaggerated) they are quite funny. I feel that the ability to laugh at oneself is part of being a mature, comfortable human being.” A second grad student patiently explained that Brown didn’t understand his own best interests. “The problem is that censorship costs more than the disease you’re trying to cure,” the student wrote. “If you really believe in the conspiracy, I’m surprised that you want to give ‘them’ tools to implement their goals.”

The reactions against Brown were so uniformly critical that he chose a different tack, opening up to his fellow-students about the difficulties of being a black man at Stanford. “Having received most of my pre-professional training in the Black American educational system, I have a different outlook than most students,” Brown wrote. “I certainly didn’t expect the kind of close, warm relationships I developed at Hampton University, but I was not prepared for the antagonism.” He continued, “I don’t really mind the isolation—I can still deal, and it gives me PLENTY of time to study. But I really don’t like the cruel humor. Once you come down from the high-flying ideals, it boils down to someone insisting on his right to be cruel to someone. That is a right he/she has, but NOT in ALL media.”

Again, no one responded directly. The closest there was to a defense of Brown came from another grad student, who said that, while he was opposed to the rec.humor.funny ban, he worried that many of his peers believed that “minority groups complain so much really because they like the attention they get in the media.” He added that people rarely “try to understand the complaints from the minority point of view.” Then he ended his post to the bulletin board by asking, “Do people feel that the environment at Stanford has improved for minority students? Worsened? Who cares?” Based on the lack of reply, “Who cares?” carried the day.

McCarthy wasn’t persuadable on the matter, and certainly not through personal testimony. To his way of thinking, there was no such thing as inappropriate tech or inappropriate speech. Besides, who could be trusted to decide? One post, which McCarthy endorsed, suggested that letting I.T. administrators determine what belonged on the computers at Stanford was like giving janitors at the library the right to pick the books.