strypey

Update 2022-11-27: I've added in a couple of links to places you can find out more about the many software tools available for using the fediverse and how they work together.

When a new wave of immigrants arrives on the shores of the fediverse, all too often there's confusion and heated agreement about whether and how the software tools and their interfaces can work with the cultures of the newcomers.

There are two two equally untenable positions here. To be clear, I'm summarizing the overall discourse, not putting words in any particular person's mouth. But this is what I suspect each side is *hearing* from the other.

1) Build it yourselves, regardless of the historical reasons why your capacity to do that is limited

2) Build it for us, the way we want it, or we will shout at you and call you names.

We need to get beyond this dichotomy, together.

How might we escape the chains of this dichotomy?

It might help to start with a mutual recognition that

fediverse isn't just a joke name, it can be an aspiration; to use federated technology to celebrate and embrace human diversity in all its forms. A federated universe, of federated diversity.

Then, a mutual recognition that while the fediverse is a multi-cultural society, shaped by many waves of immigrants from marginalized groups, there's always room for more.

So what does all this mean in pratice?

In the DataFarms, diversity is stock photos of middle class millennials of different ethnic backgrounds, plastered over a monolith of technology that works one way for everyone. One company controls the technology, and through it, the people using it.

In the fediverse, diversity is groups of people, building different experiences of a social web. Different apps for different people's needs. We can all co-create the technology.

Black Twitter has decolonized their corner of a DataFarm and made it work for them.

There's a lot of ways something similar can be done here, but it won't work quite the same way. Instead of pushing against a monolith, that is, at best, indifferent to their needs, it will involve pulling things off the shelves of a fediverse toolshed. Whose toolsmiths want to know if their tools can work better for you, without degrading their use for anyone else.

If there are tools Black Twitter needs that are missing entirely from the shed, we need to know what those tools do, how you want them to look, how you want them to work. The more specific you can be, the easier the needs will be to understand.

But the toolsmiths need you to understand that they are volunteers, not employees, with limited time and energy for this work. It will take time. If you have your own toolsmiths, or aspiring toolsmiths, we want to meet them!

Perhaps now, having explored a vision of federated diversity together, we can listen to understand each other, and transform those two untenable starting points into fuel for our forges?

1) You know what you need, how can we help you build it under your control, the way you want it to be?

2) What we see so far is not what we need, or what we want. We need to know that we can get help to get our needs met here, while keeping control over our culture and our destiny.

Current Mood: optimistic
Current Location: Aotearoa
Current Music: 'Exodus' by Bob Marley, remixed by Pitch Black

BTW Anyone who declares me evil for holding the views expressed in this piece, and demands that they (or I) be scrubbed from this website for expressing them, is simply illustrating my point. Also, if you happen to think I'm not entitled to hold or express these opinions because I happen to be a "Cis-Het White Class-Analysis Man", I highly recommend 'Excommunicate Me from the Church of Social Justice' and 'No Justice Without Love: Why Activism Must Be Generous', two important essays on the same topic by Frances Lee, who is neither cisgendered, heterosexual, white, nor a man.

This is a response to a 2005 article, '10 things the left should see the back of right now ' by Isla Williams. I know this is now an old post, but the issues she responds to in points #5 and #8 have not gone away. In point #5, Williams says:

"Look there Mr Cis-Het White Class-Analysis Man! I’m gonna let you into a little secret: most of the working class people in the world are neither male nor white! A great number of them are neither cis nor straight! An intersectional analysis is, as it has always been, also an empirically and materially proper class analysis because this is the way the world is."

I agree with the comment made by Biffard Misqueegan, when the article was posted on LibCom by Joseph Kay, that this misses the point. There may still be the occasional old-school, workerist paper-seller who thinks that anything other than workplace-based labour struggle is a middle class issues. But the main criticism being raised against Safer Spaces Policing is not about it's content, but it's practice.

It's possible to show support for women's liberation, anti-racism, decolonizations, queer solidarity, animal rights, environmental defence, and so on, while building relationships and broad alliances. Doing this makes the left more diverse, and thus more resilient and effective, and many of us have been arguing tooth and nail for doing this since the 1990s. I would argue it was this kind of intersectional work that resulted in the massive movement of movements dismissed in Williams' piece as a "summit-hopping activist milleux" (thus buying into talking points, carefully cultivated via the corporate media, that focused attention on the summit-disrupting mushrooms so as to totally ignore and dismiss the mycelium of ongoing grassroots organizing that produced them, but I digress ...). Safer Spaces Policing, on the other hand, not only fails at building relationships and alliances, it valourizes destroying them as a political practice.

When one's family, friends, co-workers, or online correspondent makes a comment that shows a lack of solidarity, this can be seen as an opportunity for a teaching moment. A chance to clearly communicating one's objections to the comment, while also using a rigorous exchange of views to gain a deeper understanding of why people hold reactionary views, and maintaining a respectful tone to build a platform for further teaching moments in the future. Safer Spaces Policing, on the other hand, involves declaring to the person that they are not only wrong, but *evil* for holding such a view, and demanding that they immediately recant it. If they do not, they must be immediately de-friended, blocked, banished, declared a non-person, and an enemy of the left and humanity in general (note: I'm not saying that these response are never appropriate as a last resort, just that it's counterproductive for them to be the first response).

In point #8, Williams says:

"If you are saying things like 'stop splitting the left' because you are protecting your sexually-abusive and/or racist mates, then jog the fuck on. The left should feel glad to split from you.

If you are saying 'stop splitting the left' because you want the ideas of your groupsicle to be hegemonic, then get a grip. The left has always been diverse and has always had real internal disagreement – read some of the letters of the 19th century greats to work this out if you must. This has nothing to do with it being an effective force."

This kind of practice does split the left. Not by increasing its theoretical or social diversity, but by fragmenting it into ever-smaller shards that cannot work together, because that group still talks to so-and-so, despite their heretical views on whatever. It's high school snobbery as politics, with all its elitist in-group/ out-group melodrama. It's also a practice that, once normalized, is easily manipulated to break up groups, campaigns, and networks, and destroy activist infrastructure projects, on behalf of corporations and their PR companies, the cops, or the alphabet agencies (remember COINTELPRO?). I'm sure I'm not the only one who has seen this happen, yet our inability to have free, uncensored discussions about it without devolving into flame wars and excommunications (online *and* in-person) leaves us vulnerable to it.

Another result of this approach is that many working class people feel they are not welcome in the left because they don't have the correct views. Sadly, most working class people do not yet have progressive views on every aspect of gender, race, trans-/homosexuality, and so on (arguably *nobody* does). Indeed, given that the most progressive views on these issues (from an anarchist perspective) are not mainstream views, the only way anyone could end up holding any of them is to be regularly exposed to respectful debates with people who already hold them. If any and all discussion on these topics (especially online) boils down to "agree with me or fuck off fascist", this is both counter-productive and self-marginalizing.

Ironically, this elitist and vanguardist practice offers an explanation for why conservative nationalist movements have been able to attract increasingly large numbers of working class people who are left-leaning, but not "activists", into their orbit. Along with many others whose anti-authoritarian/ libertarian attitudes would normally make anarchist movements attractive to them. If a person knows they can go into conservative nationalist spaces and openly express dissenting views about discrimination, but that they can't go into liberal internationalist spaces and question our sacred cows without being shouted down or kicked out, guess which ones seem more attractive to them, let alone more democratic and libertarian?

The solution is not, of course, to jettison anti-discrimination politics, which have always been part of the left (although there's always been rigorous debate about the nitty-gritty details of them), but to jettison the vanguardist, scorched earth approach to them. There is an urgent need to rediscover the value of open-minded debate, tolerance of dissenting views, and the ability to continue trusting people even when we disagree with them about important things. More importantly, there is an urgent need to resist the capitalist tendency to dehumanize and instrumentalize each other, to ensure that we see each other as complete human being, whether friends, allies, or even enemies, but never tools to be used or discarded in service of "the cause". If we can achieve universal friendship among all oppressed people, revolution becomes just a matter of organizing with our friends.

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Location: China
Current Music: 'Fuck the Police' - NWA

Ok, so I want to spend a bit of time talking about social justice activism as it plays out in geek communities in the early 21st century. Now, if you're not a geek, or a social justice activist, or both, you're probably thinking, "well who cares?", and fair enough. This rant (I'd be flattering myself to call it an "essay") is not written primarily for family entertainment purposes, although I aim to make it entertaining so it's not a painful struggle to get through. My goal here is to provide myself with a firm place to stand next time I get drawn into yet another one of those awkward and seemingly irresolvable debates about what straight white guys (like me) should and shouldn't do, to make the geek communities we take part in more welcoming and "safe" for people who aren't straight white guys.

The first challenge whenever we talk about this stuff is just how many straw man arguments we have to wade through, from people on both sides of the aisle. I mean it, there is literally an army of scarecrows waiting to be slaughtered, both by those who think it's enough to just treat everyone as equals, and those who think groups needs "Safer Spaces Policies" to make sure that actually happens. This is a problem, because a lot of people get so tired of wading through this bunch of predictably beside-the-point arguments before a proper dialogue can even begin, they get into the habit of going straight for the rhetorical flamethrower any time the subject comes up, and that can be intense and scary. I suspect I might be one of those people, which is why I've been feeling for a long time that I need to write about this.

Oh, in case you're not familiar with the phrase "straw man argument", it's a way of describing an aggressive reply to something other than what you actually said. Like if you say, "I think that woman who drives the forklift at work has beautiful hair", and your friend says, "you know, it's really inappropriate to sexually objectify people you work with". Wait, what? You never said anything about asking her on a date, or even finding her sexually attractive, you just complimented her hair. That's something you're just as likely to do if you're gay, and not sexually interested in woman at all.

The point your friend is making is not unreasonable in itself, it's just that it doesn't necessarily follow from what you actually said. Your friend is jumping to conclusions about what else you might have been thinking, and then making an implicit accusation based on those assumptions, which is not just slaughtering straw man - as the saying goes - but is also passive aggressive (we'll get to that). They're assuming "bad faith". When a person is told - indirectly but unmistakably - that the person they're talking to is assuming bad things about them, then tend to return the favour. Cue the rhetorical flamethrowers, and the chances of having a discussion where both people learn something from each others' perspective gets smaller and smaller.

How many of you noticed that the example I gave assumed that you - the reader - are a man (or at least identify as a man). How many of you assumed I didn't notice that? If I gave that example in a face-to-face conversation, how many of you would have launched into a lecture about how the gender bias in my choice of example is symptomatic of an unconscious unwillingness to be gender inclusive? Hopefully you wouldn't, but there are definitely people who would, because whenever these topics come up, their default mindset is to assume bad faith.

As it happens, I did notice the gendered nature of my example immediately after I finished writing it, and I had a go at rewriting it to assume a female reader, then with neutral pronouns. But then I reminded myself it was intended to be a light-hearted anecdote based on the sort of well-meaning miscommunication that happens in real life, and that I'm essentially talking to myself here anyway. There's nothing wrong with picking my own gender for an anecdote, and anyone who picks on that is most likely doing so to give themselves an excuse to dismiss anything they feel uncomfortable about further on in the piece. In other words, it's a straw man. They're assuming bad faith, but at the same time, notice how I'm primed to expect a nitpicking response that fails to engage with the serious issues I want to take about. To some degree, I'm assuming bad faith too.

How did we get here?

This is an important question, which I can't answer for everyone, but since this is about giving myself a place to stand, I can say a bit about how I got here. Which is what the next piece in this series will be about. In part three, having given myself a place to stand while talking about finding a place to stand, I'll actually get to the point. I hope.

Current Mood: anxious
Current Location: China
Current Music: Tori Amos, 'Crucify'