Fan-fiction and the geography of freedom · 10:13pm Mar 30th, 2017
I like to snark at Europeans who say personal liberty started with the French Revolution. The American Revolution created a representative government with guaranteed civil liberties. The French Revolution created a representative government that terrorized its own people. The American Revolution had a lot more American-on-American violence than high school textbooks admit--for instance, Washington marched an army against the militias of Western Pennsylvania--but a lot less head-chopping than the French Revolution. The French started killing each other almost immediately, then made Napoleon emperor, and then started killing everybody else in Europe. The British and others had to come in and get rid of Napoleon. Then the French made Napoleon emperor again, and went to war with everybody else again, and the British had to get rid of him again. The French were the worst revolutionaries ever.
I have a theory that this is why they invented modern art. (Not all by themselves, but most roads to modern art began in France.) They developed revolutionary anxiety, the continued obsession with proving that they were too revolutionary, and proved it by unleashing a new iconoclasm against art, smashing all representational art and calling it revolution.
This story may be true, but still telling a lie. It gives the impression that there's something different about the French temperament that predisposes them to periodically lay waste to Europe, militarily or culturally. The difference may be simple geography.
There have been few successful revolutions in history that didn't immediately turn into a fight to the death between the revolutionaries for control. The Turkish Revolution, maybe? The revolution against the Marcos in the Philippines, although that was not really "in the wild" due to the American presence. The only case I know anything about is the American revolution.
I can contrast it with the French and Russian Revolutions, which I know a little about, and Cromwell's revolution in England, which I know a very little about. I characterize these as bloody revolutions.
For the purpose of this post, I also characterize the modern art revolution as a bloody revolution. There was no blood, but it was a genocidal war, as art movements often are, eliminating other ways of making art. That the world of Western art and literature was so concentrated in Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is important to this story.
A key difference between the 13 colonies and France, Russia, and England is that France, Russia, and England all had approximately one city that mattered. Who controls Paris controls France, who controls London controls England, and who controls Moscow controls Russia. In 1783, Washington DC was still a swamp. The largest cities were Philadelphia (40,000), New York City (25,000 people), Boston (15,000), Charleston (12,000), and Newport (11,000).
Look at them on a map. Charleston is 1000 miles from Boston. That's more than 3 times the distance from the cliffs of Dover to the Scottish border. 5 times the distance from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
Each city was controlled by a different political faction. It would have been nearly impossible for any faction to conquer any other big faction. The American Revolution didn't descend into bloody infighting because it couldn't. It wasn't geographically or politically possible. George Washington could march into western PA with 10,000 soldiers because western PA didn't have 10,000 men, but he couldn't march them against Boston to force them to give up their egalitarian ways. It was too damn far, he didn't have the ships to transport them, and the locals would have sniped them all along the route--and then, what would happen back in Philadelphia while he was gone?
In France, England, and Russia, it was relatively easy to control the media that mattered. In the US, each big city mattered, and each one had its own newspapers, each controlled not just by different parties, but by different cultures.
So you couldn't use the military to take over the media, you couldn't use the media to take over the military, and you couldn't run around in the middle of the night and stab your enemies. The American Revolution may have avoided becoming a bloody mess because America is big and had no mass communications or rapid transit.
Compare that to what I really care about--English literature.
The English literati are, I think (could be wrong) divided between America and the Commonwealth. America has the Pulitzers; the Commonwealth has (had) the Man Booker Prize. Our people don't attend the same parties as their people. I don't know how much influence we have on each other. I don't even know if post-modernism is big in Britain. So I will only talk about America.
The American "high literature" or "literary" scene is controlled by publishers and magazines in New York, by universities in the northeast and on the west coast, and by literary journals, some published independently, some by universities. The universities have a ranking system as rigid as the pecking order of a flock of hens, so most of the power resides in the top 20 or so. They all have instantaneous communication with each other.
If you figure 5 major publishers, 20 key universities+colleges, 10 magazines, 10 journals, and the MLA, the number of key positions controlling literary taste in America is probably--I'm guessing--5*30 + 20*5 + 10*3 + 10*3 + 18 = 328. These positions are not elected and I'm not aware of any rules in place to prevent people from awarding these positions to their co-partisans. (Certainly not at Tin House.)
Meanwhile, American colleges awarded 906,492 English BS degrees from 1970-2015.
My Little Dashie has gotten 505,325 views in a little over 5 years, so ponyfic rivals English literature as a field in size, though not as a career.
There are or have been some key points of control in ponyfic--at least the admins of fimfiction and the pre-readers of EQD. They've forced some ideological or stylistic rules on us--EQD's ban on mature stories and emphasis on body language, and fimfiction's ban on scripts, foreign-language stories, and manuals, for instance--but fimfiction, I think, still has much more diverse stories than literary presses produce, and I think it would be much harder to control.
There may be fewer than 328 key positions in ponyfic. I don't know about that; I'm ranked 114th by followers, horizon is 200th, Chris is 1,114th (!); if there are only (say) 100 positions, we're all small fry. I think instead that the three of us are big sea-ponies in one of many small ponds. One of the key findings of my survey is that most fimfic readers live in a little cul-de-sac of fimfiction, unaware of the vast majority of readers and writers here. This blog caters to one community. There are equally large fimfic communities that have never heard of Bad Horse or Cold in Gardez, where Trump voters outnumber Clinton voters.
But say there are less than 328 key positions. Fan-fiction is still very hard to control, because all the stories roll down the front page, and a lot of readers (also according to my survey) just click on stuff from the front page instead of reading recommendations. If you tried to take fimfic over, it would be more like colonial America than France.
I hope that all publishing will go the way of fan-fiction eventually--lots of independent authors, lots of independent critics, and lots of ad-hoc communities. The critical thing is to make sure that it doesn't on one hand get so centralized that it's easy to take over (like France and the American literary establishment), or on the other hand, so decentralized that, like fanfiction.net, it has little social structure and just doesn't work--or, like book sales on amazon.com, is easily controlled by whoever has the most marketing dollars.
If we can manage that, then all this fuss about post-modernism and the establishment won't matter.
I would like to see Fimfic accept screenplays. I think that'd be good, though a lot of the resulting screenplays might not be
4477603 I mean to be fair that’d just be like regular Fimfiction but with screenplays.
Have you been reading the blogs of The Mad Geniuses, the Castalia House authors, the Superversive authors, or any of the other dissident Science Fiction and Fantasy authors? Because that sort of decentralization and community-building is exactly what they're aiming for, and it's going well for them so far. The big publishing houses are slowly declining, but those folks are doing better than ever.
One of those is mine! :D
plsgivememoney ;_;
The 'geography' notion is very interesting[1], though I wonder how you could transfer all the limitations of a huge sparsely populated area to what is effectively a social graph.
As for the resilience of fanfic communities to takeovers...
Scott Alexander has foresuffered all
Enacted on this same blog or site
He who sat by LW below the posts
And walked among the lowest-voted
(Why yes, I did just make a weird Waste Land reference casting Scott Alexander as Tiresias. I make no apologies and none would suffice.)
[1] Though there's an extra thing America had: if you were sufficiently heterodox you could just go away. Mormons could just move until they hit Utah where nobody (whose opinions mattered at the time) objected to them being. No such space exists in Europe. The Mormons, thus, would have been slaughtered not because they'd be treated worse but because there wouldn't be anywhere they could go.
4477603
I've long wanted to write a FimFic play, possibly in a vaguely Elizabethan style because I think that would be funny and because I am, among many other things, a lit nerd and all lit nerds harbor a secret, forbidden desire to write in iambic pentameter.
Given this site's "Featured Stories" and "Popular Stories" boxes, which work to expose readers to stories that they otherwise wouldn't find, the effect must be even stronger on FanFiction.Net and ArchiveOfOurOwn.
4477641 Write zebras
I've had to do entire chapters in epic meter (dactylic hexameter)
my zebras talk iambic pentameter when they're somewhat serious. As the drama heightens they'll go epic, particularly if a zebra shaman is addressing his village. If they really trust you and it's private, they'll NOT rhyme.
It makes writing zebras a wonderful exercise and a horrible pain in the ass
4477652
My Zebra headcanon is different. Only the Sent speak in fixed-form poetry, and there's only ever thirty-six of those at any given time. The rest of Zebra-kind speak in prose like the rest of us. Mkali certainly does.
(But, seriously, congrats on writing a whole chapter in dactyls. Damn, that must have hurt)
From my vague recollection of High School literature and history, most of our textbooks were of the opinion that America doesn't actually have a literary culture. We just have the literary culture that Europeans had 30 years ago. 60's avant guarde? See Da Da 1920s France. Freedom and liberty? See Voltare and Locke. Etc Etc. The only notable American-grown intellectual movement was Pragmatism, and for awhile around the American Revolution, we had the Hudson River School of landscape paintings. That's about it. Everything else can be traced to an offshoot of some European movement or another.
Granted, for all I know, my textbooks could have been written by Europhiles
4477659 Chapter? There are several books with 'em. Don't write zebras kids
Interesting. Now I'd love to see someone run the following simulation:
If a meteorite were to strike downtown Manhattan on a Wednesday during peak working hours--assume the force of the Tunguska Event--what would be the resulting effect on American letters?
4477666
Friends don't let friends write Zebras.
Every year 1149921 ponyfic authors suffer from Acute Afflative Anomie trying to write properly poetic Zebra dialogue. The consequences can last a lifetime, but with proper care they can become productive members of society once more. For just eight bits a month—just eight a month—you can help an AAA-suffering author get better.
STOP THE MADNESS. STOP THE RHYMING.
Dial 1-800-ZEBRA-NO and make your donation now.
4477641
I HAVE THE SAME DESIRE! I want to write a Shakespony play. Not ironic; not pastiche. A straight-up attempt to out-Shakespeare Shakespeare. I think ponyfic is the only place you could do it.
A lovely optimistic counter to the subject of Tuesday's blog. It's like you're doing a one-man "Good cop, bad cop" routine.
4477659
I really liked that origin story you were working on, about Zecora's time in the Zebrica province of Awo-Man before she got called out to Equestria. The one where she apprentices with a blind, alcoholic former colonel in the Zebrica Defense Force, who surprisingly helps her find her way into a magico-diplomatic career.
You know, "Sent of Awo-Man"?
4477670
Just coded it. I predict that we'd lose K, Q, and W.
Wait, no—you said Manhattan, not Sesame Street.
I love how I can learn useful insight on the world and gain excellent writing tips on a pony website. It's so fun to explain to people.
4477701 *baps with newspaper* Bad pony, go back to grading.
4477694
LUNA (to the FIRST STAR): Free me? Wherefore? Thou mayst uncage a cage, as me.
Flee whence? This bitter prison? I myself
am but a cage, that shame built to gaol
that which fears its reflection more than death.
...and that's why it's never going to happen.
4477701 Anyone who doesn't vote this comment down is a feghootist.
4477616 I've read some of your comments about Castalia House, and read the amazon reviews of that book you linked to yesterday, but that's all I know about any of those groups.
4477670
Well, in the medium term a drastic decrease because of the terrible economic crisis such a tragedy would precipitate. In the long term, difficult to predict, I suppose it would continue on its current trend since whatever structures exist in New York exist elsewhere.
You'd do better to suppose a very selective plague that can only be transmitted via the collected works of Gertrude Stein.
4477701
...ow. That one's going to leave a mark.
4477726
4477732
Sorry not sorry.
4477641 That slatestarcodex post is terrifying.
Also, I'd read it before and completely forgotten about it.
So it's going to take more than hoping to make this happen. It will take... research.
Any idea what mechanisms make an MsScribe event more likely? I was on a MUSH in the 1990s that was secretly controlled by an inner cabal, and their chief weapon was secrecy--the ability to communicate messages in private. You can send private PMs on fimfiction, but you can't make private posts, or private groups, which I think is a good thing.
I suspect the distribution of follows per user is also very important, but I don't know what the best distribution would be.
If Genfiction actually happens, it could be seriously disruptive to these people.
All because Knighty wanted some ad revenue.
4477631 I don't think 'awarded' is the correct term for a degree from a university. More like 'purchased with blood, sweat, tears, and far too many student loans' would be more accurate, but far longer.
4477670 I don't know, but I would not mind finding out if not for all of the other senseless casualties. I think a far more interesting question would be "What would these people do if suddenly a vast section of the learned populace started to pay attention to *other* forms of litter-ature other than what they produce?" The major movers and shakers in the lit world have developed into a self-absorbed cult where all other forms of 'lit' are shunned. Their ability to accept new points of view and logically observe the world is near nil.
4477652 I hate you so much. I can't even get a line to rhyme right.
You'll look up and down streets. Look 'em over with care.
About some you will say, "I don't choose to go there."
With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,
you're too smart to go down any AppleMac not-so-good street.
--From Oh The Shippings You'll Crack! by Dr. Souse
4477732
My uncle from New Jersey, in his inimitable style, always had advice for me about dealing with people who don't like puns.
"Joey," he said, "They ain't real writers—not like you an' me. They just fugazi. Feghootaboudem."
4477744
To be honest, I think MsScribe needed two things, as far as I can tell:
1) Ruthlessness
and 2) Cassandra Claire.
My understanding is that Cassandra Claire was a Big Name Fan on a level that most fandoms never see, especially the fic side, and she was drama magnet herself. She was a central power that was able to be manipulated into acknowledging and supporting MsScribe, lending her legitimacy, and Cassandra Claire's tendency to get involved in drama was the tool MsScribe needed to do it (by aligning herself with Cassandra Claire in drama that MsScribe created and then painting herself as a sister-in-arms.)
Fun fact: Beheading all your opposition is also an extremely effective way to get a monopoly on the Featured Box on Fimfiction! Like in politics, you just have to be thorough enough not to let anyone slip through..
"The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide."
4477808
My dad used to refer, in a ghastly-jokey way, to Madame LaFarge and her knitting. But I never quite knew what he meant. I thought she was some background character who knitted during beheadings and was just a rather obvious metaphor for human callousness.
Then one day I read A Tale of Two Cities and found out what her knitting actually meant.
I was blown away. It was brilliant. And horrifying.
4477744
Can't you? I swear I'm part of a private group. Or, well, invitation only, at least. I guess it's probably not closed to the mods, but yeah. Not open to the general public. Not that it gets much traffic, though.
As far as conspiracies go, groups like the Usenet Backbone Cabal suggests that we're unlikely to ever be entirely rid of them. As soon as it's worth trying to control a group of people, someone ambitious will try, and if they're clever enough, likely succeed to some extent. But in general, I think the people who actually hold the power on the internet (the admins) are incentivized by the the medium and their ad revenue to be more open and inclusive, rather than controlling and exclusive. Sure, guaranteeing certain minimum standards is in their favor, but because it costs them more money to gatekeep than to just let everything through, being trendsetters or artificially controlling interest isn't worth it for them. This sort of divorces the aims of the people with social influence, who might actually form a conspiracy, from the aims of the people with the actual power, and pulls the teeth of any group that would try to strongly guide interest or ideology. They'll likely still do it, but they'll be limited by charisma for the most part.
Personally, I think Patreon is one of the best decentralizing forces we currently have. Not only does it tend to cut out the middlemen between artists and readers, it's platform-independent and not tied to a specific format or medium. I think that artists, left alone with their audience, will tend to be a bit more experimental, a bit more divergent, because although they have to please people, they know they have people to please. As long as they don't alienate their audience, they can mostly do whatever they like. I can't say I know Patreon all that well, and I think we're just starting to feel it's impact, but I really like the concept behind it.
I see what you did there
.
Your intuition is correct. Communities like fimfiction are relatively difficult to control from the perspective of a group of community participants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdWGTH30FhA&t=50m40s
I agree with 4477773. It's probably related to the idea of systemic risk. The Martingale betting system is a good example, though a bit abstract. (Imagine that a betting system is a thing that determines how the fate of one dollar influences the fate of a different dollar.) If individuals can become influential or avoid losing influence within the community in some reliable way (e.g., political correctness), that will introduce systemic risk to the community. Beyond that, it's just a game of market manipulation or waiting for the coins to align properly.
4478103
Uh... Yeah, me too.
4477672
ZEBRANO rhymes with SOPRANO.
4478169
I see.
And so it begins.
I'm not sure, but I think that "private group" just means you need permission to join and post, not to read the posts or see the list of members. That's not sufficiently private for staging a coup.
4478169 We have YouTube button:
That's the sort of network analysis that anyone designing an online community ought to do.
4478103
That seems to have worked here so far.
It's good, but you'd need 50-100,000 fimfiction followers to make a good living from Patreon. (Or not. Donations seem to have a power-law distribution.) See Patreon's top earners.
4477852
vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/pdsh/images/4/44/Ivanhoe.jpg
The sage acts by doing nothing
What I'm getting from this is that you really wish you could build a real literary career out of pony fanfic. This is a pretty good wish.
4478295
My bad. I'm used to inline YouTube videos not skipping to the right point in the video.
4478295
No, I think it's invisible. Easy enough to check, the AK Yearling Society is private. Someone who didn't join can try that link.
4478298
I can probably offer a practical example about what happens when those who hold power also are those who try to culturally shape a community. It's not pretty.
It happens all the time in the Italian fandoms. Almost to every one of them. They generally suffer from balcanization at a ridiculous level as a consequence, and the same scheme repeats over and over.
A fandom is born and a first community is formed around it. A cadre of administrators rises to power and starts to lay down more and more restrictive guidelines. A group with different ideas rises, there is some drama, then, thanks to extremely low entry costs for creating an alternative hub, they split off and create their own utopia which antagonizes and doesn't talk with others. This will happen again when they reach some kind of critical mass until you have a large number of different small entities all catering to some specific aspect and going down a path of decadence with less and less creative variety.
While the base will generally frequent more than one of this communities, there is a certain pressure to align with one, specific direction at the expense of others.
Now, there are probably a couple of factors that help this specific scenario to happen: culture, a relatively small population and a general lack of platforms that offer deal-breaking services the competitors lack, but I think it is interesting nonetheless. I suppose something similar would go down the moment the major powers in English literature couldn't offer some prestige or publishing avenues other lack.
4477641
You bastard.
I just spent nearly 12 hours learning about the saga of MsScribe. I don't feel edified in the slightest (though it was mildly entertaining).
You're just, like, the tour bus driver to the land of endless rabbit-holes, aren't you?
4478648 Derp! It says
Well, I guess my takeover of fimfiction can begin.
4478655 Is there data on the number of members groups have when they split?
4478713
Only anectodical, I fear, which effectively means this data hasn't much value. I've seen it happen with various degrees of involvement to the SF and fantasy fandom (the last one for at least three cycles), furry fandom, mlp, a ton of roleplaying communities. Academic research focuses exclusively on major social networks and on the political undercurrents there.
The state of social sciences in Italy is in a sorry state, but that would probably be a rant for another time.
4478713
And I didn't even answer to your question.
Anyway, there doesn't seem to be a fixed amount of members when this happens. It is, as far as I can tell, different each time and somewhat fandom dependant. Or better said, it depends on th growth of the fandom.
In case of stable member numbers it can happened even with small groups, under 100 even. In case of growing fandoms it takes larger groups.
And now that I've written it down I'm starting to think it could be more related to "vitality" than on absolute numbers.
4477773
I heard a story exactly like the one about Claire's professional debut some 30-odd years ago: BNF goes pro with a work largely plagiarized from others in her fanfic circle. In that case it was Darkover fandom.
(This was back before Marion Zimmer Bradley became known as the Bill Cosby of F&SF)
4479492 (This was back before Marion Zimmer Bradley became known as the Bill Cosby of F&SF)
What's this? Slanderous gossip I haven't heard? Come over and sit by me.
As usual I click on your post, curious and trying to predict how it'll go. Yet once again I'm stuck, mildly confused about how you got from evil French modern art and personal liberties to free literature and the pecking order of this site. However, as usual i can't help but agree. Good job and good luck on your next stories/post.
4480778 I don't think I made it very clear. The basic idea is that organizations are easier to take over if they are centralized, so they have a small number of key positions that are "close together", e.g., they are in the same location or read the same newspapers. Then one group can put people in some of those positions, then campaign heavily to influence the other people in those positions on some vote, and stage a coup.
The European revolutions were like that--all the revolutionaries lived in the same place, so somebody could take over just by (like Hitler) picking one night to take his key opponents by surprise and stab them in their sleep. The American revolution wasn't like that. Everybody was spread out over 1000 miles, and lived in different cultures, so there was no good way for anyone to take it all over.
Then I argued that fan-fiction is more spread-out and distributed, and that's a good thing in that it keeps us from being taken over by one group of fans.
I didn't say, but maybe should have, that there are fan-fiction sites such as Harry Potter sites, and maybe AO3 tho I dunno, which may have too much communication--their members are too much aware of what each others are saying, so it's easy for them to have drama and coups and MSscribes. On fimfiction, we're all isolated because there is no fimfiction forum, no workable meeting place, all because knighty and his friends prefer chat, which is totally unscalable. That might have been a good thing.