Silicon Insider: Tyranny of the Twit

May 14 -- Ever heard of the "Nazi Rule?"

It works like this: Run a chat thread long enough and eventually everyone will start calling each other a Nazi. In other words, at a certain level of participation all cyber-events trend towards the rude, the inflammatory, and the mediocre.

The Nazi Rule got me thinking about other rules that are unique to the Web because of its billions of users, infinite scalability and millions of sites.

But first, let me confess that I haven't the foggiest idea where I got the Nazi Rule. I was surfing various information threads on the Web, while also skimming through a half dozen magazines and watching the cable news. Somewhere in that info-morass I read (or heard) about the Nazi Rule. I tried to retrace my steps, but got nowhere.

That suggests two more rules:

The Rule of Non-Brownian Motion. Unlike the physical world, on the Net, if you wander off you will never re-cross where you started. Obviously, you can get back during the same session by hitting the backstep key. But if you randomly surf around, find a cool site, then log off to do something unimportant — like, say, eat, sleep or earn a living — you will never, ever find that page again.

The Law of Limited Ideas. Also known as the Blog Rule. During a major news event, no matter how much you surf the Net, the radio or the TV, you will in fact find only endless variations of the same four ideas, and endless rewrites of the same three reported stories. All will appear within the first couple hours, and everything else thereafter will be just an endless rehashing.

The four ideas are as follows:

1) It's the apocalypse.2) It was bound to happen. 3) We are all to blame, and 4) There is evil loose in the world.

Each writer, columnist or poster will fervently offer one or two of these ideas as uniquely his own. The three reported stories will be:

a) The View from 30,000 feet. b) On the Ground, and c) The Victims.

In other words, policy, war correspondence and bleeding hearts. They will appear in that order. And for the next few days, all commentary on the Web will consist of pouring those three stories through the sieve of the writer's adoption of the one of the four ideas. Though this might appear to produce only twelve possible positions, it will in fact result in ten million comments.