Expanded thoughts on the question of fandom, networks, and money

[silveradept]

cesperanza talked about the unease that exists between fandom and money, and how much promotion and marketing is too much, or which ways are more likely to step over a line between gifts and tips into guilt-based marketing. The comments are the liveliest part of the discussion and worth reading. In addition to that, fairestcat took issue with the entire premise, pointing out that people support work with money because they find the work valuable, or they want to help a creator not be homeless or bankrupted, not because they're guilted into it or through a bait-and-switch. When another person on my list pointed out in a locked post that there were parallels to open source software and its ethos, the gears got turning. azurelunatic reminded me of Ana Mardoll's thought experiment about how much money would be enough to be comfortable, even if you never made a dime in your life past that point, and how the numbers shifted radically (by at least a factor of ten) depending on how much of those expenses people were thinking about would be covered by a government that could provide for comfortable needs on a universal basis.

Which also brings me back to the prediction I made about fandom on Day 14 of Snowflake. Fandom and money always have an uneasy relationship with each other, because some people in fandom (as in open-source development) can afford to give their labor away for free for the idea of making a richer, better fandom. Some people are doing fandom just for themselves, and they don't particularly care about any monetary compensation about it, because it's something they do to satisfy their own urges and itches. And some people can participate in fandom only by getting compensated for the work they do, because they don't have a social safety net underneath them that will take care of things like housing, food, and medical care. They can't give their labor away to anyone.

In the open-source community, there's not a whole lot of money for projects themselves, and so projects often end up either being supported by those who can afford to give, or they get eaten up by corporations and have closed-source versions or commercial versions deployed by companies that can afford to pay people to keep them maintained and updated. Dreamwidth itself is built upon open-source code forked from Livejournal, and there's enough money from the seed accounts and paid subsciptions (thanks, all y'all that support Dreamwidth with your money) to keep the lights on and the servers running, and very occasionally, to hire someone who can work on the codebase as their job. For the most part, though, support requests, feature improvements, updating the FAQs and documentation, and most of the other things that help show that Dreamwidth is a mature code base (it's old enough to vote, at least, and probably old enough to drink, legally in the United States) and make it a place that has a robust set of features is volunteer work from people who really enjoy Dreamwidth enough and want to make it better.

The tutorials that others have created about using Dreamwidth better or remembering HTML tags that are appropriate are also volunteer work, in the sense that nobody got paid by Dreamwidth to post to their journal helpful orientations for people who are new to the site. Or to create the bookmarklets for browsers that can be used for quoting snippets and then creating an entry ready to go with the quoted bit and its attribution. That's all the collective you doing things to make the place you enjoy better. And that's awesome! Because it can free up resources to work on things that are less visible - I don't fully understand all the details of how the code works, but denise routinely talks about "technical debt" that needs to be paid. Which often includes looking at things that were cobble-coded together by Brad Fitzpatrick that work, but are idiosyncratic at best to deal with, and that will need to have their guts ripped out and re-thought if we want to make them systematic and consistent in the way they get done and allow them to interface with tools and methods of coding that were developed afterward. Those sorts of things are invisible, in that things still work when they're replaced, and they might work better for people who have to look at them on the backend, but they don't necessarily impact us, the users, in anything obvious or shiny. And yet, those are the things that a hired coder would be given as priorities, precisely because they have lots of benefits to Dreamwidth as a whole, even if they don't have any obvious user-facing benefit. All of that is to say that Dreamwidth is primarilty run by volunteers, and that arrangement is what allows Dreamwidth to keep the servers up year after year.

The open-source world also occasionally has projects where a person (maybe a few people) are set up, essentially, as Benevolent Dictator-for-Life, and they approve all the changes that are made to the project they started. There are occasions where the key-word in that title is "benevolent", and they do a good job of welcoming people and making their contributions feel valued. At least equally as likely, unfortunately, are the ones who key in on "dictator" and their environments are much less helpful to new people and sometimes actively attempt to shut out new contributors unless those contributors are willing to jump through a significant amount of hoops just to prove they're worthy before their contributions will be considered, much less accepted.

Not unsurprisingly, some of the most dictatorial entities in that regard are white men who were tech-bros before the term got widespread usage, and correspondingly, they don't get a lot of contribution from people who don't match that profile - because the people who can afford to donate their time to the project, as well as work through all of the onerous requirements and prereequisites to be part of the project tend to already be steadily employed white tech guys. At best, a project like that might get some input, in the form of feedback, feature requests, or very loud complaints to the founder on the platform itself about how the platform itself is inhospitable to people who aren't wealthy cishet white tech men and that there are other people who want to / are using the platform and their needs should be considered as well.

If it takes a certain amount of privilege to participate, then only the people who have that privilege will be able to participate. This is true in fandom as well as in open-source software.

A large amount of the history of the amalgam we call "fandom" is based on the labor of women. Women created zines, distributed them, wrote stories for them, kept their history alive, argued, and occasionally took their ideas and created works or wrote to the letters pages (and have been archiving that correspondence as well). Women traditionally have had their labors undervalued, invisibled, downplayed, and outright stolen for the benefit of men. (If you disagree with me on that, /dev/null is over there. When a nonzero number appears from it, take the number and stand in line somewhere out of my sight. I'll call the numbers as they arrive.) So women are starting from a position of less privilege. And they can expect, to some degree, that if a man does the same thing they did, or decides to tell the same story with different names, the man will receive accolades and contracts for it, while the woman who did the work will be lucky if there's an passing acknowledgement somewhere deep in the author's notes about where the idea came from. It's basically this:

"My name's Trinity."

"*The* Trinity? Who cracked the IRS d-base?"

"That was a long time ago."

"Jesus..."

"What?"

"I just thought... you were a guy."

"Most guys do."

The publishing world has done a lot of work toward the idea of making clearly women's names disappear, unless it's specifically in a genre for women. How many women writers go by initials, like Jo Rowling or the late Ursula K. LeGuin? Or have had male pen names crafted for them so that their work in a different genre would be tolerated - J.D. Robb is Nora Roberts, the prolific romance writer, after all, and Robert Galbraith is Jo Rowling as well.

Publishing, movies, and television all seem to lean into the idea that because men are the unstated default, women will watch or read anything that's about men, but that it takes special effort for men to want to read or watch anything with women in it, because that means men have to accept a narrative where they're not the default, and really, can't we just make sure that at the critical moment, a man steps in to save this woman or solve her problem or some other thing, just so that the men don't feel like this story won't appeal to them at all? Or make this woman suffer some sort of stereotypically woman thing, so that the men can imagine themselves saving her from the peril?

So, women start from a position of disprivilege, and there are a lot of institutions and societal norms that continue that disprivilege and, in many cases, amplify it. Now, we have fandom, a significantly women(and-queer, because women aren't the only people marginalized by these societal forces that privilege white cis men) space. It's inevitable that the topic is going to turn to privilege and the effective use thereof. At least in our current capitalist climate, privilege often is measured by money or what you do with your money, so the big question of exercising privilege is going to revolve around money.

There are significant concerns with regard to not pissing off the copyright cabals, this is true. Until transformative works are enshrined as an exception to the copyright laws, through court precedent or legislation, there's always going to be the dance of fair use and figuring out "well, is this going too far? Would this work fail fair use? How likely is it that I'll be courting a cease and desist letter or a DMCA takedown by doing this?" And even this is significantly driven by money - the copyright cabals have a shit ton more of it than the average fan, and so when threatened with the possibility of being bankrupted over a fanwork, most creators go "Nope, not doing that" and take it down. If someone with deep pockets, good backers, and a case that they think would stand on the merits got it, we might find out the answer to the question of whether transformative works are fair use or not, but that confluence doesn't seem likely any time soon. So, yes, all of this conversation is taking place with whatever potential disaster-of-choice is in the background, waiting to erupt if the gods of this universe get mad enough about what's going on, and that prejudices some things.

Right, so, money. And, to some degree, the way in which different types of fanwork have different perceptions of the amount of effort that goes into them. Because there's a lot of potentially invisible effort that goes into the construction of written fiction that becomes extremely visible when doing things like art of podfic. You can make a video of "here's how I draw things," or "here's what it takes to transform these raw audio takes (note that this file is a half-hour long for what will be a five-minute segment) into their finished products." It's much less exciting to post a video about "how I create fanfiction" because it's going to be a video of some length of a person staring out into the sky, then tapping on their screen (or writing on paper), and then possibly doing some research and staring at webpages and making notes, and then more paragraphs appear. It's not exactly the most compelling television to watch the fiction creative process, unless your "how I write" videos are actually secretly videos of your cat playing with toys, doing cute things, and otherwise providing a shiny distraction from the process of actually doing the work.

And with this inability to document how the work happens in an easily followable, documentable way makes it very easy for the work to become invisible. Fic-writing is easy, because it's putting words on paper. Drabbles must be easy to toss off, after all, they're only 100 words. Everybody has a novel that they haven't sold yet, right? Words are easy, words are meaningless, and certainly things like editing those words and tightening the prose and transforming a draft into a final work are also invisible, because we don't usually see that process happening (and again, it's mostly marking up and then making decisions about the markup. It's work, and published authors carve out significant time to go through those things). Drawing and recording and videos requires talent, and are not a universally-distributed thing like the ability to string words together.

Because of that perception, the idea of people asking for money for their talents works much more easily for drawing and recording and videos than it does for words. And, weirdly enough, the fact that you can see distinct processes at work and see that the results of those processes have different visual looks or have been cut together in ways that are clearly not the original works, art and videos and audio are easier, in many ways, to establish their fair use guidelines or arguments that what's been created is a wholly different work that's unlikely to eat into the proceeds or profits available to the creator of the original work.

Text does not get that luxury, as there's no real difference between a work published in one typeface versus being published in another, and a signifricant amount of good fic is about making the characters recognizable, and even beyond that, being able to generate works that are close(r) to the originals. It becomes a mark of skill in text and fic to be able to perform effective mimicry to the order of "it's just like the original, except he's gay / she's a transwoman / it's set in a coffee shop rather than a grimdark fantasy world." At least in some circles. This, as you might guess, makes them much less likely to pass fair use tests, because someone else's excellent fic could very easily steal audience away from the original and deny them the money they would otherwise get were it not for this excellent fic existing in the world.

Fic writers often get around this gods-angering premise by eschewing money. Sure, this fic exists, and it could draw a great big audience, but the creator isn't making any money off of it, or asking for any money off of it, and therefore the potential impact that it has on the original author doesn't exist, because all that potential money is still available for the original author to take.

This sets up a pair of competing interests. For some people, using their talents is how they make their living. For other people, introducing money is going to destroy the thing entirely, so there's no way that anyone should ever be asking for money, or else the lawyers will descend. Implicitly behind the idea of "no money ever," though, is that a person who participates in fandom has to be able to support themselves through some other method. And now we have the same potential situation as we have in open-source software: If it takes a certain amount of privilege to participate, then only the people who have that privilege will be able to participate.

Pushing people who have to make their living using their skills and talents out of fandom by insisting they can't participate because they're going to make money from it reduces the amount of people who get to participate in fandom. And it tends to push out very specific people - those already marginalized, whose perspective is valuable on making sure that fandom, or open source tools, don't deliberately or subtly become spaces only for people who have the intersection of several privileges, because their worldviews are narrow and can't conceive of the world outside.

This would be disastrous for canons like, say, Steven Universe, which is unabashedly queer in its very fabric. To only let non-queer people with monetary privilege decide what the fannish discourse around the very queer canon...yeah, no. Bad idea. We've done that before, in our lives, with real people getting hurt because the story being promoted was that gay men were deviants, and that HIV/AIDS was divine punishment for their "lifestyle choice." Or that young black men always deserve harsh police treatment because even if that young black man doesn't do bad things himself, he's part of a culture that does, and so he's colelctively culpable, if not individually so.

Centering Steven and Connie's burgeoning friendship and possible relationship to the exclusion of the fact that Garnet exists is certainly something that's possible, but it would be absolutely a bad idea if that were the only thing that were possible for someone to read. Or see. Which would furthermore discourage people from participating in a culture that clearly didn't want them, especially if they lacked the privilege to be able to put their work out "for exposure" or without the expectation that their work is worthwhile.

Nobody wants to get shit on for something they did for free.

Nobody can feed themselves on "exposure."

Which is where things like Patreon, commissions, and other things come in. If you start from the premise that everyone who participates in fandom does so with talents that are marketable and saleable, and that the question of whether they're marketing it is a matter of their decision of whether they need to, want to, or don't want to, then when someone chooses to market themselves, out of necessity or preference, it's not a betrayal of fandom, it's an individual decision. And unlike the multi-level marketing schemes snarled at in both of the posts at the top of this writing, commissions, Patreons, Kickstarters, and other direct support methods are putting all their money into the pocket of the creators. (MLM is overpriced stuff that mostly is overpriced because every person in the MLM is really paying the person that recruited them, who is similarly doing the same thing, and so on...)

And if you further take the idea that people should be paid for their work, then the best way to get people to give you more work is to make it possible for them to keep creating. So you pay hem for their work. And if you can't afford an appropriate commission price (and there's a lot of material you can find and examine to figure out what an appropriate cost of commissioning someone is), then you throw your money into the tip jar, and you get to enjoy the created works that come out of that. It's not yours, per se, but it's enough that the art gets made and enjoyed by the people who were able to come together and support it.

When your other options are to get one of the very few publishing contracts around, to get signed on to do art or other things for media properties, or to call your fandom/creative stuff a hobby and go find some other work to pay the bills, being able to crowdfund yourself through a lot of small bits of patronage instead of being beholden to someone else looks like an attractive option.

Of course, there's also another option, the one that fairestcat points out in fairly stark terms. You could re-set the system so that the money part doesn't matter. If the problem of money and fandom goes away, because everybody has enough to be able to live comfortably and people can gift their work without it becoming a decision between exposure to the fans and exposure to the elements, then the discussion mostly goes away.

Don't blame the person who believes in the value of their talents, skills, and work for doing what they need to get by. Turn the Eye of Sauron toward those entities that already have enough, already will have enough, and could stand to divest themselves of most of their wealth without making an impact on their lifestyle. Make them feel that helping others is the best thing they can do with their money. Or, if they're not inclined to share, make sure then that the government gets enough to provide for the basic needs of all its citizens by appropriating what it needs from those who already have enough. ("Socialism!" they cry. "Couldn't churches and charities do this better?" I might note that if you don't see churches as performing socialist functions, often by decree of their revered figures, go examine the text more closely.)

Ultimately, I can participate in fandom as a gift to fans, using spare time and resources that I have to craft narratives and then give them away, without expectation that my fic is going to be my gateway into a publishing contract or that I'm going to need three more subscribers to Patreon from this work. I have the privilege to do so.

I also want other people to be able to participate in this way, but I'm not going to tell someone who has to make their living from fandom that they have to stop and starve for my principles to feel satisfied. I don't get to use my privilege to dictate their lives. And frankly, I think the world of fandom is much poorer because of all the people who don't get to participate as much as they want, because they have to do other things for their survival.

Until things change structurally so that a person isn't forced to choose between what they love and what they need, people gotta do what they gotta do. If fandom requires a certain amount of privilege to participate, then only the privileged will be able to participate in fandom.

Fandom's history says it's not supposed to be a privileged-only space. Let's keep it that way.

Comments

[ilyena_sylph]

I am so very deeply fond of your brain!

This was good stuff.

[batrachian]

+1

[silveradept]

Thanks. Much appreciated.

[wohali]

Excellent summary, and I agree, especially on the privileged vs. needy axis.

I think I can boil down when I get ornery about "shilling" for money for creative works to a single thing: making it hard for me to read various streams in social media. I have no experience with Facebook, so I'm just talking about Twitter and Mastodon/Pleroma/"the fediverse" here.

I've had people on my friends timeline that I've had to mute (or remove entirely!) because they retweet, boost, or re-post their plea for money/interaction/involvement 3-5 times a day, consistently for more than a week at a time.

Ask for money with every new thing you release, sure. Do so a few times even, evenly spaced. Perhaps ask for money during a dry spell to help you get more creative ("I need to do some field research - help pay for my trip!")

But 4x daily? There's a reason many of us out here started using ad blockers. At some point you move from "persistent" to "annoying," and that's a problem.

I have some nitpicks around the OSS argument, primarily because the general tenor of many of these communities (if not DW) is changing, and sustainability outside of corporate influence is becoming an issue - but I'll leave that for another post.

[silveradept]

I will take what you have on OSS, when/where you feel like sharing, because being wrong about it hopefully means things are moving in better directions.

I can totally see where wanting to follow someone for their art and instead being subjected to an endless stream of advertising posts would be an unpleasant experience for the viewer and counterproductive for the person who would like to attract patronage. A danger of automation, I suspect, when you can set a client to auto-post for you.

[falena]

Here via thisweekmeta.

This is so well-written and thought-provoking. Thank you.

[yvannairie]

👏👍💯

[silveradept]

Thank you.

[saxonvoter]

Couldn't agree more.

[silveradept]

Thanks for saying so.

[thisweekmod]

Hello! May I link this post over at thisweekmeta?

[silveradept]

Sure. You could probably edit it in to the already existing block of reactions, if you wanted, for organizational purposes.

[tei]

I think there's two very different things being conflated in the entire conversation on fandom and money: 1) asking your friends for financial help and 2) creating an actuall commercial, capitalistic artistic space out of fannish works.

I-- and I suspect everyone-- am 100% OK with the former. That's what most of ko-fi and gofundme is-- it's not commercialization fo fandom, it's people asking friends for help, and those friends happen to be fandom friends. People have always asked for help and people have always offered it, and the fact that there are not sites that make it easier to do doesn't change anything.

I think the real criticisms of the commercialization of fandom are to #2, and personally, I oppose it for the exact reason that you sum up this post with-- "Fandom's history says it's not supposed to be a privileged-only space. " As far as I can tell, the reason that fandom currently is not a privileged-only space is because it is a gift economy. When I think about commercial artistic spaces-- the original fiction industry in particular, but also music and visual art-- their defining trait is that, solely because of the nature of capitalism and art, the privileged have a better chance at success. People who can afford good-quality instruction and access to spaces with mentorship are more likely to have the skills necessary to succeed. People who have families or spouses who are able and willing to support them making art full-time, and not worrying about the financial result, are more likely to be able to create products that do make money. Commercial artistic spaces are unfair by their very nature.

It seems like a lot of people are hearing "we don't want fandom to become a commercial space" and hearing "we don't want people who are struggling to be able to make money." In reality, I think it's exactly the opposite. I can only speak for myself, of course, but I know that the reason I don't want to see fandom as a commercial space is because I don't want it to be yet another place where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the art gets more cowardly.

Is ensuring that nobody can get any richer or poorer the best way out of this? I honestly don't know. But I can't think of another way, at the moment.

[silveradept]

I agree with all of this, especially the part where I'm not sure how you keep the space open to everyone and still make it possible for people to get by if the thing they have that's a marketable skill and a market that will help is their fanwork.

[fairestcat]

Pushing people who have to make their living using their skills and talents out of fandom by insisting they can't participate because they're going to make money from it reduces the amount of people who get to participate in fandom. And it tends to push out very specific people - those already marginalized, whose perspective is valuable on making sure that fandom, or open source tools, don't deliberately or subtly become spaces only for people who have the intersection of several privileges, because their worldviews are narrow and can't conceive of the world outside.

[...]

If you start from the premise that everyone who participates in fandom does so with talents that are marketable and saleable, and that the question of whether they're marketing it is a matter of their decision of whether they need to, want to, or don't want to, then when someone chooses to market themselves, out of necessity or preference, it's not a betrayal of fandom, it's an individual decision.

THIS THIS. ALL OF THIS.

Thank you for this.

[silveradept]

You're welcome. Thanks for the inspiring post.