Snowflake Challenge 2022 #11: Say Hello
Jan. 21st, 2022 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptChallenge #11 asks us to go out and interact with others. That's the Tweet, were this Twitter.
Interaction is the coin of the fannish realm, and a fair number of people, back in the wish challenge, were looking backwards toward a time when the communities and journals were more active and everyone was having fun and existing fannishly next to each other, with the occasional ship war or skirmish breaking out. I think that idea has deeper roots than first appears, but if I want to poke at it, I have to talk about an older form of the Web (again) and what made that environment possible.
I don't want to call it a generation gap, because in no way do I believe there's such a gulf of understanding between the Great Old Ones of the Internet and the foundlings just coming online and taking their first public steps that we can't understand each other, but the explosive growth of the Web does make certain things more obscured than they were before. It's absolutely possible to find the older Web and neat things there (Dreamwidth, the Fediverse, Neocities), but they're the kind of thing you have to go looking for rather than just being there.
As an example of this obscurity, many children in the current world have grown up with the ubiquity of broadband, either in their house, in their library, or over the radio waves with mobile devices (and some have all three.) This isn't actually true (as anyone who ventures out into more rural spaces can tell you), but the current Web is built on the idea that everyone accessing it does so from a broadband pipe, usually attached to an "unlimited" connection. Which means thinking nothing at all of the idea that fandom means images and video and other multimedia capabilities. Which is awesome, but also basically buries the question of "who's paying for all the storage and bandwidth it's going to take to move all of this material across the series of tubes?"
The answer is generally "the corporation that mines your data and interaction on their site for advertising purposes," which means a lot of fandom traffic is hosted on and served by platforms that may or may not want that traffic there for the sake of the advertisers (which is why you get bans on "female-presenting nipples" or other content the advertisers don't want to be associated with, regardless of whether or not the actual user base is fine with it.) Text is cheap, but images and videos cost. So, if you don't want a corporation to control what is allowed and what isn't, what are your options? Apart from buying some website hosting somewhere (and checking to make sure they will allow the kind of things you plan on doing with that website and your storage in their Acceptable Use Policy), decentralized social media projects like Peertube suggest that the bandwidth comes from you and every other person who is interested in seeing your content, which is a good solution. Up until you find out that your "unlimited" plan may not actually be unlimited, and that if you're someone who is using a disproportionate amount of traffic on the network, as determined by your ISP or wireless services provider, your connection may be slowed or suspended when you go over certain bandwidth limitations. Or, it's possible that the fanvid you spent all that time in gets hunted by a copyright bot that doesn't understand the first thing about fair or transformative use, and now you have to deal with the DMCA notices sent to your ISP about your sharing fandom, telling you to stop seeding your own project to others. (DMCA takedowns also can be sent to your website host by those same bots, which is why you have to check what their AUP is and how they handle takedown notices.) So the copyright bots are doing a fine job of making sure anything that looks even remotely like it might contain copyrighted material gets served a takedown notice, requiring a large amount of manual intervention to review the claim, and with no guarantee that the humans on the other end know enough about enough to make a good ruling on the matter, and to be willing to put their own money and lawyers on the line to generate court precedent about what is and isn't fair use (because, like so many tests endorsed by the courts, there's no "objective" standard to use).
On the more human side, as has been noted by a lot of the wish posters (and me), the current iteration of the web is making it harder for people to enjoy their fandoms or in public. The current incarnation of the Web is collapsing pseudonymity everywhere it can. Only "Real Names" (insert Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, With Examples here) are allowed in this corporatized Web, because those are the names easiest to cross-link with other data to build a more complete picture of you as an advertising target and to serve you content that you will interact with. Interaction is the coin of the fannish realm, and much like actual coin, it doesn't care what sort of morality you apply to any given interaction, it only cares about the numerical value of the interaction. And with certain tools, it's easier than it was to link any given pseudonym into a database that provides physical addresses and other such data, which can be used for harassment of all sorts, up to and including calling down bastards with guns to attack a person on the false belief there's immanent danger happening there. The easier these tools are to use to whip up a frenzy, the pettier reasons those tools get used for. So, what used to be an angry exchange of comments that might result in mutual banning can instead become a war where one person brings all their social media gang to bear on another in the hopes of silencing them permanently by driving them off the platform. And if, as these companies hope, a person's sole social interaction platform is theirs, then people have to decide between enduring the harassment that inevitably leaks through, even against a strong blocklist, or trying to set up shop somewhere else and hoping that nobody from the previous world decides to follow them over and continue the campaign. If there's no way of ditching a pseud when it becomes a target, then the options become even less good than they were before.
Which leads to another of the phenomena (doot do, de doo doo) that I've observed over the years. Some people will make their challenge prompt entries public for the course of the challenge, and then access lock them afterward. Or, assixbeforelunch noted, what if Dreamwidth seems quieter than it is because most of the activity occurs behind access locks? If it's not possible to be in the public sphere as a persistent public pseudonym, and it's not always possible to separate the parts of you that are fit for public consumption with the parts that might make trouble for your public self (being horny on main with your corporate self is not usually going to go over well, especially if your horny involves something other than the most vanilla of vanilla experiences), then the only feasible option left is to go private. The same technology that allows your employer to get dinged when someone is talking about them, good or bad, is being used by people to keep track of discussions and insert themselves into them, assuming The Algorithm doesn't serve it up on a platter. In an environment like that, where you have harvesters, spies, and snitches that will @ somebody that you're subtweeting specifically because they like to send it the flying monkeys, I don't blame anyone for wanting to keep all of their interactions safely behind access locks, limited to those people who have gone through the trouble of getting an account (and, at least in Dreamwidth's case, been granted permission to see locked entries). It won't prevent harassment, but it will at least tie it to an account that can be blocked and reported.
That's the first part of why interaction can be dangerous: most interactions on the Web feed an amoral machine whose sole job is to figure out how to get you to interact more, and become more invested in that interaction. Tuned to peak efficiency, it will serve you a constant diet of things that you are viscerally opposed to, and it will serve you constantly to people who are viscerally opposed to you. All right there where any current or future employer can find it and make judgments about you that have little to do with your qualifications and much more to do with their legally-impermissible prejudices. The second part of why interaction is risky is because our embodied world has become significantly riskier for interaction as well. Some of that is increased intensity of the things that non-dominant people have experienced all through their lives as a reaction from dominant people (just now available in 4k HD from everyone's recording devices that make it easier to capture such things and share them), some of it is the possibility that something on virtual or social will bleed over into embodiment, and some of it is Tall Poppy Syndrome. By whatever name or aphorism you want to refer to it, holding different views than the people around you is risky business if you're not completely sure they're going to be okay with it, and even then, it really only extends to the first circle of possible interactions. It's not possible to have meaningful dialogue against an ideologue, and if that ideologue has the power to enforce their personal morality on you, then you have to deal with the consequences of that.
What I'm seeing a lot of, though, are people who are afraid of the possibility that their life is going to change, in such a way that they won't be the unmarked normal, the unquestioned dominant, and that a more accurate accounting of history and a more equitable method of resource and power distribution will leave them in a less powerful position than they were in. They have convinced themselves that everyone the system has oppressed to that point will take revenge upon them (often, they believe it will be violent revenge) because of their role in upholding and advancing the causes of the system, or they scramble to justify to themselves that they are an oppressed people themselves, and therefore any hegemonic claims about them can't possibly be true. (Even as they swiftly move to use the mechanisms and policies of government to ensure their beliefs have the force of law over everyone else's beliefs.) Those who would ban books and education and those who would ban ships or fandoms are not that different in their outlooks, nor that different in who they claim to protect by their actions, nor that different in who they are actually trying to protect by projecting a smokescreen of morality. And they're not all that different in their methods of trying to get something disappeared so that someone else will never have the opportunity to see it and realize it's their jam. Or that they're not alone in the universe with their ideas and their perspectives and their fandoms.
So, if going online and being publicly yourself might get you brigaded or doxxed, and being publicly yourself in your embodied life might get you fired, discriminated against, or hurt, then authentic interpersonal interaction in any aspect of life is potentially dangerous. And yet, just about every site and advice columnist says that you should be authentic in everything you do, that becoming vulnerable is the way to generate the good and strong relationships that will sustain someone over time. If there's nowhere to be authentic (including making authentic mistakes) without it being mined for advertising or used as ammunition or justification for belligerence (or belligerents), then why would anyone want to be authentic as opposed to whatever will help them not be the next target?
I don't fault anyone who wants to set up their space to be as safe for them as they can make it. I will give you a side-eye if you say that your safe space is universally applicable. I'd like to encourage you to interact with others, but you know better than I do what kind of risk tolerance you have for that, and what experiences you might have already had in your life that well make you rather to meet new friends or to stick with the ones that you already have, thanks.
In your own space, interact with someone.The additional text is also helpful as to why this might be a challenge for someone.
We all have different levels of comfort in putting ourselves out there. Different levels of intro/extra-vertness. And while we here at Fandom Snowflake love to challenge people to go a tiny bit out of their comfort zone, we also want you to feel safe. This challenge really has so many different interpretations. Comment on someone's fan-creation, chat up the random person who visited your journal because you have fandoms in common. Find someone to wave to in tags. Really, anything that has you making a connection with someone else, counts.An opportunity to wax poetic? Don't mind if I do!
[…challenge text here…]
I love this challenge being here because, let's face it, by the 11th challenge, chances are you've already accidentally done the challenge. If not, chat with me (and anyone else who comments their "I did it!") and call it done. Of course, you're free to wax poetic about what it means to be a social animal and all that whatnot too and link that. The challenge is yours to do with what you'd like. ❤❤
Interaction is the coin of the fannish realm, and a fair number of people, back in the wish challenge, were looking backwards toward a time when the communities and journals were more active and everyone was having fun and existing fannishly next to each other, with the occasional ship war or skirmish breaking out. I think that idea has deeper roots than first appears, but if I want to poke at it, I have to talk about an older form of the Web (again) and what made that environment possible.
I don't want to call it a generation gap, because in no way do I believe there's such a gulf of understanding between the Great Old Ones of the Internet and the foundlings just coming online and taking their first public steps that we can't understand each other, but the explosive growth of the Web does make certain things more obscured than they were before. It's absolutely possible to find the older Web and neat things there (Dreamwidth, the Fediverse, Neocities), but they're the kind of thing you have to go looking for rather than just being there.
As an example of this obscurity, many children in the current world have grown up with the ubiquity of broadband, either in their house, in their library, or over the radio waves with mobile devices (and some have all three.) This isn't actually true (as anyone who ventures out into more rural spaces can tell you), but the current Web is built on the idea that everyone accessing it does so from a broadband pipe, usually attached to an "unlimited" connection. Which means thinking nothing at all of the idea that fandom means images and video and other multimedia capabilities. Which is awesome, but also basically buries the question of "who's paying for all the storage and bandwidth it's going to take to move all of this material across the series of tubes?"
The answer is generally "the corporation that mines your data and interaction on their site for advertising purposes," which means a lot of fandom traffic is hosted on and served by platforms that may or may not want that traffic there for the sake of the advertisers (which is why you get bans on "female-presenting nipples" or other content the advertisers don't want to be associated with, regardless of whether or not the actual user base is fine with it.) Text is cheap, but images and videos cost. So, if you don't want a corporation to control what is allowed and what isn't, what are your options? Apart from buying some website hosting somewhere (and checking to make sure they will allow the kind of things you plan on doing with that website and your storage in their Acceptable Use Policy), decentralized social media projects like Peertube suggest that the bandwidth comes from you and every other person who is interested in seeing your content, which is a good solution. Up until you find out that your "unlimited" plan may not actually be unlimited, and that if you're someone who is using a disproportionate amount of traffic on the network, as determined by your ISP or wireless services provider, your connection may be slowed or suspended when you go over certain bandwidth limitations. Or, it's possible that the fanvid you spent all that time in gets hunted by a copyright bot that doesn't understand the first thing about fair or transformative use, and now you have to deal with the DMCA notices sent to your ISP about your sharing fandom, telling you to stop seeding your own project to others. (DMCA takedowns also can be sent to your website host by those same bots, which is why you have to check what their AUP is and how they handle takedown notices.) So the copyright bots are doing a fine job of making sure anything that looks even remotely like it might contain copyrighted material gets served a takedown notice, requiring a large amount of manual intervention to review the claim, and with no guarantee that the humans on the other end know enough about enough to make a good ruling on the matter, and to be willing to put their own money and lawyers on the line to generate court precedent about what is and isn't fair use (because, like so many tests endorsed by the courts, there's no "objective" standard to use).
On the more human side, as has been noted by a lot of the wish posters (and me), the current iteration of the web is making it harder for people to enjoy their fandoms or in public. The current incarnation of the Web is collapsing pseudonymity everywhere it can. Only "Real Names" (insert Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, With Examples here) are allowed in this corporatized Web, because those are the names easiest to cross-link with other data to build a more complete picture of you as an advertising target and to serve you content that you will interact with. Interaction is the coin of the fannish realm, and much like actual coin, it doesn't care what sort of morality you apply to any given interaction, it only cares about the numerical value of the interaction. And with certain tools, it's easier than it was to link any given pseudonym into a database that provides physical addresses and other such data, which can be used for harassment of all sorts, up to and including calling down bastards with guns to attack a person on the false belief there's immanent danger happening there. The easier these tools are to use to whip up a frenzy, the pettier reasons those tools get used for. So, what used to be an angry exchange of comments that might result in mutual banning can instead become a war where one person brings all their social media gang to bear on another in the hopes of silencing them permanently by driving them off the platform. And if, as these companies hope, a person's sole social interaction platform is theirs, then people have to decide between enduring the harassment that inevitably leaks through, even against a strong blocklist, or trying to set up shop somewhere else and hoping that nobody from the previous world decides to follow them over and continue the campaign. If there's no way of ditching a pseud when it becomes a target, then the options become even less good than they were before.
Which leads to another of the phenomena (doot do, de doo doo) that I've observed over the years. Some people will make their challenge prompt entries public for the course of the challenge, and then access lock them afterward. Or, as
sixbeforelunch noted, what if Dreamwidth seems quieter than it is because most of the activity occurs behind access locks? If it's not possible to be in the public sphere as a persistent public pseudonym, and it's not always possible to separate the parts of you that are fit for public consumption with the parts that might make trouble for your public self (being horny on main with your corporate self is not usually going to go over well, especially if your horny involves something other than the most vanilla of vanilla experiences), then the only feasible option left is to go private. The same technology that allows your employer to get dinged when someone is talking about them, good or bad, is being used by people to keep track of discussions and insert themselves into them, assuming The Algorithm doesn't serve it up on a platter. In an environment like that, where you have harvesters, spies, and snitches that will @ somebody that you're subtweeting specifically because they like to send it the flying monkeys, I don't blame anyone for wanting to keep all of their interactions safely behind access locks, limited to those people who have gone through the trouble of getting an account (and, at least in Dreamwidth's case, been granted permission to see locked entries). It won't prevent harassment, but it will at least tie it to an account that can be blocked and reported.That's the first part of why interaction can be dangerous: most interactions on the Web feed an amoral machine whose sole job is to figure out how to get you to interact more, and become more invested in that interaction. Tuned to peak efficiency, it will serve you a constant diet of things that you are viscerally opposed to, and it will serve you constantly to people who are viscerally opposed to you. All right there where any current or future employer can find it and make judgments about you that have little to do with your qualifications and much more to do with their legally-impermissible prejudices. The second part of why interaction is risky is because our embodied world has become significantly riskier for interaction as well. Some of that is increased intensity of the things that non-dominant people have experienced all through their lives as a reaction from dominant people (just now available in 4k HD from everyone's recording devices that make it easier to capture such things and share them), some of it is the possibility that something on virtual or social will bleed over into embodiment, and some of it is Tall Poppy Syndrome. By whatever name or aphorism you want to refer to it, holding different views than the people around you is risky business if you're not completely sure they're going to be okay with it, and even then, it really only extends to the first circle of possible interactions. It's not possible to have meaningful dialogue against an ideologue, and if that ideologue has the power to enforce their personal morality on you, then you have to deal with the consequences of that.
What I'm seeing a lot of, though, are people who are afraid of the possibility that their life is going to change, in such a way that they won't be the unmarked normal, the unquestioned dominant, and that a more accurate accounting of history and a more equitable method of resource and power distribution will leave them in a less powerful position than they were in. They have convinced themselves that everyone the system has oppressed to that point will take revenge upon them (often, they believe it will be violent revenge) because of their role in upholding and advancing the causes of the system, or they scramble to justify to themselves that they are an oppressed people themselves, and therefore any hegemonic claims about them can't possibly be true. (Even as they swiftly move to use the mechanisms and policies of government to ensure their beliefs have the force of law over everyone else's beliefs.) Those who would ban books and education and those who would ban ships or fandoms are not that different in their outlooks, nor that different in who they claim to protect by their actions, nor that different in who they are actually trying to protect by projecting a smokescreen of morality. And they're not all that different in their methods of trying to get something disappeared so that someone else will never have the opportunity to see it and realize it's their jam. Or that they're not alone in the universe with their ideas and their perspectives and their fandoms.
So, if going online and being publicly yourself might get you brigaded or doxxed, and being publicly yourself in your embodied life might get you fired, discriminated against, or hurt, then authentic interpersonal interaction in any aspect of life is potentially dangerous. And yet, just about every site and advice columnist says that you should be authentic in everything you do, that becoming vulnerable is the way to generate the good and strong relationships that will sustain someone over time. If there's nowhere to be authentic (including making authentic mistakes) without it being mined for advertising or used as ammunition or justification for belligerence (or belligerents), then why would anyone want to be authentic as opposed to whatever will help them not be the next target?
I don't fault anyone who wants to set up their space to be as safe for them as they can make it. I will give you a side-eye if you say that your safe space is universally applicable. I'd like to encourage you to interact with others, but you know better than I do what kind of risk tolerance you have for that, and what experiences you might have already had in your life that well make you rather to meet new friends or to stick with the ones that you already have, thanks.
Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-22 01:07 am (UTC)* Don't click on any ads ever. If you see something you like, type it into a separate search engine.
* You can also foil people's attempts to track your shopping behavior by spamming the hell out of it. For me, it would be impossible for anyone to determine which of the countless topics I search are for my own interest, because the vast majority of what I search is for my characters. But anyone can achieve a similar effect by searching random things in addition to real interests. It doesn't stop people from spying on you, but does ruin their data.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-22 03:33 am (UTC)Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-22 04:06 am (UTC)Better to be hated for what you are, than loved for what you are not.
There's nothing I could do to make normal people like me, so no point wasting energy trying.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-22 09:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-22 03:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-22 05:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-22 09:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-22 03:50 pm (UTC)