Godwin's Law

1990

Date: August 1990 · Place: Usenet, primarily talk.* and soc.* newsgroups · Figures: Mike Godwin, attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation · Tags: Usenet, The First Internet Law 01. The Observation Mike Godwin, then 34 and working as an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, posts an observation to Usenet in August 1990: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. He is describing a behavior he has watched repeat for years on the discussion networks of the pre-web internet. Godwin will later say in interviews that he posted it less as humor than as a meme deliberately, an attempt to put a name on the pattern that would slow the pattern down. He invented the term for what he was creating; he wanted users to think twice before reaching for the Hitler comparison. 02. The First Internet Law It works imperfectly. The reductio-ad-Hitlerum reflex outlives Usenet, outlives the discussion networks of every following decade. But Godwin's Law itself becomes the first widely-acknowledged internet folk-law, taught informally to new users for 35 years and counting. It is also the first internet meme in the Dawkins sense to be designed by its author to do a specific cultural job. Godwin's Law is, in its original 1990 sense, a memetic countermeasure to a worse meme. Mike Godwin is a memetic engineer. "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." — Mike Godwin, Usenet, August 1990 Sources • Mike Godwin, Wired (October 1994): 'Meme, Counter-meme' • Wikipedia, Godwin's law