Weapon of Mass Defamation
University of Berkeley English Literature Graduate Stalks Author
"This whole project is infectious: hitting the random page button, I encounter whole swatches of text and knowledge areas requiring work, and I suddenly feel compelled to try to do something about it, even if I didn't have any particular interest in the subject to begin with. For example, I did a massive edit (for style, organization, and a general readability) for the submarine USS Trout (SS-202). I have no particular interest in the military, especially not the Navy, yet I found myself sucked into doing this."
-- Wikipedian named Calton
Whether inciting jealousy in a rival or writing a critical ethnography or exposé, authors may endure mischief designed to discredit, disrupt, or demonize. A manager of the Georgetown Barnes & Noble, host to C-SPAN televised speeches by internationally-recognized authors, informed Ehrenfels that it is not uncommon for someone to phone the bookstore to impersonate an author in an effort to cancel the author's engagement. In the age of the Internet, the range of what you could do to an author you do not like (or the author of a book you do not like) is boundless. The small gang of academics & practitioners loyal to Psychology is known the world over as a source of fake reviews for Ehrenfels's Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun in Amazon.com. But it would not have been quite as easy for a reader to diagnose disingenuousness in the scholarly prose of one "Charles Grahm of Japan," if such a person really exists. Ehrenfels might not have even petitioned for the removal of "Charles's" fake review were it not for some hints from the 'reviewer' himself that he had not read Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun. However, the reviewer made it quite clear to Ehrenfels that he had used Amazon's customer book review venue to vent frustration with the author's blog (fireflySun.com/news.html). A few months after the review had been removed, Ehrenfels found the following in a live journal entry:
"It's odd," remarked the author. "It's unclear whether this fellow is admitting to having submitted this false review. And not only this false review, but others as well. Granted, he did not admit it. Quite the contrary. He blames it on a 'friend.' Somehow he just happens to have a copy of his friend's review of my book on his hard drive months after the review had been removed from Amazon.com. The fellow also claims that his friend removed the review himself (quite an altruistic turn of events and reversal of future for all victims concerned), when in actuality, Amazon.com removed the spurious review of my book at my request. The only thing stranger than all this is how such an outdated non-event should be fodder for someone's journal."
Strangely enough, it is now known that the attack on Wyatt Ehrenfels is not motivated by sympathies for the academic community critiqued by fireflySun.com. An accidental discovery led to a growing body of evidence that two individuals harassing Wyatt Ehrenfels, "Charles Grahm of Japan" in Amazon.com and "CALTON" in Wikipedia, are one and the same person, a B.A. in English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley by the name of CALTON [LAST NAME OMITTED]. A rather meddling Wikipedia administrator who refers to himself only as "CALTON" had been shadowing Ehrenfels in Wikipedia, deleting contributions by Ehrenfels to a handful of articles about which he claims expertise as a PhD in Social Psychology (i.e. dreaming & cyberstalking) ... contributions which had been in the articles for months ... but would never be again.
"I was hard pressed to explain why my contributions seemed to aggravate him. There was something familiar about this fellow. Then I reviewed his Wikipedia user page, where I noticed in the section titled "International Travels" that he spent some time in Japan. Suddenly, I remembered a spurious negative review of my book in Amazon.com authored by someone who admitted to not having read the book and then, posing as a friend of himself in a live journal entry, admitted to having made a habit of sprinkling spurious reviews among his many genuine submissions to Amazon.com. The Wikipedia user name "CALTON" is quite unusual, and upon searching on keywords "CALTON" and "Japan" in Google, I was struck by the sheer number of front-loaded results about one "CALTON [LAST NAME OMITTED]," who took up residence in Japan and fashions himself a Western expert on all things Japanese (and a Japanese expert on all things Western). Apparently, the Wikipedia alias is the fellow's unusual first name. So I visited his Web site, where I noticed the prominent Amazon.com logo beside this statement: "Also, since I already link book titles I mention here to Amazon.com, I've decided to make the links official and have become an Amazon Associate. Hence, the official logo on the left.". Is this CALTON [LAST NAME OMITTED], the rabid reviewer of Amazon.com's book content, the same meddling "CALTON" who wrote this in his user page in Wikipedia?: "I first became aware of Wikipedia when I began using it to look up some technical terms, my being an English literature major screwing around with computers, not vice versa. Being of a copy editor bent, I noticed typos, misspellings, and generally screwy language occasionally, and after a while I realized that I could in fact edit them myself. So I did. Soon, I was hitting the random page button, just for my own amusement, and I got sucked in ... Now, this has turned into a relaxing break from my required copy editing: I get to exercise my pedantic tendencies, without the responsibility of deadlines or deliverables. I've occasionally gotten a little deeper into things, and have written a few articles from scratch ... This whole project is infectious: hitting the random page button, I encounter whole swatches of text and knowledge areas requiring work, and I suddenly feel compelled to try to do something about it, even if I didn't have any particular interest in the subject to begin with. For example, I did a massive edit (for style, organization, and a general readability) for the submarine USS Trout (SS-202). I have no particular interest in the military, especially not the Navy, yet I found myself sucked into doing this. Same with entries on community colleges and Booker Prize winners." However, beyond the matter of his technical expertise in English composition (he is graduate of the English Literature program at University California Berkeley), his edits and critiques appear designed to cut down persons whose attitudes or opinions he does not like. Amazon. Wikipedia. There is no place this person will not insinuate himself. He can found opining on the message boards of many political magazines (e.g. Washington Monthly). And he is not shy about leveraging his affiliation with all things official and worldly; in fact, these things appear to fuel his officiousness: (1) his international travel history and expertise in a culture enigmatic to Westerners; (2) he idenitifies himself as a "former ticketholder at the California Shakespeare Festival and the Berkeley Repertory Theater; (3) his home page also features two links to Web sites laying out his political opinions (i.e. "Political Opinions 1" and "Political Opinions 2"); and (4) he edited a number of essays about a Berkeley historical landmark for the University Students' Cooperative Association. Even I cannot help but be impressed and intrigued by his background, as he writes that he was born on a U.S. Air Force base in Japan and then proceeds to list all the air force bases on which he was raised. He put his Japanese private and mobile cell phone number on his Web page (just in case you want to reach him).
As an American who never made it East of Bermuda, I can't imagine what it would be like to call Japan "home." I expect that I'd be lonely and no matter how well I learned the language and lay of the land, I'd still need a way to reconnect with my roots. This is a man who gives much of himself to edit the world's works, and as a resident of the world from birth forward, one has to wonder what kind of challenges this nomadic lifestyle posed to social and personality development. There is a homelessness about this well-traveled man Calton, now employed as a copy editor for a large Japanese electronics company. Amazon.com and Wikipedia provide not only an international stage with which to seek intercourse with the world, but as a one-man "Spectre-like" editing conglomerate, he sprays the world like a male feline marking his territory. It's not like I'm not sympathetic. A man of his intelligence cannot limit his mode of self-expression to tedious technical edits of other persons' copy. At some point, someone in his position finds his client's split infinitives and dangling modifiers infuriating, and his superiority and aggravation both rear their heads in the extracurricular reviewing he performs in his spare time.
Apparently, I was not the first author to suspect CALTON [LAST NAME OMITTED] is behind a phony book review in Amazon.com, as [LAST NAME OMITTED] himself writes on one of his blogs: "I'll get into the details later, but some nutter calling himself "Steve Van Natter" took offense at my making fun of his incoherent rantings ipassed off as Amazon.com reviews. Steve apparently noticed, so back in April he responded by changing the name on the reviews to "CALTON [LAST NAME OMITTED]"-- which I found out when I happened to run a Google search on my name and they turned up for me. I complained to Amazon, and Amazon responded by deleting the phony reviews." In a live journal entry (see Weapons of Mass Defamation: Amazon.com), he reported that he withdrew his spurious review of my book himself. A few days after finding the live journal entry in a Google search of my book title, I wrote about the incident on my Web site, making sure my readers were aware that it was Amazon.com, and not Charles Grahm of Japan, who removed the review. A few days after that, the whole live journal entry disappeared (thank God for screen capturing).
The Look of Cyberstalking in Wikipedia
I contributed material in Wikipedia largely under an alias for a couple of reasons. Cyberstalkers based in Usenet google "Wyatt Ehrenfels" daily, tracking, reporting, and, in many cases, disrupting my activities on the Web. Secondly, using an alias in Wikipedia appeared to be the rule and not the exception. According to my sample, over 80 percent of Wikipedia users, and over 60 percent of Wikipedia administrators, contribute under a pen name (e.g. "SlimVirgin"). ["ALIAS OMITTED"] followed me around Wikipedia, pronouncing as fact his belief my motives for contributing to Wikipedia are impure. My contributions are diverse. In some cases, I contributed text only. In others I contributed both text and external links to Web pages from which I removed a link to my book from the navigation bar. ["ALIAS OMITTED"] did not appear to begrudge me my status as an author, but he made a big deal of the fact I was not a particularly famous author (i.e. no returns on a search of my name in Google News), and this was his rationale for removing my contributions to the page on dreaming. Even though most Wikipedia content does not come from subject matter experts, I voiced agreement that the material should be removed on the grounds that my identity as a PhD in Social Psychology could not be verified. The flaming, however, did not stop. ["ALIAS OMITTED"] persisted in spreading disingenuous information that I paid a vanity press to publish my book. He listed the articles to which I contributed on Wikipedia, characterizing each as an act of vandalism.
Naturally, I stopped contributing to Wikipedia. A Google search on my name was turning up dozens of links to Wikipedia back-end discussion pages that included all this defamatory material. I just wanted out. I didn't feel I should disrupt Wikipedia by removing large sections of text, so I altered my name slightly, inverting letters here and there so as not to show up in Google. But this wasn't enough for "CALTON" and some other Wikipedia users intent on keeping my contributions out but keeping the defamatory material intact. At that point I realized I was dealing with a defamation campaign. "CALTON" appeared to revert my edits and denounce my efforts to purge my record from Wikipedia, arguing in his usual incendiary style that I had "made my bed and now I have to lie in it." Ironically, despite my efforts to remove all traces of my work from Wikipedia, he proceeded to argue that my primary motive for editing Wikipedia was "search engine optimization" ... to boost the ranking of my Web pages in Google and other search engines.
But does the argument make sense? Before I even dispense with "search engine optimization" as my motivation, for the sake of argument we will assume Calton's diagnosis is correct. If my Web site's ranking in Google received any boost as a result of dropping links in Wikipedia, we have to assume that Wikipedia itself is running a search engine optimization campaign of its own. Google just about anything these days (e.g. "spider" or "Vietnam War"), and a link to a Wikipedia article will appear in the top 5 results. This is the result of massive hyperlinking among Wikipedia articles and among language versions of Wikipedia. All this inbred hyperlinking alone raises the ranking of any and all Wikipedia pages. So when CALTON created a "user page" about "Wyatt Ehrenfels" ... a page that contains innuendos about the vanity status of Ehrenfels's book publisher and allegations Ehrenfels contributed to Wikipedia under an alias ... the page debuted in the # 3 spot in a Google search of "Wyatt Ehrenfels" and, for at least a one-month period, occupied the # 1 and # 2 spots ... which means it ranked higher than even Ehrenfels's own Web site! All this search optimization for Wikipedia even got Wikipedians like CALTON recognition from Nicole Gaudiano of the formerly reputable Gannett News Service. Gaudiano even makes specific references to CALTON himself. Copy editor CALTON can now lay claim to the standard he unctuously invoked to disqualify social psychologist / author Ehrenfels from Wikipedia ... CALTON, unlike Ehrenfels, shows up in Google's News search database (thanks to this socially conscientious masterpiece from Gaudiano (of the once-reputable Gannett News Service).
Why Is He Doing This? What the Evidence Suggests
At that point it was clear to me who I was dealing with. CALTON is one of a growing population of Internet vigilantes, self-appointed policeman (i.e. "net coppers," "kookologists") who take it upon themselves to diagnose and redress all breaches of netiquette. I'm not sure whether to call it a personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, impulse disorder, a phobia or sensitivity, or perhaps something akin to Internet Road Rage, but it's a growing problem. We see it in those who would have us believe that individuals who promote on-topic but unconventional wisdom on message boards should be treated like commercial spammers. We see it in Usenet's self-styled "kook hunters" who harass and defame individuals whose views they deem irrational. (This practice is abused itself, with individuals nominating personal adversaries for kook awards without identifying the elements of a view that are supposed to be "kooky"). And now we see it in CALTON [LAST NAME OMITTED], who fears that my activity on the Web is boosting the ranking of my Web pages in search engines. I know, why does he care? You're one step ahead of me.
I wondered how this fellow managed to aggressively maintain a user page about me in which he snuck some libelous contents about my alleged ulterior (motives) for contributing to Wikipedia (i.e. search engine optimization) into the subject field of his edits. I was particularly curious about how he was able to have my drafts deleted from the historical archive. Even in egregious cases of vandalism on Wikipedia, Wikipedia faithfully records all old drafts on an article's history tab. So this was quite a coup indeed. Then I discovered the answer. A Google search of Wyatt Ehrenfels Wikipedia turned up a surprising number of results: 26! For those of you who ever wondered how Wikipedia ranks so highly in a search on anything, this may be the answer: duplicate pages. This is beginning to look like Wikipedia has quite a search engine optimization campaign of its own. Do we really need all these pages (and this is an abridged list) just to indicate that the page about me has been rigged so I can't answer it?
I decided to test my hypothesis that Wikipedia is arbitrary and tyrannical in its application of its policies. I dropped the full name of CALTON into a couple pages in response to his escalating libel. He and his confederates enjoy making it clear to the planet through Wikipedia and Google that the alias under which I contributed text to articles on dreams and cyberstalking is connected to Wyatt Ehrenfels. I was wondering whether he'd wince at the taste of his own medicine. Surprise surprise. Within days my reference to his name was purged from Wikipedia and Google. And then I discovered this in a search of my own name.
Apparently, CALTON managed to find something called the Administrator's Noticeboard, and explicitly requested Wikipedia's authorities delete the references to his name. And his wish was granted. I issued a similar appeal for references to "Wyatt Ehrenfels" with respect to potentially destructive libel from CALTON, but Wikipedia's administrators ignored the request. I can't think of better evidence for corruption at the top.
Probably the worst thing about this kind of (what they call) "net copping," is all the casual judgments made about whether someone's message to this or that forum is on-topic. He used Google to research my contributions to a number of message boards over the years and he decided these contributions were "unrelated" to the forums in which I introduced them ... putting me in the same class as spammers hawking generic Viagra. In actuality, the fellow doesn't know much about my area of expertise and its kinship with adjacent fields. With the exception of one or two errors (i.e. that Business School at Rutgers was a mistake), my contributions to boards devoted to Social Work, Technology Education, Philosophy, Dreaming, etcetera were all appropriate depending on whether I was talking about dreaming, cyberstalking, or my critique of academic Psychology. Not that it would matter if I had been tenuously or tangentially topical anyway. If I composed formal complaints about every message about the War in Iraq posted to any of these message boards, I'd never get anything done.
Of course, when we deal with cyberstalkers like CALTON [LAST NAME OMITTED], we can never be certain that their explanations for their actions are honest, or whether they are convenient rationalizations for some other motive. I suspect the removal of his spurious review of my book by Amazon.com angered him, as did the fact the incident, as depicted on my Web site, was a huge boon to my credibility. But this does not explain why he chose to deface my book's review page in the first place. To this day I have no idea how he even found my Web site, why he reviewed it, and why he meddled in its affairs. CALTON [LAST NAME OMITTED] thinks I am too big for my britches and that the whole world should know it. Exposing arrogance on the Internet is one of his hobbies. CALTON [LAST NAME OMITTED] does not have a psychology education, and yet he complains that a "critical ethnography" of Psychology should come from inside the field and not from an external watchdog like me with a PhD in the field about which I am opining. He even went so far as to suggest despite evidence of my empirical invesigations into dreaming (and lifelong work with dreams) that his opinions on dreams may be worth as much as mine. They may very well be. But I suspect it's more likely that before I came along, CALTON [LAST NAME OMITTED] did not give one thought to dreams. Now he's one of the Wikipedia/Dreaming article's most active editors.
Sure, I understand that my motives as a critic could always be construed as impure, but even if I were "disgruntled," such a perpipheral matter could not be used to discount the merits of the critique. CALTON [LAST NAME OMITTED] does not address even more obvious motives of insiders to protect their own careers and the reputation of their community. You could also never be sure whether individuals like CALTON [LAST NAME OMITTED] really believe that PhDs who do not find tenure-track positions in universities are bottom-of-the-barrell failures, or whether they are just misinformed. Within any academic community, it is well-known that about a hundred PhDs apply for every tenure-track vacancy. Though I suspect the following statistic is inflated by adjunct instructors who do not want to concede defeat, even the National Science Foundation and the American Psychological Association put the percentage of Psychology PhD recipients who find university employment at 35%. The 35% of the applicants selected may be brilliant researchers, or they may just be well-connected, but one thing's for sure: the 65% who do not end up working as professors are not industry rejects. They may even include brilliant researchers whose research interests or methods do not lend themselves to sources of external funding. (Applicants with grant money are given preference). When a faculty search committee can afford to cherry pick its next colleague, rest assured that the favored applicants are consensus-choice candidates who (a) appeal to the lowest common denominator of the department faculty and (b) best embody the field's (and the department's) most normative practices. And there are instances in which a faculty search committee drools at the opportunity to pad its statistics by hiring an established professor who wants to relocate from another university (usually for a higher salary, but in many cases because Dr. No feels he's paid his dues living in Jonesboro, Arkansas). And when it's not who you know or what grant money you bring to the university, it is often what side of the political fence you hang your nameplate on. Proponents of academic standards like David Horowitz are right to discuss the politicization of the faculty search process, with liberal professors hiring professors known to be liberal. I could handle some boss telling me exactly how he wants this or that done if I'm sorting screws for a living. But it's a different story altogether when I am doing something near and dear to my heart. The reason I did not pursue tenure-track employment in a department of Psychology is not so much that I didn't expect to find a position (i.e. NOTE: I didn't expect to find a position), but simply for the reason that I could not abandon my interest in dreams for more competitive research interests and, if I opted to pursue dream resaerch at some risk to my tenure, I could not tolerate being told how to approach dreams and how to conduct my research. If I managed to get that foot in the door, my colleagues on the other side would have had me sorting screws for a living.
CALTON [LAST NAME OMITTED] would have you believe that his stalking is a public service protecting persons from ideas of individuals who are not in the vanguard of the communities they criticize is a red herring at best. I suggest that CALTON [LAST NAME OMITTED], who accuses me of abusing Wikipedia for search engine optimization, is abusing Wikipedia as a weapon of mass defamation. And not just any weapon of mass defamation ... but the perfect weapon of mass defamation. As concerned as CALTON is for my alleged search engine optimization campaign, I assure you that his suspicions are calibrated by the knowledge Wikipedia itself is ridiculously search optimized. And I'm not sure these search engine optimization tactics really lie inside accepted practices. Consistent with its own policies for reporting abuse, Google itself would probably deem the duplicate pages an instance of spam. But unlike CALTON [LAST NAME OMITTED], I'm not going to play search engine optimization police. I have far too many more important (and less murky) things to worry about -- like cyberstalking and character assassination.
