Several questions/issues have been raised on Fluxlist recently on which I
would like to offer my views (in several installments). These are simply
the views and perspectives of one Fluxlist participant who has been here
from the beginning.
IS FLUXLIST CENSORED? No. No human being reviews a subscriber post to
FLUXLIST before they are sent out to the entire list (except in the case of
"bounced" messages, discussed below).
WHY ISN'T FLUXLIST "CENSORED?" Simplest answer is because 1. some of us
oppose any sort of censorship on Fluxlist (I am a particularly strong
advocate of free speech) and 2. even when there has been a strong sentiment
to try it--to either start having a moderator or create a second, moderated
email discussion group--no one has been willing to take on the
responsibility/challenge/work. We have never been able to get very far in
figuring out WHO the moderator should be and WHAT sensibilities should
guide them without this necessary discussion breaking down or unraveling
before it gets very far. One person's common sense is another one's
political censorship. One person's obnoxious Fluxlist abuser is another
person's brilliant and amusing hero. I'm not saying that sensible
even-handed moderation can't be done, or that I'm trying to stand in the
way of that (here or on another parallel list), I'm just not clear how we
get there. We've never gotten there.
HAS ANYONE EVER BEEN KICKED OFF/BANNED FROM FLUXLIST? Yes. One
subscriber. Several years ago. It's like we have no censorship on
Fluxlist, but if you go over the line (and that is really really hard to do
here), we just kill you.
WHY WAS THIS PERSON KICKED OFF? They were unremittingly obnoxious and
tedious and self-centered. They were paranoid and angry. They were so
extreme and obsessive that they either had a mental health problem or were
pursuing some sort of bizarre performance-art script (and they did have
some supporters on Fluxlist). It was like dragging a howling lunatic off
the public square and reinforcing his delusion that he is so important and
revolutionary that he is being persecuted. If this is what they were
trying to accomplish, they were a flaming success. I don't really know,
but I suspect that banning one person in six years is some sort of
record-low for this type of an email discussion group. Many FLUXLIST
subscribers, however, probably think we should have banned more people
along the way. FLUXLIST has definitely lost some subscribers over the
years because of its open/un-moderated nature. Getting value out of
FLUXLIST requires patience. Maybe too much patience.
To insure that this person couldn't just re-subscribe under another email
address, and to give us a clean break from this sorry mess, we also set the
automatic FLUXLIST email filters to "bounce" any post that even mentioned
the project and "brand" that this person was relentless promoting.
AHA, SO THERE ARE "FILTERS" THAT ARE USED TO AUTOMATICALLY CENSOR
FLUXLIST! It's pretty benign really. The email discussion group software
we use has various options for managing various aspects of the list. One
option, that only official subscribers to FLUXLIST can have their emails
automatically posted to FLUXLIST was turned on shortly after FLUXLIST
debuted. This was done to keep commercial spammers from automatically
spamming the list (this may have been the only issue on which there has
ever been universal agreement on Fluxlist). The software also allows you
to specify key words that will automatically "bounce" an email from being
posted. If we wanted to insure, for example, that "bad language" did not
appear on Fluxlist we could add words like "fuck" to this filter option and
all posts in which the word "fuck" appears would be bounced from the
list. I haven't looked at the keywords in several years (and I've
forgotten how!) but I am pretty sure the only ones we have relate to the
banned-lunatic episode. This type of censorship/filtering can quickly
become a game where in one tries to figure out ways to successfully
disguise the bounce-able words and get them past the filter.
Another benign form of filtering that is built in to the software is that
any mention of "subscribing" or "unsubscribing" in the begiining of the
email message is bounced to the list administrator. I believe this feature
was added to the software because users of these lists found over time that
messages requesting to be subscribed or unsubscribed from the list were
cluttering up the email discussions so the software is set up to
temporarily filter out any messages that it thinks might be of this
type. Fluxlist is set-up so that anyone can automatically subscribe and
unsubscribe from Fluxlist, but sometimes people forget how to do this or
are looking for a human short-cut and send the request to the list.
WHAT HAPPENS TO THE BOUNCED MESSAGES? The software is set-up to send the
bounced messages to the person designated as being the "list
administrator." The list-administrator has the option to review these
bounced messages (or not) and then to send them back to the list (or not)
with his or her approval. If the list-administrator properly returns the
bounced email with the proper "approval" statement and password, then the
software automatically distributes this email to the entire list. So if a
list administrator is doing his or her job and reviewing all the bounced
Fluxlist messages that are sent to them, then they have at that point the
discretion to select/moderate/censor which of these bounced message make it
back to the list and which do not. This allows the human list
administrator to correct any mistakes the filtering software has made
(e.g., bounced a worthwhile, newsworthy, non-commercial post to Fluxlist
from a non-subscriber, mistakenly bounced a post to Fluxlist that is not
really a subscription/unsubscription request).
People who have taken turns serving as the list administrator for Fluxlist
over the years include Malgosia Askanas, Owen Smith, Joe De Marco, Allen
Bukoff, Sol Nte, George Free (and I've probably forgotten one or two
others, sorry). Sol Nte recently took over as Fluxlist list administrator
from me. I have to confess that I was not doing a very good job of it. I
discovered that if I set my own email client here to filter all the
list-administrator messages into a special folder then they wouldn't junk
up my regular email In-box. The problem was I would then ignore the many
various announcement and bounced emails piling up for days or weeks at a
time and then simply not have the time to go through them properly and do
my job properly (i.e., return to the list the emails that had been
"mistakenly" filtered out; unsubscribe email addresses that were no longer
valid, etc). I got in the habit of ignoring this folder and then simply
deleting all of the emails--sight unseen--periodically. Confessions of a
hapless list administrator.
CLAIMS OF CENSORSHIP. Except for the one person banned from Fluxlist
several years ago and except for emails that have been automatically
filtered out because they refer to the brand this person was promoting, I
no of NO OTHER cases of INTENTIONAL censorship on Fluxlist. I am sure that
there are email messages that have been sent to Fluxlist that have gotten
bounced (correctly or mistakenly) for the reasons outlined above, and that
some of these mistaken bounces were not corrected because the list
administrator was not doing his or her job (that's me), and that this may
be mysterious and irritating to the email sender, but it has been
infrequent, benign and hopefully mostly inconsequential. Mostly no one is
really running the ship. There are more suspicions of censorship than
there has been any real censorship.
I suspect (but may be wrong) that most people on this list are more
bothered by the lack of "censorship" (i.e., thoughtful moderation that
would discourage abuse of the list and encourage more focused and
productive discussions and projects) than by the fact that any censorship
may be going on. That sentiment, however, probably changes the moment one
suddenly becomes the one being censored/edited.
Next post in this series (hopefully)....the successes and failures of
Fluxlist (from various points of view) and its relationship to FLUXUS.
