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

[Michel Bauwens]

I essentially agree with all you write below, and in the context of your
'behaviour' here, would believe your statement that any brusqueness would be
for the right reasons,

I agree, conflict is essential, civility only concerns the form in which
they are expressed, its sets rule of the game..

As with any rules, when they hide other realities, players are justified to
disgard them,

Michel

On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 2:15 AM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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>


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