The banal finale of my Notes & Queries experiment

image generated by Craiyon

Below is my final response to the weekly Notes & Queries series that appears on The Guardian newspaper website, every Sunday, at around 2pm. It is described by the paper as a “long-running series that invites readers to send in questions and answers on everything from trivial flights of fancy to the most profound concepts.”

I do not expect my comment to appear on the site. When I posted it, my account had been placed in a state of pre-moderation – a fence-sitting, but ultimately cowardly, means of censorship by stealth.

Ordinarily on the site, if a comment is submitted and then subsequently removed by the jannies, a bookmark will remain, informing readers that the post was deleted for violating community standards.

If an account is under pre-moderation and a comment is not approved by the jannies, then no such marker will appear. It will be as if the contribution never existed, and as if the writer never participated in the conversation. On a website that will often call for transparency from other institutions, and that claims to shine a light into dark places, I find this approach to moderation sinister and hypocritical, bringing to mind an equally foreboding sentence fragment from the Old Testament book of Obadiah: “They shall be as though they had not been.”

One thing that I have observed through long association with the Internet, as it transitioned from its glorious Wild West years, to its neutered present day incarnation, is that the more nefarious the website, the more open its moderation policy will be. The jannies of 4chan will readily explain to you why you have been banned. They may also take the time to call you a cunt. I have moderated umpteen online communities and have always been forthright in regard to telling someone the reasoning behind their thread-ban or expulsion.

In the same manner that the outer limits of the universe must be inferred, or crudely rendered from sketchy data, so too must the reasoning of the jannies moderating The Guardian website be fathomed from, what I suspect is, wilfully limited information. One is left staring into a dark void of passive aggression stewing behind a pair of problem glasses, presumably somewhere in Kings Cross, though the implicit meaning is always: “We don't want you here. Fuck off.”

I am obliging, because there are harder battles in my life that are more worthy of being fought.

The Argentinean magic realist, Jorge Luis Borges, said “censorship is the mother of metaphor,” meaning that, if you prevent people from expressing an opinion in one way, they will find another means of saying it. This is evident in the filthy vernacular of early blues records, or in Polari – a cant spoken by carnival folk and later adopted by the gay community, during a period when homosexuality carried with it the threat of prosecution. More recently it can be observed in the ever-evolving parlance of the dank Internet – a modern day recreation of the race between John Henry and the steam drill: On one side, a ragged legion of shitposters fighting for the right to be offensive, and on the other a smaller force of increasingly advanced AI moderators. It is a noble hill to die on given the ramifications in terms of freedom of expression if the battle is not won.

My Notes & Queries experiment was intended as an Easter egg - a secret column with no formal connection to the parent website, that also existed as a piece of metafiction connecting with material elsewhere on the Internet. The style was loosely based around the newspaper columns that H.V Morton wrote during the early part of the 20^th century.

The response was varied but roughly what I had expected. A combination of head scratching, enchantment and open irritation. What is important is no matter what people thought, good or bad, they engaged with it.

Expanding on the quote from Borges, one might postulate that if people are not allowed to say a thing in one venue, then they will find another venue where they can say it. The Guardian has made it clear they do not want my kind of avant-garde whimsy cluttering their comments section, so it is going elsewhere.

I was not banned from the site. This evening I deleted my account because it is clear that I am not welcome there and because I will not pledge loyalty to slowly sinking ships.

~ Sam Redlark

~

Which laws are most commonly flouted?

The Library of Legal Precedents occupies a refurbished, early 19th century basement in Kings Cross, having relocated there from the Temple in 1997. It resides among the picked-clean archaeological strata, beneath a 16-floor confection of sugared steel and glass that celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday last year, and which currently provides office space for “something to do with insurance,” according to Mary Ravencroft QC.

Ravencroft is of the opinion that the library is “a contender for the second-most boring place in London,” “a place where tedium takes long vacations,” and (obliquely) “a retirement home for blackboard chalk”. We will return to the matter of chalk in due course.

“I am speaking on behalf of people like yourself, who may dip a toe into legal matters but who don't like to wade in up to the neck,” she clarified. “For professionals like me who have daily dealings with the law, the library has to power to fascinate and excite on a fortnightly, or even weekly, basis.”

As we entered, we were greeted by a whitewash clamour of paintbrushes swabbing the antiquated ribcage radiators.

“It reminds me of the music Cyril Clements used to play in his office,” remarked Ravencroft.

She deployed a lemon-shaped, squeezable dust blower to unlock the air latch on a door.

“Unusual key,” I said.

“It's the same thing we use to blow dust of the manuscripts,” she replied. “They put in a newfangled iris scanner but it doesn't work so we're back to Victorian tech. It's actually more secure than it looks – the air has to be injected into the lock with just the right amount of pressure, speed and volume, or it won't open.”

“I know a steampunk-obsessed teenager who would strongly approve,” I said.

A sign above a pair of double doors on our left read 'Vinyl Department'.

“They used to document summaries of new precedents on vinyl records, in addition to any paper copies,” said Ravencroft. “The idea was that it would allow a group of interested parties to hear the same information at the same time, and to jointly form a conclusion regarding whether it applied in an ongoing case. The former vinyl librarian, Helen Perrin, used to make mock-up sleeves – The Rolling Dead, The Velvet Who and so on. It was like going into a record shop.”

“Herman's Kinks,” I suggested.

“Them too. After she retired the killjoys had a purge. It's all back to bare cardboard now. Anyway, this is the Wet Library.”

We had halted in front of a set of double doors with mottled glass windows. Ravencroft placed a finger on her lips as we entered. Her voice descended to a low whisper.

It was a sterile, high-ceilinged room that was more reminiscent of a minimalist laboratory than a library. Narrow cabinets with sliding glass-panel doors lined the whitewashed walls. The long, pale-grey rows of brightly lit study cubicles seemed to me very much like the kind of place where one might slowly be driven mad.

“This is where we keep all the wet laws,” she said. “Any English law that is less than 7 months old is more vulnerable to amendments or repeal. The term dates to when laws were written in an ink that took several months to properly dry and bond with the paper and become indelible. During that time they could be smudged or 'washed out'. The documents containing newly-penned laws were hung from the rafters in a room at the Inns of Court until they had properly dried and could be bound.”

Across the room, a young man was uncomfortably attempting to quietly clear his throat.

“There is a protocol to discreetly clearing your throat in the library,” explained Ravencroft. “It's the same technique that choralists use to avoid disturbing performances.”

She led me back out.

“We've been seeing a lot of infringement upon rights in the workplace,” she reported. “One term that I am hearing far too much is 'jackal clock'. It's thoroughly nasty, penny pinching of software that monitors the input of data entry staff and adds any wasted time to the end of their working day. It's modelled on a mechanical device that was incorporated into the machinery of mills and factories. It's been outlawed for donkey's years, but slowly its been creeping back in through loopholes that really need to be pulled taut.”

On our way out, she showed my the Warm Library, with it dark wooden shelves and huge bound volumes, as if an ancestral generation of legal minds had belonged to a race of giants. It was incredibly warm.

“These are the burning books,” said Ravencroft. “I expect you already know that, after a couple of hundred years, books begin to break down and generate heat. We powder the pages with chalk embers to preserve the paper. Me and Dawson have been discussing turning off the kitchen aga in October, since we wont be able to afford the fuel bill. So I expect that I will be spending a lot of time in here keeping warm.”

“What about Dawson?” I asked.

“If he behaves himself then I will allow him to visit as my guest.”

I hope this was of help.