I can't (and won't) defend OTW against accusations of being less subversive than fandom as a whole, but the arguments I've seen made to this effect (in dkompare's and ethrosdemon's posts and the comments thereto, mostly) are often at too high a level of abstraction to be practically meaningful (but isn't that true of a lot of theoretical radical critique?), and that's saying a lot coming from this very abstract philosopher-to-be! And I think that OTW will keep track of its radical vision as exemplified in the explicitly feminist title "An Archive of Our Own," in large part because of the acafannish influence, and am amused that it is being attacked at once both for being too radical and for not being radical enough. So I'm profoundly sympathetic to those arguing about OTW's liberalizing influence, but I'm not sure I completely share their critiques.
That said, there is something inherently liberalizing in the idea of an archiv4e. First and foremost is my concern--which I held from the very beginning--that for legal reasons chan and/or underaged readers will not be allowed. This, if it happens, would be a compromised forced by the necessity of obeying the law, not being criminals anymore. That's a liberalization. So too is the fact that on my LJ, I can write a NC-17 BDSM Dawn/Giles fic with character death and noncon where Dawn's 14 and title it "Dawn gen, PG" and the only thing anyone can do is defriend me or stop listing me on newsletters. There's a fundamental anarchy in the way we do things on LJ, with no governor anywhere except maybe SixApart or their Russian successors, and a) they are King Log much more often than King Stork, at least until recently, and b) fans typically don't feel any real obligation to obey their rules beyond the possibility of consequences.
With an archive, there presumably would need to be some type of shared consensus as to what certain fannish terms meant, one true rating system, etc. So it is certainly a pulling back from the anarchy we experience on LJ--but with LJ's masters suddenly becoming more vigilant, it's nonetheless possibly necessary that we will have to take our game elsewhere. And with the possibility of more than one archive (or rather, the certainty, since the old ones aren't going anywhere) there will be a place for anarchy as well.
Re: part 2
That said, there is something inherently liberalizing in the idea of an archiv4e. First and foremost is my concern--which I held from the very beginning--that for legal reasons chan and/or underaged readers will not be allowed. This, if it happens, would be a compromised forced by the necessity of obeying the law, not being criminals anymore. That's a liberalization. So too is the fact that on my LJ, I can write a NC-17 BDSM Dawn/Giles fic with character death and noncon where Dawn's 14 and title it "Dawn gen, PG" and the only thing anyone can do is defriend me or stop listing me on newsletters. There's a fundamental anarchy in the way we do things on LJ, with no governor anywhere except maybe SixApart or their Russian successors, and a) they are King Log much more often than King Stork, at least until recently, and b) fans typically don't feel any real obligation to obey their rules beyond the possibility of consequences.
With an archive, there presumably would need to be some type of shared consensus as to what certain fannish terms meant, one true rating system, etc. So it is certainly a pulling back from the anarchy we experience on LJ--but with LJ's masters suddenly becoming more vigilant, it's nonetheless possibly necessary that we will have to take our game elsewhere. And with the possibility of more than one archive (or rather, the certainty, since the old ones aren't going anywhere) there will be a place for anarchy as well.