Democracy or Anarchy?

I was reading through Boingboing and came across this post about Republicans trashing the Second Life Headquarters of John Edward's campaign.

I smirked, thinking shit happens then giggled at my own pun and didn't think much else until I ran into this post in Pandagon. The shit's really starting to hit the fan now thought I, before devolving into a puddle of giggles again.

Then finally, I read the source of Boingboing's post, by John Brownlee of Wired and found myself nodding in agreement with him.

Basically, Edward's Second Life HQ got defaced with "a feces spewing obscenities" and other stuff. Brownlee's assessment of this is absolutely accurate: "This is the modern-day equivalent of hippies freaking out the squares."

I'm 40 something years old, and have been involved in the internet for about 20 years now. I went from BBS's to MUD's to MMORPGs to Blogs to whatnot. I've chatted with people from Greece, Texas, Malaysia and I love this messy thing we call the internet. Should there be rules? Probably. Do we take ourselves way too seriously in things like Second Life? Probably. Should events like what happened to Edwards' HQ be punishable? Probably, but not through conventional means. These guys who committed the defacing should probably be exposed to as many hours as it took to deprogram the assault, of say... Buddy Hackett's crooning.

That should count as an eye for an eye.