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here's something strange (and maybe offtopic, but tant pis, there have been worse problems): tfp is more anarchist than the anarchy forum.
you can look at this thread as a type of collective deliberation about the way tfp operates--so as an experiment in collective self-management. if self-regulation means anything in a netformat, it'd look like this thread does--sometimes messay, sometimes annoying, but nonetheless getting to a sense of how the machinery operates, what the informal power relations are within that machine, how the rules get formulated and implemented, etc.. folk are talking as a community about the community. and in the main, they are taking that talking as a community pretty seriously. that's not so bad, despite the small waves of pissiness that course across sectors of it.
hal is in a curious position in all this, and i find the ways in which his responses have worked here to be very interesting---the tension is real between being the guy who set this machinery up and put it into motion as over against the way in which the community that has taken shape within that machinery has evolved and devolved and evolved---and i understand the conflicts that run through his posts between these two poles--the sense of ownership as over against the sense of putting a structure in place and letting that structure influence a community that itself now, in significant ways, runs the show. it's an interesting example of how the tension must work for him alot of the time--and for myself, i think it is being managed quite nicely. perhaps not with absolute elegance at every moment--but who is absolutely elegant at every moment about a complicated matter that affects them personally? i sure am not. are you?
putting a process of self-regulation into motion does not mean that there are no problems--it is about the ways in which those problems are addressed. so if the fact of this thread has meaning in itself, it is probably mostly about the underlying good health of the community as a community--even as folk disagree about this or that.
that seems to me something important, and something that should be said. so there it is.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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