[p2p-research] Jimmy Wales against on-line culture of violence

[Andy Robinson]

I've not had any reasons to complain about moderation here, it's things
which have happened on other lists which have basically got me to the point
of not posting much to elists and forums at all anymore.  The problems have
been of two very specific types: the first is when people treat me in an
insulting way and I respond in kind, and the second involves having to deal
with people with explicitly oppressive views in areas about which I have
strong feelings.  Sometimes it's just a matter of rash reactions on the spur
of the moment, but I also believe strongly that there is a right to
interrupt a dominant discourse when it is operating to exclude or silence,
and that the oppressed have a right to be angry about oppression.  I have
found this stance running up against what I consider to be empty obsessions
with form and appearance on numerous occasions.  When faced with certain
kinds of oppressive discourse, I really cannot respond "civilly", it would
cause me tremendous inner pain to try to hold back; the choice is either to
respond forcefully or to leave the discussion (and usually the list).
Because of a lot of clumsy, heavy-handed, or sometimes downright biased and
oppressive moderating, I've basically gone from a position of contributing
frequently to a wide range of elists to generally avoiding doing so.  I've
also seen it from the other side, from trying to moderate on lists I've set
up myself or been invited to co-moderate.  I felt the ease with which one
can change members' status, ban people, etc creates a great temptation to
abuse power which I myself have had to resist in cases where someone is
annoying me.  The point being that I was able to resist the temptation only
because of a strong ethical position of anti-authoritarianism and because of
my own bad experiences with other people acting the way I was tempted to
act.

The  transcendentalist idea of a situationally-nonspecific set of
speech-prohibitions tends to operate in the opposite direction, to
de-inhibit or even to encourage abuse.  I don't have a problem with people
trying to stop overtly oppressive speech-acts (racism for instance), or with
trying to stop obviously off-topic discussions, or commercial spamming, or
even blatant trolling.  But I disagree with the idea that it should be taboo
to engage in conflict (verbal or otherwise) simply because it is conflict.
Mediation of conflicts is more ethical and more effective than prohibition
of conflicts.  It is also extremely well established that speech-norms vary
greatly across communities, and that there are some fairly common
psychological conditions which alter communicative social action
drastically, including causing people to unknowingly insult others or to be
unaware of and unable to internalise conventional niceties.  Talking to
participants (on-list or off), establishing why they're reacting in certain
ways, is absolutely crucial here.  But the dominant impulse today is to
apply a very dangerous rule- or taboo-based approach which looks at whether
technicalities of external appearance match some previous schema of the
observer.  Of course the observer ends up thereby reproducing the
transcendent standpoint of the despotic-signifier or the sovereign.  Hence,
the point can't be to enforce some general code of proper speech; the point
has to be to pay precise attention to the power-dynamics and social
relations emerging in each situation, so as if possible to transform a
conflict into something more productive, or if that is not possible, to
identify oppressors and oppressed so as to be taking sides based on the real
(rather than fantasmatic-ideological) content of the situation.  The whole
problem would quite possibly disappear if people were more broadly
culturally literate and better at reading the relational content of
situations.  But there are very strong discursive forces supporting
inappropriate ways of relating to conflict.  Actually, I think that conflict
has replaced sex as the central taboo underpinning socio-psychological
repression in contemporary capitalism.  So we have to be very careful to
treat with caution any statement which seems to reproduce such taboos.
There are skills which can make people less conflictual conversants, but
there are also skills which can make people better mediators and better at
holding temporary 'leadership' positions without slipping into
authority-modalities.  I doubt we'll ever reach a situation where everyone
participating in discussions online has the former set of skills, but with
appropriate ethical dispositions, it might be possible to reach a point
where respectable and credible moderators have the latter set of skills (or
where processes of user choice are able to favour those who do).

bw
Andy
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20100102/f2d309f6/attachment.html>