Wyatt Ehrenfels to Transfer Ownership of fireflySun.com

If I were responsible solely for my own safety and prosperity, I would continue to endure these pressures as I have done the past 4 years. But it would be irresponsible for me to assume this burden with the safety of others at stake. And while this blog registered many successes, I have to acknowledge that my leadership has failed you.

More to the point, I could point to more than one occasion on which I did not manage this blog correctly in the face of hostility. But you should know that my poor decisions were made when I most needed to keep together the people whose support and whose comeraderie I cherished. And I feel honored that nearly all of you including those of you whose affiliation with this blog is not public knowledge -- Alice J., Paul T., Jimmy F., Sandy W., Lisa M., and Mike W. -- decided to lock shoulders and persevere along with me.

The bottom line is that they win. The Internet has not yet evolved beyond its Wild West, and I suspect it will be another five years before the groundwork is laid for significant change. Until that time, those willing to go the extra mile to impose a price on the freedom to blog will always win out over the bloggers. As you recall about a year ago, one of the cyberstalkers obtained the credit card number of a person whose criticism of Psychology we featured on this blog, and that credit card number was used to authenticate a fake negative review of my book on Amazon.com. This review was difficult to remove because of the credit card authentication. I decided to solicit positive reviews from individuals who had informed me at some point that they enjoyed the book (two of you included), and I submitted these reviews to Amazon.com from my own IP address to pre-empt what was shaping up to be a deluge of fraudulent defamation. At the same time, I wished to protect the identities of the individuals who enjoyed the book (again, two of you included). While I do not find anything inherently wrong with this decision, I agree that it suffered from a failure to imagine the consequences. A good chess player is able to see many moves ahead. Unfortunately, I never developed the temperament for chess. My submissions naturally all came from the same source address, and so when Amazon.com removed the spurious negative reviews at my request, they removed the recent positive reviews along with them. This prompted my cyberstalkers to depict the action as evidence of fraudulence on my part. In other words, I played right into their hands. And it wouldn't be the last time.

And then there's the matter of the whole cyberstalking news page. As a social psychologist I took an interest in working into this blog a separate but related mission to improve the climate of free speech on the Internet. As one of you wrote so eloquently in a recent edit, there can be no freedom where there are inequities in privacy. As cyberstalkers exploit their tools and knowledge of the Web to wrestle the privacy from their victims while remaining indefatigably anonymous themselves, they can impose a price on the free speech of those whose opinions or personalities they do not like. I remember grappling with the pros and cons of using fireflySun.com, and not an independent web site, for the cyberstalking initiative; and to this day it remains unclear whether I made the right decision or whether I can be faulted for the loss of our communications officer.

I believe the cyberstalking news page had a paradoxical effect on our operations. An analysis of our logs reveals that on the one hand it is immensely popular and receives a treasure trove of referrals from search engines. Other advocates in the fight against cyberstalking have even worked some of our own language into their arguments, as evidenced most clearly by a CNN interview with kindred victim Jayne Hitchcock. It is also unclear given all the visits from legislators on Capitol Hill how much of a role if any our documents played in the passing of federal legislation that imposes stiffer penalties for cyberstalking. Still, this legislation is more one small step for man than any giant leap for mankind. I was hoping for something tough and ruthless, but in the end I think we ended up with rough and toothless.

And this is all above and beyond the covert influence we have enjoyed on psychology majors around the country. However, we have paid a price for our visibility. Therefore I think it is important that we put distance between fireflySun.com and its original authors. In other words, move on. Based on preliminary conversations with the new owners, changes to fireflySun.com will be gradual in the beginning, with a signature style expected to emerge in 2-3 months. There was a lot of excitement about the breath of fresh air into critical psychology, which is why I'm beginning to think more and more like this is a blessing in disguise. I believe we've reached a point where the web site will move further under a "new administration," led by someone with a PhD in clinical psychology. Critics of the web site should be pleased that this gentleman has more of a moderate voice, his rhetoric should not be too sentient for anyone's palate.

The irony in all this is that the opposition to this blog (even in its current form) does not represent mainstream academics or professionals. Most academics and professionals believe there is more than a kernel of truth to this blog regardless of how they feel the truths are embroidered. But they understand that like most political discussions, some zeal, some metaphor, and a pinch of satire is needed to drive home points about something as obscure as academic policies. And they understand the blog is by no means a broad Scientological condemnation of mental health delivery. Of course they understand that the "professional trappings" as they like to refer to them do not require the same degree of sacrifice and adjustment from all graduate students. They understand some people have to sacrifice more than others. And they understand quite well that the science of certain phenomena also has to suffer. Naturally, it depends who you talk to. Some students are practically poured into their desk chairs, their temperament and interests perfectly suited for the pursuit of external fundung. The physiological psychologist studying dreaming in a laboratory will be hostile toward my proposition that we have been moving in the wrong direction with dreams. Other professors however have demonstrated that they can be quite receptive to my assessments. So generally what you have is a situation in which most academics agree with a "different majority" of statements on this blog, many endorsing points A, B, and C while others endorse B, E, and F. But because this blog is so big, there is something on this blog that just about every professor could disagree with. I don't think there's a single statement that draws disagreement universally, but many professors seem to require 100 percent agreement before they publicly endorse a blog. And even then, they are unlikely to publicly endorse anything that they don't believe would secure the same full endorsement from their colleagues.

And believe it or not, that's not unreasonable. In fact, it's brutally reasonable. Unlike most of us, the vast majority of professors work the same job in the same building with the same co-workers all their lives. You upset any of these colleagues, life can become quite unpleasant for your assistants and proteges, and that's if you have tenure. And you know that if you are forced to seek a "change of setting," you will be competing with somewhere between 80 and 200 applicants for every tenure-track vacancy. And in this kind of job market, your odds of being cherry-picked drop to subzero if you can't find 3-4 former colleagues willing to write that you can walk on water. Even then, one cannot rule out instances in which a cautious university will put some rather direct questions to a former colleague selected at random: a question such as "how did you get along with your colleagues?"

So let me make this clear. No one is going to lose a job because of fireflySun.com. No department of Psychology will close its doors because of fireflySun.com. And I wouldn't have it any other way. No one understands these facts better than psychology professors and psychologists, which is yet another reason why, despite the fact so much has been said about this blog behind closed doors, so few profs or therapists feel the need to write me or address this blog publicly. You will occasionally find exceptions to this rule, profs or clinicians whose identity is wholly bound up with the community's public face. My criticism may get spirited in places, not unlike the kind of feisty debate you witness on sports message boards ("what do you mean Favre is washed up!!"); but seldom does fireflySun.com name names, owing to the fact the criticisms address policies and not people. Only in rare instances do we address individuals by name, but these are standard bearers whose standing in the discipline is not only secure, but celebrated -- individuals whose approaches typify certain conventions or ideologies. My point here is that we don't put anyone down, we don't kick anyone when they're down, we don't drag anyone's good name through the mud, and we don't disrupt anyone's life or livelihood. Even in defensive reports -- reports that take up the harassment of fireflySun.com -- we do not identify anyone by name and by our most recent check, a Google search of any one of these names does not call up a single document from fireflySun.com. And again, I wouldn't have it any other way.

I think the only universal criticism of our blog is that it does not present anything positive about Psychology and therefore misleads readers that this educated blogger feels universities should chain-lock the doors to their psychology departments. I can understand this criticism, but I thought it was clear that I loved the subject matter and that I love it enough to imagine better ways of serving it. In other words, I want the same things for the discipline that the academics and practitioners want. And there's enough constructive and solution-oriented discussion on this blog to demonstrate that. Nevertheless, had I remained on as executive producer, I would have been receptive to new content suggestions had anyone been willing to offer any.

Nevertheless, I am not proud that we have occasionally flirted with the wrong way to deal with cyberharassment. But when the library or book store hosting your presentation receives a phone call from an imposter seeking to cancel the engagement, you occasionally find yourself in a defensive posture. I'd like to walk away at this point, because the only actions available to me would only inspire others to new heights of aggression. But if I can't walk away, if the blog or anyone connected to it feels a material interference with their personal or professional lives, we have no choice but to seek relief. But this is not what we were ever really about. While I can understand why an entire news page devoted to cyberstalking could within the context be perceived as a hostile act by those who have been harassing our blog, it would be more accurate to say that we at fireflySun.com like to get in on the ground floor of issues or mysteries we consider important. I have experienced enough of a vivid dream life as a child and adolescent to reach a point where I feel dreaming is one area about to which I believe I have much to contribute and, it just so happens to be a phenomenon about which so little is known. Similarly, having logged in enough experiences as a victim of a new phenomenon (cyberstalking), I believe I have something of importance to share there as well. This is not about punishing anyone, because no one knows more than I that this is not possible unless you're willing to go the whole nine yards with law enforcement or the court system. And unless you really need that, trust me ... you don't really need that.

Cyberstalking has become an inherent risk of all communication on the Web. But having built a blog we feel is comprehensive, we believe we can afford to take a step back and let someone else take the lead. After all, if no one else would be willing to do so, than we have failed in our original mission. Will taking a step back cool enough tempers? Probably not. I'm sure there will be some hardened adversaries who will continue to approach us like paparazzi approach celebrities. I would be the first to admit that we do not warrant anything near that kind of attention. I say this because I know no one has ever really been threatened by this web site. I mean, only one individual has ever come forward to claim that any of my reports posed a threat, most likely because they are written to avoid materially impacting the people who seek to materially impact this blog. And my host service verified that I accommodated this person even though I had not violated any law or terms of service. And this is West Host we're talking about. Not Go Daddy!

So we feel we've done more than enough up to this point. We don't name names. We avoid getting dragged into flame wars, and we will continue to appeal to individuals to cease dropping links to our pages in news groups (something that apparently requires periodic reminders). We also do not endorse the practice of developing web sites or web pages for the sole purpose of portraying this or that named individual in an unflattering light. I don't care who you are, what side you're on, or how far to the limit you think you've been pushed.

This cyberstalking is by no means part of the give-and-take of Web communication. We have a reputation for refusing to engage those who threaten or libel us. And those who have engaged in such behavior have never clarified the nature of their opposition to our blog or attempted any criticism of our ideas. In fact, we maintain only a defensive position with respect to content we put up on our web site for the benefit of our readers. If we feel our readers may find this or that about us in a Google search of "J W Ehrenfels" or "Operation Firefly" we address it on our web site. We do not address it in the unmoderated news group or web-based forum that it originated from. And we do not address the source of the defamation by name. In an era where someone's reputation, business, employment, and safety can be compromised universally and in perpetuity through search engine vandalism, we have maintained that there is a need to defend ourselves from those who want to use the search engines to suppress or punish our freedom to blog.

Some cyberstalkers who can't seem to resist the urge to review our Web site on a semi-daily basis choose to view our harmless defensive reports as provocations that invite them to even greater heights of stalking.

So in a nutshell, I intend to transfer ownership because the risks have reached a level that none of us could be expected to manage. I don't feel right about leaving you with the stress and responsibility of an embattled blog. I intend to transfer ownership because over the next year the demands on my time and limited access to a PC will make me more difficult to reach and will limit my ability to manage new incidents. I also intend to transfer ownership because I do not need to be perceived as fanning any flames at a time when federal intervention has become a bona fide possibility. (Personally, I think we're a few years away, but I'm encouraged that people in the right lines of work are at least taking a scholarly interest). And lastly I intend to transfer ownership because I have reached a point of diminishing returns in what I have to offer this blog. I have been transfering knowledge to this blog for five years now, refining, packaging and re-packaging; and I've reached that point in the product development life cycle where I need to withdraw to develop new knowledge. What I really want to avoid is falling into that trap a lot of artists and even academics try to break free from, the one of spending the balance of one's life or career recycling that one good idea.

I expect to finalize arrangements with the new owners by the end of the week. I recommend the new owners continue to use West Host's contact information as their registration data and I will see whether there is a way third parties can verify that ownership has in fact changed hands, though I am confident that this will obvious a few months down the road. When I return, don't be surprised if I approach you with the idea of collaborating on a new project.

I'll do now what I've noticed is traditional in valedictory remarks. I will wish everyone well, even those who sought my destruction. I think there is reason for everyone's spirits to lift, but before I embark on my new adventure, I need to exhale about five years worth of CO2, kick back with a Miller product of some kind, and catch the last two innings of the BoSox.

A Message from the New Owner

Hello, this is Dr. S. J. Adams and I am the new owner of this site. I am a licensed clinical psychologist, as well as a researcher and program evaluator.

First, I would like to offer some comments on the departure of J. Wyatt Ehrenfels. I have read his announcement, linked above. At a minimum, Wyatt presented a challenging voice to a field unwilling to challenge itself. This was needed, and appears to have had some impact.

Another achievement is that this webpage ranks between 6th and 10th on a Google search of "psychology news" (ranks apparently change periodically). This is significant. It means that this site and the ideas here have a very good chance of being read. In a world where the number of websites has only begun to explode, this is remarkable.

However, it may also speak to just how much in shambles the field of psychology is. Taking nothing away from the quality of this site, a review of other sites in the top 10 search of "psychology news" shows poor competition. If psychology wants to be taken seriously, there should be many top-quality websites that offer news, commentary, analysis, research, area for discussions, and so forth.

Psychology cannot wait for academics or politicians to advance the field. Millions, if not billions, of dollars over the past 100 years have been poured into psychological research or public mental health systems. Where are we? What can we point to and claim as a great scientific achievement? To be sure, there are achievements, and good ideas. But they exist in isolation, with no connection to a larger science that has identified fundamental principles and produced widespread effectiveness.

Psychology, at best, is a rudderless ship whose hull is leaking and masts are aflame. However, the field is not yet doomed. The damage can be repaired. But it will take those interested in its success to work outside the main channels of psychological thought as they currently exist. The creation of this website by J. Wyatt Ehrenfels has achieved this.

In terms of the direction of the site, all current pages will remain. However, I will somewhat redesign this page (although there will always be a link to this page as it stands today) and create new pages. My goal is to make this the #1 site for psychology news and commentary. Wyatt's creation will not go away, and will require only one click to find. But mine will come from my own focus and perspective on the field. To the extent it differs from Wyatt's, so will the website.

Stay tuned...the best is yet to come.