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Also known as: TINC, there is no cabal
The alleged secret group of administrators controlling Usenet, answered for decades with the phrase there is no cabal, abbreviated TINC. The joke worked because a backbone cabal really had held influence over propagation in the 1980s, making the denial simultaneously true, false, and impossible to disprove. It survives as shorthand for any suspected informal power structure in an online community.
Browse all terms in Culture & History, or see the full Usenet glossary.