Editing Mark V. Shaney (section)

==History==
In ''The Usenet Handbook'' Mark Harrison writes that after September 1981, students joined Usenet ''en masse'', "creating the USENET we know today: endless dumb questions, endless idiots posing as savants, and (of course) endless victims for practical jokes." In December, Rob Pike created the <code>netnews</code> group ''net.suicide'' as prank, "a forum for bad jokes". Some users thought it was a legitimate forum, some discussed "riding motorcycles without helmets". At first, most posters were "real people", but soon "characters" began posting. Pike created a "vicious" character named Bimmler. At its peak, ''net.suicide'' had ten frequent posters; nine were "known to be characters."  But ultimately, Pike deleted the newsgroup because it was too much work to maintain; Bimmler messages were created "by hand". The "obvious alternative" was software,<ref name="Harrison"/><!-- whole above paragraph --> running on a Bell Labs computer<ref name="Jillette"/> created by Bruce Ellis, based on the Markov code by Don Mitchell, which became the online character Mark V. Shaney.<ref>Harrison, p. 219</ref><ref name="Dewdney"/><!--authorship--><ref>Dewdney and Pike both credit Ellis alone. Harrison and Jillette credit both Ellis and Pike.</ref>

[[Brian Kernighan|Kernighan]] and Pike listed Mark V. Shaney in the acknowledgements in ''[[The Practice of Programming]]'',<ref name="Practice"/> noting its roots in Mitchell's <code>markov</code>, which, adapted as <code>shaney</code>,<ref>Kernighan, Pike, p. 84</ref> was used for "humorous [[deconstruction]]ist activities" in the 1980s.<ref>Kernighan, Pike. p. 82</ref>

Dewdney pointed out "perhaps Mark V. Shaney's magnum opus: a 20-page commentary on the deconstructionist philosophy of [[Jean Baudrillard]]" directed by Pike, with assistance from Henry S. Baird and Catherine Richards, to be distributed by email.<ref name="Dewdney"/> The piece was based on Jean Baudrillard's "The Precession of Simulacra",<ref name="PikeEmail"/> published in ''[[Simulacra and Simulation]]'' (1981).