The trouble started on May 21, around 5:30 p.m., when Jeff Nelson lost his connection to the VegSource Web server. Perplexed, he called his technical administrator -- who had just discovered to his own shock that he, too, could no longer control the machine. Next, the front page of the Web site disappeared. Then, with dismaying inexorability, the rest of the site's content began to vanish. Finally, the guts of the server's operating system imploded. To make matters worse, the Nelsons discovered that, for reasons beyond their control, their site hadn't been properly backed up.

VegSource had been destroyed. But by whom?

The Nelsons don't know exactly who assaulted their Web site, and despite the involvement of the FBI and the hard work of their tech admin and ISP, they may never know. But they have a pretty good idea: They believe the culprit is a gun advocate who disapproved of the Nelsons' banning of gun discussions from the message boards at VegSource.

For the three weeks before the attack, the Nelsons and VegSource had fought a running online battle with a group of vociferous pro-gun ideologues intent on disrupting debate at VegSource and harassing the Nelsons. According to the Nelsons, not long after they started deleting what they considered inappropriate posts to their message boards, they began to receive obscene phone calls and threatening e-mail. They saw their own physical address and phone numbers posted to message boards at pro-gun sites, along with threats to send the Nelsons a destructive computer virus. At one site in particular, "Tom Bowers' Politically Incorrect Machine Gun Pages," aka "Subguns," the message board participants reveled in whipping each other into a frenzy of anti-vegetarian and anti-VegSource fervor.

Submachine gun groupies on the warpath against animal-loving vegetarians? At first glance, it looks like just another wacky slice of Net life. And we haven't even begun to discuss the role of talk show host Rosie O'Donnell in all of this. Or the pistol-packing vegans popping out of the Web woodwork. Or the attack on Subguns itself by demented white power racists hailing from a Web site devoted to Adolf Hitler.

But to the Nelsons, the loss of three years of work -- three years of interactively created content generated by an entire community -- isn't in the least bit ludicrous. Instead, it's a depressing indication of where the Web is headed, mid-1999.

As the Web matures, it reflects ever more closely the stresses and shocks that radiate through the offline world --- and its edges seem to sharpen. The VegSource trauma, for example, was a direct outgrowth of the Littleton high school massacre. Increasingly, the Web is where people are turning to voice their outrage and act out their passions in the wake of galvanizing current events.

At the same time, the Web is accelerating the creation of ever more specialized "communities of interest" -- gathering places for more or less like-minded people, united by their love for dairy-free diets or Thompson submachine guns. These communities are fast becoming online tribes. Which means that what happened to VegSource may represent something more than just run-of-the-mill social friction: It could be a sign of burgeoning online tribal warfare.

Next page | Machine gun-toting "black hats" shoot it out with "wacko hippy veg loons"