Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 09-09-04 01:18 PM: > It may be the Berkeley Relic speaking in me, but I have often found > "ettiquette" to be the next door neighbor of fascism.
It doesn't ring the same bells for me. I'm fond of Eco's (vague but indicating) characteristics of fascism: 1. cult of tradition 2. luddism/irrationalism 3. action for action's sake 4. anti-critical 5. fear of dissension 6. appeal to the frustrated middle 7. pervasive belief in conspiracy 8. the myopic underdog 9. life is warfare 10. contempt for underlings 11. herophilia or glorification of martyrdom 12. conflation of the biological with the social 13. abstracted (ideal, not real) body politic 14. newspeak And I don't really see a good place to put etiquette. I suppose various colors of it could fall under (1), (4), (5), and (14)... and, perhaps (2) and (8) on a stretch. But, mostly, etiquette is just an attempt to govern based on a minimal, civilized, set of soft rules. Everything anti-fascist can still take place within the bounds of etiquette. But the thing I was trying to point out was that any "standard of behavior" over and above what is possible is easily punctured when the underlying components are simple and easily composed. A great example is a unix shell. An interesting example is, say, RESTful web development. A self-referencing example is the recent discussion of kitchen-sink ABM frameworks. A HowTo on "how to use a wiki" is a lot like one on "how to build an ABM". But a HowTo on "how to build a page graph in a wiki" is much more tenable, even though it's still multivalent. The more specific and concrete you get, the more likely you'll be successful. (... unless your goal is to use large catch-all buzzwords to get people excited without giving them any real tools they can take home with them, in which case you want to be as general and abstract as possible.) A more reflective point about puncturing standards of behavior (e.g. Ikea's recent font change) is that when a subset of the participants _expect_ an easily punctured standard, innovative participants will inevitably be considered rude or as not being "team players". I think this is why the internet intensifies people's feelings that others are rude or obnoxious.... because the internet consists of simple, easily composed things that no matter what organization one chooses for her construct, it will violate some other person's standard. That also leads to a much larger number of "should" statements... "One should never use orange text on a blue background!" [grin] -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
