Banned from Boing Boing?

This was posted here yesterday. I took it down after a few hours because I wasn’t sure the the proper intent was behind it and that it simply didn’t add fuel to the fire. After receiving a couple of e-mails about it from people who saw it (here or on feeds) and then saw it was gone, I’m going to put it back up with this note. It is important to note that I have been quite a fan of Boing Boing over time and have generally believed that they were doing all of the “right” things when it came to blogging and documenting the state of things on the net, especially the battles over copyright and the like. That is part of what has been this whole issue so much of a lightning rod for people, including me. We thought that Boing Boing was better than this sort of thing and feel a bit let down.

There has been an Internet “tempest in a teapot” during the last few days over at Boing Boing, the well known group blog that includes Cory Doctorow. (For those that don’t know it…) This has to do with San Francisco sex blogger and columnist Violet Blue noticing that all references to her have been removed from the blog. This is over 70 references according to her and go back several years in posts that mentioned her blogging or writing.

For the first day or so, Boing Boing ignored this, seemingly pretending nothing was happening. Any questions about it in comments on posts were quickly deleted (I had this done to me). Only after the Los Angeles Times and other high profile outlets started asking questions (Valleywag doesn’t count) did they make a post publicly mentioning it but they still refuse to say why they did it. That post has now, I believe, turned into the most commented post ever on Boing Boing. In the midst of all of this, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, the paid moderator for Boing Boing, and the commentors started going at it hammer and tongs with Teresa insulting people (later deleting or editing many of these) and deleting comments left and right when she didn’t like this.

I pointed out the following earlier:

and I now find myself (and my IP address even) banned from posting comments on the blog. No official explanation or notice was given, my ability to post comments now simply returns “An error occurred: Permission denied.” from the posting script and attempts to make a new account to post tells me that my IP address has been banned. Hmm… I would think a warning or even an e-mail would be in order?

I don’t blame the core Boing Boing writers for this sort of behavior but it does make me question the “moderation” of their paid moderating staff who attack the very community, with some rather unfriendly and confrontational language, after inviting that same community to comment on the post about the larger issue. Somehow, I doubt if I’ll be submitting too many more links to Boing Boing in the future. This is too bad as I was quite happy to see on of my posts on their front page a little over a week ago.

Update: I’ve had e-mail with Cory, who is on vacation and, I guess, staying away from the mess which is Boing Boing on this whole issue. He said that there is no reason why my IP address would be blocked and CC’d Teresa on his response. She has unblocked it (which she said was the fault of an assistant moderator who “is still a little shaky on IP addresses”). No word from her, in response to a direct question, about my seeming banning with no notice or explanation so I expect that I still won’t be participating on their site anymore. I’m still receiving an error message any time I attempt to leave a comment on any Boing Boing post.

I did appreciate the following comment posted by “Lizzle” near the end of the giant ass thread in respond to one of the true believers. She reiterates the issue that I touched above to how the “moderation” by Teresa, who is paid to moderate Boing Boing, affects the readers and, therefore, the overall community on the blog:

#1115 posted by Lizzle, July 2, 2008 4:38 PM
@ #1084 - How would you know what’s “normal” for BB if this is the first thread you’ve ever posted on? Are you claiming to be a lurker for years and this is your first post?

I didn’t want to post here yesterday when this all blew up, because it seems fairly clear that it’s all about something unpleasantly personal. It’s been bothering me all day, though, and some of the things said by mods and extreme BB enthusiasts in the comments thread in particular are really disquieting.

Antinous, among others (is GregLondon a mod or just a TruFan? He seems very personally invested in the whole thing), have expressed the opinion that those who don’t comment here regularly can’t possibly be familiar with BB or have a sense of the ethical values that the site has espoused in the past. Teresa has just descended to ad hominem dismissal of people making comments as “nonsense”, “stupid” and “blockheads” - it’s a form of rhetoric she uses distressingly often when someone disagrees with the status quo, and in threads other than this one. I don’t comment here often; the moderation policy and the choice of someone with such an abrasive tone as chief moderator it has, in particular, made me feel uncomfortable. That said, I’ve been reading daily for long enough (I’d estimate six years or so - you’ve published some links I’ve sent in on occasion too) that the comment section still feels extremely new to me. (I also notice that among the mods, Takuan seems pretty much absent from this thread; and that among the contributors, Cory has also been very quiet.)

All this - the general comments policy, the mistake (you can’t deny, given the number of people who have felt moved to post negatively here, that it *was* a mistake) that sparked this discussion off, the sense that those who don’t comment aren’t welcome - simply makes me feel more and more disengaged from a site that I used to read daily. It also feels disingenuous to represent BB as a simple personal blog; you’re the third most popular blog on the Internet, you attract some big-money advertising and you’re looked to as a good example of how to manage a certain kind of really important, *good*, liberal content. Readers do have a stake in BB outside the free milkshake analogy, given that (more) advertisers are (more) willing to pay you (more) if they see you have a large readership. (My own blog recently grew a Google PageRank point, and I’ve watched the queries from advertisers and revenues grow as a direct result.) Some people here have been very dismissive of the notion that breaking backward links is against the whole sense of a wonderful networked, searchable Internet world that readers here like to imagine we inhabit, but I find the breaking of those links to be a really uncomfortable precedent, especially here at BB. We all have a sense of what this site stands for.

I think it’s absolutely delightful that BB has fans who are dedicated enough to post such impassioned defences of policy to those who have disagreed with what happened over the Violet Blue thing. I wish I could feel the same, but my own engagement with the site has been dribbling away in recent months, especially given some of the moderation decisions I’ve watched being taken. The Violet Blue disaster and the generalised snippiness about the value of discourse with people who aren’t regular commenters just alienates me a bit more (the mods’ opinion and attitude here is, for me, intimately associated with the opinion of those who write the blog and with my understanding of the blog as a whole - I can’t possibly be the only person who feels that way). I feel a bit like someone who is arranging to gradually see less and less of a friend she used to get on with but doesn’t really want to see much any more; it’s a shame. What happened to whuffie?

I must also add this limerick, found on metafilter, which seems to sum things up nicely:

A blogger named Violet Blue,
considered by some taboo,
last year or last night,
was erased from the site…
The official response was “Who?”

Update for 7/3: Teresa responded after two e-mails on the issue (the second one after 24 hours or so) and she cc’d the entire Boing Boing staff. In response to my stating that her lack of response after a day was just fodder for the blog, she stated “You’re now threatening me and Boing Boing because you didn’t get your answer instantly? That’ll play well.” My immediate reaction to this kind of thing is “And they pay you to actually moderate a public blog site?” Wow. I didn’t realize pointing out that this kind of thing is blog fodder was a “threat” (and not just to her but to ALL of Boing Boing!). I mean, seriously, when I’m bitching about being banned on Boing Boing, the fact that the moderator, after responding on one issue, then blows me off for a day is likely to wind up being mentioned here. It looked pretty willful to me since she responded within ten minutes on the other issue when Cory e-mailed her.

Olympic Protests Continue

As you can see above (or here), the Olympic torch route is continuing to have protests. This is footage from Katmandu of the crowds of protesters there. It is shameful to see Nepalese police kicking Buddhist monks (though not surprising in a protest situation).

It seems unlikely that the situation leading to the Beijing Olympics is going to calm down at any point. It makes me wonder if we might see incidents at the actual olympic events. I do hope that the Chinese don’t go completely overboard in their response to protests but the recent events in Tibet make it seem pretty doubtful that restraint will be shown.

Collapse or Change?

I’ve been reading quite a few books that could be loosely gathered together into “Sustainable Living” (or, I prefer, “Mindful Living”) and “Peak Oil” stacks.

I read Dimitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse when it came out a few weeks ago. Orlov’s core argument is that the United States is likely to undergo the sort of collapse that the Russians went through during the 1990s in the near future. He draws analogies between the situation there, economically, culturally, and politically, and the situation in the United States. He also writes quite a bit about the way things are different here (and not usually for the better). Many Americans are probably blissfully unaware of just how bad the former Soviet Union got during the years following its fall. Food shortages, no hard currency, little economy at all, etc. Orlov makes a strong point that the Russians were well served by their history of relying on their own gardens for foods, by their mass transit (which kept operating), and the fact that since housing was largely state provided and a right, people were not generally evicted into the streets to die in the winters.

In comparison, most Americans (and I number myself among them in most ways) would be at a loss if grocery stores were no longer supplied with food on a regular basis. Hardly anyone grows any of their own food. At my house, R has a small garden but it is only really started to develop in the last year. With the recent subprime mortgage crisis, I think people here are painfully aware that we could all easily wind up with no place to live in a bad enough depression. I have a mortgage, like many here, that is expensive and only really maintainable with two incomes. The days are gone in urban areas (at least the ones with functional economies) where one can simply buy a home outright. Heck, you can’t even buy land for cheap anywhere near a city. With the price of gasoline over $4.59 a gallon here this last week, owning a place outside of urban areas could also easily become suicide. R and I are fortunate, in one sense, that being on the Oakland/Berkeley/Emeryville border, we’re right in the middle of an old urban area. We have BART a mile or so away and the main Amtrak station for this part of the East Bay is a mile the other way.

I also read Farewell, My Subaru, which is a book by journalist Doug Fine on his attempt to build a local lifestyle for himself in the Southwest. He bought a house on rural property within 20 miles of a town but without any development other than other ranches and their houses. He installed solar panels to power his well pump (and later his home, I believe), got a truck to run on biodiesel, and began raising chickens and goats. While the book is written in a fairly light tone, and often for laughs, he makes it clear that he was completely unprepared for this sort of lifestyle change and literally had no idea what he was doing when he started. He’s found it valuable (and he maintains a blog that is ongoing about it) for the quality of life it promotes for him, especially being mindful of the food he’s growing and the lives of the animals that he’s raising.

The third recent book is the novel by Howard Kunstler (best known for The Long Emergency) called, “World Made by Hand. This depicts a post-Peak Oil world in which both Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. have been separately destroyed by terrorists which, combined with huge economic problems and then a depopulating flu epidemic, effectively push the United States back into something closer to the 18th century than the 21st. The protagonist is a former computer software exec who moved to a small town in upstate New York, only to watch his wife and daughter die to disease (along with much of the town), his son run off when grown, and generally civilization shrink to a day’s walk in any direction. I think Kunstler depicts an overly harsh scenario (much of it wouldn’t be possible as he writes it without the flu epidemic) and I think that in a significant collapse scenario, a lot more order and communication would be maintained. As we all know, many people would probably happily work under draconian conditions in return for order, shelter, food, and water if things got bad and I think of that as the most probable worst case.

Reading all of these books (and a few others) together puts me in a rather reflective frame of mind about where we are going in this country and how to plan for the new 20 or 30 years. Orlov doesn’t give much practical advice other than showing that doing some preparation (like having a garden) is a good thing for any disaster scenario but he makes a strong case that much of the preparation is mental. The people that did the worst in the Russian collapse were those who were unable to adjust, especially middle aged men, who then simply drank themselves to death over time. Having a flexible mindset can do wonders.

I do believe that some of the Peak Oil scenarios are quite real possibilities. Do I think the country will descend into unceasing anarchy? No, but I do think we could easily see the likes of the Great Depression here with people on the street, bread lines, and forced agrarian labor to raise the food that we currently import from the rest of the world. I think the era of the car is over, no matter what, and we’re simply beginning the tail end of it now. Gas prices are not going to head the other way. That hasn’t happened since the 1970s. The rate of increase seems to be going up, especially now that we’re hitting record oil prices and oil sources are tapering off sooner than expected. I fully expect that the days when you could afford to drive your car across the country, as many of my friends have, or even to fly to another country, may be ending for those not of the richest classes. With the complete neglect of our rail system over the last 50 years, this leaves us with few alternatives, outside of boats, for long distance travel during the next few decades. I think that sort of thing will end with a whimper and taper off though. We’re not going to wake up one day in the near future without oil but where will you go when it is $25 or $40 for a gallon of gasoline?

All of that has very real effects on the larger economy as it begins to occur. Cheap goods shipped in trucks all over the country are no longer going to be imported from overseas. Since I work in technology, I wonder how my work will be affected. I can work from home (and already do a few days a week) but if the economy slows down enough, will I still be employed to do so? When I do go to my office, it is 45 miles in each direction, something that I’ve already been troubled by during this last year.

I also wonder what will happen in large urban zones like the Bay Area if the economy heads in a bad direction for long enough. There are many many people here already living in very marginal situations. There are real ghettos here and a lot of working class people who are just getting by. How are they going to react to these circumstances? What do people do when forced to choose between, for example, buying gasoline at $10 a gallon to get to their job or using the same money to buy food to eat?

I try not to be all doom and gloom about this and I don’t talk about it often with my friends because no one will have any answers. I do think that all of this is quite real. The books just bring it home to me even though I’ve been thinking about aspects of this for at least 16 years. What I do recommend to people is to cultivate local relationships and connections. Get to know the people in your area. Attend local events or take classes at a local school or center. Learn hobbies that are both interesting but also useful, perhaps even fulfilling as well. Don’t build your life around driving to see people who are an hour away and learn to do some things for yourself. Most importantly, think about these things so, if they do come to pass, you are able to roll with the punches and adapt to the changes that life brings. Even if people are somehow wrong about these changes, all of these things would serve you well.

Update: I am apparently wrong about gas prices only headed in one way (up) since the 1970s. A friend of mine sent me this explanatory graphic after a quick search: