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silveradeptIt is an ongoing situation with the Organization for Transformative Works, regarding both actions and the lack thereof regarding substantive and meaningful change in the organization and its major tools, such as the Archive of Our Own, toward preventing racist harassment of volunteers and fans on the tools and through the organization, as well as several other notable failures of the organization for things that seem like basic management of a website with user-generated content. With the upcoming Board elections coming up, there is increased scrutiny and materials about the conduct of current Board members and those who wish to become part of it.
erinptah attempts a summary of the most recent things that have been happening with regard to the Organization for Transformative Works and the election season and continued attempts to hold the organization accountable on topics of making the place less racist.
While the named candidate infairestcat's Reasons why I will not be voting for Audrey R. in the OTW Election and don't think you should either has since withdrawn her candidacy for the OTW Board, it is an instructive piece on what should be considered the bare minimum of competency and knowledge for a person who wants to run for the board of an organization such as the Organization for Transformative Works, with the worldwide remit and fans that such a Board member will come into contact with.
The most recent issues and affairs seem to have centered on a few different persons, and they are, to many degrees, inter-twined in their stories and accounts, because they all are on the receiving end of or are protesting racist treatment by the Board of the OTW. (So there may be some repetition.)
During one of the Question and Answer sessions for incoming Board candidates, a question was asked of Zixin that was initially redacted because of the potential danger it would have to Zixin for even the allegation of her involvement in anti-government protests in China. The question comes with a significant history of mistreatment and maltreatment of Chinese volunteers by the Organization, who understandably have different risks and safety requirements than others who volunteer might.
dhobikikutti has been trying to make the organization better, or at the very least, make the organization aware of the depth and scale of the problem it has and the ignorance that it continues to proceed with. Examples: demands for transparency and for outside auditing of the organization and its structures and demanding Legal do a shit-ton better in their responses to Organization volunteers being sent child sexual-exploitation material. (As you can see from the first letter, this is a years-long set of efforts for her.) For those efforts, a formal reprimand was delivered from the Board about taking better care with internal communications, the supposed linking of fannish and wallet name identities, and being a less abrasive person around others. (Also at that post, the formal response to such censure and a right and appropriate rejection of the idea that an organization has the power to forbid a person from talking about their own experiences or from trying to hold that organization accountable for their racism.) Some additional clarification, contextualization, and other responses, many of them horror at what was deployed, at synonymous, who is doing a fair amount of synthesis work for these problems.
When given an opportunity to do better and acknowledge the problem, a specific Board member instead tried to draw a line between their own behavior and the behavior of the person calling them to account. (Alex Tischer has since resigned from the OTW Board, but remains a committee chair and can exercise institutional power.) Especially galling in that defense is that many of the things that were cited in the formal reprimand were also things leveled at Alex Tischer (and with better receipts) but no action was taken against Alex. More context and explanation of why Alex's remarks were not as innocent as they could have been read, as well as other behaviors present that form a chain of regular racist responses, viasynonymous.
A different board member blamed Dhobi Ki Kutti as part of the reason why he was resigning from the organization, which also references Alex Tischer's behavior as something other than racist, but the blame itself seems to focus more on perceptions of behavior, and attempting to spin it as a privacy and safety issue that the organization's communications were being pasted in public channels and places such as Fail Fandom Anon. The pushback to said post also present atsynonymous points out, the text of the reprimand itself is long on things that it acknowledges are not actually policy violations, but instead tone concerns, and very short on specific actions taken that are policy violations and what parts of the policy are being violated, which, if present, would make it easier to contest what actually happened.
The point, as it always has been, is that the OTW continues to need significant work in recognizing the ways that it privileges whiteness over everything else, and to put in systems that will prevent this privileging and will result in both greater awareness of what it is doing, while also requiring improvement and enforce consequences on those who refuse to improve or who abdicate their responsibilities toward improvement.
One of the possible actions that can help might be a complete bylaw reform that tailors the OTW much more effectively to what it is now, rather than what it was when it started, which could allow for better governance through structural reform by the members and possibly paid staff, rather than requiring it to come solely from the Board.
An additional, and much more familiar to me, angle about this situation is the understanding of AO3 as a universal archive is going to cut off some of the possible solutions that will make the place better for fans of color to avoid harassment. I appreciatedawn_felagund explicitly pointing out the parts of AO3 where they say their mission is maximum inclusivity, and how that viewpoint shapes their willingness to archive things that are distateful and even flagrantly offensive. That's very familiar language to me, because it's literally the language of the Freedom to Read Statement and several policy documents that your public library has and still takes as their operating documents.
Whendawn_felagund talks about the difference between a universal archive and a community archive, and how the community archive had different standards and different things they want to collect, I think "yes, and," and here comes the nerdery.
I think one of the issues that is happening with AO3 is the difference between something being archivally relevant and the difference between something being in a circulating collection. (I swear I saw someone on Dreamwidth talking about the difference between an archive, where scholars visit and have context, and a library, which doesn't, and that AO3 may have been conceived as an archive but is functioning as a library. If you know where that is, I'd love the link.) For scholars who want to research whether or not there was virulent racism in fandom, or to construct Fanlore articles about it, the presence of racist fic is archivally important. It's the proof that such things existed, and it should be preserved for later scholars to find so they can provide evidence that such things exist. (dawn_felagund talks about this in the post and the comments.) Similarly, academic libraries and archives may collect racist and offensive material for the purposes of making them available to the scholars who are researching such things, writing about them, and need primary sources and scholarly writing to cite and use in support of their arguments. That's mostly uncontroversial, mostly because we assume that scholars who are looking for this material have the appropriate context and are making an affirmative decision to look at those materials, either for assignments or for their own scholarly progress.
Does the local public library also have a duty to purchase and make available virulently racist material? According to the Freedom to Read Statement and most of the materials that the American Library Association puts out, the answer is yes, because not including them would be "establish[ing] their own political, moral, or aesthetic views as a standard for determining what should be published or circulated" and "bar[ring] access to writings on the basis of the personal history or political affiliations of the author." And yet, because libraries don't have infinite space or money to house everything that is published, we develop collection criteria and priorities to try and make sure that we are using our limited shelf space and funds in the most efficient and wise ways possible. The end result is ideally a collection composed of material that is of interest and/or useful to the population in our service area. Which allows the people trained in collection development to make decisions not to buy things or to make space by discarding things on the shelves that don't contribute toward that ideal collection. Right now, public libraries are struggling with where the boundaries are between the competing ideas of providing "the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those that are unorthodox, unpopular, or considered dangerous by the majority" and curating a collection that isn't a minefield of racism, sexism, misogyny, transphobia, so that we aren't excluding people from using the library and its services by telling them the only thing they can expect to find in our collections is material that's hostile to them.
Most library workers are fine with the "include as wide a perspective as you can" for things that truly are petty partisan differences or where the major sides of an argument are well-reasoned, insightful, and stick to arguing about things like the official definition of a kilogram. For things that are "vaccines are secret Deep State mind control devices" or "anyone who isn't white is inherently inferior in intelligence, empathy, and other human qualities," for the most part, we can kick those out because they're not sufficiently rigorous or well-reviewed to warrant a position on our shelves. But sometimes those things make it because they're extremely popular with our users and the popularity and user requests are allowed to override the official judgment of the people professionally tasked with the collection (to our eternal frustration.) And sometimes we buy things before we realize their authors are complete TERFs and their works are chock-full of gender essentialism, offensive Jewish stereotypes, and work on a system that basically sorts people into jocks, brains, NPCs, and villains. Or sometimes things are allowed to continue that perpetuate racist narratives about the pioneer experience and that seek to erase or make the indigenous people who were already there into non-humans because they're part of the childrens' literary canon, as if that were some sort of fixed, immutable thing and all libraries always carry all of the Caldecott and Newberry winners from the very first award. (That even assumes that all the Caldecott and Newberry winners are still in print. They aren't.) Most of our administrators, who are several layers removed from the front-line staff seeing the consequences of these ideals, are usually clinging to those ideals as things that could not be changed or challenged, lest we lose our identity as a library. The front-line staff are usually much less sanguine about the need to uphold the ideals in all situations and much more interested in making sure that our users actually have a good experience with the library and want the library to at least acknowledge that there are people making decisions here, those decisions are not neutral and have real consequences, and that the track record we have about making good decisions is pretty terrible. To, I dunno, acknowledge that systemic racism is real, it's embedded in our organizational structure, and to do active things toward doing better about those things. (I feel like I've talked about this dynamic already in this post, about AO3, perhaps?)
I think we can also argue that virulently racist fic would generally not be something you would put in, say, a public exhibition about the contents of the Archive of Our Own, unless the exhibition itself were about racist fic in the Archive. If it were an exhibition about racist fic, the fics themselves would likely have context and warnings such that a person who went into the exhibition would understand what they were about to see and what they could expect to see in the exhibition. It would be much more upsetting if, say, there were an exhibition about songs of childhood that talked a lot about the songs of youth, and then the materials on display were copies of songs like "Yankee Doodle," "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," and in the middle, one called "Ten Little N-----s," with no context around it, nor indication that some of the exhibit would be talking about racist songs, nor any redaction of the title on display. It might be part of the collection, and a song that some children sang, but doing something like that without warning is generally considered not okay. (Even more so in polite white society if there are children around who might see such a title and then have to have uncomfortable conversations with their parents about the word, what it means, and the history of racism in the country. There are a lot of people who would really rather pretend that such things never existed, or if they did, they are comfortably in the past and definitely don't manifest in any aspect of the society of our current times.)
The campaign to add a mandatory warning for racism is essentially the argument that if someone is going to include racism in their work, then the audience should be warned of its existence. That it is bad practice to have material on the proverbial shelves that contains disturbing material and has no indication to the reader that it's there. The reason for asking for racism as a mandatory warning is because mandatory warnings gives a reader recourse to complain to the Trust and Safety folk about the lack of warning and for AO3 to then act and demand that either the author change their work to include the warning or change their work to "Choose Not To Warn" so that the reading audience will know that they could encounter anything at all in the work.
As with anything, there will be plenty of people who say this is the first of a slippery slope and soon we'll be required to warn for everything that someone might find scary or objectionable…as one would have to so as to follow the rules in other archives and places to post fic. The people who think that having to tag is an imposition on their rights to tell the story the way they want to are at least tangential to the kinds of people who proclaim they should be able to use any kind of slur or tell any kind of -ist story to anyone, including the people who would be the targets of such a thing, and suffer no consequences at all for doing so because their speech rights are more important than your feeeeeelings. And who complain about the lack of spaces where they can do just that without consequences. As an information professional, I come down on the side that metadata is information and very important information in archives and library collections, and especially for making archives and collections findable and usable. Tag your shit. (I have seen a chaptered fic put the appropriate tags for the story in as each of the new chapters is posted, so that the tagging is complete for the pieces that have been posted to that point. The argument for sequentially adding the tags was to avoid spoiling plot details in advance. That said, the tags were in place by the time the entire story had been revealed, so anyone coming to the story after its completion would have the full set of metadata available to them.)
I also believe that a taxonomy needs to be imposed on collections so that they can be searched, sifted, and their important materials found more easily. So give your tag wranglers plenty of resources, but also give them the opportunity to tweak their taxonomy according to the way that both creators are making things and searchers are trying to find it. (Some synning decisions destroy important metadata, especially in cases where one character holds multiple distinct identities.) In actual archives, especially the ones that hold and deal with primary source documents, it's completely unavoidable that there will be language used that is offensive to modern sensibilities. That puts the people creating the finding aids in a bind, since they may need to index the offensive term, and while they can provide contemporary language as references in the finding aids, once the primary source documents come out, the offensive language will be right there on the page. Many archives have created statements acknowledging the presence of offensive language in archival material and describe what they will and won't do with regard to the language present. (Princeton University's Statement on Language in Archival Description and The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's Statement on Potentially Harmful Content are good examples of the tension between the need to accurately describe and represent the material in their collections and to acknowledge that the material in their collections will contain offensive language and to do their best to avoid unnecessary use of that language. AO3 could do well to think about how, if they are going to continue to pursue maximum inclusivity, they are going to structure their finding aids and search appliances so that people can both find things that contain offensive language and racist themes, but also exclude them from being found. And what they might decide on as sensible default options for people who are going to be searching. And what vectors might be used for harassing behavior and what tools can be used to thread the needle so as to ideally prevent harassing behavior finding its target while preserving harassing materials as archivally important for later scholarship.
And, asdawn_felagund points out, a significant amount of this problem has developed because fic has, to some degree, consolidated itself onto AO3 instead of being spread across multiple community archives, mailing lists, and sites tucked away into various corners of the Internet. Various archives that have existed in places have to fold up under financial and hosting pressures, or because their maintainer no longer wishes to do all of that work, or because the mailing list service that the had been using was unceremoniously acquired and slated for shut down. AO3 imports all of those works that they can save, absolutely, but that means now the only archive of that material is on AO3, and that means material that was insulated is now available to the rest of the Internet and other factions of the same fandom who have not grown beyond ship wars and Discourse about how certain tropes, tools, or stories should be absolutely forbidden for being Problematic according to a specific and narrow mentality. If AO3 were an archive of our own, seen perhaps as the last backstop of other archives or the place where their works go to retire when their authors are no longer interested in the fandom or interested in continuing to make the dynamo of discourse spin, they might have less problems to deal with, because there would be other archives a place might decide to go to when they are done, archives with policies that are more in line with the original archive's policies. All works might find their way to AO3 anyway, as the only entity that can manage to keep the servers humming and the lights on, but they would do so after having had their entire life lived elsewhere and existing on AO3 mostly for the scholars and so that there would be a semi-permanent URL to link to a decades-old fic for when someone wants it to have new readers or to gush about it as a seminal work of their fandom experience.
None of this GLAM nerdery excuses the problems of the OTW Board, or the vectors of harassment currently in use, or the extremely poor taste of people using offensive symbols as names, as pictures, and of creating offensive works. None of this would invalidate the need to continue trying to do better and to ask for others to do the same. But I hope it does help make clearer where some of the philosophical contentions might be, and how it's possible that people may be talking past each other because they have different ideas of what the purpose of AO3 is and what kind of power they believe the OTW has to bring about their conception of AO3 and/or the OTW. The OTW still needs to eject and expel the people who are behaving in racist ways toward their volunteers, regardless of where they are in the organization, needed to find someone competent on dealing with DDoS attacks and CSEM yesterday, and needs to make visible progress or at least visible efforts toward progress on the promises they made about handling offensive content on the Archive and the vectors of attack currently in use. Whether than involves bylaws revisions, outside auditing, the creation of paid staff to manage the volunteers and their labor (and, quite probably, to make payments on the technical debt and structure the codebase to be better, easier to use, and capable of getting new features and tools), I don't know. And also, it might mean the re-creation of various archives of our own as the primary places to store works and perform the social functions of fandom. (It's not that I think of siloing as a solution, but that it's also a regular function that groups who are attacked in large gathering spaces to create smaller, better-run and more tightly-managed groups as a way of providing breathing space and social space without the noise of the larger group.)
We can hope the new Board members will be able to do some of these things. But we should not place all our hope in those new Board members, and instead continue efforts to hold the OTW accountable and to help the people in our own circles to understand the harmful tropes in our lives and perpetuate them less in our lives and our works.
erinptah attempts a summary of the most recent things that have been happening with regard to the Organization for Transformative Works and the election season and continued attempts to hold the organization accountable on topics of making the place less racist.While the named candidate in
fairestcat's Reasons why I will not be voting for Audrey R. in the OTW Election and don't think you should either has since withdrawn her candidacy for the OTW Board, it is an instructive piece on what should be considered the bare minimum of competency and knowledge for a person who wants to run for the board of an organization such as the Organization for Transformative Works, with the worldwide remit and fans that such a Board member will come into contact with.The most recent issues and affairs seem to have centered on a few different persons, and they are, to many degrees, inter-twined in their stories and accounts, because they all are on the receiving end of or are protesting racist treatment by the Board of the OTW. (So there may be some repetition.)
During one of the Question and Answer sessions for incoming Board candidates, a question was asked of Zixin that was initially redacted because of the potential danger it would have to Zixin for even the allegation of her involvement in anti-government protests in China. The question comes with a significant history of mistreatment and maltreatment of Chinese volunteers by the Organization, who understandably have different risks and safety requirements than others who volunteer might.
dhobikikutti has been trying to make the organization better, or at the very least, make the organization aware of the depth and scale of the problem it has and the ignorance that it continues to proceed with. Examples: demands for transparency and for outside auditing of the organization and its structures and demanding Legal do a shit-ton better in their responses to Organization volunteers being sent child sexual-exploitation material. (As you can see from the first letter, this is a years-long set of efforts for her.) For those efforts, a formal reprimand was delivered from the Board about taking better care with internal communications, the supposed linking of fannish and wallet name identities, and being a less abrasive person around others. (Also at that post, the formal response to such censure and a right and appropriate rejection of the idea that an organization has the power to forbid a person from talking about their own experiences or from trying to hold that organization accountable for their racism.) Some additional clarification, contextualization, and other responses, many of them horror at what was deployed, at synonymous, who is doing a fair amount of synthesis work for these problems.When given an opportunity to do better and acknowledge the problem, a specific Board member instead tried to draw a line between their own behavior and the behavior of the person calling them to account. (Alex Tischer has since resigned from the OTW Board, but remains a committee chair and can exercise institutional power.) Especially galling in that defense is that many of the things that were cited in the formal reprimand were also things leveled at Alex Tischer (and with better receipts) but no action was taken against Alex. More context and explanation of why Alex's remarks were not as innocent as they could have been read, as well as other behaviors present that form a chain of regular racist responses, via
synonymous.A different board member blamed Dhobi Ki Kutti as part of the reason why he was resigning from the organization, which also references Alex Tischer's behavior as something other than racist, but the blame itself seems to focus more on perceptions of behavior, and attempting to spin it as a privacy and safety issue that the organization's communications were being pasted in public channels and places such as Fail Fandom Anon. The pushback to said post also present at
synonymous points out, the text of the reprimand itself is long on things that it acknowledges are not actually policy violations, but instead tone concerns, and very short on specific actions taken that are policy violations and what parts of the policy are being violated, which, if present, would make it easier to contest what actually happened.The point, as it always has been, is that the OTW continues to need significant work in recognizing the ways that it privileges whiteness over everything else, and to put in systems that will prevent this privileging and will result in both greater awareness of what it is doing, while also requiring improvement and enforce consequences on those who refuse to improve or who abdicate their responsibilities toward improvement.
One of the possible actions that can help might be a complete bylaw reform that tailors the OTW much more effectively to what it is now, rather than what it was when it started, which could allow for better governance through structural reform by the members and possibly paid staff, rather than requiring it to come solely from the Board.
An additional, and much more familiar to me, angle about this situation is the understanding of AO3 as a universal archive is going to cut off some of the possible solutions that will make the place better for fans of color to avoid harassment. I appreciate
dawn_felagund explicitly pointing out the parts of AO3 where they say their mission is maximum inclusivity, and how that viewpoint shapes their willingness to archive things that are distateful and even flagrantly offensive. That's very familiar language to me, because it's literally the language of the Freedom to Read Statement and several policy documents that your public library has and still takes as their operating documents. When
dawn_felagund talks about the difference between a universal archive and a community archive, and how the community archive had different standards and different things they want to collect, I think "yes, and," and here comes the nerdery.I think one of the issues that is happening with AO3 is the difference between something being archivally relevant and the difference between something being in a circulating collection. (I swear I saw someone on Dreamwidth talking about the difference between an archive, where scholars visit and have context, and a library, which doesn't, and that AO3 may have been conceived as an archive but is functioning as a library. If you know where that is, I'd love the link.) For scholars who want to research whether or not there was virulent racism in fandom, or to construct Fanlore articles about it, the presence of racist fic is archivally important. It's the proof that such things existed, and it should be preserved for later scholars to find so they can provide evidence that such things exist. (
dawn_felagund talks about this in the post and the comments.) Similarly, academic libraries and archives may collect racist and offensive material for the purposes of making them available to the scholars who are researching such things, writing about them, and need primary sources and scholarly writing to cite and use in support of their arguments. That's mostly uncontroversial, mostly because we assume that scholars who are looking for this material have the appropriate context and are making an affirmative decision to look at those materials, either for assignments or for their own scholarly progress.Does the local public library also have a duty to purchase and make available virulently racist material? According to the Freedom to Read Statement and most of the materials that the American Library Association puts out, the answer is yes, because not including them would be "establish[ing] their own political, moral, or aesthetic views as a standard for determining what should be published or circulated" and "bar[ring] access to writings on the basis of the personal history or political affiliations of the author." And yet, because libraries don't have infinite space or money to house everything that is published, we develop collection criteria and priorities to try and make sure that we are using our limited shelf space and funds in the most efficient and wise ways possible. The end result is ideally a collection composed of material that is of interest and/or useful to the population in our service area. Which allows the people trained in collection development to make decisions not to buy things or to make space by discarding things on the shelves that don't contribute toward that ideal collection. Right now, public libraries are struggling with where the boundaries are between the competing ideas of providing "the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those that are unorthodox, unpopular, or considered dangerous by the majority" and curating a collection that isn't a minefield of racism, sexism, misogyny, transphobia, so that we aren't excluding people from using the library and its services by telling them the only thing they can expect to find in our collections is material that's hostile to them.
Most library workers are fine with the "include as wide a perspective as you can" for things that truly are petty partisan differences or where the major sides of an argument are well-reasoned, insightful, and stick to arguing about things like the official definition of a kilogram. For things that are "vaccines are secret Deep State mind control devices" or "anyone who isn't white is inherently inferior in intelligence, empathy, and other human qualities," for the most part, we can kick those out because they're not sufficiently rigorous or well-reviewed to warrant a position on our shelves. But sometimes those things make it because they're extremely popular with our users and the popularity and user requests are allowed to override the official judgment of the people professionally tasked with the collection (to our eternal frustration.) And sometimes we buy things before we realize their authors are complete TERFs and their works are chock-full of gender essentialism, offensive Jewish stereotypes, and work on a system that basically sorts people into jocks, brains, NPCs, and villains. Or sometimes things are allowed to continue that perpetuate racist narratives about the pioneer experience and that seek to erase or make the indigenous people who were already there into non-humans because they're part of the childrens' literary canon, as if that were some sort of fixed, immutable thing and all libraries always carry all of the Caldecott and Newberry winners from the very first award. (That even assumes that all the Caldecott and Newberry winners are still in print. They aren't.) Most of our administrators, who are several layers removed from the front-line staff seeing the consequences of these ideals, are usually clinging to those ideals as things that could not be changed or challenged, lest we lose our identity as a library. The front-line staff are usually much less sanguine about the need to uphold the ideals in all situations and much more interested in making sure that our users actually have a good experience with the library and want the library to at least acknowledge that there are people making decisions here, those decisions are not neutral and have real consequences, and that the track record we have about making good decisions is pretty terrible. To, I dunno, acknowledge that systemic racism is real, it's embedded in our organizational structure, and to do active things toward doing better about those things. (I feel like I've talked about this dynamic already in this post, about AO3, perhaps?)
I think we can also argue that virulently racist fic would generally not be something you would put in, say, a public exhibition about the contents of the Archive of Our Own, unless the exhibition itself were about racist fic in the Archive. If it were an exhibition about racist fic, the fics themselves would likely have context and warnings such that a person who went into the exhibition would understand what they were about to see and what they could expect to see in the exhibition. It would be much more upsetting if, say, there were an exhibition about songs of childhood that talked a lot about the songs of youth, and then the materials on display were copies of songs like "Yankee Doodle," "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," and in the middle, one called "Ten Little N-----s," with no context around it, nor indication that some of the exhibit would be talking about racist songs, nor any redaction of the title on display. It might be part of the collection, and a song that some children sang, but doing something like that without warning is generally considered not okay. (Even more so in polite white society if there are children around who might see such a title and then have to have uncomfortable conversations with their parents about the word, what it means, and the history of racism in the country. There are a lot of people who would really rather pretend that such things never existed, or if they did, they are comfortably in the past and definitely don't manifest in any aspect of the society of our current times.)
The campaign to add a mandatory warning for racism is essentially the argument that if someone is going to include racism in their work, then the audience should be warned of its existence. That it is bad practice to have material on the proverbial shelves that contains disturbing material and has no indication to the reader that it's there. The reason for asking for racism as a mandatory warning is because mandatory warnings gives a reader recourse to complain to the Trust and Safety folk about the lack of warning and for AO3 to then act and demand that either the author change their work to include the warning or change their work to "Choose Not To Warn" so that the reading audience will know that they could encounter anything at all in the work.
As with anything, there will be plenty of people who say this is the first of a slippery slope and soon we'll be required to warn for everything that someone might find scary or objectionable…as one would have to so as to follow the rules in other archives and places to post fic. The people who think that having to tag is an imposition on their rights to tell the story the way they want to are at least tangential to the kinds of people who proclaim they should be able to use any kind of slur or tell any kind of -ist story to anyone, including the people who would be the targets of such a thing, and suffer no consequences at all for doing so because their speech rights are more important than your feeeeeelings. And who complain about the lack of spaces where they can do just that without consequences. As an information professional, I come down on the side that metadata is information and very important information in archives and library collections, and especially for making archives and collections findable and usable. Tag your shit. (I have seen a chaptered fic put the appropriate tags for the story in as each of the new chapters is posted, so that the tagging is complete for the pieces that have been posted to that point. The argument for sequentially adding the tags was to avoid spoiling plot details in advance. That said, the tags were in place by the time the entire story had been revealed, so anyone coming to the story after its completion would have the full set of metadata available to them.)
I also believe that a taxonomy needs to be imposed on collections so that they can be searched, sifted, and their important materials found more easily. So give your tag wranglers plenty of resources, but also give them the opportunity to tweak their taxonomy according to the way that both creators are making things and searchers are trying to find it. (Some synning decisions destroy important metadata, especially in cases where one character holds multiple distinct identities.) In actual archives, especially the ones that hold and deal with primary source documents, it's completely unavoidable that there will be language used that is offensive to modern sensibilities. That puts the people creating the finding aids in a bind, since they may need to index the offensive term, and while they can provide contemporary language as references in the finding aids, once the primary source documents come out, the offensive language will be right there on the page. Many archives have created statements acknowledging the presence of offensive language in archival material and describe what they will and won't do with regard to the language present. (Princeton University's Statement on Language in Archival Description and The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's Statement on Potentially Harmful Content are good examples of the tension between the need to accurately describe and represent the material in their collections and to acknowledge that the material in their collections will contain offensive language and to do their best to avoid unnecessary use of that language. AO3 could do well to think about how, if they are going to continue to pursue maximum inclusivity, they are going to structure their finding aids and search appliances so that people can both find things that contain offensive language and racist themes, but also exclude them from being found. And what they might decide on as sensible default options for people who are going to be searching. And what vectors might be used for harassing behavior and what tools can be used to thread the needle so as to ideally prevent harassing behavior finding its target while preserving harassing materials as archivally important for later scholarship.
And, as
dawn_felagund points out, a significant amount of this problem has developed because fic has, to some degree, consolidated itself onto AO3 instead of being spread across multiple community archives, mailing lists, and sites tucked away into various corners of the Internet. Various archives that have existed in places have to fold up under financial and hosting pressures, or because their maintainer no longer wishes to do all of that work, or because the mailing list service that the had been using was unceremoniously acquired and slated for shut down. AO3 imports all of those works that they can save, absolutely, but that means now the only archive of that material is on AO3, and that means material that was insulated is now available to the rest of the Internet and other factions of the same fandom who have not grown beyond ship wars and Discourse about how certain tropes, tools, or stories should be absolutely forbidden for being Problematic according to a specific and narrow mentality. If AO3 were an archive of our own, seen perhaps as the last backstop of other archives or the place where their works go to retire when their authors are no longer interested in the fandom or interested in continuing to make the dynamo of discourse spin, they might have less problems to deal with, because there would be other archives a place might decide to go to when they are done, archives with policies that are more in line with the original archive's policies. All works might find their way to AO3 anyway, as the only entity that can manage to keep the servers humming and the lights on, but they would do so after having had their entire life lived elsewhere and existing on AO3 mostly for the scholars and so that there would be a semi-permanent URL to link to a decades-old fic for when someone wants it to have new readers or to gush about it as a seminal work of their fandom experience.None of this GLAM nerdery excuses the problems of the OTW Board, or the vectors of harassment currently in use, or the extremely poor taste of people using offensive symbols as names, as pictures, and of creating offensive works. None of this would invalidate the need to continue trying to do better and to ask for others to do the same. But I hope it does help make clearer where some of the philosophical contentions might be, and how it's possible that people may be talking past each other because they have different ideas of what the purpose of AO3 is and what kind of power they believe the OTW has to bring about their conception of AO3 and/or the OTW. The OTW still needs to eject and expel the people who are behaving in racist ways toward their volunteers, regardless of where they are in the organization, needed to find someone competent on dealing with DDoS attacks and CSEM yesterday, and needs to make visible progress or at least visible efforts toward progress on the promises they made about handling offensive content on the Archive and the vectors of attack currently in use. Whether than involves bylaws revisions, outside auditing, the creation of paid staff to manage the volunteers and their labor (and, quite probably, to make payments on the technical debt and structure the codebase to be better, easier to use, and capable of getting new features and tools), I don't know. And also, it might mean the re-creation of various archives of our own as the primary places to store works and perform the social functions of fandom. (It's not that I think of siloing as a solution, but that it's also a regular function that groups who are attacked in large gathering spaces to create smaller, better-run and more tightly-managed groups as a way of providing breathing space and social space without the noise of the larger group.)
We can hope the new Board members will be able to do some of these things. But we should not place all our hope in those new Board members, and instead continue efforts to hold the OTW accountable and to help the people in our own circles to understand the harmful tropes in our lives and perpetuate them less in our lives and our works.
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Date: 2023-08-06 06:00 pm (UTC)There's definitely a lot more improvement that has to be made in the space of preventing harassment from reaching the intended target through their platform. If they want to collect things that are directly harassing, people have to be able to block things successfully so that any given harasser gets to die mad without ever having successfully been seen by their target.