It wasn't Trashcan Man's idea to raid rec.pets.cats, though I'm sure he wished it had been.

Inciting a riotous Usenet flame war, like the war between alt.tasteless and rec.pets.cats, isn't a common notion of a good time. Then again, neither is starting fires in trashcans, blowing up one's hand with a firecracker or crashing a university computer system - all things that Trashcan Man has done, and done proudly.

If you're a reader of alt.tasteless, as I am, you've probably heard of Trashcan Man. His real name is Constantino Tobio Jr., and he's a 21-year-old history major at Columbia University, in Manhattan. Everyone, though, calls him by his self-annointed nickname.

Trashcan Man's two favorite possessions are a coin purse made from a kangaroo scrotum and a tin of Vegemite. Vegemite is an Australian food substance made from yeast extract. It has the consistency of axle grease. Among readers of alt.tasteless, who prize Vegemite for its sublimely disgusting flavor, the spread has achieved cultlike status. According to one a.t.'er, "It was the grossest thing I ever tasted. It's about as thick as peanut butter, and to say it tastes like shit would be an understatement."

You can buy it in health food stores.

Trashcan Man has yet to sample his: "I fear it, man, I fear it," he says, wistfully.

Which is an intriguing thought: Trashcan Man fearing something. He doesn't even fear Karen Kolling, and she is the one who finally brought him down. Trashcan Man, like most of the hardcore correspondents on alt.tasteless, spends so much time probing the darkest grottoes of human experience and imagination that the thought of his actually fearing something is itself frightening to contemplate.

You should know that Usenet, the battleground for what has become known as The War Between alt.tasteless and rec.pets.cats, is the Internet's answer to Time Warner's 500 channels of cable. Usenet makes 500 channels seem limited, frankly. There are more than 4,000 "news groups" on Usenet; more come online every week. Each one is dedicated to one niche interest or another. You can read daily collections of messages dedicated to LISP programming in one group (comp.lang.lisp), Bob Dylan's music (rec.music.dylan) in another, and fireworks (rec.pyrotechnics) in a third. This last one is the group Trashcan Man posted to on July 4, 1993, minutes after he nearly blew off his fingers with a blockbuster firecracker.

Usenet is like a vast computer bulletin board, readable by more than 10 million people around the world every day. It actually does cable one better: It's already interactive. You can post notes to Usenet groups, ask questions, comment on someone else's remarks, conjecture idly and often.

Which is how Trashcan Man and his pals started the war of words that got out of control.

It's hard to say with precision how many people actually read any one news group. (The term news groups is peculiar, since most of the postings, known as "articles," would not be considered news. Nevertheless, Usenet users refer to them in this way.) The Internet, as you probably know, is anarchic, not owned by anyone, and monitored mainly at its ever-expanding edges by the system administrators who sell or give people access. Periodically, various surveys attempt to poll Internet sites that distribute net news. These surveys give rough estimates of who reads which news groups.

So who reads the articles posted to alt.tasteless? According to a Q&A in the alt.tasteless FAQ (most news groups have FAQs, or Frequently Asked Questions files), 60,000 people around the world browse it. You can believe it or not; I choose to believe it in the same way that I believe most people will slow down and take a good look at the carnage of a car accident. Why do we look?

WELCOME TO ALT.TASTELESS 1. What is alt.tasteless?

A news group devoted to tasteless phenomena in all its forms. A place for people with a twisted and sick sense of humour. In alt.tasteless we like to get into the details: short jokes have their forum in alt.tasteless.jokes, we want the feel of it, the smell of it, the stench of it, every little rotten and pus-oozing detail. And then of course some rough gifs of it in alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless or alt.tasteless.pictures.

- From the alt.tasteless FAQ

Alt.tasteless was created in the autumn of 1990 "as a place to keep the sick people away from rec.humor and other forums," according to Steven Snedker, a Danish journalist for Denmark's largest computer magazine. "Alt.tastelessers see this as an important turn in Usenet history, on a par with the creation of alt.sex. Both alt.tasteless and alt.sex are fine forums that serve their purpose to keep the other parts of Usenet clean, and to dig further into the stuff discussed."

Of course, Snedker adds, "I might be a bit ignorant here, as I don't read alt.sex. I mean after all, I'm Danish."

Trashcan Man urged me to correspond with Snedker, one of alt.tasteless's founding fathers, as well as the author of the 710-line FAQ quoted from above. He was the first person to be voted "Mr. A.T.," a lifetime honor Snedker likens to "winning the Mr. Universe Contest."

Snedker won the title for his collected postings; to say Snedker likes to write about the scatological is a serious understatement, comparable to saying M.F.K. Fisher liked to write about food.

"Shitting feels good. Sex feels good. Killing your boss feels good," Snedker wrote me in e-mail one day. "But you're actually not allowed to talk about it, although almost everyone either actually does these things (I know people who do) or at least fantasize about doing them. In alt.tasteless there's no hypocrisy: We call things by their real name. And nothing is sacred."

For Snedker, Trashcan Man, and some of the others, there is something transcendent about being really gross. Anyone can be off-color now and then. It takes a particular kind of genius, though, to be truly tasteless, to shock people who have devoted a lifetime to collecting revolting facts, disgusting jokes, and synonyms for the word "penis." "There's no forum in the world like alt.tasteless," Snedker writes. "I know of no other place where people can trade toilet experiences in such an atmosphere of friendship, sharing, and understanding. Where dead-baby jokes can be enjoyed. Where cynicism can be so funny."

Trashcan Man discovered alt.tasteless in January 1993, led there by a friend who, he says, "knew me since I was 6, starting fires and pissing on them to put them out."

He adds: "I have been disgusting for as long as I can remember."

This is one of the amazing things about the global Internet: Whole communities are crystallizing around marginal interests. Here you have Trashcan Man, feeling disgusting and alienated in New York City, who checks into Usenet one day and, blaaaaat! He finds other disgusting, alienated people, people who think exactly like he does, only they live in Denmark and Canada and London and Ohio.

Now, you can say that Howard Stern, the king of alt.tasteless morning drive-time shock radio, does that too. You drive into Manhattan on a weekday, roll down your window to pay a toll, and all around you hear Stern's voice as if piped over a loudspeaker - the combined effect of a thousand car radios from a thousand commuter cars. But one fundamental difference between Howard Stern fans and alt.tasteless readers is the Stern fans don't connect, don't correspond, don't even know each other. Their only connection is through a radio personality. On Usenet, people actually find each other and interact.

A funny sort of out-of-control synergy happens when some people connect online. It's like wilding, electronic style, and it happens all over the online world, not just on Usenet. On the Well in 1992, a bunch of people who frequented the Weird Conference moved in on the Miscellaneous Conference, posting assorted silliness that offended, among others, a man who had come to the Misc Conference looking for solace in the aftermath of a grandparent's death. It ended a day or so later when the perpetrators (they were "only trying to have fun") apologized and apologized and apologized. Then, as is typical of the often-navel-gazing Well-ites, the community spent from April until July discussing what it all meant.

When Trashcan Man discovered alt.tasteless, it was as if he had been reunited with his long-lost brothers. There was a gush of recognition, a feeling that, finally, he belonged somewhere. "We're probably quite a bunch of misfits deep down inside," he says of his Usenet group. "We don't seem to conform to society's norms of decorum and good taste. Deep inside we have this desire to just be as disgusting as possible."

In alt.tasteless, Trashcan Man found a place where "disgusting" is a grudging compliment. It is not a rebuke, as it was at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs, the parochial school he attended in Forest Hills, one of the more tasteful sections of Queens. A lifetime in parochial schools led to Trashcan Man's first postings on alt.tasteless, riffs off a blasphemous idea he had: "What would have happened if the crucifixion had been an impalement?"

For starters, "Doubting Thomas touching the wound would have been more dramatic. And people would make the sign of the stick," he said.

Many alt.tasteless people enjoyed Trashcan Man's articles. He was scatological. He was sacrilegious. He was really disgusting.

He was tasteless and they loved him.

One night last summer, the boys on alt.tasteless were feeling, well ... if it were a Usenet group it might be called alt.restless. Maybe they were getting bored with each other. Maybe they craved the sensation of saying something really gross, and getting a Big Reaction. You know, something sisterly, like EEEEEEEEWWWWW GROOOOOSSSSS! You never get that kind of response on alt.tasteless.

Someone - no one remembers who - suggested invading another Usenet group. A Usenet panty raid! The suggestion was well received by other a.t.'ers. But whom to raid? After much discussion, a likely target emerged:

Rec.pets.cats.

Rec.pets.cats, as you can tell from the name, is a Usenet group for serious cat lovers. It's the kind of place where people like to discuss cat health problems and adorable things their kitties did. If you were able to put all of humanity on a giant spectrum, cat lovers would undoubtedly occupy the frequency opposite people who are alternatively tasteless.

A PhD grad student named Adam Steele, from Canada, suggested what he termed a "stealth attack," designed to engage the unsuspecting cat people. He fired the opening shot in The War Between alt.tasteless and rec.pets .cats by posting the following article, anonymously, to rec.pets.cats:

I have two cats - Sootikin (Sooti for short) a 2-year old female, and Choad.

Choad (stupid name) is a neutered tom who was dumped on me by my scumbag ex-roommate (he had been given it by one of the two women he was dating at the time).

I'm not what you would call a real studly type guy (although I have a lot of women friends), so when I date it's really important to me. Anyway, Sooti goes into heat something fierce (sometimes it seems like it's two weeks on, two weeks off). I had a date a while back, when she was really bad. Yowling and presenting all the time - not the most auspicious setting for a date. While dinner was cooking, I tried to stimulate her vagina with a Q-tip because I had heard that one can induce ovulation that way. My date came into the bathroom while I was doing this, and needless to say I don't think she bought my explanation. The date was a very icy experience after that.

Choad's problem is that he has really stinky shits (paint peelers).

During my most recent date - I don't know if this was a jealousy thing - he shit in the bathtub. I live in a loft, and the bathroom is open for ventilation, so in a few seconds we were gasping for air. Another date ruined, I'm getting desperate.

What should I do. I love my cats, so I don't want to get rid of them, but I can't go on like this any more. It's my love life, or them. Please help!!!

Moby (not my real name ;-) Sooti & Choad

Some of the more earnest participants on rec.pets.cats took this article seriously and offered advice. They recommended a trip to the vet for Sooti, a change of diet for Choad. But it quickly became apparent that something was wrong. Hordes of new "cat lovers" suddenly besieged rec.pets.cats, offering extremely tasteless advice. One correspondent suggested nailing the hapless cats to a breadboard. Another thought firing "multiple .357 copper-jacketed hollowpoints" longitudinally through Sooti and Choad would solve the problem. (The cats' names are slang words indigenous to alt.tasteless. Choad is a word for penis, of course, and Sooti ... e-mail me if you need to know.)

During the ensuing months, it is safe to say that hundreds of messages passed back and forth. Whenever life began to return to normal at rec.pets.cats, someone from alt.tasteless would post an article there looking for, say, a good recipe for Polynesian cat. Occasionally, someone from rec.pets.cats would try to fight back by posting an article about his or her cute kitty on alt.tasteless. But that only led people like Trashcan Man to respond with their own articles about topics such as vivisecting the cat and having sex with its innards.

Yes, Trashcan Man was right there on the front lines of the war.

One day, a (real) rec.pets.cat person posted an article to his own news group asking whether anyone could suggest a way of keeping a neighborhood dog from harassing his cat. Trashcan Man had a suggestion: Spray it in the face with muriatic acid, a form of hydrochloric acid. Of course this is dangerous - about as sensible as warming a cat by putting it in a microwave oven (which someone had previously recommended).

It was around this time that Karen Kolling decided enough was enough.

Kolling lives with her three cats, Sweetie, Holly, and Little Bit, in the San Francisco Bay area. She has been reading and posting to rec.pets.cats for about as long as Trashcan Man has been on alt.tasteless.

"A lot of people don't understand how pet owners feel about their pets. A lot of times, people use the analogy of pets being like kids," Kolling tells me over the phone. "Suppose someone went around in a park putting up posters of your kid getting mutilated. This is what it was like."

Kolling says many of the people in rec.pets.cats are not what you'd describe as typical computer people. "We have a lot of unsophisticated users in this group." Many people are steered to the group when they are dealing with the grief of losing a pet, for instance.

Kolling is a sophisticated user: She's a software engineer for Adobe Systems and has been a Usenet regular for more years than she can recall. Shortly after the alt.tasteless invasion, Kolling began teaching the cat people how to write "kill files."

On Usenet, kill files are a way to filter out messages from people you don't want to see. Some places refer to them as "bozo filters." With a kill file, you can, say, screen out any messages posted by someone named Trashcan Man, so that when you go through the day's articles none of his will show up. It will be as if they were never written.

"Let's say Joe Smith posted a message to rec.pets.cats, full of descriptions of how he likes to mutilate cats," Kolling explains. "You can set the kill file to get rid of the messages of Joe Smith." And that is precisely what she taught her friends to do. It worked for a while, until alt.tasteless people began "counterfeiting names so you wouldn't know it was Joe Smith," she says.

If there were any rules for behavior in the first place, the people from alt.tasteless were clearly no longer playing by them. "That took it unquestioningly beyond freedom of speech," Kolling says.

So did some other moves that escalated the war. One convention on Usenet is known as cross-posting. Cross-posting is a way of automatically posting the same article to other groups. An article on, say, a rabies outbreak in the Northeastern US might be as interesting to rec.pets.cats as it is to readers of rec.pets.dogs. So you would cross-post it. One day, Kolling responded to a tasteless posting that had been planted on rec.pets.cats. She didn't look closely at the article and didn't see that it was cross-posted to misc.test.

Misc.test is a news group that people use to see if their postings are being transmitted properly. It's the Usenet equivalent of standing up at a microphone and asking, "Is this thing on?" Posting to misc.test generates thousands of automatic messages, delivered as e-mail, from all over the world.

"My In box was swamped with automatic responses from systems as far away as Australia," she says. "My In box sunk like a stone."

Kolling did not find this amusing. "It was deliberately malicious."

And then she started getting death threats.

"I got mail from people telling me that they wanted to cut me up with knives, that they were going to tie me up and watch me squeal like a pig," Kolling says. "I got one message where the guy had enclosed my work address." They were all anonymous. So were the telephone calls, where someone would just listen to Kolling say "Hello? Hello?" and not hang up.

It was disturbing.

When Trashcan Man and his pals started telling people to squirt muriatic acid in animals' eyes, Kolling decided it was time to take more serious action.

"I think most people know you shouldn't (stick animals in microwave ovens or spray acid in their eyes). But some people don't," Kolling says. She was concerned that someone might not know that muriatic acid was hydrochloric acid, and dangerous.

While some people suggested calling the police to report Trashcan Man's muriatic acid shenanigans, Kolling and a few of her Net-savvy friends began contacting the people who provide Net access to some of the more flagrant abusers. These system administrators were at universities in some cases; in others, they ran commercial gateways to the Internet.

"What I was hoping was that the system administrators would just tell them, 'Hey, grow up,' and that would be enough," she says.

Maybe that's what did happen in some cases. In other cases, though - cases like Trashcan Man's - the reaction was more pointed. At the time, Trashcan Man was reduced to buying net access from Panix, a popular provider in New York City. He had had a free account at Columbia, but that was suspended after Trashcan Man planted a thing called a fork bomb on the system, which caused it to crash.

One morning late in the fall, Trashcan Man connected to Panix and got a stern warning from the owner, Alexis Rosen. In e-mail Rosen noted that there had been complaints - again - about Trashcan Man. The tone of the message was clear: Knock it off, or else.

"So I knocked it off," Trashcan Man says, "because I value my Net access."

"See, when I got suspended, the biggest loss was not school - I didn't give a flying fuck," he says. "It was the Net access - not being able to post, not being able to get e-mail.... It's a very effective tool to control me."

Trashcan Man says he never sent anyone death threats, nor did he harass anyone by phone. All he's guilty of, he maintains, is being a prime agitator in a flame war. Threatening to cut off his Net connection - his connection to his community - was patently unfair, bordering on cruel. It was only words, after all; no one was hurt. It was all in fun, right?

Wrong, says Kolling.

"This whole thing says something interesting about the character of the Internet," she said. "There are folks who think the Internet is like the Wild West, where there are no rules and you can do anything. Well, I don't think that's the way it should be."

"If people want to post stuff like this to alt.tasteless, fine," Kolling adds. "But it doesn't belong in rec.pets cats."

For his part, Trashcan Man has calmed down a bit. "Oh, I still do the usual flame, but not as a bait. I have changed my flaming habits such that I now flame people whom I feel deserve it on news groups that I inhabit," he e-mailed me recently. "This includes alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless, and, to a somewhat more toned-down degree, on rec.arts.marching.misc (I'm in the Columbia Marching Band). But now I flame only when I feel the flaming is begged, i.e., when I'm insulted, when I see someone monumentously stupid or just ignorant, or when my hemorrhoids are acting up. But, newsgroup invasions are probably a thing of the past, unless they are very weak (i.e. alt.fan.karl-malden.nose)."

In the fall, Trashcan Man will graduate, God willing. He has no immediate plans, other than to "get a job. Preferably a job with Net access."

In the long run, though, "I have political aspirations," Trashcan Man said. "I'm a member of the Republican Party on campus. I have often proclaimed that I am the future of the Republican Party."

If you are unsure of how to connect to Usenet, see Chapter 5 of The Internet Guide for New Users, by Daniel Dern.