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Black Mass was born in 1963, the brain-child of Jack Nessel, who was the Drama & Literature Director at KPFA in Berkeley, the first voluntarily listener-sponsored non-commercial FM station in the world. (The BBC was compulsorily supported by a government-imposed license system.) Jack suggested the idea to Erik Bauersfeld, who taught aesthetics and philosophy at the California School of Fine Art, and had recently begun to do readings of classic and modern literature for the station. Erik was not wildly enthusiastic, but thought that it might be interesting to search out some of the best stories of the supernatural by first-rate authors who did not normally write within that genre. Obligation soon became obsession.

Will the Chinese people rise above cyber-vigilantism and use the Internet to build a just and fair society governed by accountable leaders? Or will the majority be be happy to wield their new-found powers of online speech in random fashion? That's really up to them. People like Liu Xiaoyuan and Yang Hengjun and a number of others have been raising such questions. It's hard to know whether people beyond the elite intelligentsia will pay attention to such concerns. This is why the suppression and censorship of Cultural Revolution history in China is so dangerous. If people could freely write and debate about what happened under Mao, history would have less chance of repeating itself.