#fanac

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The majority of censorship is self-censorship

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA (Saturday night, with Adam Conover), Seattle (Monday, with Neal Stephenson), then Portland, Phoenix and more!

I know a lot of polymaths, but Ada Palmer takes the cake: brilliant science fiction writer, brilliant historian, brilliant librettist, brilliant singer, and then some:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/10/monopoly-begets-monopoly/#terra-ignota

Palmer is a friend and a colleague. In 2018, she, Adrian Johns and I collaborated on "Censorship, Information Control, & Information Revolutions from Printing Press to Internet," a series of grad seminars at the U Chicago History department (where Ada is a tenured prof, specializing in the Inquisition and Renaissance forbidden knowledge):

https://ifk.uchicago.edu/research/faculty-fellow-projects/censorship-information-control-information-revolutions-from-printing-press/

The project had its origins in a party game that Ada and I used to play at SF conventions: Ada would describe a way that the Inquisitions' censors attacked the printing press, and I'd find an extremely parallel maneuver from governments, the entertainment industry or other entities from the much more recent history of internet censorship battles.

With the seminars, we took it to the next level. Each 3h long session featured a roster of speakers from many disciplines, explaining everything from how encryption works to how white nationalists who were radicalized in Vietnam formed an armored-car robbery gang to finance modems and Apple ][+s to link up neo-Nazis across the USA.

We borrowed the structure of these sessions from science fiction conventions, home to a very specific kind of panel that doesn't always work, but when it does, it's fantastic. It was a natural choice: after all, Ada and I know each other through science fiction.

Even if you're not an sf person, you've probably heard of the Hugo Awards, the most prestigious awards in the field, voted on each year by attendees of the annual World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). And even if you're not an sf fan, you might have heard about a scandal involving the Hugo Awards, which were held last year in China, a first:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/science-fiction-authors-excluded-hugo-awards-china-rcna139134

A little background: each year's Worldcon is run by a committee of volunteers. These volunteers put together bids to host the Worldcon, and canvass Worldcon attendees to vote in favor of their bid. For many years, a group of Chinese fans attempted to field a successful bid to host a Worldcon, and, eventually, they won.

At the time, there were many concerns: about traveling to a country with a poor human rights record and a reputation for censorship, and about the logistics of customary Worldcon attendees getting visas. During this debate, many international fans pointed to the poor human rights record in the USA (which has hosted the vast majority of Worldcons since their inception), and the absolute ghastly rigmarole the US government subjects many foreign visitors to when they seek visas to come to the US for conventions.

Whatever side of this debate you came down on, it couldn't be denied that the Chinese Worldcon rang a lot of alarm-bells. Communications were spotty, and then the con was unceremoniously rescheduled for months after the original scheduled date, without any good explanation. Rumors swirled of Chinese petty officials muscling their way into the con's administration.

But the real alarm bells started clanging after the Hugo Award ceremony. Normally, after the Hugos are given out, attendees are given paper handouts tallying the nominations and votes, and those numbers are also simultaneously published online. Technically, the Hugo committee has a grace period of some weeks before this data must be published, but at every Worldcon I've attended over the past 30+ years, I left the Hugos with a data-sheet in my hand.

Then, in early December, at the very last moment, the Hugo committee released its data – and all hell broke loose. Numerous, acclaimed works had been unilaterally "disqualified" from the ballot. Many of these were written by writers from the Chinese diaspora, but some works – like an episode of Neil Gaiman's Sandman – were seemingly unconnected to any national considerations.

Readers and writers erupted in outrage, demanding to know what had happened. The Hugo administrators – Americans and Canadians who'd volunteered in those roles for many years and were widely viewed as being members in good standing of the community – were either silent or responded with rude and insulting remarks. One thing they didn't do was explain themselves.

The absence of facts left a void that rumors and speculation rushed in to fill. Stories of Chinese official censorship swirled online, and along with them, a kind of I-told-you-so: China should never have been home to a Worldcon, the country's authoritarian national politics are fundamentally incompatible with a literary festival.

As the outrage mounted and the scandal breached from the confines of science fiction fans and writers to the wider world, more details kept emerging. A damning set of internal leaks revealed that it was those long-serving American and Canadian volunteers who decided to censor the ballot. They did so out of a vague sense that the Chinese state would visit some unspecified sanction on the con if politically unpalatable works appeared on the Hugo ballot. Incredibly, they even compiled clumsy dossiers on nominees, disqualifying one nominee out of a mistaken belief that he had once visited Tibet (it was actually Nepal).

There's no evidence that the Chinese state asked these people to do this. Likewise, it wasn't pressure from the Chinese state that caused them to throw out hundreds of ballots cast by Chinese fans, whom they believed were voting for a "slate" of works (it's not clear if this is the case, but slate voting is permitted under Hugo rules).

All this has raised many questions about the future of the Hugo Awards, and the status of the awards that were given in China. There's widespread concern that Chinese fans involved with the con may face state retaliation due to the negative press that these shenanigans stirred up.

But there's also a lot of questions about censorship, and the nature of both state and private censorship, and the relationship between the two. These are questions that Ada is extremely well-poised to answer; indeed, they're the subject of her book-in-progress, entitled Why We Censor: from the Inquisition to the Internet.

In a magisterial essay for Reactor, Palmer stakes out her central thesis: "The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power":

https://reactormag.com/tools-for-thinking-about-censorship/

States – even very powerful states – that wish to censor lack the resources to accomplish totalizing censorship of the sort depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four. They can't go from house to house, searching every nook and cranny for copies of forbidden literature. The only way to kill an idea is to stop people from expressing it in the first place. Convincing people to censor themselves is, "dollar for dollar and man-hour for man-hour, much cheaper and more impactful than anything else a censorious regime can do."

Ada invokes examples modern and ancient, including from her own area of specialty, the Inquisition and its treatment of Gailileo. The Inquistions didn't set out to silence Galileo. If that had been its objective, it could have just assassinated him. This was cheap, easy and reliable! Instead, the Inquisition persecuted Galileo, in a very high-profile manner, making him and his ideas far more famous.

But this isn't some early example of Inquisitorial Streisand Effect. The point of persecuting Galileo was to convince Descartes to self-censor, which he did. He took his manuscript back from the publisher and cut the sections the Inquisition was likely to find offensive. It wasn't just Descartes: "thousands of other major thinkers of the time wrote differently, spoke differently, chose different projects, and passed different ideas on to the next century because they self-censored after the Galileo trial."

This is direct self-censorship, where people are frightened into silencing themselves. But there's another form of censorship, which Ada calls "middlemen censorship." That's when someone other than the government censors a work because they fear what the government would do if they didn't. Think of Scholastic's cowardly decision to pull inclusive, LGBTQ books out of its book fair selections even though no one had ordered them to do so:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/06/books/scholastic-book-racism-maggie-tokuda-hall.html

This is a form of censorship outsourcing, and it "multiplies the manpower of a censorship system by the number of individuals within its power." The censoring body doesn't need to hire people to search everyone's houses for offensive books – it can frighten editors, publishers, distributors, booksellers and librarians into suppressing the books in the first place.

This outsourcing blurs the line between state and private surveillance. Think about comics. After a series of high-profile Congressional hearings about the supposed danger of comics to impressionable young minds, the comics industry undertook a regime of self-censorship, through which the private Comics Code Authority would vet comings for "dangerous" content before allowing its seal of approval to appear on the comics' covers. Distributors and retailers refused to carry books without a CCA stamp, so publishers refused to publish books unless they could get a CCA stamp.

The CCA was unaccountable, capricious – and racist. By the 60s and 70s, it became clear that comic about Black characters were subjected to much tighter scrutiny than comics featuring white heroes. The CCA would reject "a drop of sweat on the forehead of a Black astronaut as 'too graphic' since it 'could be mistaken for blood.'" Every comic that got sent back by the CCA meant long, brutal reworkings by writers and illustrators to get them past the censors.

The US government never censored heroes like Black Panther, but the chain of events that created the CCA "middleman censors" made sure that Black Panther appeared in far fewer comics starring Marvel's most prominent Black character. An analysis of censorship that tries to draw a line between private and public censorship would say that the government played no role in Black Panther's banishment to obscurity – but without Congressional action, Black Panther would never have faced censorship.

This is why attempts to cleanly divide public and private censorship always break down. Many people will tell you that when Twitter or Facebook blocks content they disagree with, that's not censorship, since censorship is government action, and these are private actors. What they mean is that Twitter and Facebook censorship doesn't violate the First Amendment, but it's perfectly possible to infringe on free speech without violating the US Constitution. What's more, if the government fails to prevent monopolization of our speech forums – like social media – and also declines to offer its own public speech forums that are bound to respect the First Amendment, we can end up with government choices that produce an environment in which some ideas are suppressed wherever they might find an audience – all without violating the Constitution:

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/

The great censorious regimes of the past – the USSR, the Inquisition – left behind vast troves of bureaucratic records, and these records are full of complaints about the censors' lack of resources. They didn't have the manpower, the office space, the money or the power to erase the ideas they were ordered to suppress. As Ada notes, "In the period that Spain’s Inquisition was wildly out of Rome’s control, the Roman Inquisition even printed manuals to guide its Inquisitors on how to bluff their way through pretending they were on top of what Spain was doing!"

Censors have always done – and still do – their work not by wielding power, but by projecting it. Even the most powerful state actors are not powerful enough to truly censor, in the sense of confiscating every work expressing an idea and punishing everyone who creates such a work. Instead, when they rely on self-censorship, both by individuals and by intermediaries. When censors act to block one work and not another, or when they punish one transgressor while another is free to speak, it's tempting to think that they are following some arcane ruleset that defines when enforcement is strict and when it's weak. But the truth is, they censor erratically because they are too weak to censor comprehensively.

Spectacular acts of censorship and punishment are a performance, "to change the way people act and think." Censors "seek out actions that can cause the maximum number of people to notice and feel their presence, with a minimum of expense and manpower."

The censor can only succeed by convincing us to do their work for them. That's why drawing a line between state censorship and private censorship is such a misleading exercise. Censorship is, and always has been, a public-private partnership.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/22/self-censorship/#hugos

[raheemsradio]

idk if this is a hot take but "cringe culture" (or whatever tf we're calling it) will wreak havoc on fannish archival practices.

current and former fans are deleting, archiving, and/or disavowing fanworks that aren't "problematic" or harmful simply bc they're afraid of being perceived as cringe. even when they are works for fandoms that had or have a long streak of harmful behavior, we need these fanworks - including fanart, fic, rec lists, criticism, etc - to be extant so that our fandom archives can be full and complete with context.

we lose a lot when all we know about harmful fandom behavior comes from secondary sources. in addition, we lose a lot when everyone is scared of being cringe and good, amazing fanworks are taken down simply for the crime of having the potential for cringe.

cringe is dead. long live cringe.

[postcard-from-the-past]

Restaurant Julien on the Fanac Island in Joinville-le-Pont, southeastern suburbs of Paris

French vintage postcard

[crowns-of-violets-and-roses]

One of the many oddities in this year Hugo nominations is how many works have low point totals compared to their number of nominations.

For those not familiar with the Hugo nominations the basics are that "First, the total number of nominations (the number of ballots on which each nominee appears) from all eligible ballots shall be tallied for each remaining nominee. Next, a single “point” shall be assigned to each nomination ballot. That point shall be divided equally among all remaining nominees on that ballot. Finally, all points from all nomination ballots shall be totaled for each nominee in that category."

Nominees are then eliminated and points reassigned until the finalists are determined. While I haven't seen anything mathematically impossible there has been a lot of discussion of works points total being unusually low compared to nominations.

One interesting example is the fancast Worldbuilding for Masochists which has been nominated for three years running. In 2021 it had 34 nominations and 26.83 points on the final round or 0.789 votes per nomination.

In 2022 it had 42 nominations and 30.87 points on the final round or 0.735 points per nomination.

This year in 2023 it had 56 nominations and 11.30 points an average of 0.2017 points per nomination. The theoretical minimum number of points it could have gotten was 11.20 (56*0.2).

This is some quick math below so feel free to correct me if I've gotten anything wrong.

If 55 people voted for Worldbuilding for Masochists and had all 4 or there nominees in the final round and a single person only voted for Worldbuilding for Masochists it would have gotten more points than that.

If 54 people voted for it and had 4 other of their nominees still in the last round and 2 voted for it and had 3 of their other nominees in the last round it would have the 11.30 points shown ((54 * 0.2)+(20 * 0.25)).

I think at most two voters could have voted for Worldbuilding for Masochists and not had 4 other of there nominees still in the final round.

I know I have some Hugo voters following me and I'm sure there's more on tumblr. I'm curious if any of you nominated Worldbuilding for Masochists and didn't nominate four of the five below works:

Hugos There

Octothorpe

Hugo Girl

Coode Street Podcast

Kalanadi

FANAC Fan History Videos

[olderthannetfic]

Man, and me was using fan content as an umbrella term for everything fans create. Art, fics, music, games etc. Shucks I guess, any better words?

--

If you're a hundred years old and in literary SF fandom, 'fanac'. If you're in fanfic fandom, 'fanworks'.

It really depends where you're hanging out and how much you're looking at just products vs. at activities and labor more generally.

And I wouldn't say nobody around these parts ever uses 'content' in some context. It's just that when someone uses it where 'fanworks' would be equally apt, it can read like they spend too much time around influencer types not deeply embedded in oldschool fanfic fandom and the like.

If I were discussing AO3, for example, I might say that it contains a lot of content that gets deleted elsewhere or I might describe the site design in terms of menus vs. content or something. But I would not describe individual fanworks as "content" while discussing them. I would not generally call my own oeuvre "content".

[meeedeee]

Preserving "Fandom" History

I attended the bi-annual  SciFi Collection Libraries Consortium (SFCLC) Zoom meeting. It is a gathering of universities that archive science fiction and fantasy collections. This week was a presentation by the Data Speculations IMLS Project which is gathering feedback on digitizing university science fiction/fantasy collections. The project is being led by Sarah Potvin (Texas A&M University) and Alex Wermer-Colan (Temple University)

A wonderful fandom run project digitizing science fiction and fantasy fanzines* FANAC.org came up several times during the meeting as an example of a successful digital collection - and one that has bravely waded into areas that most universities are hesitant to tread. I think universities can learn a lot from the FANAC project.

FANAC also does more than just digitize: they host video Interviews about early fandom on their YouTube channel (example below). Check them out.

*These are non-fanfiction fanzines dating back to the 1930s - full of articles, essays, poetry, original fiction and more. "Fandom" is a term that applies to many communities, often overlapping

[zinedom]

I am not affiliated with this fandom history group, but they do great work

FANAC Fan History Zoom publicity release

"We have less than a week until the next FANAC Fan History Zoom program. We have some very knowledgeable fans on this program and it promises to be an enlightening subject in an often overlooked area of our field. This is the last FANAC Fan History Zoom for this season. Join us!.

 Please get the word out to all your friends.

The Women Fen Don't See

Claire Brialey, Kate Heffner, and Leah Zeldes Smith

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Time: 3PM EDT, 2PM CDT, Noon PDT, 7PM London (GMT), and Mar 17 at 6AM AEDT in Melbourne

To attend, send a note to fanac@fanac.org

[shpadoinkle-day]

[eastercon]

17 DAYS TO GO! The FANAC Fan History Project will have a scanning station at Conversation 2023 and they are hoping to get hold of some quality UK/European zines to add to the archive. So, if you have any fanzines you would like to get scanned, please bring them along to the convention. Just bear in mind that issues will need to be taken apart (with great care) and restapled, and fanzines will not be put online without permission from any editors who are still around. See fanac.org for more information about the project!

[allegrasloman]

first exposure to fanac was reading "night of the twin moons" when my mOm's best friend brought a photocopy by

Yknow what I LOVE about the Star Trek fandom? It’s ANCIENT. I had a talk with a nice old lady at the old persons home that my great grandma is in and she noticed my Spock shirt and was like “oh I love that show I thought the premise was lovely” and you all know THE PREMISE is trekspeak for spirk and I was like “do you accept the premise because I do” and she looked at me with the eyes of someone who is reliving their otp moments and she said “the premise is all I wrote about, dear” and we just talked about spirk for a hella long time and I just love how age doesn’t matter in this fandom you can be ninety and still be the biggest spirk bitch ever how rad is that

[theamazingstories]

Time Machine: February 4, 2024

AMAZING NEWS FROM FANDOM: February 4, 2024 The Hugo Awards Are A Danger To Themselves The Big Idea: Alexander C. Kane RETRO REVIEW – JOHN DIES AT THE END and Other Stuff (SPOILERS) Matt’s Reviews: The Glass Hotel / Sea Of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel New Releases in Science Fiction/Fantasy/Paranormal Romance for JAN 31 Australia, Australia, Australia, We Love You. Amen. FANAC Fan…

[astramthetaprime]

Revelations

So I went to my hometown con yesterday.  

I’ve spoken before regarding my antipathy toward drinking and drunk people, so I don’t stay for the goings-on after about 7 PM.  I am drawn primarily to the panel discussions, and if I have money to spend I’ll take a turn or two through the dealers room.  But quite unexpectedly there was a panel on “normalizing disabilities and neurodivergence”.  

So I have met my first autistic peeps.  And I don’t quite know what to think.   But I feel ... I dunno.  Not alone.  They’re part of a local anime club and have started a neurodivergent thing on Facebook.  So I’m trying to get back into the Facebook account I made once and now can’t get back into.  So we’ll see.  If nothing else Genji’s social circle is on there so that would be useful.  But I trust Facebook about as far as I could spit a rat.  I’m told that’s where all the cool kids go, so who knows.  I think it’s more a “heaven doesn’t want me and hell’s afraid I’ll take over” kind of thing.  

And I attended a couple other panels for writing.  There’s an indie publishing outfit here local who look useful, I may be able to submit Watchtower to them.  I dunno, we’ll see.  There are options.  

One of the things the girls at the neurodivergence panel talked about was getting involved in fandom, by just speaking to the folks who run conventions and above all “speak your need”.  I’m not going to get back into fandom if I don’t actually do anything to get back into fandom, and I understand that.  It’s all well and good to say “I’m participating in fandom by writing sci-fi, by contributing to the genre”.  But fanac is not just writing the genre.  It’s making connections.  It’s actively trying to make friends in fandom, not just pining away waiting for it to magically happen.  

And for a wonder, I saw three old friends there, and for a while -- a little while -- I wasn’t alone.  I was with people who know me down to the atoms, and who have known me for more than thirty years, who listened to me say “I am autistic” and hugged me tight the same as they always did.  

Sometimes, under the right stars, with the right people, it isn’t a curse.  Or a cross to bear.  It’s just the way I am.  

I have hope now, that I’ll get to the bottom of this someday, this bottomless pit of revelations and floors that collapse beneath me to new states of normal.  I have hope that I might find myself back where I started all those years ago when I walked into the consuite of my first con and saw a guy dressed as Nightcrawler leaping across the room.  That moment of the most profound connection has been my light all these years that in the end I was not alone.  

Back where I belong.

[postcard-from-the-past]

Fanac Island in the Marne river by Joinville-le-Pont, southeastern suburbs of Paris

French vintage postcard

[businesstiramisu]

machine-saint already acknowledged this in their reply to flakmaniak, but 'curative vs. transformative' was not MEANT to be an all-encompassing binary of How People Do Fandom, and I don't think we should be encouraging that viewpoint by trying to shoehorn in other fanac that doesn't fit it well.

Or maybe it was meant to be, because the people who proposed it were myopic. Here’s the post credited with coining “transformational fandom”, it’s about Racefail ‘09 and armchair psychoanalyzing creators. Here’s the post credited with coining ‘curative fandom’, it’s a theory explaining why Reddit Whovians hate Tumblr Whovians. (Neither mentions video games, they weren’t relevant to the arguments at hand. Also, hilariously to me, both posts assign cosplay to the other side.)

These paradigms might have made sense in the context they were proposed, but like the Bechdel test people have taken the terms and run to all sorts of broader conclusions that are unhelpful.

a thing I noticed in the discourse I see sometimes about curative/transformative fandom is that discussion of video game fandoms is basically entirely omitted. the warframe wiki is basically essential to playing the game, and it's one big curative project! same with FFXIV raid strategy guides/BiS sets and so so on.

[fandomroad]

Fandom and COVID-19?

Are there any oral history projects or surveys that are recording fan and fandom’s response to the pandemic?

[protytwo]

I’ve finally read the new Legion of Super-Heroes #1. Gonna sit with it for a while, and write a review for my Interlac zine in the next few days. Overall: good, cool, promising.