Success Quote by Steve Crocker

“Usenet is the last uncensored mass medium” lands like a warning disguised as nostalgia. Steve Crocker isn’t spinning a poet’s metaphor; he’s staking out a practical claim about infrastructure. Usenet, in its classic form, wasn’t owned by a single platform, governed by a single moderation team, or optimized for ad safety. It was messy, decentralized, and stubbornly hard to police at scale. Calling it “mass” elevates it above hobbyist tinkering: this wasn’t just nerd chatter, it was a public square that worked precisely because nobody could fully gatekeep it.

The phrase “last” does a lot of work. It frames censorship not as a hypothetical risk but as an inevitability everywhere else: broadcast media had regulators, newspapers had editors and publishers, early web portals had corporate policies, and even “open” internet spaces tend to consolidate into chokepoints. Crocker’s background matters here. As an internet architect and later a business figure in the DNS ecosystem, he understood that control is often exercised upstream, by whoever runs the naming, hosting, and distribution rails. “Uncensored” is less moral posturing than an engineering description: if there’s no central switch, there’s no easy off button.

The subtext is ambivalent. Usenet’s freedom is also its liability: spam, harassment, extremism, and disinformation flourish when accountability is optional. Crocker’s line romanticizes that openness while quietly acknowledging the tradeoff modern audiences now live with: centralized platforms provide safety and reach, then charge for it in rules, surveillance, and quiet deamplification. The quote reads today like an early forecast of our current bargain - convenience for control.