From longform.org comes this 15-year old Wired article about the Internet discovering Scientology, and vice versa. It’s a quaint read; the descriptions of how the early Net adopters traded messages through Usenet is about as unfamiliar to the Facebook generation as the Pony Express was to telephone users.

The author, Wendy M. Grossman, describes how early on, a Scientologist staffer wrote a memo advocating the flooding of the Internet with “positive messages”:

“If you imagine 40 to 50 Scientologists posting on the Internet every few days, we’ll just run the SPs right off the system. It will be quite simple.” She ended with, “I would like to hear from you on your ideas to make the Internet a safe space for Scientology to expand into.”

This memo, when leaked to Usenet, caused an uproar, according to Grossman, which led to an all-out war between the church and its anonymous online critics…a war that hasn’t quite abated 15 years later. If we give the Scientologist staffer the benefit of the doubt, isn’t she basically describing the marketplace of ideas? That is, that the best, most truthful ideas will rise to the top without the need for censorship. Without reading the rest of this memo, it’s difficult to say whether the staffer intended a more insidious campaign, such as a denial-of-service attack (a flood of messages making it impossible for others to read or post to the the newsgroup). And, as Grossman writes, the church opted for a strategy of aggressive censorship and litigation, which, as we know today, didn’t help the church’s image at all.

If the church wanted to adopt a more benevolent approach today, that is, having all of its followers post to the Internet in a reasonable and rational manner…well, it’s probably too late to convince people that it was sincerely trying the “marketplace of ideas” route. What could’ve been, I guess…