h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well... I've been away from h2g2 for a couple of weeks, and on returning I discover that all hell has been breaking loose again. I don't normally get involved with the internal politics of h2g2 - life's too short, and I've got better things to do with mine - but the banning of LeKZ left a nasty taste in the mouth. So I feel that I can't, in good conscience, let this rather sordid affair pass without at least commenting on it here in my journal, in this quiet little backwater of the community.

Pretty much everything I want to say has already been said a hundred times over by other people... Personal feelings as well as principles have been involved on all sides, and I don't presume to have any final judgement on an event that, as I say, I wasn't around to witness first hand. I didn't know LeKZ, and I have no particular axe to grind - except, perhaps, the libertarian one. I might also add that I have a healthy respect for h2g2's editorial and community staff, whose efforts in keeping this site going for two years, under often very trying circumstances, are probably not always sufficiently appreciated by community members, myself included.

If there is draconianism here, it comes from above - from the Holy Beeb, who now set the rules around here, of course... and, as their (albeit reluctant) guests, we can hardly refuse to obey those rules without expecting to suffer the consequences.

But, yes, there *is* draconianism here. My understanding of the LeKZ situation is that she received her lifetime ban for a third offence, after an initial suspension followed by a final warning. The general consensus among the chattering classes of what we might call 'Middle h2g2', seems to be that she had been 'making trouble' for some time around here, and that therefore her departure was if anything long overdue. A closer inspection reveals that the first two offences were questionable, to say the least - a matter of rigid interpretation of the House Rules, rather than fair and consistent application - and that, by the time of her third 'bookable offence', LeKZ was consequently no longer in a position where she was likely to be given the benefit of the doubt.

(Go to Lucinda's page @ http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/U129960 for links to the relevant discussion threads, where the original - putatively offensive - postings were made. Scroll down Lucinda's page to his / her journal entry for mid-July - the relevant links are there, along with a more coherent synopsis of events than I've been able to deliver here.)

LeKZ had also, by that point - by virtue of what we might call a rather unconventional personality, and, what shall we say, a somewhat *diverse* way of expressing it - evidently succeeded in antagonising a number of the more conservative h2g2 community members, to the extent that it was pretty much a matter of time before someone managed to pin something sticky and sweet-smelling onto her. (I'm not talking about the Community Team, here, by the way - they were simply doing their job, as I say, in difficult circumstances. And, if I understand correctly, one of them has been personally quite hurt by these events. I'm referring to the interfering do-gooder who insisted on 'translating' that now-notorious self-censored text message of LeKZ's, when it was frankly better for all concerned had it been left as the author intended. But she was sufficiently unpopular with enough people by this point that, if that one particular solid citizen hadn't done what they did then some other like-minded individual probably would have taken the opportunity sooner or later.)

So we have a situation where one of the community's more interesting and creative (and, perhaps, somewhat troubled) members has been banished, forever, without hope of a repeal. I take the view that if a community is worth anything at all, then it should function as a haven for the inclusion and support of creative-minded individuals, rather than narrow exclusion of eccentrics / heretics / nonconformists. Without wanting to sound ridiculously melodramatic, a lifetime ban sounds a little bit like the death penalty, in that it makes the same basic assumption that a person is incapable of change, incapable of learning from their mistakes and wrongdoings - incapable, in a word, of ever reforming and becoming a useful, productive member of a society. These are the sorts of conditions that narrow-minded reactionaries across Britain would like to see applied to people like the Bulger killers. I come to places like h2g2 to get away from that sort of thing.

The whole affair puts me in mind of an (admittedly rather smaller) incident a couple of months ago, when a Freedom From Faith Foundation (h2g2's sceptics' forum @ http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A254314 ) member got on the wrong side of the law for making a daft crack about Christianity. I remember thinking, at the time, how much better it used to be when we were able to *see* such postings for ourselves, and pounce on them ourselves, without having to have them safely moderated for our 'benefit'. Okay, the odd dumb comment slips out here and there, as it does in real life. And, as also tends to happen in real life in discussions between rational, intelligent people, the dumb comments tend to be picked up on by others, and corrected, and in this way the group slowly evolves an ability to self-correct the bulk of its own folly. After all, as a rational person, one knows that to earn the respect of intellectual equals, one has to try to avoid being taken for an ill-informed fool by them.

A small number of researchers are leaving the site, of their own accord, in sympathy with LeKZ. Others have boycotted the site temporarily as a protest. I'm personally inclined to do neither - my presence here is so minimal these days as to render a boycott pointless, even if I were persuaded to go to such a length. But the main reason why I no longer use this site very often - and can no longer be bothered to make the effort to do such things as contributing Guide entries - is this increasing officiousness, and the feeling that whatever one does around here there is someone looking over one's shoulder, examining it for ungoodthinkful content. I'm sorry... but I Just Don't Like It.

People *will* leave under such conditions - are, I think, already doing so - and, worse, the ones who go will tend to be the ones who have the most to say, and the most to contribute. Because they are the ones who need the leeway of free speech most of all, and they are the ones who feel its absence most keenly. And those people tend to be the ones who are most capable of self-regulation - that's why they believe in it so strongly, because they know that it *works*. Take a look, for example, at the personal spaces of Freedom From Faith Foundation members and check how many of them (including me, I don't mind saying) have contributed high quality articles to the Guide. My prediction is that those articles are going to start drying up. The smarter people will leave, because - well, because they can, because they're smart enough to be able to find somewhere else to carry on their discussions...

Anyway, I'm not the sort of person who wants go out there and try to change the world. I prefer the Thoreauvian approach to civil disobedience - that is to say, the individual's first responsibility is to their own conscience, and to find a reasonably honest and decent way of living in the world. I'm not going to join in the main thrust of this argument, which seems to be petering out now anyway. I'm just going to quietly post these observations and then take a step back, keep an eye on events here but - more importantly - see if I can set about finding somewhere else (on the Web, or elsewhere) that comes closer to matching the hopes that I once had for this place. Or maybe I can fall in with a group of like-minded people somewhere and start helping to actually *create* that place myself. Because it certainly isn't going to happen here, not with the way things are around here nowadays.

Maybe h2g2 would have been better off just closing down after all, at the beginning of the year - then at least it would have lived on in the affectionate thoughts of a large number of people. It's been a dispiriting experience since the Beeb takeover, watching a nice self-regulating community slowly degenerate into the bastion of bland, superficially pleasant - but looking more deeply, actually rather ill-tempered - censoriousness that it's becoming. Anyway, I've felt this brewing up for a couple of months, and I'm taking a back seat now while I've still got some pleasant memories of the place.

There is, at any rate, one good thing about having the moderators around - at least I can be sure that *someone* out there is going to be reading through all of this crap...

It was fun while it lasted...

Lear