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rynlingDuring the summer of 2020, when normal people were outside touching grass with the BLM movement, a small but vocal number of internet people decided that the place for their activism was going to be AO3.
There was post after post of Anglo-Americans writing long, hand-wringing essays about how there needs to a mandatory content warning category for "racism" on AO3, while people from outside the United States were replying mostly in vain, gritting their teeth as they tried to explain that the problems they've been complaining about are problems within the structure of the OTW organization.
I thought the whole thing was asinine. People were dying, and I did not care about AO3.
What I really thought was this: (a) "Racism" has been used as a weapon since anti-fandom took its current form in 2016, with its primary targets being people who aren't Anglo-American, (b) it is not "anti-racist" to recruit a bunch of POC volunteers and then not compensate them to spend their time dealing with people's bullshit on AO3, and (c) can we just get a block function already.
Yesterday I encountered an old tweet thread from one of the founders of Dreamwidth that neatly summarizes my exact thoughts: https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1273627467505373185
This is a key excerpt:
ToS work is trauma work. It is mentally draining, it is emotionally wretched, it is gruelling, and it causes long term personal harm to many people who do it -- and all that is in the absolute best of cases.
One of the things I've continually had trouble explaining to people is that institutional changes are beneficial only if they allow people to do LESS WORK. No matter how good your intentions are, putting minorities in a situation in which they have to perform difficult and uncompensated labor that the majority does not is not "social justice." To give an example, requiring one "diversity member" to be on every committee means that, more often than not, the same individual is going to be that member, thus requiring them to be on twice as many committees and do twice as much work for the same pay as their "non-diversity" colleagues.
In other words, requiring minorities to do more work so the majority can feel good about themselves isn't just counterproductive, it's actively discriminatory.
And this is what people from outside the United States were trying to explain to the OTW - if all labor is, by default, uncompensated and performed on a strictly volunteer basis, then the only people who are going to be able to work for you are people from privileged positions who have the time and energy to devote to volunteering.
Idk, Americans are kind of delusional about volunteer culture, and honestly I don't think this is so much about race as it is about capitalism.
There was post after post of Anglo-Americans writing long, hand-wringing essays about how there needs to a mandatory content warning category for "racism" on AO3, while people from outside the United States were replying mostly in vain, gritting their teeth as they tried to explain that the problems they've been complaining about are problems within the structure of the OTW organization.
I thought the whole thing was asinine. People were dying, and I did not care about AO3.
What I really thought was this: (a) "Racism" has been used as a weapon since anti-fandom took its current form in 2016, with its primary targets being people who aren't Anglo-American, (b) it is not "anti-racist" to recruit a bunch of POC volunteers and then not compensate them to spend their time dealing with people's bullshit on AO3, and (c) can we just get a block function already.
Yesterday I encountered an old tweet thread from one of the founders of Dreamwidth that neatly summarizes my exact thoughts: https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1273627467505373185
This is a key excerpt:
ToS work is trauma work. It is mentally draining, it is emotionally wretched, it is gruelling, and it causes long term personal harm to many people who do it -- and all that is in the absolute best of cases.
One of the things I've continually had trouble explaining to people is that institutional changes are beneficial only if they allow people to do LESS WORK. No matter how good your intentions are, putting minorities in a situation in which they have to perform difficult and uncompensated labor that the majority does not is not "social justice." To give an example, requiring one "diversity member" to be on every committee means that, more often than not, the same individual is going to be that member, thus requiring them to be on twice as many committees and do twice as much work for the same pay as their "non-diversity" colleagues.
In other words, requiring minorities to do more work so the majority can feel good about themselves isn't just counterproductive, it's actively discriminatory.
And this is what people from outside the United States were trying to explain to the OTW - if all labor is, by default, uncompensated and performed on a strictly volunteer basis, then the only people who are going to be able to work for you are people from privileged positions who have the time and energy to devote to volunteering.
Idk, Americans are kind of delusional about volunteer culture, and honestly I don't think this is so much about race as it is about capitalism.
