Racism, the O·T·W & the End There·of

Published: 2023-11-21T23:18:26-05:00.

This post is a follow·up to my previous post, “End Racism in the O·T·W”, 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 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 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, 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 A·O·3 needs to handle (e·g sexualized photography of minors).
That it has a Policy & 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 A·O·3’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, 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 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 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 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 A·O·3 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 A·O·3’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 A·O·3 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 A·O·3, 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 A·O·3 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. 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, but I hope to get back to this sort of development soon.