So everyone found out that Ana Mardoll works for Lockheed Martin and Twitter has been an amusing place for the last twenty-four hours. Well, as much as it can be these days, anyway. Reactions have fallen into two predictable camps: one group of people saying 'I told you so' and another faction decrying Mardoll's cancellation. Amusingly the Daily Mail has came down on Mardoll's side, at least inasmuch as it gives them a stick to beat the 'woke' with. But you see, here's the thing -
I'm fucking sick of this bollocks.
I had actually been following Ana Mardoll before all this happened, because I agreed with his opinion on a recent crappy, transphobic genderplague novel called The Men, in which wouldn't you know it, all the trans women magically disappear one morning along with the cis men. I agreed with Mardoll because all the information I saw about The Men, including extracts and plot summaries, and also elements of its author's previous questionable works, suggested to me that it was a pile of dogshit and certainly not a book anyone needs to read when Gretchen Felker-Martin's Manhunt, which is a much better genderplague novel, is out there.
But I never really felt that comfortable following Mardoll because, well, he had a bloody picrew avatar, and I keep seeing takes from supposedly queer people on Twitter with picrew avatars which make my spook-radar go haywire. Something I noticed about these accounts was they seemed fixated on intra-community beef: trans women and trans men beefing over who was 'transmisogyny exempt', endless tenderqueer bollocks, 'no kink at pride' stuff, that kind of thing. I don't know if they come from one of the chan boards, from Russia or from the CIA (and obviously the degree to which those are three discrete things is an open question these days) but it seemed a lot like GamerGate and a lot like the shit we'd seen floating around online in the run-up to the 2016 election. They smelled like an op, these guys, and while I didn't immediately lump Mardoll in with them - well, I probably should have done that when he began arguing that it's ableist to expect writers to read, which seems to have been the take which led people to expose his connections to the merchants of death. But the thing is,
I am FUCKING sick of this BOLLOCKS.
It's just endlessly based on the idea that the way we will win liberation from cis hegemony is by being nice. By being reasonable. By showing that we can be trusted. It's queer centrism! It's respectability politics! And I'm sick of it!
I don't want a queer liberation that is entirely dependent on not spooking the straights. I like marching in my local Pride parade with people wearing bondage gear and pup hoods and I wouldn't bother going on a march which refused to include them because seeing 'kink at Pride' might scar the delicate minds of children because if seeing a man dressed in a latex animal costume is going to scar those kids then Batman's already done it, Freddy Wertham Jnr. When did us queers get so goddam soft?
Inevitably I blame social media, not for any of the obvious reasons but because social media led to what you might call the HRification of social life online. The structural nature of the big online platforms meant that the way of dealing with hate speech which they found most effective was algorithmic and based on certain trigger words, with a second level of (usually outsourced, more often than not horrendously traumatised) human oversight layered thinly on top. This meant that instead of racism, transphobia, etc being driven off the platforms the systems rewarded people who were sneaky about voicing their bigoted opinions, incentivising euphemism and mass-reporting instead of actual conversations.
And frankly it's hard to see how social media companies operating in a capitalist society could do anything different. And unfortunately our society is too hooked on capitalism to enact the necessary regulation which would make the social networks work properly, so we're stuck with a situation where a bunch of companies are doing catastrophic damage to the discourse on an hourly basis because their fiduciary duty to their shareholders precludes them from hiring a sufficient number of sufficiently educated and emotionally intelligent moderators to give their sites a liveable culture. Given that we are currently dealing with a planetary situation in which those same fiduciary duties are creating a situation in which the actually existing atmosphere will soon become unliveable this is, well, not ideal. We could do with throwing our best minds at the problem of climate change, and if we don't have enough of them we could probably get a similar boost from hurling a shitload of second-rate intellects at the same problem, and either of those groups of intellects are likely to get better results if they haven't spent a decade training themselves like rats in Skinner boxes to run around online insulting people for dopamine hits and yes I am talking about myself in that last bit.
The thing is, it is possible to build communities online but it requires an investment of time from real, actual humans that you only really get in fandoms, where people are used to giving up hours of their free time for no great financial reward. Barbelith, the message board I frequented most often in the pre-social media days, had a user-to-moderator ratio that a global behemoth like Facebook or Twitter would never be able to reproduce while still keeping their shareholders happy. And it could support that ratio because it occupied a particular niche - in Barbelith's case fans of Grant Morrison's comic book The Invisibles and other projects, and related topics (yes, obviously I know in theory 'related topics of The Invisibles' could mean literally everything but in practice you know what I mean) - which meant there was always going to be a limit on the number of people the site would cater to. So on Barbelith arguments over the edge cases of what language was acceptable from what users in what context really did become actual conversations in which everyone would eventually arrive at a position they were happy to abide by (well, that or flounce off in a strop after threatening to 'close the connectors' on the site through some occult means). Whereas with the social networking platforms there simply isn't time for that - everything becomes about how to appease the mods, or game the mods (and crucially in this situation the mods are truly, panoptically anonymous, unlike the mods of message boards who would most of the time be people you also regularly talked to on those same boards) or generally second-guess the mods, and the result is that people begin to internalise the idea that, just as on Twitter there is a way for you to just about communicate your meaning without getting mass-reported, there is also a way in which you can behave in the real world as a queer and not get in trouble and oh, honey,
no.
There is no way of behaving which will keep you safe from the violence of cisheteropatriarchal white society. That violence is deep in the structures of this world. It is there in the fact that capitalism has robbed queers of online spaces where our elders could have effectively modelled the messy business of actually building community because giant, impersonal walled gardens where you are made to internalise a terror of stepping out of line and getting noticed by the mob can outcompete them, at least as long as they're propped up by venture capital money, as much as it is there in the mobs of fascist trash with records of child sex offences as long as their crappily-tattooed arms who stand outside libraries calling drag queens 'groomers'. This is not a violence that can be reasoned with. It is not a violence that can be persuaded. It is not a violence which can be befriended, though the more you look like the white cisgender men who benefit from it the more likely they might be to save you a seat on a later train to the camps.
This violence can only be fought and it has to be fought all the time and it is impossible and it is demanded of us that we do the impossible. Certainly it is not fair. But we have to fight. We have to hold our shields and hold each other up and take what shots back that we can, and also, because they outnumber us, and because they have all the money, we have to cheat. We have to play dirty. And they will always play dirty because they outnumber us and have all the money. There is no agreement you can make as a queer person with cis, straight society that they will ever treat as anything other than conditional on their needs, their desires, their fragile feelings.
So let's stop acting like there is.
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