Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

I’ve started this blog to be my “public face”, because after Six Apart’s mass deletion incident, I no longer feel comfortable linking back to my old Livejournal, though I’m not planning on leaving there entirely either. Six Apart has issued an apology and unsuspended most of the journals affected, but there’s plenty in that apology to keep me feeling troubled. It refers to “journals that used a thin veneer of fictional or academic interest in events and storylines that include child rape, pedophilia, and similar themes in order to actually promote these activities”. I don’t really want my blogging service to take on the responsibility of deciding which stories fit in this category. I’m not a child, nor are the majority of LJ users (you have to say you’re over 13 to get a journal without parental permission), and to insist on the importance of protecting children as if we were (or as if parents weren’t responsible for minors) infantilizes us. The increasing social insistence that all spaces be child-safe has one major casualty: adulthood.

Part of adulthood is independent thought– critical and moral. Keeping society childish assures that rebellion will only be childish. Children, even if their rebellions succeed, cannot maintain that success, simply because they never learned how to defend or take care of themselves. Nor do their rebellions tend to be the sort of principled thing that can create a widespread movement. (Compare “my bed time is too early” to “freedom of expression for all”.)

Another interesting angle on this is economic. Ads are a relatively recent addition to Livejournal. Before the Six Apart takeover, paid and permanent accounts subsidized the free users. Why were free users allowed at all? Because they help create the content– and the community– that allows LJ to attract new users (who might in turn pay). Now, in a privately owned factory, you have workers who produce the product and customers who buy it. There may be overlap between the groups, but when an individual acts, it’s pretty clear which role they’re enacting. By contrast, a privately owned blogging service’s customers are its producers. They create the product they want to see, using the facilities provided by the company. In this case, Six Apart tried to interrupt that process to make that product something more pleasing to their new set of customers– the advertisers– and, possibly, to potential new owners. (There has been talk of an IPO since Six Apart bought LJ.) Livejournal users responded with a whole array of strategies: some left (went on strike); some created protest communities, posted pr0n in protest, and left comment spam in official communities (had a sit-down strike); and others changed their accounts from paid to basic (launched a consumer boycott). We had some success. Without these actions, I doubt any journals would have been restored. Of course, we’re only going to be completely safe when we own our means of production, but there’s a lesson in here for other social movements: utilizing a variety of tactics is absolutely essential. Don’t argue over tactics: go your separate ways.

Finally, part of the continued controversy is semantic. Barak Berkowitz, in his apology, suggested that part of the logic for the deletions was that listing things as “interests” implies that you like or support them. This is, of course, pure nonsense when you look at general usage. Somehow, I doubt that most of the academics who would list colonialism as a research interest support it. And it’s clearly not the way people on LJ have used it. People who get migraines have listed migraines, for instance. The evidence Berkowitz used was the bit on the edit profile page that says that whatever you write in your interests should fit in the sentence “I like __”. Most people, however, have read this as a grammatical suggestion; it’s also labeled as a “rule of thumb”, which supports this reading. The disagreement here comes down to a conflict over who gets to determine what a word means: the language community that uses it or some authority. Berkowitz’s attempt to redefine “interests” reveals the power dynamics inherent in such conflicts, since he has no particular expertise when it comes to the English language (whereas many users do) but, rather, only the authority that comes from the socioeconomic power of a CEO.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.