Arisia Roundup: The Ephemeral City

[jducoeur]

Continuing with random memories from Arisia...

One of the joys this year was that my two favorite panels were the two I moderated. I expected The Future of Online Community to be interesting and free-wheeling, which it was, but The Ephemeral City took me by surprise -- not just in how much fun it was, but in how much I learned.

In particular, I was surprised at how *different* the examples were. We had two people representing Pennsic, one from Burning Man, and one from the Rainbow Gathering. (About which I had known little.) To my amusement, Pennsic was by far the most *conventional* of the three.

We think of ourselves as weird and different, but by and large we don't tend to challenge the mundane status quo. Indeed, Pennsic is by now deeply intertwined with the area it is embedded in -- we bring a huge amount of money into the local economy, work with the local medics, and so on. By contrast, Burning Man exists somewhat uneasily with the mundane world around it, and the Rainbow Gathering is quite the serious challenge: since it doesn't really recognize the legitimacy of the authorities (or the mundane economy), it sounds like it rather pisses them off.

The result was a fascinating discussion at a higher meta-level than I'd expected. I had lots of topics planned (as usual: I like to go into panels with a list of ideas, in case things slow down) on subjects like how their bureaucracies run, and how the economy of the city functions. Instead, we wound up spending a lot of time talking about whether to have a bureaucracy at all (Burning Man apparently has one, although it's lighter-weight than Pennsic's; Rainbow is very intentionally anarchic), and both of the others more or less forbid the use of mundane money on-site.

Neat stuff, and a good reminder that there are lots of other kinds of good weirdness in the world. Sometime I really must check them out...

Comments

[siderea]

We think of ourselves as weird and different, but by and large we don't tend to challenge the mundane status quo.

That's not a "but" that's an "and".

There is this entire other dimension/lens in which Pennsic is far more weird and different than is Burning Man or Rainbow, and that is why we've gotten so good at our interface with the mundanes. We've had to be more defensive of ourselves, and the way we've done that is by, as you yourself noted in the panel, having these two systems, one of which interfaces with the outside world and the other of which operates wholly and pretty much exclusively within our culture.

I've said before -- and I don't think you believed me then, because you really didn't know what the spectrum was -- that the SCA is for people who can handle hierarchy. I've had people who had checked out the Society (usually because a friend was involved) tell me that while the whole lets-pretend aspect was cool, the very existence/tolerance of a monarchy within our culture, just having ranks and titles and precedence and so forth, made it not their scene. One person who was involved in the SCA for many years, told me he eventually realized it was a "Ponzi scheme" of rank and status and that's why he left.

So the Society organically selects for people who can handle a culture which uses hierarchy. This makes the Society a population who largely does not respond to even external authority with a knee-jerk, "Who are you to tell me I can't?!?" We're a people who largely can work with external authority figures and systems.

And because of that cultural/demographic aspect, I think we can demonstrate higher levels of social cohesion than those other cultures can. We have no trouble exerting social control (formal and informal) upon our own members. We use peer pressure to shame people who do antisocial things. We use public acclaim to encourage people who do prosocial things. All of which means that when the EPA tells us to goddamnit stop digging clay out of the swimming hole, we just do. We don't have to post guards on the swimming hole to beat off rogue potters in the middle of the night. We don't have to arrest on sight people with shovels. And we most definitely don't throw up our hands and tell the EPA, "Sorry, there's nothing we can do to get our people to stop doing that."

Contrast that to how BM and Rainbow interact with the BLM and the Park Service. Now, interestingly, I have the suspicion that Rainbow, despite being the more "anarchic" (or so it would like to think) actually does a better job with social control than does BM. I get the impression that Rainbow has more social cohesion, arising out their connection with activist culture and "collective action". (I should like to find out some day.) BM has had a history of eschewing responsibility for social control (that whole "temporary autonomous zone" meme), and that flew like a lead brick as it scaled up, so it's been developing systems to attempt to impose social control -- but all at the gesellschaft level, not having a culture of cohesion it can leverage at the gemeineschaft level. Another way of putting it, both Rainbow and the Society have a moral dimension to their cultures which BM seems to lack. [*]


ETA:

[* I was very struck by how much more (from my Scadian perspective) antisocial behavior there was at BM, and less actively prosocial behavior. A lot more problem with theft, a lot smaller volunteer population (and sharper divisions between the volunteer population and the rest of the population), and people responding to me with astonishment when I did the trivial helpful things I had said I would. This is a summary of much larger essay of ethnographic observations I'm not writing today. :)]

[jducoeur]

Interesting stuff, and I'd be quite interested to hear about your Burning Man observations at more length when you have the time and motivation to do so.

But it's fascinating to realize how relative this all is. The thing is, remember that my other main club is Masonry. Compared to that, the SCA looks practically libertarian. Respect for authority and hierarchy runs *much* deeper in Masonry than it does in the Society. (At least in the East, which is a potentially important caveat.)

So it was somewhat startling to realize that the SCA is, nonetheless, still over on the authoritarian side of the spectrum, just not as *far* over as Masonry is. The "Order, Neutral, Chaos" comparison at the end of the panel really caught my attention...