Why I Support The OTW, by Speranza, aged mumble-mumble
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| Title: | Why I Support The OTW, by Speranza, aged mumble-mumble |
| Creator: | Cesperanza |
| Date(s): | January 8, 2008 |
| Medium: | journal post |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Why I Support The OTW, by Speranza, aged mumble-mumble, archive link page one; archive link page two |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Why I Support The OTW, by Speranza, aged mumble-mumble is a January 2008 post by Cesperanza.
The Post
Because I want us to own the goddamned servers, ok? Because I want a place where we can't be TOSed and where no one can turn the lights off or try to dictate to us what kind of stories we can tell each other.
People, listen to me: the web has changed. It's no longer made up of government and university BBS servers and private freaks and geeks. The infrastructure is now owned by for-profit corporations. Moreover, the product of the web is--like network television before it--eyeballs. Network television is (was: historically) "free" because the transaction runs like this: a television show sells an audience to an advertiser: YOU are what's being sold in the television world, YOU are the product. The X Files tells Pepsi, "If you give me $50,000, I will give you the attention span of X number of viewers from X demographics for 30 seconds." That's the historic economic deal behind television, and its the one that the VCR and Tivo and timeshifting and downloading is changing; the television show maker can no longer guarantee the advertiser that many eyeballs for that number of seconds.
The web right now works the same way; people are making money on the web by selling attention span, YOUR attention span, by getting you to look at ads: on google, on myspace, etc. From a for-profit, corporate point of view, fandom is a gold mine: we are a sexy content-generating machine, we are a group of people constantly looking at web pages, constantly hitting refresh, so to speak. Many of us (hi, I resemble this remark) are GLUED to fandom in one way or another. But our eyeballs are seeing remarkably few ads.
Here's what the for-profit web wants--they want a nickel every time we communicate in our "social network"--hey, did you know that you and I are a social network? Well, we are! Welcome to Web 2.0!! And every time I post a story, and you look at it--they want a nickel. Every time I read my LJ --they want a nickel. The web works by putting a toll on the links that people make to each other, by putting an ad in front of the content that people want to view--or rather, flip that, because it's the other way: they are trying to figure out how to create content that people are willing to view ads to get!! We want to see the X Files, we'll put up with ads between chapters. You want to read the next part of that WIP? You want to read my (really terrific) next SGA story about Sheppard and the lesbians? Will you click through an ad for Pepsi to do it?
I would. I would sit through a 30 second flashwave ad to get a new story by fiercelydreamed or see a new vid from sockkpuppett. But I don't think I should have to, because I don't see why THEY--someone else! someone not in fandom! someone who has never contributed or given us anything and who would throw us to the wolves for a dollar!--should get a nickel from me, or from you, or from this community that we built. It's not even that they want to make money off us: they want to make money off us but not give us equal value back. We make Livejournal, youtube, imeem, etc., profitable companies, but our status in these for-profit "communities" is highly uncertain; they can TOS us without qualm, if that's what their advertisers want. It comes down to this: I'm not their user-generated content. I'm a fanfiction writer, and I write for free, for you, and I gratefully read what you give me.
So! The OTW is created on the model of public television or public radio--Channel 13, as we have it in New York. It's free. There are no ads. Anyone can watch it or listen to it. And a few people who care about public television and who can afford it become "members"--you remember the slogan: "this is member-supported NPR, this is member-supported Channel 13." And so I'm happy to contribute my time, money, and energy to help fans buy servers and write software and keep our "social network" a real community. And I hope you will, too.
It boils down to what I said above: I want us to own the goddamned servers. I want us to make our own infrastructure, host our own party, set our own terms of service and play by our own rules.
And that's why I support the OTW.
Some Comments at the Post
[sara merry99]:Absolute Holy Freakin' *Word*!!
I knew I supported OTW, but I couldn't articulate why. And now you've done it for me. Only, like, miles better than I could have.
[laurie ky ]: I followed your journal links to the OTW web page. I do like the idea of this being a member owned service -- like a coop kind of. The gift economy that I see so much evidence of is very cool and I like being a part of it. After I read the terms of uploading stories for a final look-see, I'll probably join as a member. If they do fundraisers, like they do for Moonridge in the TS fandom, I'd write for it and probably pay for stories also.
[ladyoflisquill]: Wow this sounds amazing! I started reading not really understanding what it was about but this sounds amazing... because you're right. As a member of fandom I don't feel we have any 'safe' place for ourselves. Will be going over to website now to get the full info on it all.
[nestra]:Power to the people!
We need a slogan, man, and I think "Because we need to own the fucking servers" is a little wordy.
[serrana]:I rather like, "Because we should own the fucking servers," actually.
I mean, I'd wear that on a t-shirt.
[blissfire]: Whenever I read these wonderful, impassioned posts about OTW, I hearken back to my Empire Records days - "Damn the Man! Save the Empire!" *lol* And then I want brownies.
[sundancekid]: That's kind of what I've been thinking about this whole thing; the fannish equivalent of "freedom of the press is only for people who own one."
[toftfroggy]:*cheers*
I've said this before, and I'll say it again - I'm so *proud* to be here right now. I am not involved with the OTW right now, but I hope to be in the future, and you have my praise and my love and admiration! Thank you for being awesome and tough and fighting for me so that I do not have to.
[lilacway]:Yay OTW!
Though when you mentioned public television I had this vision of you and astolat doing fund drive spots. "With your $85 pledge to OTW you can get one of these darling Sheppard/McKay plush dolls. McKay wears a genuine "Fat my dust" t-shirt! Or you can get a limited edition copy of John Sheppard's "A Taste of Iowa" Cookbook!" Call now! Volunteers are standing by." (Hey -- have I written OTW fanfic here?)
[j s cavalcante]:Amen to that! We are OFF THE GRID, we have always been off the grid.
We want to stay off the grid.
[cesperanza]: RIGHT. But to stay off the grid, we have to BUY THE LAND. This is what nobody's getting. We have to buy the land AND TAKE DOWN THE TOWERS. And to do that, we need a structure and money and stuff.
[simonesa]: I guess I have this fear based response that a public web site might get the wrong kind of attention. Then before you know it, TPTB are shutting the whole thing down.
[ceseperanza]:But it's all public web sites. THIS is a public website. Fanfic.net is a public website. And they're making money off our fanfic; OTW is like the biggest disclaimer in the world: NOT MAKING MONEY; HOBBYISTS! CHARITY!
Let me give you a quick example of how the new archive will help; if you're the nervous type (check out the archive roadmap at transformativeworks.org) you could lock down your stories to logged-in archive users only. Not "friends" like on LJ, where you have to friend each one. Archive users. Now wouldn't THAT be nice? And if you wanted, you could have them viewable to all, but at a nice not-for-profit website named after Virginia Woolf. *G*
Put aside your fear! We can do this!
[tielan]:I admit, I've let most of the OTW news sail over my head, figuring that it was for people-who-aren't-me, but your post intrigued me enough to read and really consider what they're doing.
Thanks for the insight. :)
[loriel eris]:Thanks for this. I was and am totally behind OTW, and have been since the LJ comm was created as fandomarchive. But. As time went on, I got confused as to exactly why we needed this - in my head, I was thinking, "Well, isn't that kinda what ff.net does [the whole pan-fandom fic]? And ok, ff.net is crap and has ads, but what's going to stop the Archive of Our Own having crap fic and ads [as I type I'm going d'oh, the donations/fundraising/the whole bit where it's a not-for-profit organisation with accounts and stuff is what'll prevent ads]?" So, in my head, I was thinking that we were just going to end up with another ff.net. The only difference being OTW = ff.net + Money So As To Allow Us To Fight For Fanfic. And yes, this bit was really important, but I just couldn't get past the fact that ff.net is panfandom, and look where it ended up.
After reading your post, I get it. I'm still not sure how we stop (if we even can) the utter crap that you get on ff.net, but I get it.
Also. I should perhaps have prefaced this comment with the fact that I am so much in love with the concept of a permanent panfandom archive that it cannot be described. My major fear is the loss of information/knowledge. That terrifies me more than anything else I can imagine. So the fact that this is permanent is a huge plus point. And the panfandom-ness is way up there in the list of Things That Are Most Awesome About The Archive - I sometimes despair when I'm reading fic on the net. I can either go to an author's personal webpage (if she has one) and find all her fic (and, pray tell, how does one find all the personal archives?). Or I can go to an archive and find all the fic for a pairing (and don't get me started on this - if I had my way, each fandom would have one archive, and one archive only. None of this trying to keep track of the 19 million archives for one fandom). But there is nowhere that you can get fic by authors as well as fandom, except on ff.net. And that's why I still have my ff.net account. And post my (omg so very limited) fic there. It's the only place (I know of) other than my personal website (or LJ, both of which have their problems) where I can archive all my fic. And the... completist? in me can't stand the thought that my fic is spread out all over the net.
And this is probably less coherent that it should be. And way, way more than I should offload in someone else's comments. I suspect I should have stopped at "Thank you so much for this awesome post."
I'm going to go and read more in depth about OTW now that I have a frame of reference. Thank you.
[boogieshoes]:It boils down to what I said above: I want us to own the goddamned servers. I want us to make our own infrastructure, host our own party, set our own terms of service and play by our own rules.
fwiw, i agree with this... what i have issues with is the wording of the rules themselves. it's not that i really want OTW to fail completely - i really do think that recent events show that we need something like OTW and the archive.
it's just that one bullet point in the values stmt that drives me around the bend. and it's not even that i have issues with the wording, per se - it's that it really doesn't say what i've heard OTW folks say they *mean*, and yet it feels like they've got a massive blind spot over changing to reflect reality.
i'm going to post further in my own lj about it when i get some RL breathing space, but it's just as much an issue of how the public will perceive OTW as much as what OTW is saying to folks in fandom.
[cesperanza]:it's not that i really want OTW to fail completely
Just partly, then? *g*
Is it that the OTW values its history as predominantly female community while currently welcoming all people of all genders, shapes, colors, sizes, and preferences for cheese? Cause let me take a crack at it if it is (and here I speak for myself, not for the OTW. Io sono Speranza, fan and feminist.)
The OTW archive's going to host fanfiction; fanfiction has a forty + year history and has been historically written predominantly by women. (The chapter of Star Trek Lives reviewing all that early fanfiction, circa 1975? All women. The fanfic writers in Joan Verba's Boldly Writing? (available .pdf online?) All women, etc.) Now yes, there are some male fan fiction writers and male literary pastichers (the Holmes society, etc) and such, but their history is very different than ours. The point is this: if you write something you label as a slash, m/f/f, h/c, mpreg, first time, you are writing a story whose terminology, genre, cliches, frame of reference, aesthetics, etc have been developed by a 40 year female canon of writers. I am proud of that and do find it to be a positive value. It's not something that happens a lot, that much female influence on an artform.
Now, today, mainly due to the web, lots of people have read fanfiction and want to write it--men, women, teens, people from all over the world, with all sorts of sexual desires and orientations. And I'm happy they're here--yay, great, welcome! But to me, it is important that this is a place whose aesthetic tastes were created and shaped by women, because I don't think women have had a lot of places where art--and I'll go further and say, erotic art--was shaped so perfectly to their tastes. Men, including gay men, have huge industries trying to figure out how to meet their erotic needs. Women, not so much, and other groups: bisexuals, transgendered folks, questioning and queer if not gay men folks, even less. So I don't want that changing to suit the needs of a majority male viewpoint; I'm much happier if we evolve to better serve the minority communities within us.
How does that strike you?
[boogieshoes]:yeah, i know mission statements are hard - but in part, that's why i think it's a-ok to be nitpicky about it *now*. it's one of those things where it's really important to get it *just right*, so picking at it until it's as perfect as you can get it in the beginning is just as important as writing it in the first place.
well, that's my theory, anyway.
but i wanted to thank you for putting the new wording on the table - it's such a small change - switching the place of 'history and identity' - but it would make a *huge* difference to a lot of us.
thank you.
[kyuuketsukirui]:Yes, yes, so much yes.
There is a huge difference between valuing that history and saying the biggest value of (this corner of) fandom is that it's predominately female. Whether or not the latter is meant to be unwelcoming, it really, really is. (And of course if they really do want to say that that is fandom's biggest value, that is also perfectly fine, but they need to stop pretending that that's being inclusive, because it reduces anyone who doesn't identify as female to second class citizens whose presence is only grudgingly tolerated, but doesn't really add anything.)
[supacat]:I'm genuinely ambivalent about OTW. I support everything you say here, but at the same time I feel like Angel Investigations about to become Wolfram and Hart.
Some of my ambivalence is definitely tied up values its history as predominantly female community. The fact that fandom is (largely) decentralized, community policed (eg plaigerism dealt with by word-of-mouth not by TOS), doesn't require external validation to exist (as a community we value our own works, and so we create them even though they are not seen as Worthwhile by the outside world), and is continually defining itself against The Man -- these are qualities that feel both intrinsic and female to me, yet will be lost at Fandom Incorporated. I have an uneasiness with the contradiction: OTW is claiming to value a fannish way of being that has evolved naturally, yet at the same time OTW is enforcing change.
[cesperanza]:Hey, believe me, this argument I support, and if I thought doing nothing were the only option, I'd say, do nothing. But there are people out there who are actually--you meant it as a joke, but ACTUALLY--calling themselves Fandom, inc. and fanlib.com and etc; they are total outsiders trying to, like, create a visible thing to attract newbies and kids, like strangers in a car offering candy. And the fact is, we can't stop them--if newbies and kids want to go to Fanlib or Fandom.com, they will and mozel tov, but we can at least put up a visible alternative that says, hey, these ain't our values. This ain't how we do it.
My other point is this: a lot of the people in the OTW are the same people who have made things you may already use and enjoy: they're the fans who wrote the Automated Archive software, who run communities and lists and sites like Buffistas.org and Polyamorous Recs and are archivists and run fic challenges; and you know, fans have always done the best that we could for our own people, right? If your website was broke, some fan came to help you fix it, or somebody steps up to maintain the email list that's about to die. This is just a bigger version of that, except this time, what gets built isn't gonna be somewhere where the server dies or if the archivist gafiates, it's all lost. And the archive software will be offered to everyone to build something--hell, build as many fabulous sprawling cities of fandom as anyone wants. We totally ALSO want to stay viral--sorry, have you seen? Imeem has put ADS on our VIDS, so I mean!!--but it's not an either/or situation anymore. It's gotta be both/and and more/more.
[copracat]: As someone in a business where we are keen to control our own web system, rather than buy in to someone else's, so that we can have more control over the message to the eyeballs we sell to, can spend less money doing so and earn the additional income that is generated? Big old WORD. I do not want access to participation in media fandom controlled by corporations like my own. Much as I agree with and work dedicatedly towards our corporate goals, this is not what I want for my dear hobby or for other fans.