ownership and CI community

It's funny that a lot of conversation and thought can come out of something so "dry" as a listserve, but in an age where so much of our communication happens online and where community organizing happens through them, listserves represent potentially a lot of social power and their politics and control are worth considering.

I've seen the notion of ownership and control of contact community manifesting with some frequency lately. For me, it triggers ethical questions in how it is claimed, when people in some way assert control over a local community. On the one hand, i believe there is nothing wrong with making a personal business out of serving the contact community. On the other hand, i feel that something is amiss when people use priveledged access to communication channels that have been given to them by community members with a broad interest in CI in order to direct their own personal or financial agenda.

to start, a few stories...

1) a small group of local organizers in a big city with a relatively young contact scene (about 3 years) quietly decide to keep control of the list serve that they developed for local contact to only promote events that have come through them. They also expect to make a significant cut of the profits of any local contact workshop, even if they are not doing anything to help organize it directly, because the community is "theirs".

2) an organizer in another contact community (up until this event, THE organizer) became upset when someone who had been one one of her students decided to organize a workshop without going through her, and she asked people not to go to it, for this reason, because she did not organize it. again, this community is a young community of about 5 years.

3)a group of teachers who had been THE group of teachers and organizers in another big city (larger, older community... about 8 years or so and maybe 6 or 7 teachers). Decided when someone else started to teach that there were already too many teachers and that they would not open their list to be used by any more new teachers... a list serve that had been promoted widely as the "local contact community list serve". In other words, people signed up to this list trusting that it was representative of local ci, and the moderators of the list decided to deny the promotional use of the list to people outside of their group.


What to think of these stories in a world originated at least partially around anarchist ideals?

There is the desire to steward a contact scene, to hold a specific space of exploration. There is the desire to be able to make a living out of the good work that one does in the world in proportion to the work one does and the benefit one gives to others. There is the capitalist entrepreneurial freedom to promote events as one pleases, and let others promote the events they want to promote and let people choose which ones they want to go to. These are all either good or at least socially neutral views.

A few problems arise for me, however.

1. promoting oneself explicitly and implicitly as serving something larger than one serves. To promote oneself explicitly as serving a larger community than one's own clientele and then to abuse the trust that people place in you to follow that promise is questionable to say the least. For example, to ask people to sign up to a list serve for the local community and then restrict announcements to only one's own events is questionable. I have a similar feeling about emotional currency -- to emotionally present oneself as universally inclusive when really the "love" is restricted to a specific environment of status and money exchange i also find rather distasteful. Because it doesn't deal with such linearly clear things as words, it is harder to nail this down, but i feel its presence.
   
2. denying the business-nature of one's actions. I find it wholly sensible to offer one's work for money. However denying that this exchange is important or even present, i find questionable... presenting oneself as an altruist or accepting praise as an altruist when their is a clear money exchange i find sad and misleading. Further, using the trust that is put in one as an altruist for one's personal financial gain i find reprehensible.
   
3. attitude towards competition: I find it the worst kind of spirit of capitalism to think ill of one's competition just because they are one's competition and because their success might lead to your financial detriment. If one chooses to engage in a capitalist system with capitalist goals, then one should only wish the best on one's competition in the spirit of compassion and good will.
   
4. owning people and knowledge: I find this very strange, the idea that one owns information or owns people. To say that one owns a local community because one is their first teacher is relatively ridiculous. Similarly to think that one owns a group of people because one was the first person to organize them is very questionable.

Complicating these feelings on my part are a few points

1. sometimes a new teacher or group of teachers in a community can ruin the business of teaching for many without being able to establish a business for themselves. Because so many teachers exist on the edge of financial viability and with fixed expenses like studio rental, taking away a few students from them might cut their earnings in half. Thus, a new enthusiastic teacher who is not actually capable of gathering enough students to make a business for themselves, but who is willing to put a lot of energy into something that looses them money for a while might in that time screw over an existing teacher so that they are not able to survive in the moment, where they would otherwise be able to survive. Thus, adding a new teacher (or flow of new teachers) to the mix in an uncareful way can mean that no one ends up able to teach in the long run, and the overall quality of available teaching goes down.
2. I definitely feel, as i mentioned, that people should be able to offer their services for money and that it is a great thing when client and businessperson are both happy with an exchange.
3. I strongly believe in people keeping the containers that they wish through their personal activities. That is, if someone wants to create a contact jam, scene, or festival that has a specific approach or set of rules or agreements, i think that is great. I am by no means trying to argue that people should always be completely open altruists, giving their effort and work to whomever wants to take it and allowing anything into any space. I personally prefer a diversity of specifically focused spaces and venues vs a lot of the same, lowest-common-denominator events.
   

So, the main issue that i have is one of clarity of communication, both in words and in attitude. It is easier to talk about the words that should be said or not said... for example that a listserve is actually for a private organization and is not actually for the larger contact scene, or to be very open about how one intends to sell the use of the listserve to other potential organizers. I think that the personal demeanor, attitude, emotional presence is probably at least as important, even if it is harder to point to ... to maintain a non-duplicitous sense of clarity in one's emotional presence and not be communicating something emotionally that is not in line with one's core beieifs and behaviors.

There is also the general spirit of good will. Can one have one's own desires and projects and maintain a sense of goodwill towards others whose projects might run counter to or even eventually eclipse one's own?

From a practical view point, I imagine that being possessive of a scene, discouraging competition, and presenting a false face of community service actually does, in the short term, benefit those who do it. It might even in the long term serve them in terms of control and status, but if resentment builds up to a high enough degree over time, it can have ill affects on a scene, and it also does not do a service to the actual depth of the practice.

And, this communication should be made relatively explicit given that this community was founded on a lot of people who held to more anarchist beliefs, who donated their time and energy to make things happen, who took their own ego out of the way to help promote a community where there was not an explicit way of doing contact or set of rules about how to do it... Of course, there were from the beginning people who made a business out of it to the benefit of the form, but there are hundreds who do not appear in the history books whose contributions were vital and who chose to "serve" without recognition or recompense.