It's unusual, and a little disconcerting, to be asked to write an article summarizing a series of events of which one was a part. This goes double when the venue in question, The Internet Review of Science Fiction—which calls itself a "review" and features articles with footnotes and annotations—seems to have inclinations toward what we used to call "scholarly objectivity." Of course, such objectivity in the humanities and social sciences is an ideal one can only approach asymptotically and is increasingly not worth trying for. Still weird though, but I, and you, should get used to it, as we now live in a world where rhetorical and reputational power is radically decentered—as several people have recently found out.

It started, as much Internet nonsense does, with an email. Luke Jackson, a writer living in Los Angeles, submitted a science fiction short story to Williams Sanders of Helix, an online magazine. The emailed rejection letter explained that the story was not sufficiently science fictional enough for Helix, and that Jackson may wish to try non-genre magazines. Sanders said a few other things as well:

I'm impressed by your knowledge of the Q'uran and Islamic traditions. (Having spent a couple of years in the Middle East, I know something about these things.) You did a good job of exploring the worm-brained mentality of those people—at the end we still don't really understand it, but then no one from the civilized world ever can—and I was pleased to see that you didn't engage in the typical error of trying to make this evil bastard sympathetic, or give him human qualities.

Later in the letter, Sanders also referred to Muslims and people from the Middle East as "sheetheads," concluding that no magazine in the genre would publish a story that offended them as this one likely would. Jackson posted the letter at William Preston's blog—not, it must be noted, to remark on its Islamophobic content, but to ask about non-genre markets for his story. Thanks in some teensy little way to me, the content of the letter did become one of those weekly big deals in the SFnal blogosphere. I was shown the URL featuring the text of the letter, laughed, and then IMed the URL to SF writer and activist K. Tempest Bradford. She published the link and declared Sanders a bigot. Lots of people read Tempest's blog, especially when she's outraged about something. We were off to the races.

Then stuff got funny. Sanders and others, such as long-time editor of Asimov's Science Fiction, Gardner Dozois declared that the publication of the letter was both a violation of professional ethics and copyright infringement. Many others dissected the letter and subsequent remarks by both Sanders and Jackson. N.K. Jemisin, who had twice published with Helix and was amongst those dismayed by the Islamophobic commentary, had a discussion with Sanders which ended with her stories being removed from the Helix archive, where they had been contracted to remain indefinitely. The text of these stories, and those of three other writers, was replaced by "Story deleted at author's pantiwadulous request" on the Helix site, pantiwadulous being a neologism for "redolent of wadded panties," one presumes. Sanders then declared that anyone else who might wish their story removed from Helix's online presence would have to pay $40 for the privilege, the amount representing an hour of work by Helix's website designer, Melanie Fletcher.

This is life after power. Nearly eight years ago in an essay I published in The Village Voice, I predicted that email would collapse the layers of bureaucracy between customers and corporate heads, and that this would lead to flame wars between employees and customers. Written as an homage to Notes From the Underground, the essay was widely misunderstood—I generally only think of it when someone digs it up and says about me in some discussion, "You're doing this on purpose!"

Well, yes, of course I am.

Computer-mediated-communication has served to collapse hierarchies, and not only between layers of corporate power. The hierarchy between the recipient of a message and the general public has also been collapsed—everything is CCed to everybody. Any number of humorous and embarrassing emails—many of them having to do with dating foibles—have swept the globe. With blog software, we are all pundits now; we need not wait for the letters page editor of a newspaper or magazine to pluck our opinions from the mailroom and give them three column inches. There's an old saying amongst the political left in the US: "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one." Well, now we all do own one, and distribution is worldwide and instantaneous. Good.

Life after power is both liberating and humiliating. Liberating for those who did not previously have power, and humiliating for those who used to have power going spare. It is no surprise that editors of long standing were shocked to hear that writers often share their rejection letters with the public—and this despite the fact that there are entire websites dedicated to rejection letters, and many such letters appear on the home pages of prominent writers—nor is it a surprise that so many people howled for Sanders's head. "Why is he still running a magazine? Why hasn't he been fired?" Sanders owns his own printing press too, that's why. Life after power doesn't just cut both ways, it cuts all ways.

Historically, those with power got to decide what ethics were. Why is it so awful to talk about money? One major reason is purely a convenience for the employing class—if people compared paychecks, employees would soon learn who was being systematically underpaid. Why has the copyright of a rejection letter with a market value of absolute zero somehow become important? Because intellectual property makes a decent bludgeon when the gentler corrective of "professionalism" fails due to common practice.

These days, ethics are in flux. This is not a bad thing; every new suite of technologies leads to new ethics—what makes the 'net different is that the emancipatory potential of the technology is more immediately apparent. Unlike a railroad or a steam engine, even a kid can handle it. Really, a kid is especially well-suited. The rest of us, not so much. Thus Sanders complaining about decency in one breath and discussing panties sliding up labia in the next; in return the aggrieved witnesses can howl about how unprofessional Sanders was being, despite the fact that "professionalism" is not something they were interested in just a little while before.

Both sides of this online slapfight were interested in claiming not the moral high ground but one based on power, on the ability to declare "thou shalt not." Thou shalt not spread another's email, thou shalt not call Muslims sheetheads and then lie about it by claiming that you really meant terrorists, thou shalt not keep my story on your site, thou shalt not humiliate me by taking down your story because I will call you pantiwadulous and charge you for the pleasure. I'm still a bit enamored with power too—writing this article is, to me, a bit more legitimate than writing a very similar post on my blog would be, so I'm careful with my claims and rhetoric in a way I wouldn't be on my own Livejournal. (For example, I haven't called anyone a "dipshit"—though be sure I'm discussing dipshits.) I mean, this publication has Review in the title! It must be important. We're all haunted by power.

We're also all haunted by old rhetorics. Sanders, for example, appealed to context when he claimed that the letter was really about terrorists and not Muslims or people from the Middle East. However, the Internet is a medium of perfect recall, and thus we knew exactly what Sanders wrote and could easily see what it meant. For example, had Sanders meant terrorists, this is what his letter would have looked like:

I'm impressed by your knowledge of the Q'uran and Islamic traditions. (Having spent a couple of years in the Middle East, I know something about [terrorists].) You did a good job of exploring the worm-brained mentality of [terrorists]—at the end we still don't really understand [terrorists], but then no one from the civilized world [as terrorists only exist elsewhere] ever can—and I was pleased to see that you didn't engage in the typical error of trying to make this evil bastard sympathetic, or give him human qualities.

Doesn't fly, not unless Sanders spent his years in the Middle East hanging out with terrorists. Appealing to an incomplete context is a good rhetorical ploy for the pre-net world, but doesn't work anymore. Nor does Sanders's insistence that one needs simply to read the story—conveniently unpublished—to really understand what he meant in his letter. As editor of Clarkesworld, I did read the story some time before Sanders received it; I can say that Sanders clearly misunderstood—or at best only skimmed—the story if he felt that the narrator had no human qualities. The context of Sanders's remarks were very well known to many of the people he accused of having formed politically correct lynch mob. That his opponents included Tempest Bradford, N. K. Jemisin, and Toby Buckell—you know, black and mixed-race people—just made that howl of powerlessness even more delicious. Oh you Negroes and your lynch mobs, when will you ever learn!

The anti-Sanders crowd was also haunted by the past; in the past magazines were disposable. They went out of print. The unsold supply was pulped sooner than later, and most copies ended up in the trash or in a bus depot somewhere. Even those few pulp collectors never dared open their magazines to read them. Now though, the Internet is forever—imagine being able to buy the newspaper from every day of your life at the corner store, and then imagine that the corner store is as big as the world and the papers are free. Nothing goes out of print. These days it requires, you guessed it, power to negotiate a contract that limits online rights to some time less than perpetuity, and we are in a post-power environment. In the old days, inventory expenses were sufficient to guarantee that stuff would vanish from the marketplace—indeed, it took power to keep things in print. Now every bad decision will, yes, haunt you.

If there is power at all these days, it is the power of harnessing an audience. Thus folks like Sanders actually feel threatened by Tempest, a blogger with a few publications under her belt. I regularly receive emails from people frantically warning me against saying this or that—well, against saying this or that again—because "[my] opinion is important and it carries a lot of weight in the field," and I'm a nobody as well. Indeed, we are all nobodies, except insofar as we can get a hearing. Some great and powerful Ozes will have their curtains pulled back, and some scrappy little Totos will make it happen. Indeed, for the good of the field, I hope my opinion doesn't carry a lot of weight. On the other hand, I'm not necessarily interested in the good of the field.

Helix, with its pantiwadulous endgame, demonstrated its essential powerlessness. To remove some stories—even under duress—is one thing, to retain the links to the stories and replace the text with a juvenile and sexist insult is quite another. It's all but an admission that Helix doesn't have much of an audience. Promising a story by an author in the form of a link and having it lead to a big ol' raspberry isn't an attempt to retain power, it's a bald admission of its lack. No audience, no power. A magazine that publishes single-sentence insults in place of stories is positively eager for any kind of attention, even if limited to those who pop by just to point and laugh at the dumb editor and his undie fetish.

And that's how we win.