question that came out of a conversation at a munch and i cannot stop thinking about it.
somebody mentioned that a man who caused real problems in a scene about six years ago now goes to things in a city two hundred miles away and nobody there has any idea. said it quite casually, as though it were obvious.
and it made me realise i have been operating on an assumption i never examined, which is that the scene has a memory. that if somebody behaves badly, people know, and it follows them.
but does it? the whole thing runs on informal networks of people who happen to know each other. those networks are dense in one place and non-existent between places. and half the people i have met this year are on apps and go to nothing, so there is no network to know anything about them at all.
so how much protection is any of this actually offering? i am asking sincerely rather than cynically. i would like to know what to rely on and what not to.
