Happy Birthday, Liberty Round Table!

It was twelve years ago—not this date, exactly, but this day, if you follow the distinction I’m drawing—that the Liberty Round Table was born.

It was Lobo’s idea, encouraged into existence by Wendy McElroy; I just happened to become his friend at the right time to volunteer to help design and build the web site. I had no idea what I was doing, and this was well before the advent of WYSIWYG site-building software (none of which have ever lived up to that promise, in my experience) or CSS. So, the original site was full of the kinds of things that most netizens would find garish today: differing backgrounds, differing font colors for certain pages and for emphasis, and lots of little graphics that slowed load times back in those days. Each page was built by hand. I bought one book as a tutorial, and it was quite helpful—but the best suggestion it gave was to view the source code from sites that did neat things, in order to learn how to do them oneself. So the book got put up on the shelf, never to be opened again ...

We launched the site on election day intentionally; we wanted to present alternatives to the electoral circus that is largely a sham at any level higher than county. We hoped to energize the freedom community, to inspire others to stop griping about the lack of freedom and instead to start doing freedom. And now, twelve years later, here we all are. I had no idea how much that one “Yes” would change my life. Of course, by that time I was an anarchist—Lobo wanted someone who grokked his message to work with him on the site—but I think our collaboration on that project helped romantic feelings bloom into a full-fledged partnership. We called LRT our child; later that became modified to cyber-child, as we became parents to two snolfs [SNake + wOLF, you see]; but LRT is still considered our first child in some ways.

The Liberty Round Table expanded my horizons in other ways, too. We—not just Lobo and I, but the group in aggregate—attracted a fair amount of attention in the online pro-freedom community. It was because of our notoriety that I became an editor at Free-Market.Net ... and I think ‘most everyone knows where that trail led, so I shan’t repeat it today. Through LRT I met Claire Wolfe, Wendy McElroy, Vin Suprynowicz, and Elias of The Mental Militia ... I’d already known L. Neil Smith, but through LRT and TLE our friendship expanded and deepened ... I learned of, and in some cases got to know personally, Victor Koman, Jim Hogan, F. Paul Wilson, Victor Milán, Peter St. Andre, Rick Tompkins, Boston T. Party, and so many others. Less-known names, but at least of equal importance to me, include The Hunter, Mama Liberty, Carl Bussjaeger, Dan Wiener, Ilo Jones, Don Doig, Bill St. Clair, Russmo ... this list could also stretch on and on. And there are many others who I know prefer to remain anonymous, but whose commitment to liberty and personal friendship I treasure.

Lobo and I started “The Liberty Channel”, an offshoot of LRT which was intended to be an online interactive community of freedom lovers. The most that came of that endeavor—before our utterly inept ISP crashed and burned—was a series of live, online interviews coupled with chat fora that featured some of the above, and also interesting think-tank people like Bumper Hornberger. Sadly, with the ISP crash we lost all those interview files ...

Inspired by that success, we hosted a VirtualCon—online, realtime interviews with a lot of sci-fi authors (many of the above, and more, such as J. Neil Schulman, Brad Linaweaver, Bob Boardman, and W.T. Quick) as well as pro-freedom academics, including Vin, Chris Sciabarra, Ken Schoolland, Mary Ruwart, Fred Foldvary, Peter McWilliams, and Sheldon Richman. I think we have at least one CD of those interviews around still.

From these projects, and inspired by the interest in them, we launched Doing Freedom!, an online ‘zine devoted to exactly what it says—but with a twist: we wanted to build a profitable venture for all involved. We paid our writers, with funds generated by subscriptions to the content and from investors. In retrospect, I think our model was ahead of the curve; we were unable to sustain sufficient growth to keep the venture going.

The ripples of LRT are still working in my life. From many of the people named above, I’ve met other interesting folks, mostly online but sometimes in person. From meeting Kirsten online via FMN and her private space exploration web site, a friendship sparked that has deepened and grown over the years—and which has led to my meeting many more lovers of liberty. Bureaucrash is a project that is thoroughly in the LRT style and which I wholeheartedly support, even though I’m too much of a fossil to feel comfortable there these days. Through ISIL’s purchase of FMN, I became aware of the Liberty English Camps and have had the privilege of teaching at one camp in Lithuania, and a sister project in Georgia. One of those students is now working on getting the LRT site updated and active again ... a fitting circle, I think.

All this—and so much more: more than I could ever stream from mind to fingertips to tell you all about—from a single decision to be a web mistress, twelve years ago. So don’t you dare try to tell me that our small steps are necessarily of little consequence. And I’ll try to remember this tale when I’m feeling down and ineffectual. :)

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