Unintended Consequences - How We Launched the Internet & the Greens in the 1980s Leading to the Election of Trump. I Am Truly Sorry

by Zvi Baranoff

This is how we helped launch the internet and the Greens in the USA. I probably should apologize for both.

Dana Beal came back from Europe and brought with him buttons and T-shirts and literature from the Alternative Liste für Demokratie und Umweltschutz (Alternative Ballot for Democracy and Environmental Protection, AL) and die Grünen. He introduced the Green Party to his circle of friends and loose network mostly in Manhattan and the Greater New York area. Soon interest grew. We began reaching out and networking the embryonic Green Movement in North America.

I was living in Philadelphia at the time. I met Stan Pokras in the early 1980s. He is an avid community networker and an early user of computers. He was one of the first nodes of what became a national computer network of Green activists.

We organized Green Conferences in multiple cities in the Mid Atlantic region of the USA to convene simultaneously and to communicate with each other through computers. We had meetings in Baltimore, Washington DC, Philadelphia and New York. We were linked by dial up service on clunky computers and able to type messages to each other. How exciting!

There was a contentious debate concerning the use of computer technology. Some argued that the computers could be used for design and layout of newsletters and such but not for communication! We plowed on, developing the networks anyway.

Ben Masel from Madison, Wisconsin bounced all over the country and was instrumental in finding folks with interest and skills for the task.  Ben Masel was producing the Zenger in Mad Town. Ben passed away in 2011 from cancer at the age of 56. The obituary in the Madison newspaper called him a “prominent marijuana activist and professional rabble rouser” and I am sure Ben would have been OK with that description.

I moved to Phoenix, AZ and was working with Lare Clark to produce Green Action Newspaper. We coordinated by computer with Stan Pokras and Nancy McClernan in Philadelphia to produce the Nationally distributed independent Green newspaper.

Meanwhile, the Committees of Correspondence (COC Greens) maintained a stand against the use of computers for communication. They also wanted nothing to do with cannabis. As the Green Movement staggered forward towards the idea of a Green Party this dynamic and these conflicts simmered.

In 1989 we marched a Giant Joint on the COC Green National Convention in Eugene, Oregon to demand a hearing of cannabis issues. Shortly afterwards, most of us decided to leave the Greens to their own process paralysis and we shifted our resources and energies elsewhere.

The Greens went on to adapt to the Internet, using it in a most unwholesome way. They also claimed the electoral mantle of Marijuana Legalization. They effectively tipped close elections to Republicans.

Every action has a reaction and usually chains of reaction. It is impossible to foresee all the consequences. Hindsight is 2020 so it is far easier to say what one should have done than it is to say what one should do going forward. We all do the best we can.