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Also known as: the backbone cabal
The informal group of administrators at the large, well-connected sites carrying most Usenet traffic in the 1980s. Because their machines relayed feeds between regions, their decisions about which groups to accept effectively determined what propagated. They drove the Great Renaming, and resistance to that control produced the alt hierarchy. Denials of their existence became the joke there is no cabal. Dissolved around 1988.
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