Harry Potter, LLMs, and Ethical Consumption Witch Hunts
I think forcing a public power project over fandom is excessive and unhealthy, but would people here be as vitriolic over this if this was the place the 10th Doctor and Rose parted? No, they would not. I likewise agree that it is extremely dangerous how JK Rowling has hijacked the Harry Potter franchise to fund global attempts to suppress transgender rights. However, a lot of online spaces have turned this into hating EVERY SINGLE fan, even those who no longer buy HP media. (JK Rowling receives less than 0.70 USD for every $7 USD paperback copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone sold, assuming she has a 10% royalty rate)
People's energy aren't focused on combatting transphobic legislation or helping transgender people, but have excessively focused on how consuming Harry Potter, even in an innocuous, non-commercial way is a Sin that Virtuous People must avoid lest they become Corrupted and therefore EXACTLY as Evil as JK Rowling. It's all very similar (if not identical) to the mentality of antis and wider conservative Christian purity culture; especially the fundamentalist moral panic over Harry Potter in the 90s. As @freedom-of-fanfic pointed out:
But now that anti-shipping is here being a noticeable force in fandom spaces, I think it’s gathering steam particularly among younger people (especially Americans) because it has built itself into a perfect storm of social forces:
- Its surface motivations are appealing and pretty (enforcing social justice);
- the underlying motivations have base appeal (crushing things that make you uncomfortable or that you don’t like for personal reasons);
- the methodology gives an illusion of power (intimidating others into doing the ‘right thing’);
- the dogma is familiar and simple (black & white thinking, some people are Good and some are Bad & you can never cross from Bad to Good, clear in-group/out-group designations); and
- you can never leave once you’re in (a completely insular social web that enforces cutting social ties with defectors and non-believers).
At the same time, anti-shipping is influenced/shaped by outside social forces such as:
- rising authoritarianism in western society,
- post-truth society;
- valuing ‘safe spaces’ over personal freedom;
- anti-intellectualism;
- TERF/REG forces within queer spaces; and
- religious dogmatic structure
When I look at the shaming, harassing, and ostracisation of people whose worst crime is buying Hogwarts Legacy (etc), I can't help but see the exact same pattern of black and white thinking and the illusion of power.
Likewise, all this moral policing and shaming of individuals for structural issues and problems elites are spreading applies to the use of LLMs. One hour of gaming on a PS4 consumes as much electricity as 580 short Gemini queries, and AI usage makes up only 1/5 of data centre power usage. Likewise, one person using LLMs to write Warrior Cats fanfiction isn't morally equivalent to a corporation destroying thousands of books after scanning them for LLM use. Again, the total lack of nuance is both rooted in and a result of the kind of authoritarian mob mentality we need to oppose.
Blaming individuals for structural issues like billionaires using millions of dollars to fund extermination campaigns or transnational corporations sucking up energy, art and literature will never stop the billionaires or corporations because they aren't being targeted. These witch hunts and moral panicking will, at best, only change individuals' behaviour. Yet it's far more common for people to react with shame and resentment towards their accusers if they're shamed or harassed for something, or, at worst, to embrace the opposite causes.
In sum, shaming, harassing and ostracising individuals whose contributions to structural violence (however publicised or not) are not effective and reproduce the kind of authoritarian mentalities left-wingers like myself need to stand up against on more of a nominal level. Hopefully I will have more time in the future to explain why this happens.
