Community Info
Community InformationBelow is information about the "Bad Subjects: The Bad List Reborn" community on LiveJournal. To join this community, click here. You may leave the community at any time.
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| User: | badsubjects (14871645) |
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| Name: | Bad Subjects: The Bad List Reborn | ||
| Theme: | This community provides an opportunity to reflect on contemporary culture and politics from the Left | ||
| Website: | Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life | ||
| Location: | Berkeley, California, United States | ||
| About: | This community represents an attempt to revisit and revive the "Bad List," a listserv run by the pioneering internet publication Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life. For a number of years, starting in the fall of 1993, the Bad List provided a forum where progressives and those interested in progressive politics -- otherwise known as the Left -- could freely debate the intersection of politics and culture without worrying about political correctness or the need to maintain a "party line." As the editor's column written by Annalee Newitz and Joe Sartelle for the publication's first issue, playing off of philosopher Louis Althusser's description of "good" and "bad" subjects, declared, "The purpose of a Bad Subjects article is to take a stand, preferably one which is defiant of conventional leftist wisdom in the service of leftist politics; principled defiance is part of what it means to be a "bad subject." That spirit animated the Bad List from the beginning. Indeed, the listserv lived up to the injunction to promote "principled defiance" so well that its members consistently and creatively called its founders and their publication to task. And that was precisely what needed to happen. As the sadly limited samples of Bad List conversations compiled in the publication as "Voices From the Collective" -- look here and here and here -- indicate, it was a place for exchanges that it was hard to find anywhere else Over time, unfortunately, as use of the internet spread to a wider swath of the population and phenomena like spamming and jamming became increasingly prevalent, the unmoderated freedom of the Bad List started to feel like a perverse form of bondage. As the ratio of thoughtful contributions to angry screeds decreased and as the percentage of postings having nothing to do with the Bad Subjects mission dramatically increased, the Bad List's guardians decided, no without complaint, to shut it down. A decade later, the experience of everyday life on the internet has changed, in some cases radically. Unmoderated listservs and comments are rare, with their biggest antagonists now machines. While it is tempting to see whether the Utopian aspects of the original Bad List's unfettered freedom could be duplicated in the present, the time constraints facing its former participants are too great to expect that this experiment would amount to much more than a state of "constant vigilance" where gatekeeping became the principal and perhaps only focus. To that end, some former Bad List members and contributors to the publication Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life have decided to see whether we can simulate what was best about the Bad List in its first and best years by creating a social networking forum that takes advantage of Live Journal's capacity to create a "safe space" where intellectual roughhousing can take place without risk of injury. We aren't sure how this effort will turn out. But we're going to try to make it worthwhile. To some extent, this community will proceed on the basis of nostalgia for those heady days that preceded the Dot Com book, with the opportunity for participants in the Bad List to rediscover each other over a decade after they first "met." Over time, though we hope to develop this community into a place where the desire for new experiences trumps the longing to relive old ones. Ideally, this community will end up being a forum where those interested in progressive politics can once again come together to elaborate on a future where freedom doesn't get reduced to the free market and where solidarity never means having to say you're sorry for disagreeing with your comrades. As this is a moderated community where membership must be approved, please write us to make a case for yourself. We aim to be welcoming. And we welcome people who have never heard of either the publication Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life or the Bad List. But we want to be sure to grow this community slowly and carefully, so that it remains a community instead of devolving into acrimony and chaos. | ||
| Interests: | 13: anarchism, bad subjects, everyday life, globalization, leftism, listservs, marxism, new media, political education, popular culture, progressive politics, radicalism, the left | ||
| Maintainers: | 2: badsubjectslist, bright_birch | ||
| Moderators: | 2: badsubjectslist, bright_birch | ||
| Members: | 10: badsubjectslist, batdina, bright_birch, cbertsch, dhenwood, driscoll, eat_more_greens, jsterne, kdotdammit, masoo | ||
| Watched by: | 11: badsubjectslist, batdina, cbertsch, dhenwood, driscoll, eat_more_greens, jsterne, kdotdammit, masoo, pasdeschiens, veggieducksalad | ||
| Account type: | Plus Account | ||
