By Austin Bunn

[Don Saklad]

Sent To: ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom List
         <alaoif (a) ala1.ala.org>
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Via
[http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1999/03/03feature.html]
...[[Salon]]...

...

...-----*Molotovs and mailing lists*

21st image When bomb-throwers target e-mail discussions, no one can
escape the carnage.

BY AUSTIN BUNN

*I*t starts, as usual, with an argument about tone -- in this case,
vibrato. Back in December 1994, Katherine Nagel watched the
Early-Music mailing list erupt for the umpteenth time into
"The Wobble War," over the use (and abuse) of vibrato in medieval
music. "Mild-mannered effete snobs" turned into "raving lunatics," she
says. It was "truly vicious."

Fed up with the race-to-the-bottom routine, she posted a curt,
sociological summary called "The Natural Life Cyles of Mailing Lists."
According to her theory, all lists went through initial stages of
"enthusiasm" and "evangelism" that rapidly spiraled down into
"discomfort with diversity," and then to "stagnation,"
"smug complacency" or (if you're lucky) "maturity."

She missed one critical step between "discomfort" and "maturity" --
spontaneous combustion. Not all mailing lists go through it, and even
the bad cases usually survive. But more often than not, a single
person lights the fuse.

Take a close look at the wreckage and talk to survivors, and it's
evident that mailing-list flare-ups are the handiwork of agent
provocateurs determined to pump the bellows. They want to take your
attention hostage and jam your mailbox with their agenda. At best,
they're a kind of online performance artist trying to expose some
elusive truth; but at their worst, they're rogues waging list-serv
terrorism.

How else do you explain the exploits of "Mediafilter," who hijacked
the Nettime list-serv -- a high-brow art and academia mailing list --
by subscribing all its readers to a doppelgänger list from which no
one could unsubscribe? Or "Antiorp," a gender-bending culture jammer
who ritually mail-bombed the same Nettime list with thousand-line,
crypto-poetic screeds against "korporate fascist konglome.rantz"? Or
Kerouac biographer Gerald Nicosia, who list members say argued so
voluminously against his detractors on Beat-L, the Kerouac fan list,
that it went under?

For their part, the apparent aggressors call their work "art," social
experimentation, even self-defense. And sometimes it legitimately
is. Pinning them down, though, is beside the point. They're already a
confusing mix of impulses: puritanically close readers, conspiracy
theorists, composers of annoyance. Often, they're so high-strung the
only thing they seem to do well is snap. But as victimized as they
might feel, the traumatic effects of their actions can't be ignored.

Levi Asher, webmaster at [[Literary Kicks]]
[http://www.litkicks.com]
and one of the Beat-L peacemakers "who got shot at," says he signed
off the list for a few months "to save my sanity." That's serious
language -- and it's getting more serious all the time. On Feb. 19, a
San Francisco judge heard the case of a $500,000 defamation suit filed
by Nicosia against Diane de Rooy, a member -- or assailant, depending
on your perspective -- of the erstwhile Beat-L and the new
Subterraneans-L, who published a critique of Nicosia on her
[[Web site.]]
[http://www.aol.com/kerouacult]
The judge has requested more time before ruling, leaving the case in
limbo.

Certainly, the Net is no stranger to flame wars and toxic
personalities. Entire books -- like Julian Dibbell's
[["My Tiny Life"]]
[http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/books/1999/01/22books.html]
and "Lineland: Mortality and Mercy on the Internet's Pynchon-L
Discussion List" -- have been built out of online civic
meltdowns. What happens when a list falls under siege is
well-documented (and if you don't know already, you will). But what
are these loose cannons after? And, perhaps more urgent, is there any
defense against them?...
[http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1999/03/03feature.html]

...

...*N E X T_ P A G E* .|.
[[Mailing-list moderators dodge Molotov cocktails]]...
[http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1999/03/03feature2.html]

...

...MOLTOVS AND MAILING LISTS | PAGE {{1}}, 2

*T*he best barrier against such attacks -- having a human moderate the
list -- is often the first casualty. On Nettime, Ted Byfield works as
the list arbitrator, "approving" every post before it goes on to the
list's 1,050 subscribers. When Antiorp began the avalanche of
art-spam, Byfield initially screened out just some of his/her 10
~daily~ missives. As moderator, he had already received complaints
from readers about Antiorp's obtuse and logorrheic posts.

Eventually, Byfield began screening all Antiorpisms out to save time
and "subscriber patience." But once notified, Antiorp went
"ballistic," says Byfield, sending hostile mail and alerting the
list's service provider, Netcom. Days later, Antiorp fudged headers on
some mail to impersonate Byfield on a separate list. Byfield promptly
unsubscribed Antiorp from Nettime, but he says, "For all I know, it's
subscribed ... It does use a number of pseudonyms."
(Attempts to contact Antiorp were unsuccessful.)

Moderating mailing lists is not only hard work but, as the case of
Mediafilter shows, it can be easy to sabotage. Last fall, Paul Garrin
(aka Mediafilter) conducted what he then called an
"electronic disturbance" on Nettime. First, he got the entire catalog
of Nettime subscribers by querying the list's electronic administrator
"majordomo" with the command "who nettime-l." He then created in one
fell swoop a new "Netttime.free" with the same member list. The first
post announced, "Welcome to Nettime.free, the renewed, UNMODERATED AND
OPEN revival of the Nettime Community."

The only catch was that the majordomo address didn't allow the new
members to sign off Nettime.free. One observer christened the new list
"Nettime.asshole."  Garrin claimed his experiment was intended as
"comedic parody," a commentary on list moderation itself.
"Rerouting Nettime was a staged 'exercise' as an 'operation' using an
emotional trigger," Garrin then wrote to the original Nettime along
with a disingenuous apology. His experiment had lasted a whole three
days. When approached for comment, Garrin wrote, "Come back to me with
some interesting questions and I will address them."

Short of forcibly ejecting people from public lists -- which, in the
era of disposable e-mail accounts, is pointless -- the slyest method
for keeping people in line might be some custom software designed by
the folks at [[FringeWare.]]
[http://www.fringeware.com/]
Paco Xander Nathan, the head of the Austin, Texas, alternative
bookstore and moderator of the FringeWare mailing list, has developed
an application to cripple e-mail accounts. "When I get tired of
somebody's antics, I'll just make their data pipe slow," he says.
"Not slow enough that they realize they're being squelched, but
[enough to] keep their e-mail feed bouncing slightly" and to drop
messages. (Fortunately or unfortunately, the application is not for
sale.)

Users often have an even simpler solution: mail filters. When TR-L,
the private mailing-list for the [[Technorealism]]
[http://www.technorealism.org/]
movement, grew overwhelming with long, deconstructionist postings by
new media consultant Mark Stahlman, some members rigged their e-mail
software with "bozo filters" to bury his posts in subsidiary
folders. Brooke Shelby Biggs, a writer and one of the TR-L members,
says it wasn't so much a matter of disliking her TR-L colleague but
feeling that the conversation (of 20 posts a day) had swung hopelessly
out of balance. "It gets this way on every list I've ever been on,"
she says. "Someone comes in and tries to throw a Molotov cocktail on
the list -- it's like trying to reason with someone who has a weapon."

But that's the tricky knot of the problem: Often these provocateurs
have something essential to contribute, but the sheer wattage of their
energies endangers the connection they're trying to create. Where
Biggs sees a weapon, Antiorp sees performance art, Mediafilter sees
social critique and Stahlman sees a hidden agenda needing to be
exposed.

"Stahlman strives to uncover the deeper truth in any situation," says
author Douglas Rushkoff, another TR-L subscriber. "It is his purpose
and intent to reach into a discussion and then open up its can of
worms. But once all the worms are out, it's almost impossible to talk
about anything at all."

Stahlman himself cops to his ambition to "strip bare the assumptions"
in a given situation. But he stresses that "real" conversations about
technorealism were held live, and that the list was an "internal
planning list" and also a kind of "a hoax" which had "an agenda for
doing things ... which was never made explicit." (With TR members
shaking their heads over his reportedly 10,000-word posts, one wonders
what the live conversation about Technorealism must have been like.)

If Gerald Nicosia carried a weapon on the Beat-L, it's because, he
says, he felt surrounded by them. The 300-person Beat-L was created in
1995, and hummed along peaceably for a year until Nicosia joined the
list. At that point, the list exploded regularly -- like "a civil
war," says Levi Asher -- in fights between Nicosia and a handful of
detractors who disputed his work as literary executor of the estate of
Jan Kerouac (Jack's daughter) and as Kerouac biographer.
(Nicosia authored the book "Memory Babe.") It was an impossibly
convoluted controversy, with ridiculous nastiness to match.
"How long did your father jerk off in a flower pot to raise a blooming
idiot like you?"  one member asked Nicosia. List creator Bill Gargan
got fed up and dumped it in February 1998.

By most accounts, Gargan, a librarian at Brooklyn College, mediated as
well as he could. He moderated the list, reduced the number of maximum
posts per day (from 100 to 50), tossed off some of the most aggressive
Nicosia attackers, even negotiated with Nicosia by phone.
"Gerry is very combative and confrontational -- and the whole thing
mushroomed," says Gargan, noting that Nicosia would reply to each
critique with a 10-page letter addressing every point. "I just didn't
need all the aggravation." Nicosia, in his defense, says he was
"outnumbered."  "Three or four people would each be making a dozen
posts a day," he says. "There is no way you can keep protesting -- you
just can't keep fighting it."

And certainly, nobody could keep reading it. Still, the conflict
continued in the Subterraneans-L and got sillier even as the stakes
shot up. Nicosia detractors claimed he was responsible for marketing a
"Kerouac blanket" now sold at Restoration Hardware (Nicosia laughs off
the charge). But when Diane de Rooy, a technical writer and sometime
journalist, published a scathing critique of Nicosia's work on a Web
site and announced it on the list, Nicosia initiated legal recourse
against her in August 1998.

How do you cope with a list terrorist who feels terrorized himself?
You sign off. That is, perhaps, one of the most brutal lessons of
riding out the rockier patches in mailing-list metabolism: The only
way out is to abandon ship. "[Beat-L] was like a tarbaby," says
Asher. "And there were people who became very emotionally invested in
the fight and didn't want it to stop." But a deeper truth is that list
members also fall in love with the controversy. Asher aptly calls it
"co-dependency." It's also a kind of electronic rubbernecking, where
the misfires and cattiness are an essential part of the show.

Inevitably (and mercifully), the curtain falls. John Sampas, the
Kerouac literary executor, had been a longtime member of Beat-L, but
in secret. For his first and final posting last November, he posted an
unpublished poem by Jack called "Psalm" to the Subterraneans-L, and
left the list. It reads, "Like steel/I will be, God, growing harder in
the forge-fires, grimmer, harder, better." It ends poignantly: "Strike
me and I will ring like a bell." It's as if Kerouac himself were
hardening himself for the flame war to come.

For the feuding and clanging factions on the list, the post resonated
deeply. Sampas' offering seemed to call for some "maturity," as
Nagel's "Natural Life Cyles of Mailings Lists" would put it. By now, a
small peace has visited Subterraneans-L -- perhaps because both
Nicosia and de Rooy are off the list. But that doesn't mean the
critiques have stopped, says Asher: "People now complain that it's
boring."
			   *SALON | March 3, 1999*

[[Austin Bunn]]
bunn (a) feedmag.com

writes for the [[Village Voice]]
[http://www.villagevoice.com]

and is an editor at [[Feed Magazine.]]...
[http://www.feedmag.com]

...

[http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1999/03/03feature2.html]
[http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1999/03/03feature.html]