Disconnected thoughts and a few links regarding Strikethrough 07, legality and corporate control
I've spent a great deal of time today reading about LiveJournal's mass banning, in the wake of campaigning from a Christian Right anti-paedophile group. Accounts that listed "incest" and similar terms in their userinfo were reported to LiveJournal Abuse, and LJ suspended their accounts regardless of the content of the sites. Some paedophile and man-boy love sites have gone; so have many fanfiction sites, including the massive Harry Potter slash community pornish_pixies, and a Spanish-language discussion group on Lolita. ETA: I forgot to mention, but most horrifically of all, they have deleted sexual abuse survivors' communities.
a news link and discussions from various fans.
My initial responses, fairly train-of-thought:
(1) Fuck the innocent child on the net, as Lee Edelman says in No Future; sometimes adults want and need to talk about things that it may not be appropriate for children to see. I don't want to condone sexual abuse (it's a little absurd that I feel the need to say that), but this kind of moral panic is exactly why obsessive surveillance in the service of 'protection' is an unbelievably bad idea. It's bizarre and ridiculous, or it would be if it didn't have such significant implications. No communities on LJ can encourage illegal activities, apparently: no disagreeing with the government (of America, never mind which country you happen to be in) on their website! Hmm. I try whenever feasible to base my actions not on whether they are legal or not in the country I happen to be in, but on my own ethical principles and my conscience; if I promote this point of view, am I to be banned for inciting others to lawbreaking? It would appear so. I generally try not to incite lawbreaking online for simple reasons of basic paranoia (I don't post anything that would make me suicidal if it were linked to my real name, either) but the idea that utterances should (or, logistically, can) be policed to this level just seems, as I said, bizarre and ridiculous.
(2) I've always rather liked the way whole subcultures devoted to incestuous gay porn about TV characters lived quietly in corporate blog and social network sites. But LJ's kneejerk response to having that section of its community exposed makes me realise that using their services means submitting to their rules, subjecting ourselves to their ideas of what is and what is not appropriate - and I'm thinking of all the activist communities on LJ here, as much as the fannish ones. Clearly, some kinds of compromise are inevitable; but perhaps it's necessary to be more careful about what the compromises are when it comes to web services than I had thought. Comments to this post over at deadbrowalking are a useful reminder that LJ's abuse-reporting services have rarely been bastions of impartiality (and also that LJ is not the world); I had friends who left over Nipplegate (when LJ banned all users who had nipples in their default icons, infuriating many breastfeeding communities); I should have paid more attention when that was going on, I suspect.
(3) This relates also to the recent blowup in fandom around fanlib.com, a for-profit archive which various corporate types have been trying very unsuccessfully to sell to mediafandom (discussion in Henry Jenkins's blog and from icarusancalion here; interview with the founder by Jenkins; an amusing poll). Fans are very suspicious of the motivations of the corporate webspace providers there; recent events might highlight the fact that LJ, though a hospitable site that has gradually and organically been adopted as fannish community space (and which is similarly central to many other communities), has its bottom line and its advertisers as its primary concern rather than the opinion of its users (who may, after all, be in support of the bans as easily as subject to them; anyone can obtain an account or several). An alternative to FanLib has been proposed, at fanarchive; I expect interesting things will arise from that. Is an alternative required for LJ? I don't see how this size of online community could ever be maintained without using the servers of a public, corporate service, any of which would be likely to have similar attitudes to LJ and here is why; and I would hate to lose the interconnection between personal, intellectual, fannish and political engagements I maintain by spending time here.
The larger questions this whole thing raises, about surveillance and legality and publicity in the age of fannish de-marginalization, make my brain hurt so much that I'm probably going to have to write a paper about them one of these days.
Also, normally I give more information with my LJ links, and cite the name of the poster. But there are a lot and I got tired of typing <>s. Sorry.
a news link and discussions from various fans.
My initial responses, fairly train-of-thought:
(1) Fuck the innocent child on the net, as Lee Edelman says in No Future; sometimes adults want and need to talk about things that it may not be appropriate for children to see. I don't want to condone sexual abuse (it's a little absurd that I feel the need to say that), but this kind of moral panic is exactly why obsessive surveillance in the service of 'protection' is an unbelievably bad idea. It's bizarre and ridiculous, or it would be if it didn't have such significant implications. No communities on LJ can encourage illegal activities, apparently: no disagreeing with the government (of America, never mind which country you happen to be in) on their website! Hmm. I try whenever feasible to base my actions not on whether they are legal or not in the country I happen to be in, but on my own ethical principles and my conscience; if I promote this point of view, am I to be banned for inciting others to lawbreaking? It would appear so. I generally try not to incite lawbreaking online for simple reasons of basic paranoia (I don't post anything that would make me suicidal if it were linked to my real name, either) but the idea that utterances should (or, logistically, can) be policed to this level just seems, as I said, bizarre and ridiculous.
(2) I've always rather liked the way whole subcultures devoted to incestuous gay porn about TV characters lived quietly in corporate blog and social network sites. But LJ's kneejerk response to having that section of its community exposed makes me realise that using their services means submitting to their rules, subjecting ourselves to their ideas of what is and what is not appropriate - and I'm thinking of all the activist communities on LJ here, as much as the fannish ones. Clearly, some kinds of compromise are inevitable; but perhaps it's necessary to be more careful about what the compromises are when it comes to web services than I had thought. Comments to this post over at deadbrowalking are a useful reminder that LJ's abuse-reporting services have rarely been bastions of impartiality (and also that LJ is not the world); I had friends who left over Nipplegate (when LJ banned all users who had nipples in their default icons, infuriating many breastfeeding communities); I should have paid more attention when that was going on, I suspect.
(3) This relates also to the recent blowup in fandom around fanlib.com, a for-profit archive which various corporate types have been trying very unsuccessfully to sell to mediafandom (discussion in Henry Jenkins's blog and from icarusancalion here; interview with the founder by Jenkins; an amusing poll). Fans are very suspicious of the motivations of the corporate webspace providers there; recent events might highlight the fact that LJ, though a hospitable site that has gradually and organically been adopted as fannish community space (and which is similarly central to many other communities), has its bottom line and its advertisers as its primary concern rather than the opinion of its users (who may, after all, be in support of the bans as easily as subject to them; anyone can obtain an account or several). An alternative to FanLib has been proposed, at fanarchive; I expect interesting things will arise from that. Is an alternative required for LJ? I don't see how this size of online community could ever be maintained without using the servers of a public, corporate service, any of which would be likely to have similar attitudes to LJ and here is why; and I would hate to lose the interconnection between personal, intellectual, fannish and political engagements I maintain by spending time here.
The larger questions this whole thing raises, about surveillance and legality and publicity in the age of fannish de-marginalization, make my brain hurt so much that I'm probably going to have to write a paper about them one of these days.
Also, normally I give more information with my LJ links, and cite the name of the poster. But there are a lot and I got tired of typing <>s. Sorry.