Molotovs and mailing lists

Molotovs and mailing lists: By Austin Bunn. When bomb-throwers target e-mail discussions, no one can escape the carnage.

By Austin Bunn

Mar 3, 1999 | It starts, as usual, with an argument about tone -- in this case, vibrato. Back in December 1994, Katherine Nagel watched the Early-Music mailing list erupt for the umpteenth time into "The Wobble War," over the use (and abuse) of vibrato in medieval music. "Mild-mannered effete snobs" turned into "raving lunatics," she says. It was "truly vicious."

Fed up with the race-to-the-bottom routine, she posted a curt, sociological summary called "The Natural Life Cyles of Mailing Lists." According to her theory, all lists went through initial stages of "enthusiasm" and "evangelism" that rapidly spiraled down into "discomfort with diversity," and then to "stagnation," "smug complacency" or (if you're lucky) "maturity."

She missed one critical step between "discomfort" and "maturity" -- spontaneous combustion. Not all mailing lists go through it, and even the bad cases usually survive. But more often than not, a single person lights the fuse.

Take a close look at the wreckage and talk to survivors, and it's evident that mailing-list flare-ups are the handiwork of agent provocateurs determined to pump the bellows. They want to take your attention hostage and jam your mailbox with their agenda. At best, they're a kind of online performance artist trying to expose some elusive truth; but at their worst, they're rogues waging list-serv terrorism.

How else do you explain the exploits of "Mediafilter," who hijacked the Nettime list-serv -- a high-brow art and academia mailing list -- by subscribing all its readers to a doppelgdnger list from which no one could unsubscribe? Or "Antiorp," a gender-bending culture jammer who ritually mail-bombed the same Nettime list with thousand-line, crypto-poetic screeds against "korporate fascist konglome.rantz"? Or Kerouac biographer Gerald Nicosia, who list members say argued so voluminously against his detractors on Beat-L, the Kerouac fan list, that it went under?

For their part, the apparent aggressors call their work "art," social experimentation, even self-defense. And sometimes it legitimately is. Pinning them down, though, is beside the point. They're already a confusing mix of impulses: puritanically close readers, conspiracy theorists, composers of annoyance. Often, they're so high-strung the only thing they seem to do well is snap. But as victimized as they might feel, the traumatic effects of their actions can't be ignored.

Levi Asher, webmaster at Literary Kicks and one of the Beat-L peacemakers "who got shot at," says he signed off the list for a few months "to save my sanity." That's serious language -- and it's getting more serious all the time. On Feb. 19, a San Francisco judge heard the case of a $500,000 defamation suit filed by Nicosia against Diane de Rooy, a member -- or assailant, depending on your perspective -- of the erstwhile Beat-L and the new Subterraneans-L, who published a critique of Nicosia on her Web site. The judge has requested more time before ruling, leaving the case in limbo.

Certainly, the Net is no stranger to flame wars and toxic personalities. Entire books -- like Julian Dibbell's "My Tiny Life" and "Lineland: Mortality and Mercy on the Internet's Pynchon-L Discussion List" -- have been built out of online civic meltdowns. What happens when a list falls under siege is well-documented (and if you don't know already, you will). But what are these loose cannons after? And, perhaps more urgent, is there any defense against them?