backbone cabal n.
A group of large-site administrators who pushed through the
Great Renaming and reined
in the chaos of Usenet during most
of the 1980s. During most of its lifetime, the Cabal (as it was
sometimes capitalized) steadfastly denied its own existence; it
was almost obligatory for anyone privy to their secrets to
respond "There is no Cabal" whenever the existence or activities
of the group were speculated on in public.
The result of this policy was an attractive aura of mystery.
Even a decade after the cabal mailing list disbanded in late 1988
following a bitter internal catfight, many people believed (or
claimed to believe) that it had not actually disbanded but only
gone deeper underground with its power intact.
This belief became a model for various paranoid theories about
various Cabals with dark nefarious objectives beginning with
taking over the Usenet or Internet. These paranoias were later
satirized in ways that took on a life of their own. See Eric Conspiracy for one
example.
See NANA for the subsequent history
of "the Cabal".