Online after the Oklahoma Bombing

As one message on an Internet newsgroup devoted to explosives put it, "There are a lot of unstable compounds out there." The writer was responding to a naif surprised that a bunch of fertilizer and some diesel fuel could rip the side off a nine-story building. But the man could have been talking about the rhetoric of Net politics itself. Long a fertile ground for anarchist and antiauthoritarian thought, Net political culture also includes heaps of reactionary conspiracy theory, racist...