geekdom

This isn’t the eighties — you aren’t Gary Groth

Published on June 16, 2011

Noah Berlatsky annoys the fuck out of me with with his review of that DC Flashpoint map. Most annoying paragraph:

Part of the map is dedicated to the kind of fanboy-tease insider “surprises” that always suggests someone’s mother’s basement and dim, sad, lurching figures dressed only in sweatpants and stale cheetos. Oooh…Project S! In Metropolis! What oh what could that mean! And a time anomaly in Central City huh? Chuckle, wooo! What won’t they think of next! And Green Arrow has a whole island from which he can resist the Man! Fight the fight, Ollie! I bet you got just the one arm, same as you did in Dark Knight!

In the virtual highschool that’s the blogosphere, a comics reviewer talking about “mother’s basement”, “sweatpants” and “stale cheetos” is like a math nerd attempting to beat up the chess club. It’s also tedious, dull, predictable and safe. Nobody ever thinks of themselves as fanboy.

Fake Syrian lesbian turned out to be a real American douche

Published on June 13, 2011

So there was this Syrian blogger, supposedly a gay girl living in Damascus, who got a lot of attention recently, as her blog was one of the few direct eyewitness accounts of the Syrian revolution and subsequent government crackdown. This attention reached a fever pitch when it looked like she had been abducted, perhaps by government agents. But several bloggers smelled a rat however; she sounded slightly too good to be true, certain details didn’t add up and people started digging in “Amina”‘s background. Surprise surprise, it was all a hoax and “Amina” wasn’t a Syrian lesbian living in Damascus, but a straight American douche called Tom MacMaster.

Yesterday the shit hit the fan as various people closed in on his story, so he dropped the mask and posted a non-apology:

I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.

I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in thıs year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience.

This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.

However, I have been deeply touched by the reactions of readers.

Which was followed by a longer explenation today which I won’t bother with. Even in his apology it’s all about him and his feelings, with no thoughts spared to the people he decieved or the damage he has done. There’s no awareness whatsoever that his actions might have consequences beyond the internet. As Daniel Nassar put it, an actually existing Syrian LGBT activist puts it:

Because of you, Mr. MacMaster, a lot of the real activists in the LGBT community became under the spotlight of the authorities in Syria. These activists, among them myself, had to change so much in their attitude and their lives to protect themselves from the positional harm your little stunt created. You have, sir, put a lot of lives, mine and some friends included, in harm’s way so you can play your little game of fictional writing.

This attention you brought forced me back to the closet on all the social media websites I use; cause my family to go into a frenzy trying to force me back into the closet and my friends to ask me for phone numbers of loved ones and family members so they can call them in case I disappeared myself. Many people who are connected to me spent nights worrying about me and many fights I had with my family were because you wanted to play your silly game of the media.

You feed the foreign media an undeniable dish of sex, religion and politics and you are now leaving us with this holier-than-thou semi-apologize with lame and shallow excuses of how you wanted to bring attention to the right people on the ground. I’m sorry, you’re not on the ground, you don’t know the ground and you don’t even belong to the culture of the people on the group.

You took away my voice, Mr. MacMaster, and the voices of many people who I know. To bring attention to yourself and blog; you managed to bring the LGBT movement in the Middle East years back. You single-handedly managed to bring unwanted attention from authorities to our cause and you will be responsible for any LGBT activist who might be yet another fallen angel during these critical time.

I’m outraged, and if I lived in a country where I can sue you, I would.

MacMaster’s little stunt is born out of an attitude that denies the reality of the people on the other side of his computer screen, an attitude you see a lot on the internet. It’s clear he never thought about the impact his lies might have had on the lives of real Syrians, gay or otherwise, because he’s clearly never really believed that what he did on the internet might matter “in real life”. It’s also clear that despite his protestations, MacMaster never saw the Syrian and other Middle Eastern activists and bloggers who fell for his story and became concerned about “Amina” as real people, or he could not have done this. These were the actions of a psychopath, but it’s the sort of psychopathy that all of us are vulnerable to on the internet, as it is so easy to stop believing in the humanity of people who aren’t part of your own social circle. Proof for this can be found in every collision between two separate net cultures, going back to e.g. the invasion of rec.pets.cats by alt.tasteless in the prehistory of the internet, 1993. Internet as a game, rather than as a way to communicate, where because you’re manipulating symbols on a screen it’s easy to forget you’re dealing with people.

The Netherlands embraces net neutrality

Published on June 10, 2011

Imagine a world without net neutrality

Dutch politicians as a class are not know for their internet nous, but they exceeded expectations in a big way this week. Lately several big mobile phone companies (ex government monopoly KPN and of course Vodafone) have been whinging about their consumers not texting and phoning enough. Instead people have increasingly turned to things like WhatsApp or Skype to do it for free, over mobile internet. And sure, KPN and Vodafone earn money selling mobile internet subscriptions, but not enough. Which is why KPN announced a few weeks ago it would start to charge extra for access to certain kinds of internet services.

Which pissed people off big time, of which politicians took notice and last week the opposition parties drafted a proposal to introduce net neutrality, which would prohibit providers from filtering or charging for access to internet services the way Vodafone and KPN wanted to. If this proposal makes it into law, the Netherlands would be one of the first countries in the world to regulate internet access this way. Which is important, because it means your provider will no longer be able to decide what you can and cannot see on the internet.

Without net neutrality, we’d see mobile internet evolve cable access subscription schemes: you’d just get a small part of the internet with your standard subscription and would have to pay extra to see the more interesting stuff, without ever having the opportunity to see everything, a bit like on the illustration above. Kudos for our politicians for preventing this from happening.

It’s Hugo time again

Published on April 29, 2011

Earlier this week the Hugo Award nominations were announced and the category I’m primarily interested in, Best Novel, is okay but not great:

Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Ballantine Spectra)
Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)
Feed by Mira Grant (Orbit)
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

Interestingly enough four out of the five nominees are women, something that hasn’t happened too often. So far I’ve only read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but have both Cryoburn and The Dervish House on the to-read pile. Was I forced to vote, I’d go for the Jemisin (one of the best books I read last year and a very strong first novel, followed by the McDonald and the Bujold — but knowing how much the Hugo voters like Willis, she seems a safe bet to win this category.

It being Hugo Award time again, of course it’s also time for the semi-annual Hugo Award bitchfest, as online fandom once again berate the voters for being out of touch and exclusive. This time there has been a small storm brewing over the fan categories:

But don’t even get me started on the Best Fanzine and Best Fan Writer awards. Maybe I’m exposing my ignorance here, but beyond StarShipSofa, I haven’t heard of a damn one, nor am I familiar with any of the writers. My beef, obviously, is the lack of presence of blogs, bloggers and online writers. Where’re the Nialls (Harrison and Alexander)? Where’s Abigail Nussbaum or Adam Whitehead? No nod for SF Signal? Really?

James Nicoll, nominated for the second year in a row for best fanwriter (congrats!) was quick to put Aidan Moher right: “Apparently the net is large enough for us not to have run into each other in the 25 years I’ve been online + however long you’ve been online“… Most of the nominees Aidan complained about were online and had been online for years, if they hadn’t always been online — that he didn’t know them was an indication of how big online fandom has become.

Setting that aside, there remains the more general complaint about the out of touchness of the Hugo voters, as echoed in comments by Jonathan M: Hugo voters tend to be older and not too involved in online fandom and generally are conservative in their choices, much of which I agree with.

The problem with the Hugo Awards is that they were established in a time when science fiction and fantasy were much smaller and the fan commmunities build around them even smaller, a time when it was probably possible to know every active fan in the world. They got their prominence when it was still possible to read every word of science fiction published in English in a given year and when it was true that the Hugo voters were the sf and fantasy community.

This hasn’t been true for decades now, but the Hugos, as the oldest still existing awards in the genre, retain their standing even when the community that votes on them has become less and less representative of fandom as a whole, if you can still even speak of fandom this way. You can be an active, happy and well connected fan and never ever know about worldcons, Hugos, fanzines and old skool fandom at all, just like many Hugo voters happily putter around the same small world of their fandom.

All of which doesn’t really matter if not for the fact that the Hugos are the most important award in science fiction and fantasy still — if they’re out of touch and conservative, they’re worthless. I’m not certain this point has been reached already and certainly in the fan categories there has been somewhat of a renaissance the last few years — James Nicoll may be know in traditional fandom, but his fanac is as untraditional as you can get. Being ignorant of the nominees does not necessarily mean the awards are at fault; as said fandom is big enough that this will quite often be the case.

If people do want to reform the Hugos they need to put money where their mouth is and buy a supporting membership of this year’s Worldcon to get involved. At fifty dollars (about .5 euros in real money) this is a significant barrier to entry in these economic depressed times, I agree, but it’s the only way to change them as the organisation behind the awards, the World Science Fiction Society can only change the awards if their members want it. Online kvetching won’t change that.

fiawol/fijagh/gafia

Published on April 27, 20111 Comment

Dave Lartigue is sick to death of “nerd culture”:

I am tired of zombies. I am tired of Joss Whedon. I am tired of steampunk. I am tired of Monty Python. I am tired of zombies. I am tired of ninjas. I am tired of Batman. I am tired of bacon. I am tired of Star Wars. I am tired of Nintendo. I am tired of zombies. I am tired of Halo. I am tired of elves. I am tired of Cthulhu. I am tired of Boba Fett. I am tired of zombies. I am tired of pirates. I am tired of Battlestar Galactica. I am tired of mecha. I am tired of superheroes. I am tired of Star Trek. I am tired of “funny” bands. Have I mentioned that I am tired of zombies?

Dave himself is of course as guilty as any other nerd of the excesses of nerd culture — Write More Good e.g. — and his post is part of a larger wave of nerd anxiety that regularly courses through various fan communities that is as old as the concept of geekdom as a coherent community itself. As such I think it would be enlightening to look at three concepts from science fiction fandom, one of the oldest clusters within this community: fiawol, fijagh and gafia.

Science fiction fandom quite early on realised that there is an inherent tension between people for whom fandom is a way of life and behaved accordingly, the be and end all of their lives and for whom fandom is just a goddamn hobby, no more or less so than e.g. going out bowling with your workmates, with most fen hovering between these two extremes. This tension is unresolvable, is different for everybody, but will lead a lot of people to gafiate: get away from it all. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Indulge yourself too much in almost anything and you get sick of it; spend some time doing something else, recharge your batteries and you can come back refreshed or you realise that you don’t actually need it anymore. Either way you win.

Trying to change the wider nerd culture because you don’t like certain aspects of it (mashups, bacon, obsessive quoting, bacon, undsoweiter) is a mug’s game. It’s only worthwhile when you’re trying to change genuinely toxic aspects of it, as with the whole racefail “debate” of a few years ago. The rest is only a matter of personal taste where you always have to remember that no matter how played out, tired and boring something is to you, it’s always somebody’s first exposure to a particular idea/meme…