Fanlib association-chain... or som...

Slashdot yesterday posted an article about fanlib which has just opened my eyes to a huge controversy I never would have known about otherwise. The basic summary is that a couple of guys left Yahoo! to start a fanfic site of their own, with an eye towards making it a for-profit joint venture with Big Media—without understanding that this is not how the fanfic world works. For more details, see Mary McNamara's article Slashdot linked to and its continuation.

There is much to be said about the situation and its relationship to fandom, but that's not actually what I want to focus on. Particularly since most of it has already been said, and since I'm not a member of any fandom. One thing life has taught me so far is that it's impossible to judge something you haven't experienced.

What I'm here to talk about today is my observations from the slices of fandom I have seen today. Being blissfully ignorant of fanfic as a whole (besides the slash stereotypes), the fact that fanfic is a 'female space' with the associated politics and ethics has come as rather a shock. As has trying harder to wrap my head around what business would look like if the Old Boy networks of modern corporate America were missing.

I took an ethics class in college. There's a whole thick book on ethics: Kant, act/rule utilitarianism, and so forth... and one chapter on feminist ethics. "An ethics of care." Back then, I still thought I knew everything, and it was pretty easy to brush that off, if only to bury the irrational frustration at the whole concept. I haven't had time to consider all the implications of this, but I wonder if at some level feminist ethics are simply a rejection of the relentless formalization that has defined science for the past few centuries. At its heart, it is an ethics that says "You can't make any fixed set of laws/rules that are purely ethical." It's Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem for ethics, if I've understood everything.

The idea of fanfic being a gift economy and meritocracy sends my thoughts back to my days of being a bum in Kentucky. I really didn't want to get a job, and especially not a pathetic, entry-level job like a lowly gas station clerk. I spent a good portion of my days thinking about economics in the context of what money is and why it's so prevalent if it's not required for survival. The conclusion which I arrived at was that money tracks contribution to society, in a convenient, logical package. (Years later, I discovered Paul Graham making essentially the same point in his essays on wealth.) So an alternate way to structure the world would be to remove money and simply trust that everybody is doing their fair share for the sustenance of the community.

Which is exactly how open source software (and maybe fanfic) operates. Being a user/reader is an implicit invitation to produce something in return to benefit the community. "Patches welcome" is a popular phrase for the software crowd. However, these things are not a matter of life and death to their authors. We learned at summer camp that communism works when not much is at stake, because nobody cares so deeply about the outcome.

In the culture clash between fanlib and fandom, caring about the outcome runs pretty deep, because there's an entire community (into which many people have put years of effort) in the balance. And fanlib just slimed the most influential, well-connected, and well-respected people in fanfic. Now their users will mostly be newbies, who aren't likely to stick around if it's clear that being in the community means rejecting fanlib.




[Apologies for the rambly disconnectedness. My thoughts are many and not yet organized, even inside my head. Oh yeah: all the graphics on this post are cut from the infamous 'marketing PDF'.]