#adjacent to it because of spacebattles

[witchofanguish]

listen there's a lot I don't know about warfare, but I don't feel like I can take the discussion online about it seriously when "Arabs are culturally unsuited to modern war" is a serious thing people debate about the subject.

[olderthannetfic]

Anon who originally asked about the FanDomination cease and desist:

From the Fanlore article the case was from 2003, which came before the Bandom stories about... milk. Honestly I’m not sure why the Baseball RPF story was called that, but apparently it was 20 chapters. Not sure who else to ask if they have any knowledge on the case.

--

Somebody probably still knows.

One thing I’ve noticed is that while fans in general find fandom history interesting, the people I personally see posting a lot tend to be from a narrow slice of fandom that’s:

very LJ-y

mostly into specific kinds of Western fandoms

mostly into m/m.

at least somewhat OTW-adjacent

That’s partly because that’s who I tend to know. (Never underestimate how much is due to one’s own bubble, especially on tumblr!) It’s also partly about who cares about making a public record of fandom’s history. You’ll find this bias on Fanlore, among people I reblog, and sometimes among people in “fan studies”. (Though, of course, there’s plenty of academic work on kpop fandom and so forth, though not always in the same departments as the people looking at old fanfic zines.)

I’m reminded of this because FanDomination was one of Laura Hale’s things, and Hale had a hateboner for OTW in addition to being in a slightly different flavor of fandom. I imagine plenty of FanDomination alumni are still into fic and would be happy to weigh in. I don’t know that they’re on tumblr or that my social circles overlap with them.

Here’s an example of the lovely programmer of FanDomination responding to astolat’s call to action:

“P.S. Why does a fic reader/writer need to be on thier board at all? Do they have an investment in the operation? Also, why would there HAVE to be a female on the board? That seems pretty sexist to me to REQUIRE one to be 'legitimate'. Are you saying that males are incapable of truly understanding the nature and intricacies of fandom? Sounds like a bunch of feminazi horseshit to me.”

Ah, whiny fandom men. So oppressed. (OTW was much more “fandom is by women for women” in its very early days. The language got made slightly more inclusive over time, though probably not in a way the shittiest of cis men would want.)

Not that that tells you who exactly was using the site. I’m just saying there have always been multiple groups in fandom, and there may be cultural factors that mean a post of mine on here doesn’t turn up many responses from old FanDomination users.

I might try Reddit or Spacebattles or something if I were really hunting for people. (IDK if anybody on Spacebattles was actually on there, but it’s a more dude-heavy space with a different background and vibe than people I tend to know, so it would be a good starting point to get outside my own social circles.)

r/FanFiction is the big subreddit for fic. You could always try asking there.

[arcticdementor]

Warning: a longpost

Tensions between the social effects and "imperatives" of technological developments and elements of our human natures are not new — people have been debating it as far back as Diogenes, Confucius, and Laozi. But in recent discussions, I note a rather stark polarity.

On the one end, you have the people for whom the human must be subordinated to the technological. Issues created by technology cannot be fought, only individually adapted to, mostly via more technology. The people who will admit — or even go on at length — about the toxicity of social media… and yet for whom the idea of actually doing anything about it — other than individually tuning out if you can — is anathema, and they react with horror when you raise the possibility. People whose response to widespread obesity, particularly among the poor, as a result of modern lifestyles is pushing bariatric surgery (like some doctors friends and family have dealt with). Or at further extreme, singularitarian or singularitarian-adjacent ends, the people who look at our society's increasing difficulty producing future generations, and say either that it's no biggie because Any Day Now™ we'll cure aging and no longer need future generations, or it's no biggie because Any Day Now™ we'll figure out the tech for mass-manufacture of future generations like Brave New World or Battletech's Clans. At the furthest, you have the people who take the Marxist arguments about the "inherent contradictions" between industrial "capitalism" and human flourishing… and say 'so much the worse for humanity; time to start engineering the AI corporations to replace us dumb monkeys' like Nick Land.

Then you have the people at the other end, who go Luddite. Again, you can go back to filthy hobo Diogenes for this one. You've got the "environmentalists" who see anything more advanced than being a hunter-gatherer as the "rape of Mother Nature" and who unironically quote Agent Smith. Then there's the Right-wing primitivists who note that preindustrial societies cannot afford much leftism, and therefore argue that giving up electricity, indoor plumbing, medicine that works, etc. (let alone escaping this small, fragile planet) are all a small price to pay to Own the Libs.

But Confucius, while acknowledging that the creations of the Sage Kings, in bringing us from the "Greater Harmony" to the "Lesser Peace," created a certain tension between societal requirements and our human nature, pointed out that such things, like buildings, and clothing, and fire, and agriculture, and writing, et cetera, are worth the trade-off as opposed to a more natural lifestyle as naked cavemen. But, accepting the trade-off doesn't mean we can't do things to ameliorate those tensions and try to reduce the negative impacts.

Tyler Cowen posited his future Average Is Over dystopia of the vast majority of the population relegated to being impoverished, packed into overcrowded favelas eating beans and bugs, pacified by VR, drugs, and omnipresent government surveillance and enforcement… and when confronted about the undesirability of such and how we might avoid it, simply proclaims it inevitable: the Economy has spoken, and we humans can only obey its dictates. Whatever happened to the idea that our tools and our economy exist to serve us, and our human needs, rather than us existing to serve their needs? Okay, probably most people who held that view from a secular perspective likely ended up embracing Marxism as the means of doing so, and then Marxism failed. (This links in to my unwritten potential post about how Wokism is neither Marxist nor postmodern, despite drawing partially from both.) And those who did so from a religious perspective ended up divided by their various specific sectarian views and given to "solutions" that boil down to unsupported individual piety — or else, being the Amish.

There's that whole bit about "unless you're over 60, you weren't promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia." And plenty of people have covered this ground before, about how our visions of technological progress used to be about how it would make our lives better and allow us to better pursue our various human ends, but now are all about how it will make our lives worse and force us to pursue its various inhuman ends. Even the few "optimistic" visions are hyper-individualist, and when confronted about man's nature as a social animal, either insist that said needs will be met through "relationships" with individualized AI surrogates (the whole "2d > 3d," yay sexbots view), or else that the need for human connection will prove yet another "flaw" to be engineered out in whatever manner of "posthuman" creatures replace us.

I look back on those more optimistic visions. At what past societies considered a better future, before we gave up on it. And I note how even the utopian visions of 19th century socialists are, compared to our day, rather spectacularly un-Woke — and definitely better than 'soypunk dystopia, but at least with rainbow flags and nobody being misgendered while they toil for Amazon.'

And, of course, if you go further back, you eventually end up before any serious ideas of progress. Then, ideas about a better world were not speculations about the future, but about the afterlife. I recall a couple of discussions about Bleach, Soul Society, and the average Tenth Century Japanese peasant's idea of Paradise; or (IIRC, prompted by some terrible "humanity curbstomps the invading Legions of Hell who are wielding Bronze Age weapons against modern militaries" story on SpaceBattles) what a Bronze Age goat-herder would consider Heaven?

Are subordination to technological imperatives or Luddism really the only two choices? Are we really left with either the poor afflicted with starvation or the poor afflicted with obesity? For those of us who find the society "progress" has created increasingly alienated, and who prefer older visions and modes of living more attractive, is total renunciation and "going full Amish" really the only alternative?

I look at writers like Chesterton and Lewis and Tolkien, and their ideal social structures, and I think, isn't there some way that technological progress can be channeled towards allowing us — or, at least those of us who want to — to achieve a better, more comfortable, more broadly-available, less labor-intensive version of the Shire Hobbit lifestyle, rather than better digital circuses to numb us while we all eat bugs in our dorm tubes in Scat Francisco?

Or, for those of you so inclined, a better, more comfortable, more broadly-available, less labor-intensive version of the Oscar Wilde lifestyle? After all, I note that a perennial condemnation of aristocrats has been about what big, degenerate perverts they are behind closed doors — that de Sade got in trouble, more for atheism, but also for the "writing publicly about it" part? I mean, aside from maybe @ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres, where are the people trying to work out, instead of "Fully-Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism," how we might create "Fully-Automated Decadent Space Aristocracy"? Where are the people trying to use computers and AI to create a better version of the Imperial court of Elagabalus without all the slavery and need for foreign conquest to pay for its orgies?

Is there even a term for this idea, of using technology to create better versions of the past, rather than simply letting "progress" take us wherever it will, and all negative consequences treated as simply things we must each individually struggle to avoid and cope with, with all of us in competition against one another to become one of those chosen few ultra-rich tech overlords wealthy enough to escape living in the favelas, the few powerful enough to avoid ruination should one end up on the wrong end of Twitter cancelation?

Wow. Look at me, gloomy pessimist that I am, actually calling for some optimism and hope for the future. Yeah, I probably shouldn't have even bothered with the effort of writing this post. Because of course the only possible futures are all terrible.