The backbone cabal was a group (or cabal) of large-site administrators who pushed through the Great Renaming and reined in the chaos of Usenet during most of the 1980s.

Gene "Spaf" Spafford is said to have organized the backbone in 1983 to stabilize the Usenet propagation. [1] (http://www-cse.stanford.edu/classes/cs201/projects-98-99/controlling-the-virtual-world/history/rename.html), [2] (http://www.vrx.net/usenet/history/rename/) While many news servers operated during night time to save the cost of long distance communication, servers of the backbone were available 24 hours a day.

During most of its lifetime, the Cabal (sometimes capitalized) steadfastly denied its own existence; it was almost obligatory for anyone privy to their secrets to respond "There is no Cabal" whenever the existence or activities of the group were speculated on in public.

The result of this policy was an attractive aura of mystery. Even a decade after the cabal mailing list disbanded in late 1988 following a bitter internal catfight, many people believed (or claimed to believe) that it had not actually disbanded but only gone deeper underground with its power intact.

This belief became a model for various paranoid theories about various Cabals with dark nefarious objectives beginning with taking over the Usenet or Internet. These paranoias were later satirized in ways that took on a life of their own. Follow-ons include the Eric Conspiracy of mustached hackers named "Eric"; and the Lumber Cartel putatively funding anti-spam efforts to support the paper industry.

External links

• Jargon File entry (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/backbone-cabal.html)
• Cabal Conspiracy FAQ (http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/cabal-conspiracy-FAQ/)
• Lumber Cartel (http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/L/Lumber-Cartel.html)