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Phoenix666 writes:

The Kernel reflects on the Anarchist Cookbook and its legacy in the Information Age:

The Anarchist Cookbook is largely a book of recipes—for drugs, for explosives, for trouble. It contains directions on how [to] make LSD and tips for growing magic mushrooms. There are sections about constructing bombs out of fertilizer, putting bombs in mailboxes, and “how to send a car to Hell.”...

The Anarchist’s Cookbook‘s proliferation initially spread only as far as people who were willing and able to physically sell it, limiting its reach mostly to independent bookshops and hand-me-downs from knowing older brothers. As the book rippled across America, a pair of Duke University graduate students in the late 1970s were figuring out how to link their computers together into a new kind of network.

Using homemade modems, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis created a decentralized system called Usenet that plugged into the ARPANET, a precursor to the modern Internet linking a handful of universities across the United States. Usenet functioned like a bulletin board service where users could post messages for each other. It started by linking Duke with the nearby University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, but it quickly grew exponentially.

Truscott and Ellis called it the “poor man’s ARPANET.” Getting a computer to hook into that network took upward of $100,000 and the explicit backing of a major research institution. Usenet, on the other hand, only cost as much as a computer that could run the Unix operating system, a modem to get online, and however much the telephone company charged for the time spent online.

Since 9/11 The Anarchist Cookbook surfaces in the public discourse every 5 years as new journalists rediscover it and write breathy articles about its ties to threat-to-civilization-du-jour. At the moment, that's ISIS. But even before the Internet there was as much information in the US Army Field Manual about how to build IEDs and booby traps as there was in the Cookbook. Now with YouTube, Instructables, several billion other how-to sites and files, and even Mythbusters, most nerds and geeks would say any one work is irrelevant--the meme's the thing.

So if suitable, common materials and the information to assemble them into weapons are ubiquitous, it would seem the missing ingredient that transforms them into realities is motivation, and the more you motivate someone the more they create the reality you would like to prevent. Food for thought...