It is two in the morning, Pacific time. This is a time when no reasonable person should be awake, especially when they have class bright and early the next morning. However, a girl at a well known California college, through the vagueness of shifting moods and insomnia is wide awake. Since sleep eludes her, she climbs out of bed and turns on the monitor to check up on the happenings in her IRC channel.

In the channel this evening is a guy from Southern California, keeping an eye on his servers and watching anime; a guy from the left coast of Canada who is working frantically on something, and tosses pieces of it out for public consumption every once in a while; a guy in Europe, who, due to the time difference between California and Europe, is either busy at work or pretending to be; and a guy on the east coast who is up early for some reason or another, working on a private project or six of which he only gives the slightest hints. Sometimes, there's a guy on the channel from the same California college as the girl, a reminder that there are real people on the other end of the keyboards.

This is a crew that has, for quite a long time, referred to itself as the #tjab Night Shift. The Night Shift part of the title is fairly obvious, seeing as how it is the middle of the night where most of the people are. The #tjab designation refers to the name of the channel, which often gives an observer a clue about the subject of the channel. In this case, #tjab stands for The Jihad Against Barney.

It is about this time that the funny looks usually start. Yes, that is Barney as in Barney the Purple Dinosaur. And more importantly, there is a group of Barney haters (for lack of a better term) who have bonded together. The Jihad is a community, for better or for worse, although how it has gone using the technology at its disposal to create a community has varied at different points in its lifetime.

First, I think, it is best to start at the beginning. What is a community? Having some criterion for community, can we see that the Jihad fits these criterion?

I thought of looking this up in the dictionary to figure it out, but paused when I saw the very long definition for the term community. A dictionary definition does not do a very good job of capturing the whole idea of community, planned or otherwise. However, there is no other fitting definition that fits the idea very well either. In actual practice, it seems that any group of people getting together through a common interest (or maybe even not so common) is a community. Yet the word remains slippery. People are shoved into communities that, if given the choice, they never would have been involved in. The paramount example is that of a child who longs to get out of his or her rural town, convinced there is life beyond the horizons.

In much the same way is it with the online world. The communities here are like the big cities that the child from the rural town has only heard and not seen. The rumors about the city spread among the townfolk in the rural area, just like the rumors spread about the wild things that can be found on that internet thing. However, people are people, and they tend to drag their reality behind them online -- hopes and dreams and fears alike.

A common interest is a common interest, whether one is sharing that common interest with the person over the next hill, or a person in Europe. And hence, I think communities easily extend online. I am not even sure we need the world "virtual" to describe them, although they take place in a medium that is incredibly flexible. As a distinction between them and communities that take place in what has been described as "meatspace", that is, the reality that we exist in, I can see the distinction -- but would this not make friends whom you only speak to on the phone part of your "virtual community?". It is easy to get lost in this semantic garble, and hence I will simply refer to a community that takes place online as a community, to make things simple.

What is the Jihad? It is a group of like-minded individuals who exist for the express purpose of making fun of Barney. However, it has raised Barney bashing above and beyond the traditional mutilation of show songs and proving that Barney is the antichrist by torturous numerology. Although these activities can be enjoyable at times, many of the members of the Jihad are intelligent, rational folks and prefer productive debate, well rationed ideas, and the creative art of storytelling over the former entertainments.

Somewhere along the way, the Jihad has established itself an entire roleplaying universe. The key tenements of this universe is that Barney is not just a kid's television show character, but a demon intent on destroying humanity. The white hats in this universe are, of course, the Jihad--a group of freaks and oddballs who realize this threat to humanity and are prepared to battle against it. People often post under their character names as opposed to their real ones, and often, a real name may be unknown to the rest of the group.

The most interesting fact about the Jihad is not that it prefers intellectual debate or this odd roleplaying universe, but the fact that the name and the ideals behind it have been so constant. Saint Kressja wrote in a usenet post in efforts to answer the very question I have posed:

"The crusade to kill B*rney takes many forms, but the largest is the losse[sic] confederacy known as the Jihad. A Jihad, as you probably know, is a Holy War. The High Prophet (poadbbon), after receiving the revelation of the Three-Fold Truth, soon realized that the time was right to call for a Jihad. The Jihad is now ongoing." ¹

Here we come across the idea of the Threefold (or Three-Fold) Truth as a guiding light to all Jihaddi. Indeed, although a complete definition of a Jihaddi has changed over the years, the one constant has been these three axioms, written by the High Prophet (pbuh²) in the early days of the Jihad:

1) Barney is the demonic incarnation of all hell on earth.
2) Barney seeks to make the world his Purple Kingdom, and does so by corrupting the innocent and weak into Sponge Minions.
3) Barney must be destroyed. All else is irrelevant.³

Although the times have changed, and it is generally realized that "destroyed" in its strongest context is not to happen in real life, each character in the game holds to these beliefs firmly. In the few real life campaigns there have been, the third axiom is still held to strongly, "destroyed" in this case meaning kicked off television. Therefore, I think it is fair to say that the Jihad is a group of people who believe in the Threefold Truth. Anything more firm would cause the idea to be lost in the attempted translation. There is no agreement exactly what it has meant to be a Jihaddi at different points in the Jihad's history, with the exception of the basic ideas held below. Compare Kressja's definition with the current one, found in the FAQ file:

"The Jihad is a heterogeneous organization of people on the Internet dedicated to defamation, humiliation, eradication, killing, and removal of Barney the Purple Dinosaur of the television show "Barney & Friends" from the airwaves and from every human's life. When The Jihad speaks of killing Barney, we refer to the idea of Barney the Purple Dinosaur, not the person(s) in that bloated, disgusting purple suit. The Jihad categorically does *not* support real life violence against people wearing suits of Barney, nor those helping to propagate the Purple MindSucker's 'show.'"⁴

The idea contained therein is very similar. There is not a lot that has changed in the Jihad that could not be explained by learning from experience. The Jihad is a community in the sense that it has a defining ethos, and an elaborate community-built universe in which to participate. As time has gone by, we have built structures that did not work, and have learned from those. If this is not a community, then neither is a town.

Given that the Jihad is a community, how has it changed over time? In the opinion of this author, the history of the Jihad can be broken up into three parts based on the ways in which they communicated among each other -- the early days of the Jihad, the rise and fall of Serp, and the rise of the Web.

Usenet has often held a special place in many Jihaddi's hearts. The reason it is held in such special regard among Jihaddi is that for many years, it was not only our home base, but our only base. The newsgroup is called alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die, or ab4d for short.

Why Usenet to start out with? The Jihad was formed in 1991, and often, the easiest way to communicate with a large group of people in those days was through Usenet. Besides, there was some interestingly creative group names that were springing up.

As the story is told, the Jihad came to be out of a group called alt.television.criticism. It turns out there was a group in this group who were determined to discuss the evils of the television show "Barney and Friends" to the neglect of other topics. After a few words were had, the Barney haters packed up and created their own newsgroup. This newsgroup is the one we know today as ab4d.⁵

There is not much known about the first few years of the Jihad. Only a few posts have survived, and none of the seven original founding members is active in the Jihad anymore. The FAQ file and some Jihaddi look back upon these days as "The Golden Age", a moniker that gets problematic at times. There are only a few Jihaddi who still are even somewhat active in the Jihad that were around for that time, and most of what happened in that day and age is being lost to time. Given this, I like what one fellow Jihaddi called the time: "The Prehistoric Jihad."

Ironically enough, the flavor of the time is captured in a book. Where magnetic stored bits have been lost to time, the hardcover book has lead to the recruitment of three or four current Jihaddi. The book is called Surfing on the Internet:A Nethead's Adventures Online, by J.C. Herz. While it is simply a chapter of her experiences on ab4d, it offers us glimpses of what kind of community was there in the days of simply Usenet. Folks created organizations, joined them together, split them apart, and did other things for the sheer fun of it. The universe as a roleplay tool was not very well defined at all, and anybody could come along and add what he felt like adding. It was not complete anarchy, but it was pretty close. However, the next step was to add some organization to the Jihad.

In the Herz book, the primordial stirrings of organization are to be found, as everybody identifies themselves as a member of some Barney hating group or another. Indeed, there is one Usenet post from a guy who called himself Serbeus exhorting his fellow Jihaddi to help support a battle. The post itself is not really all that important, it is the signature file that I would like to draw to your attention.

Commander Tripwire Scripio Tomarctus Serbeus
Fleet Commander
Doberman Empire

The signature file is easy to read. Three lines, which are simply name, rank, and organization. The concept of organization under the Jihad was fuzzy before. One was a Jihaddi if one followed the principles of the Threefold Truth. But now there was also organizations housed under the umbrella of the Jihad. These would be referred to as Jihad Autonomous Organizations, or JAOs for short. To this day, the Doberman Empire is usually recognized among the first JAOs.

This is the introduction to the next phase of Jihad history -- the rise of the JAO, the rise of IRC, the preoccupation with organization, and a new person in the Jihad who would eventually have major repercussions to the community.

The second period of Jihad history is defined by the organization that I mentioned previously. The organization started mainly out of a flamewar, as it seems so many things in the Jihad did. This flamewar happened between Serbeus and a guy named Wayne Syvinski over the future of the Jihad -- philosophical or militaristic? The debate raged on for months before it was resolved in the Corollary of Thought and Action, by Centurion Manticore, which stated that the Jihad had a both philosophical and militaristic bent.

While this fight was going on, somebody on the newsgroup decided it would be a good idea to declare himself President of the Jihad, and somebody else objected that the first person hadn't been elected to the title. An election was held to determine who should be "President of the Jihad", and Serbeus won. Upon his win, he changed the title to Praetor. This piece of organization would later become important.

At about the same time, some Jihaddi had discovered Internet Relay Chat, or IRC. They quickly staked themselves a channel on EFNet and proceeded to start hanging out there. This was an interesting change in how the Jihad did business. Before, the main line of communication was Usenet, a place in which somebody had to type out exactly what they wanted to say in completeness before sending it, and also had delayed propagation. In contrast, IRC was a real time media. Just as things often slip out when a person talks to another person, IRC is fraught with the same difficulty. Yet, its one major detraction can also be its biggest advantage, as one always (sometimes uncomfortably) gets to know the persons one hangs out with.

The few IRC logs that exist from those time periods show an attempt to bring the trolls and the Barney-bashing onto IRC, but it quickly turned into a way for folks to talk to each other about possible story ideas in the Jihad universe, and just plain talk to one another. There was some confusion between the actual real life self, and the persona one created to be part of the Jihad. In Usenet (and, as we will find out, in mail), it is very easy to play a persona. On IRC, it gets a bit more difficult, but not impossible.

In the meantime, there had been a flamewar between groups on Usenet which caused the office of Praetor to gain much more importance than it had before. After these flamewars were over, the level of apathy in the Jihad rose to an unprecedented high. People dropped out of the Jihad to wander off to more interesting tasks, which left the door open for a charismatic leader to take over. That leader was somebody who went by the name of Ennio Phillips, but better known to his Jihad comrades as Serp the Feral.

Every community attempting to pick its way through the unknown has its demagogue. Serp was the Jihad's, and to this day he is easily the most reviled Jihaddi. Indeed, at one point, somebody in the Jihad proposed the Jihad addition to Godwin's Law that stated "When a person brings up Serp, they've lost and the thread is over."

But what made Serp so hated among Jihaddi? After all, the Jihad had slipped into a near fatal period of apathy when he took over the Praetorship. He quickly moved to establish the Serpmailer, another tool for getting Jihaddi to talk to one another. What effects did this new way of communication affect the community that is the Jihad?

For one, it gave many Jihaddi a place where they could speak up without being seen by the crowds. Ideas on how to organize Jihaddi government once and for all could be discussed in a closed forum. Indeed, as shown by mail that was saved from such a time, some pretty radical plans for changing the Jihad's structure were discussed over that channel.

The problem with a mailing list, especially one like the Serpmailer (the name of the list) is that it blows apart rather spectacularly when somebody decides to email bomb it. It is this reason first and foremost that Jihaddi veterans resist ideas of a Jihad-wide mailer when it inevitably comes up again. I don't really blame them, either. I believe it was an idea that helped the Jihad close ranks and regroup, and was a good thing for its time, but I don't think it's an idea that needs resurrecting.

This is not to excuse Serp. He had power and he abused it, proposing at one point to condense the Jihad into one group with the Praetor at the top, and when this idea was nixed, demanding the ability to kick people out of JAOs without the consent or even the knowledge of their JAO commanders. At the same time, a plot to take over three or four JAOs was discovered by other Jihaddi. In simple words, Serp was threatening to destroy the community that had been built up, and therefore he rightly deserved the boot.

The third piece of Jihad history is that of what can best be summed up as the modern Jihad. There is much of this period in which I actually participated and observed. I will keep to the third person narration that I have used throughout the essay, but I may not be able to be as objective as I was before. The third part of the Jihad overlaps with the commercialization of the Internet, and the rise of the Web. There is also a few events that shook the shared roleplay universe, which I will describe. Because of these events, the community has become a very different place.

After the fall of Serp, many things happened in the Jihad. J. Foxglov took over the Praetorship and immediately handed power back to the rest of the Jihad, remaining in the position just as a figurehead. There was much activity as the Jihad struggled to return to the days before apathy and Serp. And a middling-high member of TRES Corps known as Cyberpyro (later to be known as Deadlock the Feral), and started an operation he dubbed Phoenix.

The operation format had been tried once before, in a story called Worldwalk, and it had been relatively successful, but Phoenix was to be the biggest op ever attempted in the Jihad. It would tell the story of a Jihad struggling to keep itself together and fighting after being overwhelmed tactically by what could be termed as an alien society in alliance with Barney. This story would have a great impact on how things were written in the Jihad universe. Before, it would be one person working alone, maybe two or three, but never such a large group of people. For better or for worse, the notion of narrative in the Jihad was changed, and the consequences of this change still survive.

A second major change, also made by Deadlock, was to change the structure of the "government"⁶. Seeing how much damage had been done by the Praetorship by Serp, and how much the Jihad was pressuring J, to the point of real life frustration. Seeing all the difficulty fraught in having one person at the top, whether a figurehead or not, Deadlock decided it would be a good idea to split this position into a council of three. In keeping with Roman nomenclature, he called these positions the "Triumvirate." Their job is to act in areas that don't fall cleanly in any one JAO's jurisdiction, like adding new JAOs to the Jihad or appointing positions such as historian if it falls open. This structure has worked well enough, especially with the Triumvirs generally agreeing on a hands off policy towards governance.

Another big change that has occurred is simply the world around the Jihad. Simply put, the internet is not the same place that it was even as late as 1996. One of the big things has been the rise of the Web. Seeing as how many Jihaddi are interested in technology, it is a given that the Jihad has had some semblance of a web page since David Brogden created the first incarnation of JihadWeb in 1994. Indeed, the webpage has served as an introduction to the Jihad for many of its members, but as David got busy with other things, and the web server that JihadWeb was hosted on got too busy, the webpage had to be moved. Deadlock and Shardik volunteered to take over hosting it, and managed to get a new front page on it before it would stagnate again. However, Deadlock had a surprise up his sleeve.

Early in 1998, he announced to the Jihad that he had managed to bring up JihadWeb again at www.jihad.net. Not only had he redone most every page in the hierarchy, he had coded a few things to keep folks coming back, the biggest being a project he called CGIab4d, that is ab4d on the web.

CGIab4d was one of those sorts of ideas that seemed smart at the time. After all, our traditional home, Usenet ab4d, had been massacred with numerous rmgroups which had messed badly with propagation of articles. After a failed vote to create a couple new groups in the rec hierarchy, it looked as if the Jihad was going to get no further on Usenet, and that it was time to try a new medium. It worked, for a while.

It was agreed by most folks in the Jihad that we should still continue to lurk in Usenet ab4d and still carry on conversations there, but the bulk of the traffic would be moved to CGIab4d. The problem came when Deadlock decided to retire from the Jihad, and handed over code to the new webmasters in April. Between real lives and a lack of Perl knowledge by a couple of the webmasters, the main group broke. This problem was not fixed until November.

There were mixed emotions about the idea of moving to the Web in the first place. Most people seemed to accept it, but many of them also kept posting to Usenet ab4d anyway. The traffic split that was caused by the two places to post has been made up somewhat by a couple of people who regularly post CGIab4d discussions to Usenet to keep both places alive with the spirit of the Jihad, but should be a concern for the future.

A couple other interesting developments have been Jihad Universe 2 and the increasing split of #tjab with the Jihad. JU2 has been an effort to standardize Jihad roleplaying in a way that makes it accessible, and in many ways bring us back to what are roots in the roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons. The project has not been public for very long, so its long term effects on the Jihad have yet to be measured. However, folks seem to be mostly enthusiastic about the standardization.

A more fascinating thing to watch has been the formation of a new community on what is the Jihad's IRC channel, #tjab. Although the Jihad is the common bond of most folks on the channel, it is becoming less and less so, and the topics can vary from Linux to roleplaying games to music to school to the Jihad. Why this has happened is unknown, although I would guess that #tjab being the one stable place at the moment has helped this trend. Another help has been a large number of folks who are active in the Jihad in no other way than showing up and chatting on IRC. It wouldn't surprise me to see #tjab eventually split away from its Jihad roots, if it hasn't already.

We sit on what could be an interesting year. Already this year one Jihaddi has retired with a formal request that we close up shop and the last one out turn out the lights. Whether this will happen or not is determined on what happens over the next few months.

It is difficult to predict the future, which is probably why pundits get laughed at for being dead wrong. What does the future hold for this quirky online community? The truth is, I don't know. I do not think there is a Jihaddi who does. This being so, I would like to ruminate on the future for a moment.

At the moment we seem to have fallen into an apathetic slump that we've been in for quite a while. There's many reasons for the apathy, from the fact that Barney has become much less popular in recent years to people actually getting lives. I believe this is part of the reason for the request to give in, shut out the lights, and go home. I don't think this is necessarily what we need to do, though.

There has been much stagnation within the community. We need new blood, which we have not gotten due to different causes, or at least we need old blood to get renewed activity. There is some hope in glancing at the historical record to see that there was a bad slump of apathy at one point. However, I would hope that we will not need a demagogue to get us out of our seats again.

What needs to be done is simply the following. JihadWeb needs a facelift; we have to accept the fact that the web will probably be our primary source of recruits for the foreseeable future. People sitting on tasks need to finish one or two of them. Web pages need to be spruced up; operations need to be posted. In short, things need to be done.

Given that, I am going to propose something radical involving #tjab. As I pointed about above, #tjab is fast on its way to becoming its own community, separate from the Jihad. Maybe we should not give folks credit for being active in the Jihad if all one does is hang out on #tjab? It is just a thought, as something needs to be done or we seriously entertain the thought of shutting out the lights.

It has been an interesting jaunt discovering just what exactly has made the Jihad into an interesting online community. In my own participation in it, I have learned a lot about writing, about people, and about myself, which is what participation in community should be about.

As I sit here early in the morning putting the final touches on this paper, I glance over to my IRC window. The only people awake are me and the guy in Europe, and we have been chatting back and forth about what makes the Jihad such a special place. I think of the guy that came on IRC the other night to tell me how he joined the Jihad, and asking to see my paper once it was finished.

When it comes down to it, a community is a group of people sharing a common interest, and getting to know more about where each of us is coming from. Community is learning more about yourself in a safe and supportive environment. And community, in this case, is the idea of "Barney must be destroyed, all else is irrevalent." This is what makes us different from all the other communities out there.

Brook, James and Boal, Iain, ed. Resisting the Virtual Life. City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1995.

Goodman, Paul and Percival. Communitas. Columbia University Press, New York, 1947.

Herz, J. C. Surfing on the Internet:A Nethead's Adventures Online. Little, Brown, and Co., Boston, 1995.

Ludlow, Peter, ed. High Noon on the Electronic Frontier. MIT Press, Caimbridge, 1996.

Web: http://www.jihad.net/

Web: http://www.jihad.net/faq/

Usenet: alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die

The personal archives of Dragonfyre Jones.

Dragonfyre Jones, for allowing me into his personal archives in the first place, and to willingly listen to ideas I had for this paper.

Rens Houben (aka The Guy From Europe) for keeping me sane on the last push to complete this paper and for offering some wonderful insights on the history and community of the Jihad.

The rest of the #tjab crew including (not an exhaustive list) aoiushi, Aris_TGD, rob, Calculus, keebler, Fireball, Darkside, J-Rock, nexxus, WhtStar2, akopps, jabowah, JakeW, NickM, Arsenal, Uplink, Zibblsnrt, ransom, Mal-3, Will, MacRae, Puppeteer, Azzy, Svartalf, Red_Pldn, phenyx, and X.