Cuteness Beam

At the first volunteer meeting I went to, Bob announced that Alice had been removed from the team because she was rude and aggressive. Apparently she had told Bob to "stop talking" and Bob didn't like that. I mentally marked this down as "potentially concerning" and went on with volunteering.

Over a few months, some obvious problems started cropping up with how the support sessions were being run. They were way too formal, people were afraid to go to the bathroom while Bob was talking, and he talked a lot. People had to stick to the "meeting theme" otherwise he'd interrupt to make them get back on track. Imagine going to a support session the day after you were the victim of a transphobic attack, and you're not allowed to bring it up because "we're talking about Pride today". It was laughable. Tbf Bob was very young and had no experience and he said he wanted feedback from people older and wiser so I did that.

I wrote a pretty long message to the team about what I thought the group did well and what could be improved. One issue was that Bob had floated the idea of "keeping track of everyone's hours worked", and Dave and I strongly objected to this since it is totally counter to a happy volunteer team to treat it like a workplace. But half the message was devoted to praising the good things Bob had done, because there were actually good things about it too.

Bob was receptive, some months passed, and then Dave sent a similar message, but much more confrontationally written, about various issues with the group. Dave quit at the end of his message, then Bob quit saying he'd "had enough of all this criticism", so then it was just me and Charlie.

At this point I decided to contact Alice to find out what had happened with her. It turned out the "stop talking" thing was when Bob had been having a meltdown and she was trying to calm him. She didn't know she had been kicked out of the group until I contacted her months later, no one had told her anything. So now I have a particularly low opinion of Bob.

Anyway, Charlie and I kept running the group for several months, though Charlie lives far away so I am doing all the irl work. Then one day I find I can't access the group email address or Instagram. Then Charlie messages me saying they don't want to be involved any more, and they also think it's unfair for me to have access to resources of the group when I criticised it. Even though it was Dave who criticised the things in question, I am being held responsible.

I press further, and it turns out that Bob has changed all the passwords behind the scenes because he doesn't want me "profiting" off his work (what profit? We're all volunteers!). Charlie says it's unfair for me to stay since this whole thing was Bob's creation and I shouldn't get to keep it, so Charlie is leaving and if I want to keep running support sessions I'll have to have a chat with Bob and see if he's willing to work with me again. So I end up essentially being asked to interview for a position I already have by someone who doesn't even work here any more, because he took the group's passwords hostage, and Charlie is taking his side because they're friends. I honestly think about it, despite all the indignity, because I don't want the support to dry up for the people who rely on it, but in the end I can't face Bob again.

One of the subplots in the trans support organisation saga involved the group Instagram account. Bob, who started the group, was really passionate about art, and he wanted every single Instagram post (e.g. announcing the date of the next meeting) to feature original artwork by the volunteers. Unfortunately most of us were not particularly good at or interested in art, and we joined because we wanted to help the community, not because we wanted to showcase our art.

Anyway, over time Bob became increasingly stressed with the workload of running something like this. He started to express frustration that none of the rest of us were contributing artwork because the "original artwork" policy meant he was having to make the artwork himself every month.

So I wrote a message explaining, from the perspective of someone with more experience running things like this, he was putting far too much pressure on himself and was just going to burn out. I said a group that is imperfect but can run for years is better than a perfect group that collapses because you burn out in a couple of months. I said original artwork was a "nice to have" but not "essential" part of a trans support organisation, and it was great that it made us stand out from the crowd, but if it's causing him too much stress we can always re-use old art or make a bland post with no art at all.

He got upset with this, said that the art was really important to him, and I was denigrating what to him was the most important part of the group: the art. I said conciliatory words and we moved on (I assumed) with no hard feelings.

Bob quit a few months later for unrelated reasons, I continued to run the group for months with occasional help from Charlie (another volunteer and friend of Bob), and then one day suddenly found that I had been locked out of the Instagram and email accounts. It turned out Bob had mentally reframed my concern for his burnout 6 months earlier as "I think Instagram is a waste of time", and thought it was unfair that I should get to keep using something that he set up and I had said was useless, thus even though he was no longer involved in the group at all he kicked me out of it. And Charlie, being his friend, agreed that it was hypocritical of me to keep using Instagram when I had criticised it for being useless. I had to carefully explain, without getting annoyed, that I never said Instagram was useless, only that Bob's mental health should take priority over the "original artwork" policy.

But it made no difference. I, the only person trying to continue to provide community support at this point, was being kicked out by someone who had left months earlier, due to the classic transmisogynistic one-two punch of misconstruing your words and then blowing them out of all proportion. I never said Instagram was useless, and even if I had, would it have been proportionate to effectively close down a valuable community resource over it?

this one made me happy. while i don't want to be misinterpreted as saying "all artists are morally obligated to voluntarily give up the possibility of ever getting paid" (since this wouldn't meaningfully alter the structural problems at play), i do like when stuff is public domain. if you want to release your original work for free then the creative commons license is your new best friend

real as hell and not mentioned nearly enough in these discussions, thank you for bringing it up. if copyright monopolises the distribution of educational materials for decades after publication then the only source of up-to-date knowledge is locked behind a paywall that's simply inaccessible to anyone outside of a fairly select group.

if, for example, i wanted access to the lancet medical journal then it'd run me about 22 bucks a month. certainly not nothing, but cheaper than a premium netflix subscription. a minimum wage bartender in my country could cover this in about 2-3 hours. in somewhere like india, where the minimum wage can be as low as $1.92 per day, we're talking about more than a quarter of someone's entire income for something that costs me the equivalent of a round of drinks. when every journal comes with its own pricetag, shadow libraries like sci-hub are vital for people and institutions that can't realistically pay for unlimited access.

on the other hand, profit.

shit sucks, it's horrible and it serves to maintain imperialist exploitation in a supposedly post-colonial world.

great addition, thank you again for bringing it up.

insanely funny, thanks for reminding me of it, check out the video here. it should also be mentioned that metallica's biggest hit ever is incredibly similar to a 1989 song by excel, who said at the time that even if it is stolen, they couldn't pursue a "lengthy, tiring court battle" against the biggest metal band in the world. once again small artists can't even get into the courtroom, let alone win.

grouped these ones together because they illustrate the kinda central point of all of this: every single time this conversation comes up, you have one side basing their arguments on the actual real-world effects of copyright and another which ignores them in favour of an imaginary good copyright that functions completely differently.

for example, as you said, ip law has absolutely been used to screw racialised (particularly Black) musicians out of getting paid ever since the earliest days of the record industry. it replicates and perpetuates existing wealth disparity through an unequal balance of power: when you have a kid trying to escape poverty up against professional contract lawyers, the negotiations get very one-sided and the artist comes out much worse off. the only way to win is to become one of the suits and restart the process from the other side. this is why rappers start their own labels, why diddy, dre and jay z are all billionaires, and why most of michael jackson's wealth came from buying other artists' publishing rights rather than the billions of dollars he made for sony.

just like any other capitalist legal framework, ip law was built by an exploitative, racist society and preserves the power structures of that society under the guise of free and fair exchange. it places power in the hands of those able and willing to exploit others. it is directly implicated in over a century of misery worldwide, particularly against racialised/colonised people, and i have never, ever in my life seen a pro-copyright argument that properly acknowledges this.

.also, scale reference! just the wheel is 70 feet in diameter