C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

An interesting approach to keeping a mailing list, or in-person group, active and desirable. I have noticed on more than one occasion the "bad pushes out good" phenomenon in groups. In a small enough group, which is completely open, the people who I go to see will stop attending because they don't want to be around the people who I don't go to see. Soon, mostly the bad apples and the very forgiving are left. Very few people are willing to un-friend someone, or push someone out of anything. They prefer to start over with some other community. The approach described in the article allows them to start over in the same community. What are your thoughts?

Edited to add: www.calebclark.org went down and the link was broken, so I am linking to the archive on the Wayback Machine. I'm also adding the full text to Caleb Clark's original post, below:

Hot Tubbing An Online Community

Caleb Clark, January 12th, 1999.
Email listservs often parallel in person group growth patterns and grow very fast, too fast. Sometimes this will lead to a situation where pleas to the list have no effect and the list is in danger of degrading into flames and lots of useless noise.

Here’s a proven way I’ve come up with to get a list back on its feet and back to its core misson and people.

In Oakland California there’s a hot tub in the back yard of an early producer of the Grateful Dead. You have to go very quietly along an ally next to his house, and then punch the code on a redwood door to get in. My friend did not let me see the code.

There’s a changing room, a hot tub, a redwood deck, a hammock, and a few small redwoods and plants on a lot behind his house that he never developed. Talking is discouraged. No drugs of any kind are allowed. Clothing is optional.

I have an image of the friend I was with during my visit. It’s burned into my brain. She is quite an attractive woman and was standing buck naked in a light drizzle of warm summer rain. The ex-producer had came down from his house (which is inches from the tub) and they had struck up a conversation.

So here’s this soft friendly 50 something original hippie, fully dressed, talking to this young naked woman, at night, in the rain, beads of misty water dripping from his hair, and her body, and all among redwoods in the middle of Oakland. I just swung naked in the hammock I was in and marveled at the scene. We ended up going into his house and he played some jazz on these new speakers he’d just got. They were 8 feet high, three inches thick, and looked like the Monolith in 2001. They sounded smooth as the slick redwood decking of his hot tub.

Later that night my friend told me about the hot tub. She said it had been around for years and at first there was no gate. But then a few incidents happened. Negative things, like drugs or violence. So a gate was installed with a code. The code was then given out to only a few long time users of the hot tub. They in turn shared the code with close friends they trusted. Eventually the code would spread over the years and something negative would happen. Then the code would be changed again. This had happened a few times in my friends long experience with the tub.

I took this over to email mailing lists and thus we have “hot tubbing”.

When a list gets too big, has too many flames, and won’t respond to cries for sanity from it’s core members, hot tub it by doing this:

1. Send out a well subject headered message saying something like: “in 24 hours this list will end. A new list will start up. The new lists’ address will be given out at local meetings in person only. If you want to start your own local list, please do so. We are sorry for the this but this list can no longer support the number of people on it.”
2. Kill the list.
3. Start a new one.
4. Give out the address at an in person meeting.
5. Your core group will immediately subscribe to the new list and email out their close friends the new address. In a few months you’ll have a good list again, albeit much smaller.

We need a new term for a particular blogging/tweeting phenomenon in which internet crowds form sides and square off for a smackdown. Opposing cultures are exposed to each other by the web, are shocked and appalled, and express more and more shock, claiming greater and greater magnitudes of hurt, used to justify worse and worse behavior, culminating eventually in threats or stalking. The most recent example is springing up around Penny Arcade Dickwolves Debacle which resulted in speakers cancelling their appearance at Penny Arcade Expo. (Of course there is an obligatory timeline to collect links to the drama.) There have been several such phenomena in recent years. Some have called them "Fails". That doesn't seem to express what it is. But it seems most likely to catch on.

Very few of us are likely to join triggered trauma victims in their emotional cave-- other than those with an automated guilt reflex. I mean, it is just not going to happen. I wish there were no victims of grievances stuck in a cold, dark, joyless mental place, with padding on the walls so that it's a safe space. But when they are, there seems to be nothing the rest of us can do about it except join them there. A "trigger"-- that event for which a "trigger warning" is issued-- is not just a case of hurt feelings. It is a brain event similar to a panic attack, which grabs the traumatized person by the hindbrain and shakes. Imagine living in an entire world made out of knives. You never know when you're going to get cut. That's what it's like.

In extreme cases we are talking about literally avoiding the entire humor genre. That is not an exaggeration, interpretation, or straw man. That is exactly what the words say in the blog post which (next to the Penny Arcade cartoon "The Sixth Slave") forms one of the twin centers of the controversy. Shaker Milli A offers me the stark choice of conforming my emotional world to the limits of her trauma cave, or look her in the eye and say "I do not care about your rape". Well, put like that, we have clearly discovered how much I care about your rape. We cannot co-exist in each others' social environment. If we accommodate each other, we will both be indescribably poorer for it. It appears we must walk away from the negotiating table.

I'm male, white, cisgendered, heterosexual, non-obese, abled, non-bullied, non-anxious, non-depressed, non-traumatized, and pretty much all-around non-oppressed. This comes with a long list of privileges. I don't really like the word "victim" associated with me. I also possess no automated guilt reflex whatsoever. The rare occasions on which I am capable of the emotion of guilt about anything, it is based on evidence, not social pressure. Then I set it right if possible. If there seems no way to do so, I don't think about it any more, so I am free of the pressure, if not the knowledge, of guilt. For me, guilt does not involve anything larger than me, such as society, the world, humanity, identity groups, demographic segments, or culture. I don't want a cookie, or a trophy: I have no interest whatsoever in whether I am deemed sufficiently liberal.

I said all that to head off any outraged surprise from activists down the road. If that's a problem for you, you might wish to unsubscribe from me on social networks. You might also wish to stop attending the cons, gaming groups, and other locations I frequent, in order to avoid me. Some of you already have, which makes those places dramatically better, because I don't want them to be a padded cave. If you want a dirge instead of a celebration, you have better options for your recreation dollars.

There are other victims who have elected to cut non-victims a lot of slack. For that I thank you, and admire you. I follow and read oppression-related links, when my friends post them, and have become gradually less ignorant. If you have a social justice grievance at a con, and a solution to suggest, and if there is a cause-and-effect relationship between your problem and your solution, bring it up. (For instance, there is certainly such a thing as a terrible rape joke, or murder joke. Pretty much any tragedy joke can go too far or be used in the wrong context.) But the cave is not an option.