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ESMB 2010

Alanzo

Bardo Tulpa
ESMB was created in January of 2007.

At that time, Marty Rathbun, Mike Rinder and David Miscavige had been able to intimidate almost every media company from reporting on the abuses and criminality of the Church of Scientology.

These Young Turks had infamously sued TIME Magazine so many times for their "Church of Greed" cover story from the 90's that TIME'S Insurance company dropped their liability insurance.

Marty, Mike and Dave lost every lawsuit, and every appeal they filed. But the fact that they had a legal team of loyal, dedicated Sea Org members to abuse the US legal system created fear throughout global media. Most media companies are small businesses. They simply can't afford to put up this kind of fight.

So Marty, Mike and Dave were able to do, pretty much, anything they wanted to Scientologists and not ever have it reported in the media.

These "Young Turks" were pretty proud of themselves.

They were Causative OTs.

But the Internet allowed a kind of asymmetrical response to this situation. Individual, anonymous, Ex-Scientologists could tell their own stories of abuse and criminality that they'd witnessed in Scientology - ordered by Marty, Mike and Dave.

And Marty, Mike and Dave found this very hard to deal with.

I hope that other members of ESMB, and other Old Guard Scientology Critics, can help fill in some of the history here.

But what was the reason I picked the year 2010?

Because that's the year everything changed.
 

Enthetan

Master of Disaster
What laid the groundwork earlier was alt.religion.Scientology

A.R.S was (and still is, it's still in use) something called a usenet newsgroup. It was established in 1991, before there even was an Internet like we know it today (the first web browsers didn't start coming out until 1992-3), and where most of the general public didn't have access (most users in 1991 were either connected to a university or government contractors).

The powerful thing about usenet groups, from Scientology's perspective, was that there was no single server that could be taken down. There was no real administrator who could be sued. You had thousands of servers which passed along thousands of newsgroup feeds. People could post anonymously.

In Scientology's early days, they would go after publishers with lawyers. They found it difficult to sue Usenet. It was like having this huge elephant gun, but you were being devoured by millions of ants.
 

Alanzo

Bardo Tulpa
What laid the groundwork earlier was alt.religion.Scientology

A.R.S was (and still is, it's still in use) something called a usenet newsgroup. It was established in 1991, before there even was an Internet like we know it today (the first web browsers didn't start coming out until 1992-3), and where most of the general public didn't have access (most users in 1991 were either connected to a university or government contractors).

The powerful thing about usenet groups, from Scientology's perspective, was that there was no single server that could be taken down. There was no real administrator who could be sued. You had thousands of servers which passed along thousands of newsgroup feeds. People could post anonymously.

In Scientology's early days, they would go after publishers with lawyers. They found it difficult to sue Usenet. It was like having this huge elephant gun, but you were being devoured by millions of ants.
Exactly, Enthetan!

ARS was the original use of asymmetrical warfare which laid the groundwork for Marty, Mike and Dave's Viet Nam.
 

Roan

Patron with Honors
I am not quite sure of what question you are asking. Or what "thesis" you are proposing. :) Sounds interesting though.

Talk divides; Action unites. Generally speaking, that is the conundrum in activism (of almost any sort). Getting people to take effective action, rather than merely peck at keyboards. Communication (talk) is important of course as people flesh out ideas and test the boundaries of the Establishment they are confronting. And the asymmetrical online assault on Scientology that you refer to was important and huge. But it is activism in real life (with colleagues) which unites a movement and creates un-stoppable energies.

Now that you mention it, I think maybe something did shift around the time you mention. I think there was a healthy tension between factions of our scruffy "leadership" in this movement many years ago. Yes, there was bickering, but that seemed to motivate the combatants to compete as to who could (behind the scenes) produce more of a product that would hurt CoS.

I think having a professional (yellow) journalist and what is now two men, who importantly, were our main targets not much more than a decade ago, leading the "movement" has been a net negative. Especially since one of them is a well paid TV side-kick.

I hope this doesn't sound to pessimistic. After all, everyone involved has done mostly good work. The world today (because of the internet) is basically inoculated against the virus of Scientology. Anyone who has gotten into it in the past ten years or who will in the future is acting upon powerful karmas that are coming to fruition.

And none of this may make any sense based on my lack of clarity on what you're asking here.
 

Alanzo

Bardo Tulpa
I think having a professional (yellow) journalist and what is now two men, who importantly, were our main targets not much more than a decade ago, leading the "movement" has been a net negative. Especially since one of them is a well paid TV side-kick.

Thank you. I appreciate your historical perspective here, Roan.

I hope this doesn't sound to pessimistic. After all, everyone involved has done mostly good work. The world today (because of the internet) is basically inoculated against the virus of Scientology. Anyone who has gotten into it in the past ten years or who will in the future is obviously acting on powerful karmas that are coming to fruition.

Good point.

But I'd like to know from you and your historical experience at OCMB - do you think 2010 was a significant year?

Why or why not?
 
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