i’ve just seen someone ask, “ao3 is problematic, tumblr is problematic, is there nowhere to go, is nothing sacred???”
there is nowhere sacred for fandom-at-large to go. and i don’t think there is anywhere sacred that fandom-at-large can go. wherever we go, by definition, would be profane: profanus, outside the temple. doesn’t necessarily mean dirty or bad. profane is just where we are, outside the temple. that’s the space where everyday life is lived.
if you are waiting for a “perfect” space for all fandom, where no monsters can ever tread, i am sorry, but it doesn’t exist. it can’t, not out here, beyond the temple. no open-access platform (like ao3, like tumblr, like twitter) will ever live up to perfect ideals for everybody all the time. (that’s not a reason not to strive for decency, of course! and you can sensibly ban nazis and illegal materials and porn bots and harassment without doing what tumblr’s doing, which is panicking and throwing everything it owns out a window.)
but we are all just humans, from anonymous trolls to moderators: everything we can build is still just built by people. people fail. people forget. people ignore. people are too busy, too greedy, too idealistic, too short on resources, too whatever, to be perfect. so if you want a big open cross-fandom platform to play in, what you get is profanity. in a very broad sense.
if you want a perfect space, a sacred space, you have to build it inside the temple. i don’t mean that in a specific religious sense: not a Jewish or Christian or Muslim sense. i mean, you are going to have to build a pure fannish temple and keep the profane world away from it: specifically, you’d have to keep most of the world out. it couldn’t be a place for fandom-at-large: it would have to be a place for fandom-at-small. for the few. because you are going to have to build doctrine and enforce it. you are going to have to define sin and cast sinners out. and no free open social media platform is going to do that for you: you’d have to do it yourself, continuously, rigorously, defensively, judgementally, like a guard at a gate. like a god.
“that sounds like a lot of work!” oh, it is. it’s a lot of work to gatekeep. “oh, i’m not talking about being a gatekeeper, i just want bad stuff gone!” mm-hmm. i understand. i genuinely do. but let me know if you find an easy, cheap, non-exclusionary way to let hundreds of thousands of people with very different backgrounds and beliefs post millions of pieces of only universally acceptable, non-problematic, perfect content. i’ll be over here holding my breath.
origamiaround
andulkaphoto
pixelskylines
snowghoul
blakekathryn
