The wisdom of the outraged masses

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Title:	The wisdom of the outraged masses
Creator:	cofax7 (and commenters)
Date(s):	July 23, 2008
Medium:	online
Fandom:	all
Topic:	group behavior, fan community norms
External Links:	here, Archived version
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

The wisdom of the outraged masses is a post by cofax7 on Live Journal on July 23, 2008.

Some Topics Covered

• Fan History Wiki and Laura Hale
• Vehemently's Law
• fannish outrage, and fannish trust
• BNFs and influence
• OTW

From the Original Post

As for the topic du jour, well. There's this thing called the Wisdom of Masses, yeah? It's why Wikipedia works. But you have to have an invested community that thinks their efforts will be useful and respected. (That's one reason why Laura Hale's wiki doesn't work: every time someone really tries to fix it, she reverses the changes and bans them.) It takes a lot to get most fans invested in a big effort: we are, if not lazy (I know I'm lazy!), disinclined to rock the boat. Despite our so-called subversiveness, media fans are generally pretty conservative, I think. We have our comfort-zones and we don't like to leave them.

This reluctance to take action is made even more complicated when you're talking about action with regards to a particular individual. If you take on a toxic individual in public, you run the risk of dealing with their friends and allies, and since everyone else is worried about that too, you don't actually know who your allies are. Do you have enough allies to get support, so if you say something publicly it won't be something you can't recover from? How skillful is this toxic individual at making trouble? Could she hack your LJ? Does she have a mole on your flist? Would someone give her their email password so they could read your private lists? Does she know your real name, and what damage could she do with that? Are you willing to show up on Fandom_Wank? Just how good is your evidence--is it proof, or merely circumstantial? Or is it just hearsay?

So there's an inertia in fandom at work against standing up and calling someone out: you don't want to put your reputation on the line for something that could be written off as grudgewank. Something that could cost you friends and allies. And most of us are here (at least in part) for the social aspect of fandom: we would rather just be silent than make things uncomfortable socially.

Excerpts from Comments

• comment by ithiliana ("Simply fantastic! A superb explanation of the conservatism in some respects of fandom and why it is so difficult to take action! I'm going to be linking to all the posts I can, so I hope it's all right to link to yours (and yes it's going to be circular for a while), but I want to get as much together as I can!")

• comment by sophia helix ("Very nicely put. And the sad thing is that I remember almost all of your examples and how hard it was to rouse fandom's ire and how long it took to turn the tide of public opinion and how the fallout never really ended in some ways. People who get burned tend to remain burned for a while; fandom doesn't have a long memory but Google does.")

• comment by malnpudl ("Thanks for this post. You're always a voice of reason. Also: Vehemently's Law? That's new to me, and google isn't turning anything up.")

• comment by nestra ("It's something along the lines of "In an unmoderated forum, you are only as oppressed as you choose to be."")

• comment by veejane ("In an unmoderated posting environment, you are exactly as oppressed as you choose to be. In this instance, it means that calling Laura Hale all the mean names in the world won't necessarily make her go away; only places that mod and/or ban have any power to stop her from blabbing and wanking unto the ending of the world.")

• comment by eregyrn ("Yeah, that's the problem, isn't it? At the end of the day, there is absolutely nothing practical that anyone can do to stop her. And one gets the sense that she is not exactly shedding tears over "fannish opinion". If she was, she wouldn't have done all the things she's done over the years. I'm glad folks are being made aware. But there's something really unsatisfying about it, in the end.")

• comment by cofax7 ("Yeah. And no matter how well we spread the word now, there's no way to properly warn incoming fans in a year or three.")

• comment by eregyrn ("What I mostly fantasize about is being able to find out who she tries to sell the FH wiki or the marketing info to, just so as to be able to drop a word in their ear: "hey, you know, the people whose info she's selling to you hate what she's doing like POISON. if they find out that someone is contacting them via that info, that's an instand no sell, and 'get the hell offa my lawn' thrown in. So if you really *want* a marketing list that is a potential time-bomb..."")

• comment by neotoma ("It's not just a 'get the hell off my lawn', it's a potential flood of cat-macros. When fans get to that stage, they're generally telling all their friends about it as well, and then you've got a poisoned well, at the very least.")

• comment by franzeska ("Please tell me you're kidding with that stuff about having a mole on your flist. That's just so damn... byzantine." Sadly, I think this is an extremely realistic fear, at least if you add as many seemingly-friendly strangers as I do. Every time I add someone back during the middle of a wanky situation, I have to wonder if they had an ulterior motive for friending me. In a few cases, I'm nearly certain they did. (Of course, I make a point of virtually never posting anything flocked, so it doesn't really matter.)")

• comments by cofax7 ("I saw a post linked off delicious that was in fierce disagreement with the growing consensus that This Will Not Be Borne--and that post was, itself, quite ranty and outraged. Assertions of wankiness and so forth. (One of the commenters said that the folks opposed to LH were "retarded", "petty", and "on the outskirts of fandom", which just made me laugh and laugh. Because astolat and shrift are on the outskirts of fandom? Fandom as we know it would not exist but for them.) Which is, frankly, not what I'm seeing. People are angry, but not enraged to irrationality. Because honestly lots of us saw this coming: she's been pushing buttons for years and now a critical mass of fellow fen have decided that that's enough. I think it's important to be careful about deciding what merits this kind of response. I have friends who have opinions contrary to accepted wisdom in fandom, but merely disagreeing about the relative merit of types of stories, for instance, shouldn't justify this kind of treatment.")

• comment by anatsuno ("um. Sidenote, but I am seriously bothered by assertions such as 'Fandom as we know it would not exist but for them.' I mean, seriously, I'm a modern-times slasher, I found fandom online when it was starting to migrate to LJ, etc, so that holds *somewhat* true for me perhaps, and yet I don't make the mistake of confusing the slice of fandom I can see and I play with with 'fandom' at large. And I say this without even meaning to start in again with the debate of what, exactly, 'media fandom' means, for example. I have even more trouble with the assertion because of the fact that not only is it not, I think, true (or germane with the question "outings: good or evil?"), but because it's part of a series of things that OTW peeps or supporters say and do that conveys to outsiders this image of a bunch of exclusionary reductionnists. I mean, I'm in the Wiki committee, and we know for example that one of our toughest and most important jobs will be outreach beyond the part of fandom that we have access to personally, and imo that kind of discourse is just framing things in ways that make that more difficult (so okay, perhaps that's also my bias at work here, but nevertheless).")

• comment by cofax7 ("Well, in a very specific sense, fandom *as I know it* would not exist but for Shrift and Shalott. Shrift (with Nestra) runs PolyAmorous Recs, set up the Leviathan List and archive, the Buffy Fiction Archive, hosts a couple of other archives and resources, and hosts half a dozen fan-writers on her domain. Including me. She's a vital supplier of the fannish infrastructure as I experience it. (Which I recognize is not everyone's experience, but my experience is not less valid than theirs.) Shalott co-founded both Vividcon and Yuletide, and wrote the code underlying half a dozen of the major archives in use by various fandoms. She also is one of the most influential writers in several fandoms, including SGA and SPN: whether you think that influence is good or not, she has that position. When she joins a new fandom, people notice, and often follow her. The institutions she helped found are hugely important to lots of people in fandom--and beyond. VVC and its aesthetic influence a lot of people who've never heard of the con, and I think the quality of much found in Yuletide is recognized by lots of people outside the thousand or so who participate. I've seen links to Yuletide in the most unusual places. I'm not saying that all of fandom everywhere should recognize them--but claiming that because one doesn't know them that they are nothing? It's not particularly parochial to note that claiming either Shrift or Shalott is "outside fandom" is a crock of shit. I'm also a bit put off that you would come into my LJ and tell me what not to say as if I were in some way representing OTW. I'm not, and if I tell what I see as the truth and you don't think that reflects well on OTW, I'm sorry for that but I'm not going to stop telling what I see as the truth.")

• comment by anatsuno ("I didn't think you were in any way representing OTW, but I thought it would be more honest of me to explain where a *part* of my reaction to these words comes from. I'm sorry if you took that as an injunction to not say what you want to say, that was really not my intention. Saying I have an issue with someone's words is not in any way a tactic I employ to euphemistically suggest they stop saying them. I also, personally, like I noted, think that fandom as I know it would not be what it is without these people - I just chose the wrong place to say (again) that I'm bothered sometimes by the way people (and I don't mean just you) seem to use the word fandom to cover but a subset of it, no matter how valid that subset's existence and place. It's a deep definition issue that I struggle with regularly. It's not particularly parochial to note that claiming either Shrift or Shalott is "outside fandom" is a crock of shit. No, it's not - but my point also wanted to be that this assertion would be a crock of shit when applied to many people, even non-influential at the same scale as Shrift or Shalott; that it would be true of many other fen. No one knows everyone in fandom, a BNF to me is not a BNF to you, etc, and "I never heard of her" can never be a supportive argument for "therefore she can't be in fandom".")