Wow, that's a terrific article. I don't think anyone at Xoom was in a position to make or break a revolution (maybe on Xoom International, but we'd delegated th

Wow, that's a terrific article. I don't think anyone at Xoom was in a position to make or break a revolution (maybe on Xoom International, but we'd delegated the whacking duties to the Italians on those sites, if memory serves). A lot of Xoomers moved on to Google later, and there it did start to become an issue, but all the pornwhackers had gone elsewhere (I took a detour but ended up at Google eventually anyways). It's crazy to me to think that YouTube was relearning many of the same things the pornwhackers had figured out ten years earlier. I guess there is an underbelly that Silicon Valley really, really doesn't want to talk about. When it mattered, though, YouTube did the right thing, even though it could have cost them the business. Little decisions like those can, in a small way, change the course of history. I don't think that sort of flashpoint ever happened at Xoom, because we didn't have any policies against bad taste. For all I know, Damien and his crew were gleefully promoting protest sites the whole time. If you ever have a chance to read Ted Rall's piece "A Cog In Satan's Bulldozer", do it. He touches on bits of it here and there in http://comiczine-fa.com/interviews/ted-rall http://comiczine-fa.com/interviews/ted-rall, but the real thing is mindbendingly great -- truly, almost all cynics are disillusioned idealists. When I worked for google from 2003-2004, it was as close as I've seen to a corporation with a pervasive conscience (people really did ask whether a purchasing decision was "evil"). It seems like even their ideals have slipped. I went back to school after a while. Now I design clinical trials for kids with cancer. It doesn't pay as much but at least when I die I won't say "gee, I sure sold a lot of ads!"