Dan Kemp's Paramilitary Author Blog

WRONG

But I feel like an asteroid. I feel like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. I was very, very guilty for years. I had to go to extensive therapy because I was like, “oh my god, I, Lochlan O'Neil, single-handedly destroyed fandom culture?”

She didn't she didn't she didn't. That wasn't it. She wasn't an asteroid.

She was the first skater that fell through the ice of Web 2.0.

I was also a teenager who found an amazing world, and My People, and friends I'd still talk to every day, on the internet. I spent years getting my mother to let me go to conventions and meet friends in distant cities. I started ambitious internet communities I didn't have the experience or skills to bring to fruition. I don't think there was a lot of difference between us, in a lot of ways. It's not that I was somehow smart or skilled or suave and she wasn't. She didn't have some awful planet-killing stink or velocity that she brought to the show.

The difference was this:

In 1994, when the Endless September began and the Internet felt perpetually full of stupid newbies, there were 20 million people online.

In 2001, when I got my first LiveJournal account, there were 500 million.

In 2012, when she joined Tumblr, there were 2.43 billion.

When I started out, and you joined a new messageboard or chatroom or mailing list, you had to introduce yourself to the community. Except in the biggest of websites, people expected to log onto the internet, read through all the new things that had been posted to their local bit of it, and then log off again. Older members took it upon themselves to greet the newbies and answer any questions they might have, directing them to the relevant community FAQs. People would say things like, "Oh yes, I remember you. This is only your second Thursday with us, right? I hope you have fun!"

I joined an Internet full of adults who got online through their jobs or their universities, one of the first wave of kids allowed to roam free. And the proportion of adults to kids kept steadily changing, but until DashCon, I don't think people understood how much. I remember a discussion that happened in early 2000s slash fandom, where the very true observation was made that in particular artistic ways, we had all agreed to suspend shame, which created a unique kind of space. As a community we could all admit that we were there to be embarrassingly enthusiastic in unusual ways about absolute nerd shit, and we understood that it wasn't life or death, it wasn't rocket surgery, but it also wasn't going to get broadcast onto the clouds and our bosses didn't know who we were. Everyone was (willing to act like) an adult, and we could hold the circle and create safety there.

That felt like a lot of geek spaces, then. Anime conventions, science fiction conventions, furry conventions, videogame stores, D&D meetups. Images were bulky and pixelated, video incredibly hard to move. When you got to a con, it was like a brief oasis of Weird that sheltered you and screened you from view, and you ended up volunteering because the weary, cynical, intelligent, kind people in the con ops office looked like you were throwing yourself in front of a bullet just for offering to run a clipboard down to the other end of the hotel for them.

The ice was thick enough to skate on. The circle was strong enough to let you be brave and funny and silly and free, and you could buckle down with some friends and clean all the trash out of the ballroom by 11am on Sunday, and you'd see everyone next year.

The bubble was going to burst, but nobody seemed to worry about it.

Things were changing fast for fans, all kinds of fans, in the early 2010s. Conventions that used to get news coverage like "Local Freaks Weird Out Hotel Employees: This Weekend Only" to "#Cosplay: The Hottest New Trend" and from Geocities sites that shut down if you exceeded your page visits for the month to AO3 getting 10 million pageviews a week.

It was great. We could conquer the world together. We could stay safe and together and the circle would hold.

And then the ice broke open and Lochlan fell through. Right through the bottom of that goddamn ballpit into freezing arctic sea. Right into years of people sorting through the churned ice of the wreck, taking years to come to the realization that there really had not been ANY goddamn adults in the room making sure things were okay. The community had not actually failed so much as never been formed in the first place.

Because as it turns out, group-bonding techniques that work for 100 or 1000 people do not work for 10,000. Or 100,000. Or one million. Or one billion.

That line about agreement to suspend shame sticks with me all these years after because the defining feature of post-Dashcon Tumblr has been shame. And scorn, contempt, derision, and hatred. Cringe, in short, and kys. Exactly the kind of bullshit I saw every day in junior high school, and ran to the Internet and fan conventions to get away from.

I got the kind of community and mentorship and support that have made fandom a refuge and a resource my whole life. Lochlan O'Neill didn't. Not because there was anything worse or dumber or less experienced about her.

Because a system built in the 1990s was incapable of bearing the stress of a load fifty times bigger than what was already "way too full."

Just because I'm from one generation, and she's from another.

I feel like this is more of a normie problem not a woman thing. But I still feel it’s worth discussion.

My past exes have all been horrible at understanding risk and safety when it comes to violence or nature.

Examples:

In Colorado Springs she did not want my Glock on the nightstand.

In the backwoods in Colorado I almost hit a woman for the first time. She was taking fish she had caught back to our TENT. That is how you get eaten by bears. When I explained this she started giving me lip and saying she didn’t see any bears that day.

She called me up asking for help. Her friend hit a patch of ice and went off the road the previous night. She needs me to help pull his car back onto the road. The tow trucks refuse to get him. That's my first red flag. Tow boys aren't going to pass up easy money. If they're saying no its probably dangerous.

I refused to offer up my car to pull so she says she is going out in her car. She's got pics. It looks like a pretty level stretch of road. He probably just needs a little push and he'll be fine. I know she's about to get into a situation so I tell her to pick me up. She shows up and she doesn't have a coat. I tell her to go back and get one before we head out. She assures me it's fine. We won't be gone very long and she has a heater in her car. I went back inside and got a coat to wear over my sweater.

So we embark on our journey. As we gain elevation the snow starts getting deeper. We finally pulled off to chain up and we can't make the chains fit her tires. Now is a great time to hit up a tire store and see if they have chains that fit. She decides nobody else is stopping for chains so it's fine. Don't worry about it!

We finally approach where his car is. There's a little hump in the road. On the other side of the hump it's a steep downhill slope for about 400 yards and its a solid sheet of ice. He's about 50 yards down from the top and he's firmly planted in a ditch. Motherfucker took a pic of the car at an angle making it look like it's on level ground.

There's no way in hell we can get his car back on the street. Things are too icy for us to go back up the hill. We have no chains. It's starting to get dark. We are in trouble.

She wanted to try putting on the chains on the hill. I noted that about another 50 yards down the hill levels off for a side street. I suggest we take our chances and get there before trying. She insists on jacking the car up on this ice slope and doing the chains right there. The car starts to slip so we quickly gave up on that.

She agreed to very carefully make our way to the level spot. It was dangerous but we made it. We spent a couple hours trying to make the chains fit but they were too small. She finally admitted she needed a coat so I gave her mine. They started making calls to see if someone could bring them chains. I came to the conclusion we weren't getting off that hill safely tonight. She got the idea in her head that she could carefully drive to the bottom of the hill. I pointed out we BARELY made it 50 yards without crashing. It's another 300 yards down with a sharp curve near the bottom. Without chains she is definitely going to crash and if she's lucky she'll walk away with a totalled car with nobody hurt. There's a damn good chance someone will die don't be a fucking retard.

So I suggested we see if anyone can meet us either at the top or bottom and give us a ride home. Ditch the car and come back later. She has work tomorrow? Tough shit. You're gonna focus on getting home tonight. You can't go to work if you're dead. We found someone willing to give us a ride.

So the next morning they call me up. They want to try again. Just a little pull. It's all they need. Fuck no. Well just give us a ride out there and stop at the top of the hill. No. Well drop us off a couple blocks away. I finally snapped and yelled at them. Every fucking thing that went wrong was because they wouldn't listen to me. She had to abandon her car because she wouldn't listen to me. The paid professionals refused the job because it's too dangerous and we found out the hard way why. They probably would have died if I wasn't there to talk some sense into them. Nobody is going to get his car out. Me driving them out there isn't going to fix it. We've lost her car because of it and I'm not going to give mine up just to let them continue to act like a couple of retards. They're going to wait for the thaw and they're not going to bug me about it anymore.