Originally Posted by roachboy

i have looked at the new board a few times.
i dont get it.

i dont see any particular social experiment going on there: the space seems mostly about the notion that there are no rules--but there are rules--there are obviously rules--there are rules in the hierarchy that administers it; there are assumed rules in the divisions between forums; there are rules that shape how and what people write.
there are always rules.
the political question is not rules yes/no, but what kind of rules and who is going to be able to shape them.

the problem seems to me that "anarchism"--direct democracy--has been confused with anarchy (no rules) in a particularly bourgeois way--the assumption seems to be that the absence of top-down hierarchy (the way americans in fact have their lives run, even as they like to pretend that things are otherwise) means that there are no rules at all. in the absence of rules, people get to trot out their inner bonehead. they feel all trangressive and even (bizarrely) liberated because they can be stupid in a freer way. that they reproduce cliche after clilche, social type upon social type in their free expression of whatever seems not to cross anyone's mind. so it's "woo hoo, i can tell x to fuck themselves: the revolution is surely upon us all."

if there is a demonstration/experiment happening, the point of it appears to be to show that folk cannot govern themselves. well, that's one of them: the other appears to be to provide other folk the oppotunity to laugh as they demonstrate that they cannot govern themselves. but the set-up is such that this is the outcome you want.
"here is a little experiment. there are no rules."
well, if there really are no rules, then there is no experiment.
how do you define an experiment without rules?


direct democracy is about the ability of a collective to directly shape all aspects of their social world. the collective decides what the rules will be, how they will be implemented, what will happen to those who violate them, and most importantly when and how these rules will change. if you want to go that route, then make the structure and origin of the board explicit and set up mechanisms so that folk who participate can access mod positions and enact structures collectively.

i have been doing improvised music for many years now. often folk think that improvisaton means no rules. that isn't at all true--there are always rules--you reproduce them continually, in your style, in your note selection, in the phrasing, in allusions, in your compostional logic. what improvisation does is puts you in a position of being able to tamper with/change your relation to these rules. but you can be sure that you wont tamper with or change much of anything if you are not aware of what it is that you are doing before, during and after you perform--at the more or less political level. the trick is to combine this self-awareness with a radical openness in the space of the performance.

so far, what i see happening in the anarchy space is a version of what raymond queneau criticized about surrealism:

they trade enslavement to a set of rules they knew about for enslavement to a set of rules they didn't know about.

i dont see much of interest in watching that be performed.
i find it depressing.