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door · 3 years

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CHRISTMAS EFFECTS

by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

from Tendencies (1993)

What’s “queer”? Here’s one tram of thought about it. The depressing thing about the Christmas season—isn’t it? —is that it’s the time when all the institutions are speaking with one voice. The Church says what the Church says. But the State says the same thing: maybe not (in some ways it hardly matters) in the language of theology, but in the language the State talks: legal holidays, long school hiatus, special postage stamps, and all. And the language of commerce more than chimes in, as consumer purchasing is organized ever more narrowly around the final weeks of the calendar year, the Dow Jones aquiver over Americans’ “holiday mood.” The media, in turn, fall in triumphally behind the Christmas phalanx: ad-swollen magazines have oozing turkeys on the cover, while for the news industry every question turns into the Christmas question—Will hostages be free for Christmas? What did that flash flood or mass murder (umpty-ump people killed and maimed) do to those families’ Christmas? And meanwhile, the pairing “families/Christmas” becomes increasingly tautological, as families more and more constitute themselves according to the schedule, and in the endlessly iterated image, of the holiday itself constituted in the image of “the” family.

The thing hasn’t, finally, so much to do with propaganda for Christianity as with propaganda for Christmas itself. They all—religion, state, capital, ideology, domesticity, the discourses of power and legitimacy—line up with each other so neatly once a year, and the monolith so created is a thing one can come to view with unhappy eyes. What if instead there were a practice of valuing the ways in which meanings and institutions can be at loose ends with each other? What if the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing? Think of that entity “the family,” an impacted social space in which all of the following are meant to line up perfectly with each other:

a surname a sexual dyad a legal unit based on state-regulated marriage a circuit of blood relationships a system of companionship and succor a building a proscenium between “private” and “public” an economic unit of earning and taxation the prime site of economic consumption the prime site of cultural consumption a mechanism to produce, care for, and acculturate children a mechanism for accumulating material goods over several generations a daily routine a unit in a community of worship a site of patriotic formation

and of course the list could go on. Looking at my own life, I see that— probably like most people—I have valued and pursued these various elements of family identity to quite differing degrees (e.g., no use at all for worship, much need of companionship). But what’s been consistent in this particular life is an interest in not letting very many of these dimensions line up directly with each other at one time. I see it’s been a ruling intuition for me that the most productive strategy (intellectually, emotionally) might be, whenever possible, to disarticulate them one from another, to disengage them—the bonds of blood, of law, of habitation, of privacy, of companionship and succor—from the lockstep of their unanimity in the system called “family.”

Or think of all the elements that are condensed in the notion of sexual identity, something that the common sense of our time presents as a unitary category. Yet, exerting any pressure at all on “sexual identity,” you see that its elements include

your biological (e.g., chromosomal) sex, male or female; your self-perceived gender assignment, male or female (supposed to be the same as your biological sex); the preponderance of your traits of personality and appearance, masculine or feminine (supposed to correspond to your sex and gender); the biological sex of your preferred partner; the gender assignment of your preferred partner (supposed to be the same as her/his biological sex); the masculinity or femininity of your preferred partner (supposed to be the opposite of your own); your self-perception as gay or straight (supposed to correspond to whether your preferred partner is your sex or the opposite); your preferred partner’s self-perception as gay or straight (supposed to be the same as yours); your procreative choice (supposed to be yes if straight, no if gay); your preferred sexual act(s) (supposed to be insertive if you are male or masculine, receptive if you are female or feminine); your most eroticized sexual organs (supposed to correspond to the procreative capabilities of your sex, and to your insertive/receptive assignment); your sexual fantasies (supposed to be highly congruent with your sexual practice, but stronger in intensity); your main locus of emotional bonds (supposed to reside in your preferred sexual partner); your enjoyment of power in sexual relations (supposed to be low if you are female or feminine, high if male or masculine); the people from whom you learn about your own gender and sex (supposed to correspond to yourself in both respects); your community of cultural and political identification (supposed to correspond to your own identity);

and—again—many more. Even this list is remarkable for the silent presumptions it has to make about a given person’s sexuality, presumptions that are true only to varying degrees, and for many people not true at all: that everyone “has a sexuality,” for instance, and that it is implicated with each person’s sense of overall identity in similar ways; that each person’s most characteristic erotic expression will be oriented toward another person and not autoerotic; that if it is alloerotic, it will be oriented toward a single partner or kind of partner at a time; that its orientation will not change over time. Normatively, as the parenthetical prescriptions in the list above suggest, it should be possible to deduce anybody’s entire set of specs from the initial datum of biological sex alone—if one adds only the normative assumption that “the biological sex of your preferred partner” will be the opposite of one’s own. With or without that heterosexist assumption, though, what’s striking is the number and difference of the dimensions that “sexual identity” is supposed to organize into a seamless and univocal whole.

And if it doesn’t?

That’s one of the things that “queer” can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically. The experimental linguistic, epistemological, representational, political adventures attaching to the very many of us who may at times be moved to describe ourselves as (among many other possibilities) pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, leatherfolk, ladies in tuxedoes, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldaggers, divas, Snap! queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes, lesbian-identified men or lesbians who sleep with men, or…people able to relish, learn from, or identify with such.

Again, “queer” can mean something different: a lot of the way I have used it so far in this dossier is to denote, almost simply, same-sex sexual object choice, lesbian or gay, whether or not it is organized around multiple criss-crossings of definitional lines. And given the historical and contemporary force of the prohibitions against every same-sex sexual expression, for anyone to disavow those meanings, or to displace them from the term’s definitional center, would be to dematerialize any possibility of queerness itself.

At the same time, a lot of the most exciting recent work around “queer” spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identityfracturing discourses, for example. Intellectuals and artists of color whose sexual self-definition includes “queer”—I think of an Isaac Julien, a Gloria Anzaldúa, a Richard Fung—are using the leverage of “queer” to do a new kind of justice to the fractal intricacies of language, skin, migration, state. Thereby, the gravity (I mean the gravitas, the meaning, but also the center of gravity) of the term “queer” itself deepens and shifts.

Another telling representational effect. A word so fraught as “queer” is— fraught with so many social and personal histories of exclusion, violence, defiance, excitement—never can only denote; nor even can it only connote; a part of its experimental force as a speech act is the way in which it dramatizes locutionary position itself. Anyone’s use of “queer” about themselves means differently from their use of it about someone else. This is true (as it might also be true of “lesbian” or “gay”) because of the violently different connotative evaluations that seem to cluster around the category. But “gay” and “lesbian” still present themselves (however delusively) as objective, empirical categories governed by empirical rules of evidence (however contested). “Queer” seems to hinge much more radically and explicitly on a person’s undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception and filiation. A hypothesis worth making explicit: that there are important senses in which “queer” can signify only when attached to the first person. One possible corollary: that what it takes —all it takes—to make the description “queer” a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person.

#eve kosofsky sedgwick #thinking about about queer space and queer spaces

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r0h1rr1m · 4 years

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rambly inception thoughts p.2

this has been kicked off, specifically, by disliking that i failed to include yusuf in this post but there’s already so much going on there re: exact limits/mechanics of imagination in dreams, how to call down projections, moral relativism, crack chara psych, and speculating on the future of ari’s career--and i explained most of it poorly anyway so it’s probably for the best!

to start with, i’ve always imagined that there’s a huge variety in the caliber/class of chemist u can hire in dreamshare. the title probably applies even to people whose capability starts and stops at sourcing base product for somnacin and/or the finished drug. the next level up can maybe mix up different kinds to standard specifications. idk how much education/training u’d need to be able to do this, bc i v much do not chemistry, but i’d bet there’s a lot of variety in ppl’s qualifications in this category, too. a standard formula might affect different ppl slightly differently, like any psychotropic drug (is that even the most sensible analogy to real-world science? idk and i don’t want to risk hours of ultimately fruitless wikipedia spiralling), but in the same vein, the variances will all probably fall within a reasonable range of the same functionality. without, like, some sort of neuro degree, probably, the most fine-tuning a chemist could do is optimize doses/known variants of the drug through trial and error in preparation for a job.

our man yusuf definitely has a high-level neuro degree

so, just like the rest of the team, yusuf is obviously a total powerhouse in his field. like i said, it must take sophisticated knowledge of brain chemistry in order to do what he did on the fischer job, as well as the same mad genius as the rest of them. (as an aside, can i just say how utterly delightful a team dynamic is “group of geniuses who surround themselves with enough people who are the same kind of batshit to normalize it”? i’m weak) and idk how someone gets famous in like neurochem but yusuf is so brilliant he was probably p well known. js imagine the comedic potential of whatever rising-star chemist meeting yusuf and js going dr. ____?! who published those completely revolutionary but completely balls-to-the-wall studies on x and then after throwing the discipline into an uproar either a) dropped off the face of the earth and is now known as smth of an urban legend/cryptid in the community or b) still corresponds w experts in the field but now about the wildest shit and ppl kind of have to mythologize/not think too hard abt the dude who walks in ppl’s heads in order not to risk js breaking everything

so yusuf knows his shit and his initial assertion that 3 levels is impossible can be trusted to carry a lot of weight. which means the fact that he proceeded to do it more than secures his place in the cast of demonstrable prodigies

now, bc this is ostensibly a continuation of a post that’s loosely focused on charas’ moralities, let’s look at the 2 parts of the movie where we most directly confront yusuf’s: his dream den and hiding the sedation from the team. i’m going with the assumption that any legitimate/legal research and application of dreamshare has been discontinued.

come yell at me for over oversimplifying, but that makes the question of the dream den seem p straight-forward. yusuf faced giving up dreamshare research (or came onto the scene after it was already illegal, which could make for some rly interesting stories abt how he would’ve found out abt it) and couldn’t, so he had to find a way to continue on his own. and since it would be in rly bad faith to assume he doesn’t have the full consent of all his test subjects, that’s js that. (i’m not going to argue abt the difference b/w ethics and morals, and i’m laughably unqualified to discuss the ethics of human experimentation anyway so moving on)

hiding the fact that the team was sedated was a major plot point and is discussed w according frequency, so i’m sure most ppl have their own opinions abt what this says abt the parties involved. i’ll readily admit that my view is heavily colored by the fact that i js plain like yusuf. he’s a likeable guy. (i’ll try not to go off on a tangent, but i know that my reasons for disliking cobb are a little unfair; it’s more about narrative structure than any of his personal failings. the fact is i have a weakness for hypercompetence, and cobb is presented as someone who used to be the best, but is no longer reliable. he shows flashes of his old brilliance running the mr. charles gambit successfully and improvising capitalizing on the appearance of fisher’s browning projection on l2, but he’s desperate enough to be untrustworthy and further, he’s untrustworthy in a way that is eminently predictable by the audience. we know from the get-go that his shade is gonna sabotage something, and it’s hard not to blame him for that. we also know from the get-go that he’s desperate enough to drag other ppl into a fool’s mission, and that he’s hiding something dangerous from arthur, who by all appearances should be the person cobb can trust, and the person to whom it’s most important to know that kind of shit. i’m not gonna pretend i anticipated that big twist in the parking garage on l1, but it makes a ton of sense in retrospect and all this makes it easy to see why cobb is so widely mistrusted/disliked by the fandom. and i went off on a tangent, whoops.)

so picking back up at yusuf is a likeable guy--he seems p friendly and easy-going and i thoroughly enjoyed every scene of him on l1. i’m gonna say a lot of his moral considerations come in the form of deciding what is or isn’t his responsibility. mbe he avoided or suitably resolved the thorny ethical question of human experimentation in the same way i kind of did: by saying that the participants agreed to it on their own and leaving it there. this kind of reasoning is how he would’ve let cobb take responsibility for sedating and then informing the team. it’s also probably how he decided to cue the kick early on l1 and make it everyone else’s problem. which i do think was the right decision! it would be absurd to suggest that this highly intelligent man’s patterns of reasoning are always questionable. but i do see a pattern.

as for the advice he’d give ari, i think a lot of this relates back to my mention in the earlier post of whether or not she could let an institution/legislation dictate her ethics to her. i’ve since decided that it’s simpler to assume the institutions are all outside the law, though, so i’m not going to think abt that anymore unless directly prompted. one thing we do know abt ari, though, in contrast to my suppositions abt yusuf, is that she has a v strong sense of responsibility. she took it upon herself to manage cobb, and she took it upon herself to save the job, fisher, saito, and cobb when it looked like everything had been ruined. thinking abt it now, this makes for further interesting contrast w arthur, whose sense of responsibility seems to revolve around personal loyalty, eames, whose sense of responsibility is acutely pragmatic, and saito, whose sense of responsibility is on the grand scale of stopping a monopoly (suitably ironic).

again, idk if i’ve rly made any kind of point, and now i want to go back and build elaborate hierarchies of skill in each job description (architect, extractor, etc) like i kind of did for chemists but, well. if u made it this far bless u, i hope u have a wonderful day. vote

#inception #yusuf #ariadne #arthur #eames #saito #if u haven't check out p.1 cus there's a lot there that i never rly expanded but am figuring out how to #running my mouth #yes absolutely #dom cobb

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miseriathome · 5 years

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A queer reading of Christmas by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

What’s “queer”? Here’s one train of thought about it. The depressing thing about the Christmas season--isn’t it?--is that it’s the time when all the institutions are speaking with one voice. The Church says what the Church says. But the State says the same thing: maybe not (in some ways it hardly matters) in the language of theology, but in the language the state talks: legal holidays, long school hiatus, special postage stamps, and all. And the language of commerce more than chimes in, as consumer purchasing is organized ever more narrowly around the final weeks of the calendar year, the Dow Jones aquiver over Americans’ “holiday mood.” The media, in turn, fall in triumphally behind the Christmas phalanx: ad-swollen magazines have oozing turkeys on the cover, while for the news industry every question turns into the Christmas question--Will hostages be free for Christmas? What did that flash flood or mass murder (umpty-ump people killed and maimed) do to those families’ Christmas? And meanwhile, the pairing “families/Christmas” becomes increasingly tautological, as families more and more constitute themselves according to the schedule, and in the endlessly iterated image, of the holiday itself constituted in the image of “the” family.

The thing hasn’t, finally, so much to do with propaganda for Christianity as with propaganda for Christmas itself. They all--religion, state, capital, ideology, domesticity, the discourses of power and legitimacy--line up with each other so neatly once a year, an the monolith so created is a thing one can come to view with unhappy eyes. What if instead there were a practice of valuing the ways in which meanings and institutions can be at loose ends with each other? What if the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing? Think of that entity “the family,” an impacted social space in which all of the following are meant to line up perfectly with each other:

and of course the list could go on. Looking at my own life, I see that--probably like most people--I have valued and pursued these various elements of family identity to quite differing degrees (e.g., no use at all for worship, much need of companionship). But what’s been consistent in this particular life is an interest in not letting very many of these dimensions line up directly with each other at one time. I see it’s been a ruling intuition for me that the most productive strategy (intellectually, emotionally) might be, whenever possible, to disarticulate them one from another, to disengage them--the bonds of blood, of law, of habitation, of privacy, of companionship and succor--from the lockstep of their unanimity in the system called “family.”

your biological (e.g., chromosomal) sex, male or female; your self-perceived gender assignment, male or female (supposed to be the same as your biological sex); the preponderance of your traits of personality and appearance, masculine or feminine (supposed to correspond to your sex and gender); the biological sex of your preferred partner; the gender assignment of your preferred partner (supposed to be the same as her/his biological sex); the masculinity or femininity of your preferred partner (supposed to be the opposite⁶ of your own); your self-perception as gay or straight (supposed to correspond to whether your preferred partner is your sex or the opposite); your preferred partner’s self-perception as gay or straight (supposed to be the same as yours); your procreative choice (supposed to be yes if straight, no if gay); your preferred sexual act(s) (supposed to be insertive if you are male or masculine, receptive if you are female or feminine); your most eroticized sexual organs (supposed to correspond to the procreative capabilities of your sex, and to your insertive/receptive assignment); your sexual fantasies (supposed to be highly congruent with your sexual practice, but stronger in intensity); your main locus of emotional bonds (supposed to reside in your preferred sexual partner); your enjoyment of power in sexual relations (supposed to be low if you are female or feminine, high if male or masculine); the people from whom you learn about your own gender and sex (supposed to correspond to yourself in both respects); your community of cultural and political identification (supposed to correspond to your own identity);

⁶. The binary calculus I’m describing here depends on the notion that the male and female sexes are each other’s “opposites,” but I do not want to register a specific demurral against that bit of easy common sense. Under no matter what cultural construction, women and men are more like each other than chalk is like cheese, than ratiocination is like raisins, than up is like down, or than 1 is like 0. The biological, psychological, and cognitive attributes of men overlap with those of women by vastly more than they differ from them.

and--again--many more. Even this list is remarkable for the silent presumptions it has to make about a given person’s sexuality, presumptions that are true only to varying degrees, and for many people not true at all: that everyone “has a sexuality,” for instance, and that it is implicated with each person’s sense of overall identity in similar ways; that each person’s most characteristic erotic expression will be oriented towards another person and not autoerotic; that if it is alloerotic, it will be oriented toward a single partner or kind of partner at a time; that its orientation will not change over time. Normatively, as the parenthetical prescriptions in the list above suggest, it should be possible to deduce anybody’s entire set of specs from the initial datum of biological sex alone--if one adds only the normative assumption that “the biological sex of your preferred partner” will be the opposite of one’s own. With or without that heterosexist assumption, though, what’s striking is the number and difference of the dimensions that “sexual identity” is supposed to organize into a seamless and univocal whole.

And if it doesn’t?

That’s one of the things that “queer” can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically. The experimental linguistic, epistemological, representational, political adventures attaching to the very many of us who may at times be moved to describe ourselves as (among many other possibilities) pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, leatherfolk, ladies in tuxedos, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldaggers, divas, Snap! queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes, lesbian-identified men or lesbians who sleep with men, or... people able to relish, learn from, or identify with such.

At the same time, a lot of the most exciting recent work around “queer” spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses, for example. Intellectuals and artists of color whose sexual self-definition includes “queer”--I think of an Isaac Julien, a Gloria Anzaldúa, a Richard Fung--are using the leverage of “queer” to do a new kind of justice to the fractal intricacies of language, skin, migration, state. Thereby, the gravity (I mean the gravitas, the meaning, but also the center of gravity) of the term “queer” itself deepens and shifts.

Another telling representational effect. A word so fraught as “queer” is--fraught with so many social and personal histories of exclusion, violence, defiance, excitement--never can only denote; nor even can it only connote; a part of its experimental force as a speech act is the way in which it dramatizes locutionary position itself. Anyone’s use of “queer” about themselves means differently from their use of it about someone else. This is true (as it might also be true of “lesbian” or “gay”) because of the violently different connotative evaluations that seem to cluster around the category. But “gay” and “lesbian” still present themselves (however delusively) as objective, empirical categories governed by empirical rules of evidence (however contested). “Queer” seems to hinge much more radically and explicitly on a person’s undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception and filiation. A hypothesis worth making explicit: that there are more important senses in which “queer” can signify only when attached to the first person. One possible corollary: that what it takes--all it takes--to make the description “queer” a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person.

Christmas Effects from “Queer and Now” as published in Tendencies (1994) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Transcribed by me, including removal of one footnote and clumsy inclusion of another

#eve sedgwick #queer theory #queer studies #tendencies #queer and now #the queering project #what am I reading? list #christmas #queer discourse

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sparxwrites · 6 years

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I would be incredibly interested to read what you were talking about in the tags of that ask/post~

#there’s a lot more i could write abouthow this is an emerging pattern in fan culture #and how what wasinitially meant to be a community free from content creators #is nowincreasingly becoming a community beholden to them and their approval#a community that operates within their oversight #and how people whouse fandom for what it was traditionally used for - as a sociallysubversive medium outside of mainstream control #are being penalisedfor refusing to sanitise their content and fall in line

Ihope you wanted an 8k essay about fan-creator interactions and whythey frequently end up being toxic for fans, creators, and also aboutfandom as an increasingly monetized and manipulated community, anon,because that’s what you’ve got.

Asa disclaimer, before we start: I am a linguist by training, not aneconomist, sociologist, or psychologist (though my discipline doescross over with the latter two in several places). This is written inan academic-ish style, but it’s largely based on my personalexperiences in fandom over the past ten years, the personalexperiences of the hundreds of friends and strangers that I’vetalked to or read essays by during that time, and a lot of personalresearch and reading. It’s not Word Of God, and I’m entirely opento people critiquing it, arguing with it, or elaborating on it –stuff like this is, I feel, something we need more dialogue about infandom spaces. With all that said…

Thesisstatement: Historically,fandom has very much operated on a “keep creators as far fromfandom as possible” basis, for some very excellent reasons. Withthe rise of social media contact, the gradual mainstreaming offandom, and increasingly fandom-aware creators and corporations, itis no longer possible to keep creators away from fandom. However, inthe rush to embrace creators into fandom, many of the hard-learnedlessons of fandoms past (and present) have been forgotten andignored. This, in combination with the increased monetization offandom and the exploitation of free fan labour by capitaliststructures, is a dangerous and potentially toxic combination. Whilstit’s not possible – and not desirable – to turn back the clock,fandom needs to carefully consider exactly whywe’re inviting creators into fandom space, how that should behandled, and how to mitigate the potential consequences of that.

Firstoff, there are a few pieces of terminology uses I want to make clear,and a few starting assumptions I want to detail, just so we’re allgoing into this from somewhat the same starting point:

When I say fandom here, I mean creative fandom – ie. writers, artists, graphics makers, cosplayers, and various others, along with the people who support them and interact with them in a variety of ways. There are other kinds of fandom, of course; notably casual fandom where someone simply enjoys a book / show / movie, or collative fandom, focused on collecting facts / statistics / comic editions / props. These types of fandom are not the ones I have experience with, however, and are also not entirely relevant given this discussion is specifically about creators in creative fandom.

I’m assuming that fandom is a space where people should be allowed to create whatever the hell they want, within the bounds of legality. That means if people want to write rape fic, draw art of extreme kinks, cosplay “problematic” characters, or ship unhealthy / abusive ships, they should be able to – without people going “think of the children!” or “you’re a Bad Person”. Debating whether this attitude is the right one is another conversation entirely; you can read more about why I take this stance in an essay I wrote a while back about ‘heavy’ kinks, and also in the purity politics tag on my personal blog – but if you fundamentally disagree with this stance, you’re probably going to disagree with this essay in general.

When I use “creator(s)” here, I’m talking about the people making the canon content – whether that’s an actor, a voice actor, a writer, a director / producer, a comic artist, a game development studio, a youtuber, whatever. When I use “fan(s)”, I’m primarily talking about individuals within creative fandom (ie. those who create fan content, and those who support them). Yes, some (if not most) fans are absolutely creators too, given fan content is just as valid and creative as ‘official’ content – but it is, linguistically, easier for me to use “creator” and “fan” rather than having to tie myself up in descriptive knots. Yes, there are areas of fandom that are primarily about curation rather than creation, and there are fans who simply enjoy the source material and don’t involve themselves in what they would consider “fandom” at all, and those are valid ways of interaction with the source material – but, as I mentioned above, that’s not the aspect of fan-creator interaction and fandom I’m talking about.

So,now we’ve got that out the way…

1.Fandom History, “Purity Politics”, and Censorship

Historically,mainstream media has not been kind to fandom – nor have mainstreamwebsites, or even primarily fandom-oriented websites for that matter.Fanfiction.net is notorious for having done a mass-deletionof “adult” works(though theirongoing policing of this is spotty at best and nonexistent at worst),and I remember them also having a list of authors who’d contactedthem and “asked” them not to host fic from their books / serieson the website. Livejournal also had severalmass deletions thatpartially targeted fan communities, especially communities producing“unacceptable” fanworks. Slash communities and the like wereoften specifically targeted, because the people pushing for thedeletions had homophobic agendas and considered queer fiction more“inappropriate” than heterosexual / gen fiction.

Thiswas, in some ways, the beginning of our current purity politicsepidemic – people campaigning against certain types of fanfic thatthey personally disliked or disagreed with under the banner of“protecting the children” – except, in these instances, it waspressure coming from outside fandoms rather than within them. AO3(and the Organization for Transformative Works’ associated effortstowards fandom archiving, fannish academia, and legal advocacy) wasfounded partiallyas a response to these deletionsand to the concept of “acceptable” versus “unacceptable”fanworks.

I’mnot gonna do a huge history lesson here, but if you want to read moreabout this, a little bit of googling will get you a long way (as willfollowing the links above). These events have been talked aboutextensively by people who were more involved in them than I was, andif you haven’t heard about them before, they’re worth readingabout. Fandom history is important, y’all.

WhatI’m getting at here is there’s a reason older fans / peoplewho’ve been in fandom a while have a good reason to be faintlyparanoid about creators coming into fan spaces, or being too aware ofthem. Specifically,fans who write “inappropriate” or “bad” fanworks –including adult or nsfw content, Real Person Fiction (rpf ) / RealPerson Slash (rps), slash or femslash, anything involving dark ormature themes such as sexual abuse, child abuse, incest, rape,domestic violence, etc. – have the most reason to be concerned.Backlash to the same degree as has happened in the past is a littlemore unusual, due to the mainstreaming of fandom and increased fansolidarity, but it still happens.

(Assomeone who’s both been in fandom for A While now and remembers theaftermath of the deletions (even though I didn’t have an LJ accountor write mature fanfic at the time) and writes “bad” fanworks, Ihave doubly good reason to be paranoid. Hence why I talk about this alot, and have Strong Opinions on it. Most of the other people I’vetalked to who have Strong Opinions on this tend to fall into thosetwo categories, too. If you’re not from these groups, then… maybeconsider, if you’re sitting there going, “yes, but Idon’t feel threatened by anyof this,” whyyou don’t feel threatened. Try to see it from our perspective.)

Inaddition to corporate / website efforts to stamp out fandom spaces ingeneral, and “undesirable”, non-mainstream, or subversive fanspaces specifically (including, again, gay / queer spaces, becausethat was considered “undesirable”), various authors and showsmade their own efforts. Anne Rice is notorious for her veryaggressive stance against fanfiction. Even JK Rowling, one of thefirst authors to publicly say she was okay with fanfic, has gone onrecord saying she objects to adult work involving HarryPotter characters – although“innocent” fics by “genuine fans” are okay, apparently.

Theshow Supernaturalhas had several entire episodesdedicated to taking the piss out of fandom in general – andfangirls specifically, caricaturing them as ditzy, obsessive, creepy,lonely, unlikeable, sex-obsessed – despite the fact that theirfandom is the only reason they’re still running. It’s all thesame usual, unpleasant stereotypes that get pulled up every timewomen, and especially teenage girls, become invested in or excited bya piece of media. A previous fandom of mine, the Yogscast, had ahistory of begging and / or outright stealing fanart from artists formerch, video use, or general promo stuff – but also decided to reada fairly ‘innocent’, fluffy fic on stream in order to mock boththe author and the fic (and in the process drove the author off theface of fandom internet, basically).

Again,we see fandom and fanworks being split into “acceptable” and“unacceptable” by content creators – people not actuallyinvolved in fandom, but feeling as though they have a kind ofownership over it, or say in it – based on mainstream mediastandards and their personal morals (and what they can monetizeversus what they can’t, though more on that later). And the reasonthey feel like they have any kind of ownership over fandom is veryoften that they are a creator, and they see fanworks as, in someways, “belonging” to them rather than just being a derivative oftheir work.

Creatorshave always struggled to understand that fandom is, primarily, forthe fans– not there as an expression of the fans’ heart-eyed adorationfor the creators, but as an expression of the fans’ creativity, oftheir ideas and enthusiasm for the work itself, and often of theirdissatisfactionwith the source material. Fandom is a space for the fans, butcreators often feel as though they should have some kind of say init, merely by merit of having created the source material.

Historically,this entitlement – valid or not, though I’m inclined towards not– has manifested itself as creators aggressively(and generally unsuccessfully) trying to stop the creation of fancontent based ontheir material. Which is a pretty terrible option, given it destroysfandoms and often leads to harassment and legal issues for fans.

Somewherebetween that and where we are now, we had creators realising therewas fuck-all they could do about fannish activities, given the sizeof the web and the determination of fans, and instead just did theirbest to ignore it all. This was, in my opinion, a pretty good courseof action. This was what tended to happen with fandom when I firstentered it – creators were aware of it, it occasionally got broughtup in interviews if a particularly dedicated reporter had discoveredit existed, and the creator usually laughed nervously and saidsomething to the effect of, “I know it’s out there but I tend toavoid it for legal / personal reasons”.

2.The Monetization of Fandom, and the Exploitation of Fan Labour

So,what changed between then and now? A lot, I think – including theemergence of a generation of new, fandom-savvy and tech-savvycreators, many of whom grew up in fandom (think Rebecca Sugar, AlexHirsch, the cast of Critical Role to a degree… others, probably,but those are the ones I’m aware of) knowing where to go to findfandom. Also, the rise of social media, and the increasing ease ofinteracting with fandom on a variety of platforms.

Asa creator, when you’ve got a bunch of people who love the thing youcreated, and are producing a bunch of derivative works from it, thatcan be very flattering! And people tend to react positively to theopportunity to interact one-on-one with a creator, which social mediaallows them to do, and again this positive feedback is veryflattering. Being in a fandom space for a creator is, at its mostshallow and cynical, an ego boost – you have a huge base of peoplewho all (usually) like a thing you’ve made, like you and thinkyou’ve very clever for having made it, and are (usually) eager tocreate things either based off of the thing you did, or even as adirect present for you.

There’salso the fact that fandom is now big enough to very successfullymonetize, and creators (and big businesses) are increasingly workingout how to do this successfully. This takes a lot of different forms:ever-growing conventions with ever-more dealer tables, more merch,subscription-based services (such as Geek & Sundry and Nerdist’sAlphaor Roosterteeth’s First,or even Twitch subscriptions), Youtube in general, Patreon /Kickstarter… and also, more insidiously, theuse of fandom as free labour.

Fandomhas alwaysbeen partially about labour,as anyone who’s ever made fanart or fanfic or manips or a podcastor… well, really anything, can attest to. Even being actively partof a community is, in some ways, labour. However, there’s adifference between free (and freely given) labour – writing a ficis hard work, true, but often it’s funtoo, and is done as a labour of love, as a form of play or relaxation– and exploited free labour.

Freelabour is the creation of fanart and fanfic and other art and objectsby fans, for fans. Free labour is labour done under the heading of“play” or “relaxation” or “a hobby”, something thecreator enjoys doing. Free labour is even fan-run websites, or fanscampaigning to get a show back on air, or doing other things thattraditionally PR and advertising managers would do except for free,of their own free will just because they love the source material.

Exploitedfree labour is Anime Expo, a 10,000 attendee strong for-profitconvention callingfor volunteer translators to do skilled labour for free.Exploited free labour is the Yogscast, a major Youtube network,askingfor free art from skilled fanartists, and repeatedly failing tocredit fanartists who’ve done commissions for them.Exploited free labour is Amanda Palmer raising $1.2 million onKickstarter, but solicitingfans of hers who were professional musicians to work for her for freebecause she “couldn’t afford to pay them”.Exploited free labour is Universal Studios solicitingFireflyfans to help market and promote the movie for free, and then sendingthem a cease-and-desist letter once the movie had been released.Exploited free labour is E.L. James getting FiftyShades of Grey published offthe back of reviewsand collaborative idea generation from hundreds of fellow fandommembers, butcompletely failing to acknowledge this. Exploited free labour isLiveJournal’s(thankfully failed) attempt to make a for-profit fanfiction sitewhere writers had to surrender copyright to the creators of canon.The examples go on, and on, and on.

Fandomhas gone from something small and rather community based – wherepeople didprovide skilled labour for free, because cons and such were organisedby the community for the community, because there wasn’t a lot ofmoney going round, because it was about fandom rather than profit,because they were recompensed for that free labour in non-monetaryways (including reputation and other social currencies) – tosomething monetized. Cons are run by businesses now, primarily, andorganised fan events are professional affairs where a lotof money changes hands. Corporations that try and equate the two arebeing deliberately manipulative.

Basically,fundamentally capitalist constructions like the kind we see incorporate-ized fandom deliberately invoke fandom’s history of giftculture in an attempt to scam fans out of free labour. The wholepoint of gift culture is that it is reciprocal– I create something for a friend or someone I like, and in returnthey create something for me (even if that creation is a review ofwhatever I created, or something more abstract than a tangiblereward). The whole point of capitalism is that it isn’treciprocal, or at least not in the same way – I provide a servicefor someone who is likely to be a complete stranger, and in returnthey give me money. When capitalism tries to wriggle out of the“giving me money” bit of their equation by appealing to the factthat, in a gift culture, I do things for “free”, it’s blatantbullshit quite frankly.

It’sblatant, deliberatebullshit, because the companies know exactly what they’re doing,and what they’re doing is devaluing and exploiting fan labour offthe back of fandom’s cultural traditions.

(Andbefore someone says, “but it is reciprocal! Creators make a thingfor us, and we make a thing for them,” I’m going to point outthat often fans have alreadyengaged with the capitalist modelto access the Creator Thing in the first place. Fans have paid forthe movie, book, TV show, or they’ve subscribed to the Twitchchannel, or the Patreon, or donated to the Kickstarter. The creatorsare already getting monetarily compensated for their work, becausemainstream creators work in the context of the capitalist model, notthe gift culture model. Therefore, the things the creators are makingcannotbe the reciprocal part of the gift culture, since that has alreadybeen bought.)

It’sone thing for me and a friend to organise a fanmeet for a fandomwe’re in, for free, where the meet is about meeting friends fromthe fandom and socialising. It’s another thing for, say, a companyrunning a convention that will be making tens of thousands, if nothundreds of thousands, of dollars of profit, to ask if I’llorganise thatfor free. That’s a dramatic (and somewhat unrealistic, though seethe translator thing above) example, but the point stands.

Capitalismtakes advantage of fandom’s innate gift culture, and itstraditional free exchange of ideas and fan collaboration, in moreinsidious ways, too. As thispaper (which youmay not be able to read in full if you don’t have institutionalaccess, but I can provide if you message me) notes, regarding a viralseries of videos on Youtube called Lonelygirl15that was one of the first new media fandoms:

[…] the team consciously used to theiradvantage the myth of the do-it-yourself (DIY) celebrity inherent toYouTube. […] YouTube’s ability to freely distribute content tomillions with little investment holds the promise to broadcastoneself to fame and fortune. As a result, hundreds of fans, with thehopes of becoming legitimate storytellers, created videos around theLG15world. Most hoped that mere mention of their work in the franchiseproper would open doors for them. In the process, the fans werewillingly generating value for the franchise. The team, on the otherhand, heavily regulated the boundaries of the LG15canon by actively marking fan fiction as ancillary and used copyrightclaims as ways to carefully manage community initiatives. Keeping thefans at arm’s length ran counter to their initial rhetoric ofcommunity-led collaborative storytelling and subsequently estrangedthe very community that had initially given them exposure.

[…] I argue that it is a form ofexploitation because the creative team mislead the fans into thinkingthat their participation would have a more meaningful impact on theshow proper. This intentional misleading was primarily to garner theattention of the mainstream media and grow the show into a robustfranchise. The team claimed to be experimenting with a new type ofstorytelling, a community-based narrative that embodied the generalspirit of co-authorship. They sold their show to fans as anunprecedented initiative that would blur the actor/producer and fandivide, a promise that did not actualize for many fans and wasfrequently curtailed by the creative team’s eagerness to protectthe artistic integrity of their show. Ultimately, the team’s goalof proving LG15 to be a financially viable initiative led them toconfine fan engagement within strictly defined parameters thatultimately undermined their initial rhetoric of community-ledstorytelling.

- “Exposingconvergence: YouTube, fan labour, and anxiety of cultural productionin Lonelygirl15” by Burcu S.Bakioğlu

This“business model” – in which fandom-savvy creators with a closeconnection to their fandom and a marketing-based knowledge of howfandom works string their fans along with ultimately empty dreams,whilst simultaneously holding them at a distasteful arm’s length –can be seen as echoes through somany new media fandoms, and avariety of traditional ones too. It’s the typical push-pull ofcreators who are hungry for the free advertising and labour fans canprovide, but who find fandom in all its queer, subversive,traditionally-female glory to be fundamentally distasteful.

(Fanartistsare, I think, the most vulnerable to this kind of exploitation.Fanfiction is often seen as undesirable (sometimes even within fandomspaces, but that’s another essay), but fanart? Provided it’s the“right” kind of fanart – ie. sfw, fairly canon-compliant,well-drawn, no implications of gay/trans stuff – then it’s verydesirable. Fanart contests,t-shirt or merch design contests, gif contests, are all fairlycommonplace. I’ve never heard of a fanfic equivalent.)

It’sa far more subtle form of monetization, but all the more dangerousfor it, especially because it lures fans into a false sense ofsecurity with the creator. They feel that the creator is on theirside, is “one of them”, is going to reciprocate the unpaid labourthey put in, actually “gets” fandom or is supportive of itsnon-mainstream and subversive endeavours… only to then bedisappointed, because inevitably the creator isn’t interested inanything other than maximising profit by manipulating their fanbase,and may actually find the fans they’re toying with activelydistasteful.

Youcan find a hugeamount of writing and research on these concepts via googling “freelabour fandom” or “fandom labour exploitation”, by the way, ifyou’re interested. This isn’t a concept I’ve just come up with– it’s something academics and business-people have been aware offor a long time, but hasn’t quite filtered down into general fandomconsciousness yet. The companies know about it, and are activelyusing it to their advantage, but fandom as a whole hasn’t quitesavvied up yet.

Whichis, I think, a large part of what I take issue with. Some people,after reading the above few paragraphs, will respond with, “So? Ilove [thing], I don’t mind my labour being used to support it andits creators.” However,some people will be going, “Holy shit,I didn’t realise that was a thing? That’s awful, even though I dothings for [thing], I don’t want to support the parent company / Ididn’t consent for my labour to be used like this.” Some of bothgroups, given the fact that the average age of people in fandom isskewing increasingly younger, will be twelve, or thirteen.

Thisis what I object to. Not necessarily that the labour is being used,but that there’s no informed consent to it (and also that it’soften used by the same people who mock fandom, or find it‘disgusting’, or have rather poor views of their fans). That it’smanipulative,very deliberately so. That it’s often couched in terms of it beinga moral obligation, a “labour of love”, a “volunteer position”,as “helping the community”, even when that’s evidently bullshitbecause the group trying to feed you that line is a business that isonly interested in fandom as a profit-making machine. That, often,it’s vulnerable fans – younger fans, poor fans, fans fromminority groups – being taken advantage of, deliberately andmanipulatively, by creators.

Fansare inherentlyvulnerable, for a variety of reasons (more on that later) due to thepower difference between them and content creators, and thatvulnerability is being exploited, often using the language of fandomto disguise the exploitation.

Howoften do creators run a “design a t-shirt / poster for us!”competition, where the artist gets paltry recompense (or none atall!) and often no credit for their work? How often do competitionTerms of Service end up having loopholes where the creators nowlegally own your work, in its entirety, forever, and you can’t doshit about it? Professionalfreelancers are aware of these kinds of things, and look for them incontracts – youraverage fan is not,however, and yet they are being used as (easily exploited, preciselybecausethey don’t have the experience professionals have) freelancers bycreators.

Asthisarticle regardingthe Amanda Palmer debacle above rather neatly puts it:

Ideally, you don’t even know you areworking at all. You think you are keeping up with friends, ornetworking, or saving the world, or jamming with the band. And youare. But you are also laboring for someone else’s benefit withoutgetting paid.

3.The Fan-Creator Power Imbalance and Fan Vulnerability

Let’sbe honest here: all of this manipulation is possible because fans,and fandom, are incrediblyvulnerable, on severaldifferent fronts – legally and financially, emotionally, and oftenin terms of age and experience. Though not allcreators take advantage of these vulnerabilities, it’sunfortunately not unusual.

Fansare primarily vulnerable legally. In general, the legalityof fanfiction and fanworksis super iffy,to the point Wikipedia has an entire article on it, and creatorsaren’t always happy that it’s being written (again, covered inthe Wiki article, and mentioned above as well). Fans also don’thave a great deal of legal protections– one of the reasons why AO3has a legal teamthat fights for fans and fandom – and what they do have has oftenbeen won by other fans who’ve fallen foul of copyright laws orcease-and-desist demands and fought back. Often though (but notalways), fans are young, and have neither the money nor the legalknowledge to fight back should a large corporation or dedicatedindividual creator with a beefy legal team decide to start legalproceedings against them.

Fansare also vulnerable because of their age and life experience.Increasingly, fandom is skewing younger and younger, which means manyfans (perhaps now even the majority) are underage. It issignificantly easier for creators to manipulate and use younger fansthan it is to do so with older fans. Even older fans, though, whohave more life experience, may not have relevantlife experience. A lot of fan writers and artists are hobbyists, notprofessional freelancers. “Tricks” by corporations such as dodgyterms of service or questionable phrasing in competition terms may beless noticeable to fans than they would be to professionals providingsimilar services. Fans may also not have the same tools asprofessionals when it comes to knowing how to deal with being takenadvantage of. Professional artists may have a standard procedure theyfollow when they discover their art has been plagiarised, or haveother professional artists they know as part of the community who canadvise them – fanartists are lucky if they have any such resource.

Fansare alsouniquely vulnerable with regards to interacting with contentcreators. There’s a power imbalance. This isn’t exactly the placefor discussions regarding (usually sexual) harassment / abuse of fansby creators, and I don’t want it to turn into one entirely, but…it happens. It happens a lot.A quick google search found me thisarticle listing anumber of scandals and allegations of sexual abuse or abuse of power,just regarding Youtubers,in the past year or so alone. Here’sa post from my personal blogsummarizing the multipleallegations of harassment levelled against the Yogscast, includingsome really rather serious ones, and the… frankly appallingresponse from the Yogs. That’s without even touching on theaccusations against more mainstream / Hollywood personalities thatcrop up every five seconds.

Thiskind of stuff happens a lot more than fandom would like toacknowledge. Creators hold power over fans, and sometimes – a lotof the time – they don’t use that power entirely for good.

Ofcourse, fans often enjoy having creators in fandom spaces – or,more accurately, enjoy having creators accessible. Fans want to benoticed by creators, have a personal relationship with them, meetthem, talk with them, share things with them. They often also wanttheir fandom pursuits, whatever those may be, to be validated. Theseare all perfectly normal things to want, especially from people youadmire and look up to. Hell, I would be a huge hypocrite if I triedto pretend I’ve never wanted to be friends with the creator of afandom I was in. I’m not here to rag on people for havingfantasies, or for looking up to creators – I’m here to point outthat people should be exercising caution along with those.

Becausethe issue is, a lotof people don’t feel safe with creators too far into the fandom.And some other people don’t see that as a reasonable boundary forthose people to have, or are too caught up in their “senpai noticeme” heart-eyes to care.

Beingon twitter is good, it makes creators approachable, you can tweet atthem and they might even respond – and sometimes it’s even a bitfunny if they admit they’ve gone looking for fanfic. But a creatordemonstrating a huge deal of internet savvy, having a tumblr blog,going on AO3? That’s enough to make a lot of people feel unsafecreating and sharing fanworks.

(Ifmonetization and exploitation is a particularly big issue forfanartists, then feeling unsafe is a particularly big issue forfanwriters. Not that fanartists never feel unsafe, especially if theyproduce “undesirable” content – but, for almost every creatorI’ve ever come across, whilst somefanart is acceptable, perhaps even desirable, fanfiction isunanimously “othered” in terms of fan crafts. Perhaps because,due to inherently needing a plot and the use of headcanons and havinga non-canon focus, it’s more threatening to the creator? I’m notsure and, again, that’s another issue. But for fic writers, eventhe most “harmless”, innocent, fluffy, G-rated gen fic risksscorn, humiliation, disapproval, or accusations of being “weird”or “creepy”. Those who write darker or more mature stuff, likemyself and many of my friends, have to deal with being aware thateven creators who take a “live and let live” approach to fanficwould likely be disgusted if they ever found our work. As I saidbefore: if you’re sitting here thinking “but I’mnot worried”, consider why.)

And,again, fandom is primarily forthe fans. We should beprotecting fans above and before creators.

Areally good way of doing that, whether protecting them from legalthreats, from having their labour exploited, or from creatorharassment, is to keep fandom separated from creators. Not entirelyseparate, not “buried in the depths of the web where no one canever find it” separate, but just… an acknowledgement that fandomis for fans, not creators. That fans deserve spaces they can putthings up for other fans to see, without being worried about theirwork being stumbled upon by creators or ‘upsetting creators’ –or, more unpleasantly, being mocked by creators, broadcast outside offandom spaces without their consent, or being judged according to anarbitrary, mainstream moral code.

Fundamentally,fans deserve a safe space. And when I use that word, I don’t mean“somewhere where no one will ever be triggered” or “somewherethat has been entirely morally sanitised” or “somewhere whereroving mobs of thirteen year olds get to dictate who is problematicor not”. A fandom safe space should be a space where people canpost what they want (within some reason) without fear of Big BrotherCreator watching, without fear of being mocked, without fear of beingtold they’re gross or disgusting or Wrong – and a space wherepeople can reasonably be expected to take ownership of their owncontent consumption, helped by stuff like content warnings orblacklists or AO3 tags.

Havingcreators there complicates that. It makes people worried, for a wholevariety of reasons. Something I said on a post a while back that isrelevant here: “Creative fandom, in terms of art and fic, issupposed to be an area of fandom without creator oversight – orwith very limited creator oversight. Feeling like you’re beingwatched, worrying that you might unintentionally offend, killscreativity.” Even if canon creators don’t intend to have anegative impact on fan spaces, or even want to join fan spaces inorder to interact with and please fans, they have an adverse effecton the safety and fandom-ness of the space.

Or,as out-there-on-the-maroon’sresponse to thatpost put it, probably better than I did:

This is something I’ve seen happen inreal time on the various official G&S [Geek and Sundry] discords.Initially fan-only spaces, they quickly started to welcome andexplicitly invite the cast and crew onto the discords. Which has itsbenefits and cool aspects, but also turns a fan-only private spaceinto a space watched by the creators, where the creators havepowerful voices of authority.

Suddenly any criticism or “I didn’tlike this part of this episode” comments became awkward orself-censored. Fanfic talk got dialed way back, hidden in privateDMs, or moved to separate private discords. Then there were clasheswith mods and other fans who were debating what was appropriate talknow that the cast were becoming members. It’s one thing to yell“omg I HATE [writer X]!” during a livestream of a tense episodewhen in a private discord, it’s another to do so in a channel wherethat writer frequently reads the chatlogs. Among fellow fans it’sunderstood that such talk is hyperbolic, but when the creators areright there chatting with you in a friendly way, it becomes risky.

[…] A large chunk of the “drama”that happens in these new media fandoms can be traced to there beingpoor separation of personal and private, be that a creator venting ontwitter and getting into fights with fans, fans sending explicitfanfic to a creator, or those “dramatic readings” at conventionswhere a room full of adults is invited to mock the un-edited writingsof a 15 year old. I’ve seen a lot of issues arise when someone, saya youtube star, rises to fame very quickly and is ill-prepared forputting up boundaries between themselves and their fans. (Mostyounger celebrities are actively discouraged from doing this,encouraged instead to be always available, always friendly, alwaysopen and personal with fans.)

Havingcreators engaging with fandom is not necessarily bad in and of itself– fans are excited to be noticed by their heroes, creators areexcited to hear from people who love them and the stuff they produce.It can be good, or at the very least not-bad. The issue is, though,that creative fandom is for fans, by fans, and there’s no intrinsicplace for creators in it, but creators are increasingly trying tomakespace for themselves in it anyways without understanding the effectthat has. That’s where the problem lies.

I’mnot suggesting we never ever let creators talk to their fans everagain. I’m just saying that we have sites like twitter for that –they don’t need to be coming onto tumblr, or browsing AO3, to haveconversations with fans. It should be up to fans to make the firstmove regarding contact, nine times out of ten, not the creators.

Creatorsdeserve spaces where they’re safe from being exposed to contentabout their characters that they don’t want to see or finddistasteful. Fans deserve spaces where they don’t have to worryabout the creator deciding they’ve seen stuff they don’t want toor stuff they find distasteful. The easiest and best way of doingthis is to make sure there are separate spaces for creators and fans– and that each side acknowledges, when they go into the other’sspace, they play by the rules of that space and don’t try toenforce their own. End of.

4.“Not MyCreators!”

Ifyour response to this has been, “Yes, okay, but mycreators are nice, though,” then consider: you’re probably notgoing to be in that fandom (or at least, not solely in that fandom)forever. You are eventually, inevitably, going to encounter a creatorwho isn’t nice. Your creator may also not be nice forever – it’snot unusual for creators to seem lovely and friendly and reallyinvolved in fandom, and then turn out to be a massive douchebag (seealso, Ridgedog and Sjin from the Yogscast).

Eventhe nicest creators can cause drama and conflict, too. If they’reseen to endorse a particular headcanon that people start trying toimpose as canon, if they state “preferences” for fanworks thatpeople feel compelled to (or are forced by other fans to) obey, ifpeople think they’re playing favourites… it gets messy. And thelonger someone is seen as “the nicecreator”, the longer they’re up on that pedestal, the harder theyfall when they do the slightestthing wrong.

It’snot just fans that can suffer when creators get too close. In myprevious fandom, a fan that was jealous of the attention a creatorwas showing to another fan (ie. notto them) decided to start asmear campaign over it. They tried doxxing the creator in question,got several other people to threaten doxxing, started attacking otherfans (myself included) and sending death threats, and generallymanaged to really badly fuck up a whole number of involved parties’mental health. A similar thing happened with another creator in thesame fandom, where said fan is stillrunning a smear campaign against them. These are not isolatedincidents.

AsI mentioned in replyto a content creator I’m personally acquainted with, on one of my initial posts on this topic:

I think… regardless of how hard theytry to integrate, canon creators are Apart and Above fans. They can’tbe part of their own fandom in the way that fans are - howinsufferably arrogant they’d be if they were! - and they have anatural, inescapable power over the fans in the sense that their fansare inevitably going to look up to them and idolise them / put themon a pedestal. It makes things a little sticky for creators in thesense that they’re stuck as almost a god-figure, but also thattheir fans want to be friends with the Real Them - and, of course,either the creator keeps up the god-figure persona, stays on theirpedestal, and disappoints the fans who feel held at arm’s length;or they drop the god-figure persona, get off (or fall off) thepedestal, and disappoint the fans who feel angry and betrayed andupset that their idol is actually fallible and human (and hasopinions the fan disagrees with / is boring / is bigoted / isn’tfunny when they’re not performing / isn’t a role model ordesirable when they’re not pretended to be a god-figure). Damned ifyou do, damned if you don’t.

Fandom,especially younger fandom, has an idolatry issue when it comes tocreators – and it hurts people on both sides of the god-worshipperequation that that behaviour creates.

5.Conclusion…?

Isuppose, actually, that despite the thesis statement there are a fairfew different questions actually being asked in this essay: How okayare we – as a community of fans, regardless of the particularfandoms we call home – with censorship? How okay are we, or shouldwe be, with the commodification and monetisation of fandom by bothbig business and / or fans themselves? How okay are we withnon-fandom people and groups, whose aims and morals may not alignwith fandom’s, attempting to manipulate / change fandom and use itfor their own ends? How do we plan to protect our own?

Theseweren’t the questions I expected to end up asking at the end ofthis essay but, here we are.

Iwould hope I’d made my personal positions on them clear. First andforemost, we should nottolerate censorship. Not fromwithin fandom, and not from without. We should alsonot tolerate manipulative attempts at monetisation by corporations –and should fight hard within our communities to preserve gift cultureand the fandom-as-play mentality that fandom is built on, despite therise of commissions-based fan interactions and Patreon / Kickstarterculture. We should fight hard, not to prevent fandom from changingper se, but to make sure we don’t lose our roots and principles.

Creators,by merit of being the people who create the media we love and engagewith so much, have power. A hugeamount of power. Maybe that’s legal power, maybe that’s the powerof a savvy and manipulative marketing department behind them. Maybethat’s the power conferred by being adored and idolised by a largenumber of fans, maybe that’s the power of having a twitter mob attheir control that will harass anyone they disagree with. Maybe thatpower is just older fans knowing how creators can turn on fans andfandoms, and being afraid to create things because “big brother iswatching”, regardless how benevolent that all-seeing eye is. Maybethat power is just having people feel it’s “polite” to “respectthe creator’s wishes” regarding what sort of fanwork can / shouldbe produced in that fandom.

Asthe old fandom term “Word of God” implies, creators are… well,the gods of their fandoms. That’s not necessarily a title theyearned (some creators are supershitty people, let’s be honest here), it might not even be a titlethey wanted(see also: Undertale, Homestuck, and other fandoms that suddenlyexploded), but it’s a title they have nonetheless.

Inthe end, this issue ties together a lot of things, I think – notjust creator involvement in fandom, not just censorship, not justmonetization, but purity politics, and the legality of fanworks, andhow to manage communities both online, and irl and the habit ofpeople to put creators they admire on a pedestal.

Howdo we, as a community, plan to self-organise, disseminate importantinformation, make decisions, and work as a united front in thefuture? Is that even possible – is fandom a fundamentallyanarchistic entity, unable to survive attempts to formalise it in anyform still recognisable as “fandom”; or, conversely, is fandomdoomed to dying and being subsumed by corporate manipulations if itdoes notformalise and organise, and work to protect its roots and the uniqueculture that has sprung from them?

I’mafraid I don’t really have the answers to those particularquestions, but… food for thought. I know I certainly think aboutthem a fair amount, and perhaps it’s time fandom in general starteddoing so too.

6. Fandom: The Next Generation

Whatdo we doabout all this, though?

Well,for starters, we educate both fandom and creators. There’s somegrassroots efforts to do this within fandom – professionalfreelancers making pushes to ensure people who offer commissionsprice their work correctly, and also checking through various contestterms of service and spreading the word if something’s dodgy, therecent pushback against censorship and purity politics within fandomspaces. Various fandoms on tumblr who know their creators often usetumblr, or check specific tags within it, have developed “private”tags for nsfw or shippy content, or fanfiction, to keep them awayfrom creators – either at the creators’ request, or of their ownvolition.

That’snot enough, though. We also need to educate creators.Even for those that grew up “geeky” or “nerdy” or “infandom”, they’re often talking primarily about the curative sideof fandom activities, not the creative. That side of fandom has verydifferent rules, social mores, and opinions to the creative side offandom. Creative fandom, essentially, needs to set out its stall forcreators – this is who we are, this is what we do, this is how youengage with us politely. We’re happy for you to come look at ourthings, if you want, but if you’re coming into ourspaces (ie. livejournal, tumblr, ao3) then don’t try to tell uswhat we can and can’t do, because we’renot doing this for you.Remember, when you interact with us in our spaces, you’re in ourterritory, and you should behave as such. Remember, we are acommunity, and if you try to take advantage of us or our vulnerablemembers, we will not tolerateit – even if you didn’treally realise that you were trying to take advantage.

Andhonestly? Some creators just need to remember to have basic goddamnmanners. Going on twitter to go “ewww I just read the creepiestfanfic about my book” and linking to it, or reading something outon stream without author permission, or telling part of your fanbasethey’re bad people because of how they choose to engage with yourmaterial… that’s just plain rude. We shouldn’t have to teachcreators how to be decent human beings. A remarkable number ofcreators fall short of this standard, honestly, and we need to stoptolerating it.

Ifthe creators aren’t dicks, then they’ll want to learn how to dobetter, both for themselves and also for their fandom. If they aren’tdicks, they won’t want to take advantage of their fandom, or farmthem for exploited labour. And, well, if they are dicks… that’s alittle harder, but it requires fandom as a community to stop keepingcreators on pedestals, to separate fandom from the creator of thesource material, and to be willing to occasionally kick someone’sass if need be. We’ve got to protect one another, is what I’mgetting at here.

Isuppose, if I have to end this essay with anything, it’s this:educate yourself.

Knowyour history – there are plenty of older fans on tumblr talkingabout their experiences, and plenty of blogs dedicated to it. OTW hasa huge number of resources for this, including their open-accessjournal for fan matters (TransformativeWorks and Cultures), theFanlorewiki, and the summaries of the legal activism they’ve done in agiven month for fandom in general and also specific fans. Livejournalis practically a treasure trove, with huge communities that gatheredand collated drama, wank, and general history and informationregarding fandom. Wikipedia, and the wider internet, also hasincreasing amounts of information on fandom history as fandom getspushed into the mainstream media spotlight.

Educateyourselves, educate others, and listen to people who’ve been infandom longer than you have been – though “listen” doesn’tmean “automatically agree with”. And, most importantly of all,look out for other fans. Help them, support them, protect them.Fandom’s something pretty special, after all. We’ve got to lookafter it for those that come after us.

#fandom history #meta #idk what else to tag this with but i Do sort of want to get it Out There so...#anonymous #ask #sparx chats #essays #i am sorry this took so long to do but... 8k lmao #this is a subject i am Real passionate about #(and real salty about)#and i may not have all the answers but i sure as hell have a lot of questions i'm gonna yell about til fandom actually pays attention

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docfuture · 6 years

Text

The Maker’s Ark - Chapter 42

[This is a chapter from my latest novel, a sequel to The Fall of Doc Future and Skybreaker’s Call. The start is here, and links to my other work here. It can be read on its own, but contains spoilers for those two books. I try to post something new about every two weeks, with short stories and vignettes if I don’t have a new chapter ready. The next update is planned for the week of February 26th.]

Previous: Chapter 41

"It isn't a particularly good time," said Stella. "But there was never going to be one." "Agreed," said Doc, thinking about what his self-analysis had uncovered. They had moved to a secure room, with mind screens and assorted other esoteric anti-surveillance countermeasures active. Stella leaned back in her chair. "We have a lot to go over, but we keep getting interrupted, and I have a serious personal problem. You did something supremely arrogant that has caused me a number of difficulties. Some are short term, others aren't fixable for the foreseeable future. And you appear to be unaware of how angry I still am about it, and why. Our options are restricted because of potential political consequences." Stella raised an eyebrow. "Finding a way to for us to continue to coexist professionally is necessary, and you really don't know enough about me. It's not the only reason you keep making assumptions about me that are wrong, but it isn't helping. And my old identity is likely to be uncovered eventually. I don't want you to get blindsided." Doc looked down at his hands. "Your brain was viable. If you didn't want me to try, it would have been useful to let me know beforehand. Survival of self was your priority when I stood watch for your patch replacement." "It most certainly was not. And I gave no affirmative consent. Margie was right to object. You of all people should understand how bringing someone back can be a threat." "DASI said you were changing, and that was--" "DASI was operating on a secondary node, with a slightly out of date backup, and her protections from outside influence were disrupted. So she chose to obey your override orders, despite the fact they were seriously outdated, rather than withhold information from you. We've dealt with those problems, but I'm still stuck with the result. The changes she saw were those Three required to adjust to living in a new set of bodies. A lot like some of the changes I've had to make for this damned--" Stella clenched her fist, then unclenched it. "This fine body, skillfully optimized for many things other than being me. By far the most relevant problem with it is that it still has a human brain." "No point in bringing you back at all without that. I put in as much capability for you to shapeshift and adjust to the rest as I could," said Doc. "Yes. But even if we take a humanoid body as a given, this one would have suited me much better when I was seventeen and hunting full time. I'm thirty, and my main job is to act as an auditor and figurehead for the effective caretakers of Earth--DASI and Three. The adjustment capability is the only reason I'm still marginally sane." Stella smiled wryly. "Though that point is arguable." "I based the snakes on your own telepathic self-image." "Those snakes on a humanoid bio-remote I could inhabit when I chose would have been a wonderful indulgence. They are indeed marvels of function and form. But Stella Three is much happier than me, despite not having any--because she was able to retain continuity of identity as the person I wanted to be." "She agreed. And Yiskah didn't object." "Yiskah had good and sufficient reason to pass on the call. She shouldn't even have been conscious, let alone trying to make life or death judgements. Three was who I wished to become and stay. Not who I am now. We could spend all day just on her decision tree. She couldn't rule out the possibility that all your reasoning was wrong, your motivation rationalized--but your actions were still a time-loop driven necessity for this worldline to escape an existential trap. She decided that agreeing was the least bad choice. Among other things, Flicker was inconveniently witnessing your argument and was enthralled by the same mythological scenario as you, which may be relevant soon. And Three knew she'd get to stay in the ships, no matter what happened to me." Doc stared at the surveillance screen status monitor. "Wrong but still necessary. Definitely possible. So you disagreed with my assessment of the risks inherent in giving up a biological body deliberately?" "You had an applicable nightmare about yourself, correct?" "Yes." "You overgeneralized. The Grs'thnk found considerable individual variation in biogestalt cohesion. I augmented with a specific goal of identity stability. You did not. You were on the unstable end even before you augmented, and many of your adaptions match categories that make Grs'thnk more vulnerable to biogestalt problems." "Not a coincidence. I knew I wasn't going to go down the cybernetic route, so I optimized for other methods. That's why I stay away from neural interfaces. Your way does seem more robust." Doc took a deep breath. "But Three sure acts like she thinks of humans as amusing pets." "She does. Including me. But so do I, and have for a long time. Less amusing now that I lost what was probably my last chance to personally escape." "There were others?" said Doc. "To break free of the limitations of my first body, my first brain? Oh, yes. Didn't it bother you a bit that my little adventure in Milan turned out so messily, despite all my preparation?" "Yiskah's original personality--" "Was unexpected, but not an insurmountable problem, as Yiskah currently demonstrates. I could have coexisted with her. But I told you the day we met that I didn't want more than one body at a time, and I wanted hers. What did you think I planned to do with my old one?" Doc winced. "You must have figured out Flicker was watching while you were still in the room." "I did. There was an extra mind nearby that Yiskah could detect but not localize. And Flicker was absolutely not going to watch idly while my old body died in a hail of gunfire to cover my transfer. No matter what I might say. So I had to adjust my plan on the fly and accept a number of compromises, some of which wouldn't stay tenable for long." "Is that why you needed my help with your patch?" "Yes. I hadn't planned on still having my old body. And if I'd botched it, I would have lost a big chunk of continuity and seriously disrupted Yiskah." "Okay. This seems obvious now. Why wasn't it before?" "Yiskah thinks your initial analysis memories were in the small area that got wiped when I stopped the anti-tamper trap on your mind block from killing you. You could have revisited it, but you never did. You already trusted me, so why bother? That's a problem." "Accepting that you'd tell me anything relevant is a problem?" "It sure is if you don't make time to listen. And Flicker wasn't respecting your privacy, so there were things I could not push until I was sure she was stable or we had a truly secure privacy setup. Preferably both. I also wasn't sure how much you were still being influenced by Golden Valkyrie. And there's a distinction between acceptance and not caring enough to learn, and you've been on the wrong side of that line for quite a while." Stella closed her eyes for a moment and took a breath. "Okay. Scratch that. This isn't about blame, but I'm not willing to hide my anger any longer. Do you understand that we do have a problem? And that doing something constructive about it should be a higher priority than refining models, whatever our personal inclinations?" Doc nodded. "Yes. Still listening." "Good. Let's talk about how I got the way I am--the parts you don't know, or have wrong." ***** Journeyman had good reason to keep his front door closed, and Flicker was trying to learn to respect that. She closed it after coming inside, then went to his study. She slowed back down next to Journeyman, who was sitting on the couch staring at his phone. "Hi," she said. "Greta is handling things in the Nine Worlds--the pool will be ready if I come back in bad shape. But I stopped to talk with Ashil, and she has a really solid idea that I think we--" Flicker stopped as she belatedly started paying attention to body language and other cues. "You don't look okay. What's wrong?" He looked up and smiled weakly. "Too many things happening at once. I needed a break from black hole physics, and it looks like I might get the physics part. The break part--not so much. I have a hypothetical question for you, forwarded by Three from Learning. Could you psychologically cope with 24 hours of deep space travel on board Learning if you had to, with support from his biogestalt team and me? If not, how about 16 hours? Or how about if Donner came along?" Distance, time and acceleration were life and breath to Flicker. She didn't have to calculate; the numbers were just there. "Sixteen hours to Europa? Learning can pull a hundred g's?" "Hypothetically, his maximum acceleration might be a Grs'thnk military secret, not to be revealed casually to Earthlings except in an emergency. Which this isn't. Yet." "Okay. Um. Sixteen probably, a full day maybe. It would be rough, and I'm not sure what kind of shape I'd be in when we got there. I don't think I'd even dare try to sleep, because if I turned on my inertial damping by reflex, it might blow Learning's inertial compensators and everyone else would get flattened. If I panicked and tried a momentum transfer to local mass, it might blow his main drive." "His safeties would cut acceleration before anyone else got hurt. And what if there were a special room with no inertial compensation?" "That would make things easier. But why can't you just port us? That worked fine last time." "Not... exactly. The Floaters object to the 'No, you really don't want to time-travel--oops, too late' club. Strenuously, and for what appear to be good reasons. Enough that their top communications priority is making sure I don't do it again. They only have one guy talking now, and he's been patiently scaring the hell out of me. From the other end of a long lag communications channel and across a nasty translation barrier." "Is he a magician?" "We don't think so. As near as we can translate--and by we, I mean DASI, Three, and Learning--he's a safety physicist. And he's scaring me with the questions he's asking. Way too many of my answers are 'I don't know', 'We didn't think of that', or 'We did think of that, but had no reliable way to measure, so I just had to try and see'. I feel like a fourteen-year-old with a fission pile in his basement trying to explain that criticality incident was no big deal because his friend is really fast with the control rods. Even I don't believe it." Flicker frowned. "If it was so dangerous, why didn't the Grs'thnk warn us?" "Learning did. But they've mostly been following a policy that they don't know enough about Earth yet, so they're watching and documenting disasters before they object too much to anything specific. They don't have some of the sensors and theory the Floaters do, and have translation problems of their own." He smiled mordantly. "But I have some good news--you're off the hook for 'Doomed us all'." "They accepted that I had to do what I did?" "Apparently, but that's not why. We made a wrong assumption during the first try at translation. Doomsayer was referring to our stupid portal tricks mishap, not your ballet for five million rocks and a universal reset button during the Xelian invasion. And they weren't talking about you; they were talking about me." ***** "...realized I wasn't even making a dent," said Stella. "Eleven targets in almost two years? That was down in the noise--and wouldn't make any long term difference, because they weren't getting caught; they were just dying. But I did learn a lot about poisons, psychology, social engineering, and cultural assumptions. And I didn't get caught, or even suspected, which I found increasingly puzzling, despite all my precautions. I'd assumed I'd eventually get unlucky, or miss something because of inexperience." "That was an entirely reasonable assumption," said Doc. He was acutely uncomfortable with what he was hearing--but that was irrelevant. Emotional distancing was not an option. She was his partner. He would listen. "Another reason to stop was my age." "Your age? But--" "There was an interesting legal loophole; if I managed to make it to 18 without dying or getting caught--which was starting to look possible--I couldn't be charged as a juvenile because I wouldn't be one anymore, and couldn't be charged as an adult because I was too young when the acts were committed. Even for crimes without a statute of limitations, like murder. I was still naive enough to think that mattered. But that protection went away when I turned 13. So I quit. For then." "I see." "I had a number of new options open up, because my parent's divorce battle turned nasty enough I was able to get my legal guardian changed to my aunt. She had a minor drinking problem, but was quite canny, had a good idea what my home life had been like, and was willing to cover for me as long as I remembered to eat and excelled enough at my home schooling that she could overwhelm the child welfare people with true stories of my academic performance. Which I did." "Ah." "That's when I started studying you and planning my augmentation. I was also finally beginning to suspect my sexual orientation might be something more complex than 'serial killer'..." ***** Flicker studied the summaries projected on her visor. She'd expected them to become clearer, with better defined probabilities, after everyone had time to analyze the data from the portal test mishap. That hadn't happened. DASI was now refusing to even give numerical estimates for some things, noting that they would be misleading. And the error bars on the rest... She slowed back down. "DASI thinks your Floater safety guy has a very good point. We've been focusing on what happened with the portal, without considering that it might be inseparable from what happened on the port home." Journeyman leaned back on the couch and sighed. "Heh. Maybe. He's made clear that he doesn't know what happened, neither do we, that's a big problem, and we don't even know how big." "The local and global causal disconnection scenarios are pretty scary." Flicker pulled the Skystone out of her carrying pouch. "Could you refasten this? I took it off last night, but DASI thinks it might have been crucial that I didn't take it off for the first time until we were back together in Doc's med center, and I'm feeling uneasy about it now." He looked at her for a moment, his expression hard to read. "Okay," he said. As he fastened the clasp of the necklace, Flicker felt her sense of his presence and well-being snap back into place. He seemed to be fine physically, but... "You're pretty upset," she said. He met her eyes. "Yeah. Personal stuff piling on top of everything else." Flicker struggled with conflicting emotions. "How bad? Is it anything that telling me about would help? I know your magical message drop system got accidentally DDOSed yesterday--did you miss something important?" "I don't think so. But a bunch of magicians found out the hard way that most chain-contagion assassination deterrent spells depend on the ultimate target being biological. They backfire badly if the chain ends with Black Swan. From what I've heard so far, only a few really sloppy or reckless casters died, but it put quite a few others in tight spots. Some of their former employers left standing orders to kill the magician if they died and their spell failed. Occupational hazard of working for mobsters. Everyone wanted to make sure I knew about it, though, and the messages piled up. I checked with Reveka for more details and she gave me an earful." "You still... talk to her?" Journeyman gave her a look over the top of his glasses. "I did learn enough tradecraft to stop taking a phone with me. She hears a lot about what goes on in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, and we swap gossip regularly. She personally was careful, but she has a deserved rep as one of the best, so she had a lot of clients. Three of them died within five minutes of each other. That's a lot of backlash. Fortunately she's very good at life magic. I brought a useful potion for her and helped with a few things. When I left, she was marginally less angry with me." "Why was she mad at you?" "Because I didn't warn her. Nothing I could do; I wasn't anywhere near Earth, and Black Swan didn't warn me. Besides the personal inconvenience, Reveka's professional rep is going to take a hit, because her former clients are dead and Black Swan is still flying around. But she'll cope--she's been rolling with change since before the First World War." Journeyman took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair, still looking upset and distracted. Flicker changed her mind about the question she'd been about to ask. "I'm glad you were able to help her," she said instead. "Was this after you talked to the Floater safety physicist?" "After the first round of translation and clarification requests, before the second. Then I ported around a bit reassuring some of my contacts who don't trust UPPfones yet, let alone the garbled news reports. Took a while. Hearing things through the grapevine can be exhausting when you're the one that has to move the grapes." "Yeah." "Then I got the third round of translations, along with that helpful scenario from Learning." "He's been right about a lot." "I know." Journeyman stared down at his hat. "But that didn't exactly make it any more reassuring to find out that time travel was only the second scariest thing we might have done that day, trying to get back home before your hand exploded. When I thought about it." Flicker frowned. "How so? Time travel is scary enough. But I don't blame you. We ported so quick I didn't have time to stop pushing with probability manipulation, so it might have been my fault." "And it might not. You were pushing for survival with data at the test portal. I pushed safe and fast for our port home. Hard as I've ever pushed a port. And holy shit did we get fast. We got forty million miles in negative seventeen seconds fast. And yeah, that's scary, even with Novikov self-consistency." "There are a lot of--" Journeyman looked up and interrupted her. "But you want to know what's scarier? It seems like I jumped us back in time. But I could have jumped us sideways too. Not safe to safe. Dying to not dying. I asked DASI how we verify that we arrived in the same universe we left, and... we don't. We just don't." He waved his arm. "Then Novikov goes out the window, there's no telling how different our past is from everyone and everything else, and for the rest of our lives we could be finding holes where there should be things that only the two of us remember, because they never happened here." "Um..." Flicker sped up. "DASI? Is this possible?" "Please do not become alarmed. Yes." She slowed back down, still thinking. "Okay. So we can't rule it out. Is there any evidence for it? You've been porting around for a long time without anything like that happening." "That we know of. But that whole time, Golden Valkyrie has been around. We all know she can do more than predict the future--she can change it. Shape it. But we've never been sure exactly how. What's the mechanism? Too many possibilities." "Here's the one that's been bugging me. I think it was number seven on Doc's old list." Journeyman waved his arm again. "Quantum many worlds, right? Lots of copies of everything. How many? Don't know, so use Doc's measure scale. Only relative measure matters. Now Golden Valkyrie decides what she wants in some collection of worlds. She portals out, to somewhere not causally connected to home. Takes a look with her Sight. Then comes back... But only to worlds where the thing she wanted happened." Flicker frowned. "What keeps her from appearing multiple times in the same worldline?" "That weird quantum amplitude addition thing that Doc likes to go on about when he talks about cross-world interference. She doesn't come back more times, she comes back more likely. Probability over one? That just forces the whole worldline to become more likely compared to others. And there's Doc's measure transfer, which is another thing we don't know the mechanism for." Flicker stared at the window. "Shit. There is some potential evidence now. I don't know where she was most of the time when I was hunting the Wanderer. And she was off rescuing The Volunteer during the Xelian attack. She could have chosen to only come back to where we'd won, both times." "Yup. And remember what a big deal she made about me being the one to fasten the Skystone? Like, maybe, to make sure we could find our way back to the same universe if we got separated? There's some global causal disconnection for you. And one hell of a problem if there's more than one driver at a time, and they overlap. But the Wanderer is dead, Doc has stopped watching Apocalyptic Nightmare Prophecy Theatre, and Golden Valkyrie herself is gone. So it's at least possible that someone else could manage a shaping without hosing our worldline." He took a deep breath. "If I haven't already botched it." ***** "You weren't tempted to look, after Flicker's Database search for a potential friend and mentor found me?" asked Stella. "No, I wasn't," said Doc. "Flicker asked me not to go beyond the minimum needed to make sure you weren't spoofing the Database safety metrics." "I was spoofing your metrics, and had been for years." "Not the safety metrics. DASI could tell you'd done something, but it wasn't her job to find out what. There were plenty of others who went to extreme lengths to protect family and friends during the Lost Years. Many of them had no compelling reason to trust me. And my superhero family safety program started out rough enough even for those who did. Not respecting your own efforts would have been rude as well as dangerous." "Unless I was a threat." "Yes. And your threat index was negative. Whoever or whatever you actually were was irrelevant. You were making things better, not worse. I was more worried that you'd react badly to Flicker finding you, so I insisted that she respect your privacy and listen if you said no." "She worried that she was making me more of a target. When she was inconveniencing me for entirely different reasons." Stella shook her head. "So what did happen to the original Stella Reinhart?" "She died on that boat off the coast of Honduras, along with her parents. I tracked down the saboteurs because that was what she would have done if she had become anything like the person I intended to be. All the supernatural overtones were misdirection. At least at first." Doc nodded. "You fit the supernatural vigilante or avatar profile very well. But I'm curious about something. The similarities required to make the swap possible made it tremendously unlikely. If you did enough research to understand the superhero probability distortion effect, you must have also discovered how it can snap if pushed too far. What was worth that risk?" "Family. It was still the Lost Years, and not all of my relatives were evil sociopaths. Both my aunt and the cousin who trusted me had been through far too much already." "Why keep the same first name, then?" A humorless smile. "I didn't, quite. My original full first name was Estella. My mother named me after the character in Great Expectations. A big clue about several of her issues. I was happy to stick with Stella because it let me spoof both database reconciliation and naming magic attempts to uncover my original identity." Doc frowned. "One-eyed Jack warned me that naming magic was probably used to uncover several people in my program. But how did keeping a similar first name protect against it?" "The only version most magicians know implicitly requires the form of name change to be uncommon. Marriage name changes swamp the signal from mine. And DASI can tell you all about my database spoofing legwork. That was what convinced her I was suitably competent. Didn't make me any happier about being drafted the way I was, but at least she warned me." "Wait, what? When was this?" "She didn't use her name, but she was allowed to contact me under your privacy protocols as soon as I became a potential target for Flicker's search. And she did. She didn't tell you because--" "You weren't a threat. I see. Would this be part of the 'relevant but non-urgent background' that she's been dutifully reminding me about for a while?" "Barely scratches the surface. But we aren't done with my relevant background yet, which is urgent." ***** "Mike, it doesn't matter," said Flicker. "We're still here, there isn't anything you can do about it now, and everyone is still talking reasonably, even if we don't know exactly what they're saying. And we won't do any more deep space ports together unless it's life or death." She smiled at him as he looked back up. "And obsessing over accidentally ending the world is my thing, not yours. I've got way more experience at it. So trust me, okay?" Journeyman snorted a laugh. "Okay. What was the good news you wanted to share?" "Oh! Ashil thinks she's found a way for me to catalyze the black hole without ever having to physically enter the construction space, based on some of the earlier test data." "What? How would that work?" "Um. It's easier to explain with a holoprojecter. Science room three at Doc's?" "K. I'll meet you there in a sec."

Flicker ended up mostly listening, because Ashil had been practically bouncing with eagerness to explain. "Yeah, I can put the active portal area right on the subspace boundary without reopening the portal," said Journeyman, slouching in one of the chairs. "That's actually easy. And yeah, I can make it time variant with increasing tension. But nothing can get through if I don't open it. I may not know a lot of physics, but I don't see how the subspace gets any smaller after it reaches thermal equilibrium. There's no way for heat to escape." "Is way," said Ashil triumphantly. "Can push on boundary, this side, affect quantum interactions both sides. Subtract entropy inside. So boundary can shrink, because of tension. Lots of energy, entropy outside, but we handle." "It's like an interdimensional equivalent of Hawking radiation," said Flicker. Journeyman frowned. "Wouldn't that be a tiny effect? And if it isn't, you'd have to have really fine control to keep anything from propagating to the portal edge and collapsing it on this side." Flicker held up her hand and wiggled her fingers. "Fine control right here. And the effect increases with pressure. Want to know how hard I can safely press on something that isn't made out of matter and doesn't interact with the strong nuclear force? Really, really hard. Yes, my hand will heat up, but we'll still be in orbit, so I'll have all of Europa as an entropy sink."

Half an hour later, Journeyman was still scowling at the technical details of the subspaces he would have to create. But it was the scowl he got when he was thinking through everything that might go wrong with something he was seriously planning to do. "Okay. I'll need to test that and that," he said, pointing at the display. "And retest that. And no offense to you and DASI, Ashil, but I'm not willing to say go until Doc at least gives this a once over. But yeah, there's nothing here that looks impossible." Flicker let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding, and found she was blinking back tears. Not impossible after all. She hugged Ashil, then Journeyman. "Thank you. Both of you. For figuring out how to make Skybreaker's Forge."

Next: Chapter 43

#FallofDocFuture #Maker's Ark #FallMisc

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eeveelutionsforequality · 6 years

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Mod Vape, what are your two cents on the concept of the words crazy or insane being ableist slurs? I mean, I certainly believe they can be used in very ableist ways, but in my experience they mostly fall in a similar category as the word dumb. As in like in most current uses its not used in an ableist context unless it's being used to belittle someone for their mental illness. Since they can mean anything from an insult to meaning extremely/ a lot to something that's absolutely baffling.

I had a conversation with someone a while back (I think it was on Twitter?) where they got pissed about the word "crazy" being on a t-shirt because it's an "ableist slur", and I asked why - initially they were aggressive, but they apologized for that after talking a bit and we saw each other's side.

My thinking is similar to yours - context matters. The way I understood that person was asking myself "how would I feel if it said 'psycho' or another word that I'm less comfortable with?" because I actually kind of like the words "crazy", "insane" and "mad" and use them to refer to myself a lot (as a diagnosed big ball of crazy).

The same is true of many "slurs" though - when me and my friends refer to ourselves as "a band of wild faggots", we're not insulting ourselves. On the flip side, someone who's been called "a pathetic bugger" repeatedly by an abuser might hear the word "bugger" and be far more affected by it than a minority may be by a slur that targets them.

I think separating words into "slurs, insults, and completely okay" does an injustice to how language works and how dependent upon context things are, not to mention takes the agency and experiences of the individual out of the equation.

For example, I'm fine with people casually saying "Well, that's fucking retarded" around me, but I'm not fine with being called a "retard" (but I control my emotions and don't let it get me down, because I don't like feeling like anyone has that kind of power over me).

There's nothing intrinsically special about some words, they just have personal or historic context.

Of course, if you're a manufacturer of t-shirts, putting a word on your t-shirt that might offend a lot of people is a choice that you have to think about - are you okay with getting backlash? do you want people to make assumptions about your company based on this? We live in reality, even actions that aren't morally wrong have effects that, if you're running a business, it's important to consider.

When it comes to individuals, they're either saying these words innocently and having an unintentional impact (or, if it's in the perfect setting, having no negative impact), or they're trying to insult somebody. If you're going out to hurt someone's feelings, maybe it's because you genuinely are ableist, maybe it's because you just know that the word will hurt them, but either way you're probably too angry to really be sat there thinking about history and context and implications.

The way I see it, the only instances actually controlled by "it's an ableist slur" are the innocent ones, the ones that reclaim the word and remove its power - the assholes of the world will just move on to another word if you ban that one.

I mean, who's more likely to feel bad about backlash: a t-shirt company that expected it and is profiting from the publicity, a dude who thinks all mentally ill people are disgusting and is confirming his bias with each complaint, a really angry person who's insulting you and doesn't care for your opinion, or some teenager on the internet with mental health issues who didn't know the word was on the no-go list and is now getting anon hate?

Slur just seems to mean "insult that's actual definition, regardless of the context or meaning in this circumstance (or secondary definitions), is construed to be negatively targeting a minority group" - as if "pathetic piece of shit" somehow has less of a punch than "gaylord".

Ultimately it's either casual use of a word that has really bad uses, or it's just an insult that targets a group of people who are otherwise mistreated. Sure, those two situations can hurt people, but so can a lot of words that aren't slurs - I think we just need to be mindful of the company we're in and whether we're being unduly nasty, rather that voldemorting certain words.

#Mod Vaporeon #I hope that answers your question

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topicprinter · 7 years

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This is a guide for service based businesses on how to cold call Fortune 500 companies and pitch them an innovative idea. Step by step guide on how we booked meetings with 6 Fortune 500 companies in 6 days.Few weeks ago we hired a cold caller and the strategy has been working so well that we had to share it. This is a cold calling strategy that works. Cold email works, but in some situations cold calling works better.What we've been doing is having our cold caller reach out to the enterprise for mobile app development projects.And by enterprise I mean Fortune 500 companies. The biggest companies in the world.In the first six days of our cold caller doing this we were able to score meetings with a bunch of well-known companies. Publix, Dunkin’ Donuts, Zimmer, Morgan Stanley, Adidas, Prudential.This wasn’t hard. Why it wasn’t, remains an unknown to me. But I think the reason falls somewhere between nobody cold calling at all or nobody cold calling correctly.Either way, in this post I'm going to lay it all out. I'll show you the exact strategy we're using to make these calls and book these meetings.But first, let me preface this with a very important question you need to ask yourself before you pursue enterprise clients.Is your company ready to go from small businesses or whatever your current target is to very large companies, Fortune 500, Fortune 5000?When do you know that you're ready to move to that next level?Answer: Have a solid business already.Good things about enterprise - they've got really big ticket items, it's a chance to make a worldwide impact especially if you're doing anything like marketing.The downside of the enterprise are very long sales cycles. Meaning it might take six, seven months or two to three times longer to close an enterprise deal as it would with a startup or even with a small to medium business.The other downside is there's gonna be a lot more stakeholders. What that basically means is you’ll have a meeting after meeting. At the end, it will come down to a group of people that decide for enterprise companies or it'll go up even higher to the director level. Basically, to whoever has the budget to approve it. It takes forever to do this.Make sure your business is in a good enough spot where you don't need enterprise clients to survive!If you're not in that good of a spot yet, go out and get some SMB clients. Get some startups that are gonna convert on the first or second meeting.Now, let’s jump into how to actually do it.1. Pick a Fortune 500 company (based on a case study you can replicate)Just go down the list and pick a good company.The way that I recommend our clients do this is look at your past case studies and see what sort of case studies you have that could be replicated.Example time!Here is an example of what I do at my company when going after bigger enterprise clients.We only focus on one vertical. We only focus on professional services, specifically mobile app development, UX, UI, design, branding and some advertising firms.So all of our targets are in the advertising marketing or the software category. You can do the same.One of our clients, Dom & Tom, built this app called OUBound for the University of Oklahoma.Screenshot of an app visual.And University of Oklahoma let us do a case study on it. So we took that case study and we emailed it out to a bunch of other universities and based on those emails we were able to get meetings with OSU, Yale and a few other schools. Just based on that initial cold email test we validated the replicability of our case study. Hence, making it ready for enterprise companies.We have the case studies to back our claims up. We have case studies from clients in similar niches to them. Companies that we've succeeded with in the past with those same type of projects. So that's what you need to have.Look at your past clients and keep an eye on one.What are the most successful type of clients you worked with in the past? Which ones were happiest and had saw the most results? Which company did you make the most profit from? Not most money, most profit. Which were easiest to deal with? Take that type of company.Enterprise companies always have an eye on what the up-and-coming companies are doing. So don’t think just because your case study is based on a startup or a SMB it won’t work.Smaller companies are innovating in ways that huge enterprise companies aren’t.I recommend picking only one specific case study. Something where you dominated, something where you have amazing results and pitching only that case study to companies that very well match that case study.2. Research the company and come up with an innovative ideaResearching the company and being innovative. If you run a digital agency, startup or a service based business this is where you might probably stumble.No! You can’t pitch SEO, copywriting or web design to Fortune 500 like you do with any other client of yours.Think more corporate!How do you find out what a company like Google or Coca-Cola or Ford is planning for 2017 so that you know what to pitch them?Since this presents, in my experience, the biggest problem, I’m gonna do a case study on coming up with innovative ideas for Coca-Cola.Public companies, and almost all the Fortune 500 are, will publish goal sheets for the upcoming year.They'll go out and they'll look at their initiatives for 2017 and they'll publish them online.Example time!Let’s read Fortune 500’s mind! It's actually super simple.Pop over to Google and you actually just have to search something like ‘Coca-Cola goals for 2017’.When you search this query you'll get a bunch of articles. I opened ‘Five Strategic Actions: The Coca-Cola Company’.Screenshot of a Google query.A bunch of companies have these. Coca-Cola's a good example. So let’s scan through the goals. I'm going to go through this stuff really quick and I'll show you how you can interpret it to come up with app ideas."1. Driving revenue and profit growth. In emerging markets we focus primarily on increasing volume, keeping our beverages affordable and strengthening the foundation."So the goal for emerging markets is to sell a lot of Coca-Cola at cheaper prices"In developed markets we relied more on price/mix and improving profitability by offering more small packages and premium packages."So in developed markets like USA, Canada, UK the goal is to sell these premium packages like glass and aluminum bottles.So the pitch here if you're going for an app pitch to Coca-Cola is something on that matter. Maybe a collectible app or a collectible piece of technology.This is actually a good place to pitch smart tech. What if Coca-Cola had a collectible voice app or a little hardware dongle. There's an idea. Might not be the best idea, but that is an idea based on their goals and shows you the mindset you need to be in."2. We invested in our brands and business. We made a choice to invest in more and better marketing for our brands increasing both the quantity and quality of our advertising. We’ve increased the spending by more than 250 million dollars."This means Coca-Cola wants you to pitch them exciting advertising ideas around their new brands (they bought a new brand Suja) or help them market their new partnerships like the one with Monster.So anything advertising related around those new brands. Also, in 2015 their big goal was uniting all of Coca-Cola under one name. Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Coca-Cola Life.Help them support the entire trademark. Any app that is about all the Coca-Cola brands unified or an advertising or experiential marketing campaign about uniting all those brands will work as a pitch.I will at least get their ears to perk up."3. We became more efficient. Part of the solution was 'zero-based work' -- a way of looking at our business that starts from the assumption that organizational budget start at zero and must be justified annually. Overall, we were able to realize more than 600 million in productivity improvements in 2015."Coca-Cola is open to any pitches that will improve their productivity.Redoing their internal communications. This might be a good time for someone like Slack to pitch Coca-Cola. Any sort of productivity based tool would work here. This is a big goal for them, this is number three on their five strategic actions."4. We simplified our company. Most importantly we began to look at ways to enhance further the employee experience across our company with the goal of creating the world's most exciting, productive, fun and fulfilling career environment with workplaces that nurse curiosity, learning innovation and growth."So any app that enhances the employee experience. Maybe it's an internal reward program for employees to work harder or an opportunity for employees to maybe give their ideas to Coca-Cola.Maybe something like Starbucks’ Idea Site, but focused internally for Coca-Cola.Anything around making employees happier. Apps focused on that will work here."5. We refocused on our core business model. Over the years we've acquired and managed the number of Coca-Cola bottling partners with the aim of improving performance, optimizing, manufacturing and distribution systems and ultimately refranchising the bottling territories back to independent status."Coca-Cola wants to hear about ideas that improve their manufacturing processes or ideas that make their bottling plants more integrated. Which can be done by software.So those are five strategic actions from Coca-Cola. Almost all of the Fortune 500 companies have articles like this one.You just have to Google around to find them, dig a little bit and this is what you can pull from there when you're cold emailing or cold calling these companies.Finding an article like this and coming up with ideas based on it will be that extra step that will get you in the door versus just pitching yourself as another iOS/Android development vendor.3. Find the marketing director on LinkedInSearch ‘marketing director Coca Cola’, ‘marketing director Ford’ and you'll get maybe two or three people depending on how many brands are inside of the company, but you won't have too many.Screenshot of LinkedIn results.4. Cold call until you get throughI’m going to go over the process I used to get through to the Head of Global Marketing and Innovation at Coca-Cola to show you how easy it actually is.I did this without having his direct number using only the info available on their official website.Example time!I googled Coca-Cola, went to their official website and clicked on the clearly visible contact us tab.Screenshot of a Coca-Cola website info I was looking for.We are looking for company directory. No such thing here, but there is one phone number publicly available.Publicly available info I was looking for.Next thing you know I was waiting to be connected to a Coca-Cola rep.Screenshot of me waiting for someone to pick up on Skype.From this point on, all the names and numbers will be redacted so I’m not the one to blame if they get spammed. Consider this a template on getting through to your Fortune 500 decision maker.Coca-Cola rep picks up. This is how it went.Rep: Good morning. Coca-cola. This is --Rep--.Me: Hey --Rep--! I’m trying to call --The Decision Maker--. And I just don’t have the number for the company directory with me.Rep: I can get you a number for the switchboard operator. They can search that person for you. What’s your zip code?Me: --My zip code--.Rep: Ok. Hold on one second. (...) The number is --##########--.Me: Thanks!Rep: You’re more than welcome. Thanks for calling Coca-Cola.I dial the new number, S. picks up.S: Hey this is S.Me: Hey S! I’m trying to find the extension for --The Decision Maker--.S: Ok. One moment please.(…)The Decision maker: Hello.Voila. You’re in. This took only a couple of minutes.There is a lot of theories on what cold call structure to use, but this is what works good for us: open with a quick pitch of who you are then pitch the idea to them and ask for the goals for 2017.Since you already went through step #3 you have your innovative pitch that stands out and you’re ready to go.Cold cold until you get through. If you don't get them the first time call back an hour later.I don't recommend leaving voicemails and there's no real tracking to show who's calling. So you can call them a bunch of times and it doesn't really matter. Just cold call 'till you get through.It takes an average of five times calling at different times of day to get through to these people, but once you do you're able to pitch the idea and ask about the goals for 2017.The goal of this cold call is not to sell them. The goal of this cold call is to get them on the calendar.And you're still gonna have to follow-up via email most of the time, but sometimes they'll say: 'Hey! Yeah, that sounds good. Call me back at 3pm.'That's what works there. So ask availability and get a meeting on the calendar. I don't recommend using Calendly or any software for this. You will just be creating additional friction to the ideal outcome. I recommend just booking it on the calendar. Reading a few times and doing it that way.Then have the scheduled meeting. The key is to approach them as a value provider not an order taker.Cold calling is different than managing an inbound lead. This isn't somebody who is expressing a desire in mobile app development. This is a company that you want to provide your innovation to.The key is to unlock their innovation budget and get them to go with you because you have the best ideas not because you have the best technical prowess.This mindset is a lot different than the way that your inbound sales team is selling right now.There you go. Cold call, grow your business and get the ROI on your efforts and time by using this strategy. Hope you found value in this!This post first appeared as video here and article here.Post any further questions in the comments and I'll try to help.

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