[2023-11-16] racism_otw_end

[Blog] / 2023-11-21 / racism_otw_end / #entry.rdf

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        <dc11:title>Racism, the O·T·W &amp; the End There·of</dc11:title>
        <dc11:date>2023-11-21T23:18:26-05:00</dc11:date>
        <dc11:abstract rdf:parseType="Markdown"><![CDATA[
A follow·up to my previous post, [“End Racism in the
O·T·W”][end_otw_racism], with the aim of providing thoughts on how
fandom antiracist activism has gone of late, as well as clarifying and
refining my own orientation towards the [Organization for
Transformative Works][OTW] as an organization. And possibly also the
future of fandom?

[OTW]: <https://www.transformativeworks.org/> "Organization for Transformative Works"
[end_otw_racism]: <https://blog.ladys.computer/2023-05-14/end_otw_racism/> "End Racism in the O·T·W"
]]></dc11:abstract>
        <sioc:content rdf:parseType="Markdown"><![CDATA[
This post is a follow·up to my previous post, [“End Racism in the
O·T·W”][end_otw_racism], with the aim of providing thoughts on how
fandom antiracist activism has gone of late, as well as clarifying and
refining my own orientation towards the [Organization for
Transformative Works][OTW] as an organization. And possibly also the
future of fandom?

## Developments at the O·T·W

In short, the organization has showed its entire arse. Regarding the
End O·T·W Racism action in particular, I felt that [the
response][OTW-Update] was incredibly infantilizing and beside the
point. To quote an excerpt :⁠—

> Since the posting of our original plan in 2020, we have completed or
> made significant progress on a series of goals to help protect our
> users and volunteers against harassment:
>
> - We implemented the ability to freeze comment threads and turn off
>   comments on your works entirely, giving you more control to
>   moderate interactions on your AO3 fanworks.
>
> - User muting was introduced to help you avoid encountering works,
>   bookmarks, or comments from specific users when browsing the
>   Archive.
>
> - We have implemented comment blocking to prevent specific logged‐in
>   users from commenting on your works entirely.
>
> - You can now opt out of receiving gifts on AO3, as well as opt out
>   of allowing your works to be invited to collections.
>
> - We have improved admin tools to facilitate investigations by our
>   Policy & Abuse team.
>
> - Internally, we have updated our Code of Conduct to make it explicit
>   that discrimination based on caste is not tolerated in the OTW.
>
> - We also implemented methods for volunteers to contact and submit
>   feedback to the Board anonymously by introducing a separate
>   feedback form.
>
> We are still committed to working towards giving you more control
> over how you experience the Archive going forward. To that end, we
> will be expanding blocking features to cover more user interactions,
> and further limiting how guest users can interact with you on the
> Archive.

Note how ⓐ almost all of these changes are technological in nature,
and ⓑ none of these changes are actually specific to *combatting
racism*. I didn’t participate in the End O·T·W Racism action because I
wanted “more control” over my Archive experience, I participated
because I wanted the O·T·W to cease being a racist organization.
Absolutely none of the points listed tackle that problem.

Astonishingly, in a very “senpai noticed me” moment, [the Fandom Against
Racism team seemed happy just to have gotten a response at
all][EndOTWRacism-Response], and did not offer any of these criticisms.
This made me severely doubt whether the Fandom Against Racism team
actually knew what they were protesting.

That one specific response to that one specific action aside, the O·T·W
clearly demonstrated, in the lead·up to its latest Board election :⁠—

- That it has a Legal staff with far too much power and influence over
  the organization, whose area of expertise is narrow and misguided in
  relation to the whole scope of things a platform like
  [<cite>A·O·3</cite>][AO3] needs to handle (e·g sexualized photography
  of minors).

- That it has a Policy &amp; Abuse team which is hopelessly overworked,
  unable to tackle big problems (due, in part, to afore·mentioned
  overreach of Legal), and unable to moderate even the comments of
  <cite>A·O·3</cite>’s own blogposts.

- That there are individuals in the O·T·W with long histories of racist
  and abusive behaviour, at least one of which who was a member of the
  Board and who *still* is a sitting chairmember of a committee. (There
  are not good processes, or maybe any processes, for removing these
  people from their posts.)

- That members with·in the organization are completely willing to wield
  its Code of Conduct as a retaliatory tool for silencing criticisms of
  racism.

- That East Asian volunteers, and mainland Chinese volunteers in
  particular, have had an extremely rough time of it.

- That the O·T·W still doesn’t know how to manage money and still is
  not capable of hiring needed staff.

- That the A·O·3 codebase is still a mess and there is still no
  organizational interest or capacity to bring the contribution
  pipeline up to the norms and expectations of your average open source
  project.

I’m not providing citations for the above facts because most of the
discussion surrounding them happened informally on places like
Dreamwidth and Tumblr. You should approach them with the level of
rigour you generally would use for word‐of‐mouth utterances from people
who were there and watched it happen, and I welcome anyone with the
time to chronicle them in a more durable and comprehensive fashion.

It is important to note that the O·T·W Board has changed, seemingly for
the better, since most of this stuff went down. What this likely means
in practice is just that the systemic problems in the organization have
gone back to being hidden now that there are competent people in the
role of acting as the organization’s face. However, they are finally
moving forward on having an external audit with respect to diversity
and inclusion, and that could, eventually, result in some actual
change.

## Developments in Fandom Antiracism

These have likewise been largely disappointing. I was initially excited
about the End O·T·W Racism action, because it seemed like a potentially
very effective tactic at raising the issue and building an activist
base for future antiracist work. I think that it was, but that base was
squandered and the movement now seems to have died out.

After their initial Call to Action, Fandom Against Racism announced
[their second one,][EndOTWRacism-CtA2] a voting drive to elect a new
O·T·W board. It’s important to understand that voting in an O·T·W
election is restricted to those who have recently donated, which means
this was *in fact* [a massive fundraiser][EndOTWRacism-Donate] for the
very organization which they were supposedly critiquing. To add to
this, there were (and still are) very serious doubts among many fans
regarding the capacity of the Board to actually enact change (given the
relative power of committee chairs), and it’s also worth noting that
voting (a silent, confidential activity) shares none of the qualities
which made the first action successful. To top it off, this second
action was announced *prior to the announcement of candidates*, meaning
it was unclear initially whether there were even any good antiracist
candidates to vote *for*, or, indeed, whether there were enough
candidates that voting would even matter. As it turned out, by the time
elections rolled around, there were only as many candidates as there
were open seats and voting was largely ineffectual.

Poor choice of action aside, End O·T·W Racism spent much of this time
cosplaying the very image of a large, ineffectual liberal nonprofit,
introducing a mascot and promoting a [weekend of
love][EndOTWRacism-WoL] in place of further radical disruption. They
made analyses of each Board candidate (as tho᷎ they were experts) which
generally fell short, rating them more‐or‐less on how many buzzwords
they employed in their answers. They refused to comment on the long
list of institutional failings of O·T·W as an organization, with the
excuse that they were “focused on the topic of racism” (my paraphrase),
as tho᷎ being an inept organization with no capacity for structural
change wasn’t a primary means by which racism in the O·T·W has been
perpetuated.

There was a board meeting during this time, which they encouraged
people to attend, and people did and it was a glorious mess (the extent
of Fandom Against Racism’s influence in this is unclear). This was not
followed up upon. After the (uncontested) elections wrapped up, [the
Fandom Against Racism team seemed largely satisfied with the
result][EndOTWRacism-Review] and went on haitus. Unsurprisingly,
whatever base they had initially managed to gather is now nowhere to be
seen.

## My Position as a Fan Author

In my previous post, I pledged to title all of my fics “End Racism in
the OTW” until such a time as the demands of the movement were
satisfied. Given the above, I am now rescinding the pledge, with a
note‐to‐self that in the future I should probably add a stipulation
that if everyone involved throws up their hands and says “good enough”,
it’s fair to walk away.

The thing I’m walking away from, tho᷎, isn’t antiracism but
<cite>A·O·3</cite> and the fannish culture surrounding it. I’m not
interested in fixing a racist organization or a broken platform,
personally. I don’t think it is too big to fail, and honestly, I think
its failure is inevitable. In the past year, more and more people have
locked or removed their works out of concerns regarding harassment, A·I
harvesting, or simply not wanting to share space with bigoted content
anymore. This trend doesn’t seem likely to abate and consequently I
think fandom does need to start treating the platform as fundamentally
unreliable! Being a reliable, persistent archive is of course
<cite>A·O·3</cite>’s big selling point so who can say where things will
go from here.

In terms of personal practice, *I’m* going to stop treating
<cite>A·O·3</cite> as persistent or reliable by simply not continuing
to do the work of keeping it that way. I’m going to delete more, post
less, and communicate less often regarding changes. This of course
raises the question of where the persistent home of my fanworks *will*
be, but in the meantime feel free to shoot me an email if you’re
looking for some·thing I wrote and it suddenly isn’t there anymore.

For the things I do post to <cite>A·O·3</cite>, I still stand by these
points and aim to be as blunt about them as possible :⁠—

- O·T·W meets any reasonable definition of a racist organization and
  <cite>A·O·3</cite> meets any reasonable definition of a website which
  promulgates bigotry and hate.

- It is irresponsible and unethical to monetarily support such
  organizations and websites, especially in the form of donations or
  membership drives.

- O·T·W, the organization, must earn your vote by being a welrun,
  democratic organization with good processes before any candidate
  running for any organizational position possibly can earn your vote
  by having good positions. (And O·T·W miserably fails that objective.)

I think there is value in continuing to stress these things to users,
but as the size and strengths of movements wane, I think the tactics
need to become more personal. Personal connections, communications, and
investment are how durable activist networks are formed.

When thinking about these problems, I’m also increasingly realizing
the troubling implications of the fact that fandom “isn’t what it used
to be”, by which I mean a space to be your authentic, weird, kinky self
and nerd out about your passions, in a place where other people are
also being their authentic, weird, kinky selves and doing likewise.
Instead I think fandom has taken on different, more mainstream social
functions, which is to say that I think that it has shifted from being
counterculture to being culture. This is a problem because while fandom
in its first formulation was some·thing to care about and fight for,
fandom in its more recent incarnation is much harder to organize
around. I think we need a concerted effort to bring about fandom in
the former sense, and I think the starting place is not in “media”
fandoms but in lifestyle ones (furry fandom, fashion/esthetic fandoms,
musical genre fandoms, and so forth). In these latter examples, the
word “fandom” might as well be replaced with “scene”.

I want to be a part of scenes which give a shit about the silly things
I care about (romantic c·dramas, anime, Pokémon, Nintendo). I want that
much more than I care about belonging to any “fandom” or “fanspace” in
the vernacular sense. And I think that having those scenes can form the
bedrock of culture, not only fan culture but also culture in a general
sense, a culture which produces interesting content for an audience of
like‐minded people, some of which may reference some person or
corporation’s Intellectual Property but a lot of which probably won’t.
Plenty of “original content” is produced by S·F·F fandom, furry fandom,
⁊·c, and the willingness of people to create unique works within those
spaces as opposed to without I think is a testament to the fact that
they have some·thing which other spaces lack.

I’ve made my own small efforts at building these sorts of scenes, with
the Mastodon instance I moderate and the Discord server I run and the
[wiki I set up for my friends][Wiki]. I don’t think spaces like these
are enough (I’d love a forum), but I think they are a start. We need
bigger ones, tho᷎, ones that are big enough to host events or
challenges or other sorts of community happenings, and big enough to
where they can adequately serve the function of introducing one to new
people and ideas. I’m very interested in the inflection point from
“friends and family” to “community” and think that transition is the
only kind of scale which matters.

I’ve been pretty busy with life, work, and [inane highly‐technical
Ecmascript programming][Piscēs], but I hope to get back to this sort of
development soon.

[AO3]: <https://archiveofourown.org/> "Archive of Our Own"
[EndOTWRacism-CtA2]: <https://end-otw-racism.tumblr.com/post/720333769684484096/vote-to-end-otw-racism> "#VOTE TO END OTW RACISM"
[EndOTWRacism-Donate]: <https://end-otw-racism.tumblr.com/post/721145850999586816/alt-text-image-of-a-cheerful-brown-owl-in-a> "DONATE To the OTW & Become and OTW Voter"
[EndOTWRacism-Response]: <https://end-otw-racism.tumblr.com/post/719947217883037696/the-otw-has-responded-to-our-campaign-and-provided> "The OTW has responded to our campaign…"
[EndOTWRacism-Review]: <https://end-otw-racism.tumblr.com/post/726465603305684992/2023-otw-board-election-review> "2023 OTW BOARD ELECTION REVIEW"
[EndOTWRacism-WoL]: <https://end-otw-racism.tumblr.com/post/723473630905892864/weekend-of-love> "♥ WEEKEND OF LOVE ♥"
[OTW]: <https://www.transformativeworks.org/> "Organization for Transformative Works"
[OTW-Update]: <https://www.transformativeworks.org/an-update-from-the-otw-board-and-chairs/> "An Update from the OTW Board and Chairs"
[Piscēs]: <https://git.ladys.computer/Pisces> "Piscēs"
[Wiki]: <https://wiki.ladys.computer/> "Lady’s Wiki"
[end_otw_racism]: <https://blog.ladys.computer/2023-05-14/end_otw_racism/> "End Racism in the O·T·W"
]]></sioc:content>
        <dc11:rights rdf:parseType="Markdown"><![CDATA[
Copyright © 2023
<a href="https://www.ladys.computer/about/#lady">Lady</a>
<small>[Fangirl Extraordinaire]</small>.
Some rights reserved.

This blogpost is licensed under a <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"><cite>Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License</cite></a>.
]]></dc11:rights>
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