Sometimes I miss Usenet

[ritaxis]

I'd really like to be able to initiate a discussion about the thing I wrote about the other day--how language about inclusion can either support or undermine inclusiveness--but there's no actual venue for doing that now. Either you have a widely-read blog, or you talk to five people. The problem with usenet was, of course, that if I started such a thread, on, say, rec.arts.composition, within two days some person would be saying that what I really wanted to do was Regulate Language and Institutionalize Literature and, of course, Execute Kulaks (I am not kidding. I once said that I approved of better traffic planning and it was not long before a particular person who many remember as "the reasonable, polite, and humane conservative" was drawing a connection between the statement and Stalin's actions in the Ukraine, not at all subtly accusing me of complicity in the latter  by my support of the former). Which is why we've become atomized.

I could say something on an open thread at Making Light, but the format for comments is only amenable to short notes. And I think a comment to the extent of "Some of these publications have really murky and unwelcoming language which I thnk undermines their expressed determination to bring underrepresented writers into the fold" is really not enough.These ideas need more room for developing. So, here I am, hoping that someone with a wider-read blog will become interested in the subject and bring it up, so that we can all talk about it.

The example I brought up the other day was not the worst. There's one out there which is so specific in its demands, and yet so long-winded, that I gave up before I had read the whole thing. Many guidelines are simply too long, which dilutes their message. Others include in-jokes or unlinked references to possibly famous pieces of critique. Excessively specific peeves and favorites are not as helpful as the editors think they are.

I do have some positive suggestions. It would be nice if I had any way of talking to the editorial world in general, because I'm certainly not going to copy this and send it off to all the editors who inspired this. I'm not out to pick a fight, I just want to have a better time submitting things.

Here are the things I've been thinking about, which I think would make things better:

One: write short guidelines. You do not need to write out a detailed and descriptive list of every trope you don't like very much if you're going to write over and over again that you could be persuaded by the right story, You could list maybe three things you really don't want to see, and three things that are "hard sells," but don't go on and on about them. The reason is not that writers don't want to know whether you want to see the kind of story they write: it's that all of that stuff runs together when there's too much of it and they end up confused. Just like it does in fiction, see?

Two: if you want to include your critical or political jargon to send a message about the tone and aspirations of your work, don't assume that everybody knows it as well as you do. You don't have to be condescending in defining the terms, just scaffold them (that is, embed the definitions in the text).

Three: when you post your formatting demands, try to make them possible. One venue out there demands that the writer use style sheets, which I don't think very many writers know how to use. Yes, Word does them. But most writers only use them passively by way of the automatic scripts that Word employs by default. Writers who use other word processing programs may not be able to use them passively like that. Along that line: don't demand docx. Not everybody can give it to you. Accept doc or rtf files too, and you're golden.

Other publications which have been accepting (sometimes only) electronic submissions still talk about the manuscript format as if it were on paper. This can be frustrating as the writer tries to figure out how to translate your directions into what's going to happen in the text file.

That's the most important part. On thew tone front, some of these guidelines sound like the person who wrote them hates writers and also like they hate other publications in the genre. That's a little daunting. When you've got an idea for a theme you think is underrepresented, why not just say "We can never get enough of this" or "We want to see more of this" or "This is what moves us," along that line, instead of saying it's never been done before, or never been done well before? Because you're most probably wrong on that front. When you talk about what you do and don't want to see, try not to make it sound like you have only seen two good stories ever.

Anyway, that's what I would be saying to the SF community in general, if I had a way of addressing the community in general. I'd want to talk about how the writers most vulnerable to the discouraging effects of these things are the writers that we've lately been talking about wanting to recruit in larger numbers, and I'd want to say that my suggestions are not difficult to implement.

Comments

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I miss Usenet too. But it wasn't until years after it imploded that I ran into the larger conversation about online toxicity patterns and was able to recognize some of the things that had seemed like local and particular problems as part of a larger Thing. There are times I feel like a person who is discussing a disfunctional family background with others who had similar experiences after a lifetime of thinking it was "just me".

Absolute Write does sound like a place where that conversation could be had. I only nibble around the edges there because it's a bit of a firehose.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I saw the pattern repeat itself in several newsgroups. What was especially bad was when I realized that I also had contributed to it, sometimes when I dearly believed I was fighting it and trying to maintain civil discourse.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Could you talk more about that? I mean, I knew things were toxic (I left because I could not cope with being attacked every time I tried to have a conversation), but I'd be very interested in any insights you could share as to the larger pattern.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I'd love to read Heather's thoughts on it, too. To me, it looked like politics of our times. There was a concentrated effort on the part of some people to make any civil conversation about real things untenable, and a failure on the part of the rest of us to see that it was deliberate, and deliberately destructive, until it was too late. For myself, my contribution to the destructiveness of it was persisting in engaging with it on its own terms, and in some cases mindlessly mimicking the style of discourse I saw around me.

It's not just that those people were (and are) intolerant of any opinions that challenge their own. They don't even want to convince: they want to silence. They feel that voices besides their own actually damage them simply by existing (I'm not interpreting or projecting here: I can recall several occasions when this was said almost in these words, though I thought at the time it was hyperbole or error that a person could be talked out of).

By turning every conversation into a McCarthyite tribunal on the the correctness of thought and identity of the members of the groupo, these people made it difficult to talk about whatever we were there for--whether it was in the science fiction newsgroups or in the kids and education newsgroups I also tried to participate in.

I came to understand the deliberateness of this behavior in the misc.writing newsgroup. The local culture there had an amiable custom where sometimes people would write whimsical little stories featuring each other's names: they were meant to be friendly little games. The right-wing cohort co-opted this custom to flood the newsgroups with crossposts from a dead newsgroups (was it alt.muskrats?), all of which were empty jokes not relevant to any subject. They also began objecting to posts about formatting, writing mechanics, plot structure, or any other "beginner" questions, on the grounds that they were too advanced for these things and deserved to have a place to kick back.

There, I had contributed to the destruction of the group by defending the political discussions, saying that politics was in a lot of my writing so I liked having an environment to think aloud about the ideas and formulate better ways to say things. That was not in the least bit what was going on in those discussions, but I deluded myself there.

I don't mean we should never have been discussing political things or things with political implications, or even that we should never have been discussing those things in earnest and heated ways. But the fact is that we could have recognized -- or I could have recognized -- early on that there was a faction that was not arguing in good faith, and whose tactics were not meant to convince but to destroy.

I don't regret having been there, because I met so many wonderful people and learned so many things, but I do regret not having a better part of those newsgroups and not having understood better what I could be doing there.

As always, it was James Nicoll who figured it out, but even so I think he was too late.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I think it wasn't really until I got active on Twitter (which really has only been in the last year and a half) and began reading political analyses of toxic social media discourse that I realized the larger context or what had happened on Usenet. (I tend to be a bit behind the wave when it comes to internet things.) I made the mistake of thinking that the problems were individuals: the known asshole on soc.history.medieval who spewed venom but nobody took seriously, the wacko conspiracy theorist on alt.lit.king-arthur(or whatever the name was), the "I am the most rational person in the room" jerk on rasfc who unashamedly used connections on the group to get a book deal and then proceeded to help dismantle the community with the dispassionate sociopathy of a boy pulling the wings off flies to see how they worked.

And so many of us stood by, buying the whole "don't feed the trolls" line, and thinking that if we ignored them, they'd go away. (Never mind that they didn't get ignored, between their victims who quite reasonably felt they should argue back and the bystanders who enjoyed poking the ant-hill for grins and giggles.) Or--if not thinking they'd go away--out of cowardice lest we be the next targets.

Now I see that whole dynamic in the context of [website beginning with a small square number and a suffix identical to a Japanese diminutive] and the sort of dogpiling and vicious targeting we see in g****gate. And in a way it relieves some of my depression and guilt about the whole thing because Usenet simply didn't give us the tools to deal with that mentality.

I've grown a bit fatalistic about the whole situation. The one constant about the net/web is growth, evolution, change, and death. I have a lot more to say about that, but I've already said it in a pair of posts here:

http://hrj.livejournal.com/82752.html

and here:

http://hrj.livejournal.com/92871.html

and thus I instantiate part of the problem, because I said a lot more over there than I could summarize here, but in pointing rather than repeating, a fragment the conversation.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's the politics of our times as much as the general problem of politics. Criminals, trolls, sociopaths are the problem of every time.

Or maybe it is the politics of our time: we seem to be doing an exceptionally bad job of dealing in our time. Just look at the law! I mean, the non-internet law. In the United States, the past decade has left us arguing over whether or not torture should be a legal method of interrogation, against our own highest law, and whether or not there should be regulation of financial institutions! It is not better elsewhere in the West.

The problems of law in cyberspace are the problems of law in our time, and I see no easy way of repairing them.