Unburdening Myself of Unfinished Business
By Chris M. Barkley:
ITEM ONE: As we emerge from the cold and cloudless days of January and February, you would think that the prospect of sunny days, baseball, international football (soccer), the open swimming pools and children playing outside would bring some joy to my soul.
Every year for the past forty years or so, the coming of the so-called “Daylight Savings Time” fills me with sadness, anxiety, moodiness and lastly, anger. (Yes, I only appear to be a mild-mannered reporter for a daily metropolitan daily sf news zine.)
Because myself and most of my fellow North Americans have lost an hour’s sleep. And why?
Because the farmers, blah, blah, blah. And the kids getting on the bus in the dark, blah, blah. And commerce and businesses flourish, blah, blah, blah…
When I was a young lad in the mid-1960’s, the prospect of time travel (in this fashion) was novel and exciting. Forward into the future and then returning back into the past a few months later was a perfectly appealing idea to my young mind.
But, as I got older, my priorities and attitude towards DST gradually changed. Just the thought of the approaching date brought on bouts of gnawing and persisting dread. Changing the clocks forth and back became (and still are) a hassle. And the loss of an hour’s sleep every spring is just plain wrong.
I’m not going to bore everyone with its history, musings, opinions or statistics about whether we should choose to sat in “standard” or “daylight” time or why the DST should be hunted down with pitchforks and torches, staked through the heart and left burning in the noonday sun.
Instead, I will leave you with a well known Native American aphorism:
“Only a white man would have you believe you could cut a foot off the top of the blanket, sew it onto the bottom of the blanket, and you’d be left with a longer blanket.”
Contact your congressional representative and Senators; they are the only ones who can kill this stupid and unhealthy abomination once and for all.
Enough. Said.
ITEM TWO: On the morning of February 5, 2024, my audio interview with Dave McCarty was published here on File770.com.
As many of you may know, I distribute the daily “Pixel Scroll” and other standalone news items on eight sff Facebook groups and on the Bluesky app. (I have mostly avoided posting on X/Twitter since September 2023.) If there is something more important or pressing at hand, like an exclusive interview with Dave McCarty for example, I post a File 770 link to a more widespread group of forty groups…well, actually, thirty-nine as of today. Let me explain…
That particular morning, I started posting the interview to my usual group but when I came up to the Washington Science Fiction Association, I had to pause because I was served with a notice that stated that my posting privileges had been suspended:
“Your profile been (sic) suspended in this group. The admin has temporarily turned off your ability to post, comment and earn contribution points in the group until February 23, 2024, 10:19 AM.”
I was flabbergasted for several reasons, the first of which was that I had not received any notice of the suspension from any of the administrators, there was no previous indication of any trouble before that day.
Since I was locked out of the page, there was no way to send a message to an admin, so I decided to shout out on my own page:
To the Washington Science Fiction Association Facebook Page:
While posting my latest File 770 column this morning, I found out that the admins of the Washington Science Fiction Association suspended my posting privileges on their page for three weeks. Apparently they found my most recent dispersing news on a regular basis either offensive and/or disturbing.
I have done my best to pass along vital and accurate information there for some time and I am HIGHLY upset that I was suspended without notification or an adequate explanation. Do I need to point out the parallels to what happened recently regarding the Chengdu Long List nominees?
As a journalist, I resent being effectively censored in this fashion; sf fans have every right to be informed, whether the news is for good or for ill, especially during these tumultuous times in sf fandom.
While I recognize that they have every right to run their page as they see fit, I find this action egregious, unnecessary and a disservice to the other members of the group. As a result of these actions I will be leaving the group later today.
Chris B.
During the course of that day, several friends offered advice and support, which, for the most part, I appreciated. Several suggested I reach out to the administrators to find out what the problem was. I wasn’t very receptive to doing that because I was very upset and the aggrieved party; so why would I do that?
Two friends intervened on my behalf and made inquiries on my behalf. One reported in a direct message:
“Sent your message to the three admins. I’m guessing what set this off was the piece with the McCarty interview.”
I did not hear back from anyone else about this that day. And so, at a little after 10pm, the Washington Science Fiction Association page had one less member.
My other friend sent me the following message in the early morning hours of the next day:
“Chris, you were paused by the moderator because they were traveling and could not monitor posts.”
I sent back the following message:
“Well, that’s a troubling explanation. Was this applied to everyone? Or just me? Because without a notification to me or on the page, it felt like I was being targeted.
Also the period of time described in the suspension notice wasn’t for a period of days but weeks.
So yeah, I’m having a hard time believing this.”
As of today, I have not been contacted by any of the admins involved nor have I been given an adequate explanation for their actions or offered an apology.
My reason for airing my grievance here and now is two-fold; this incident has been simmering with me for over five weeks and I felt the need to let loose before I lose my sanity, self esteem or both. Secondly, this is not my first rodeo with unresponsive page admins and frankly I’m becoming more and more disenchanted with social media and Facebook in particular.
And at its best, Facebook is a wonderful tool to keep in touch with friends and share ideas and opinions. But I am beginning to realize that for me, the pervasive and oftentimes intrusive effects of social media may outweigh its benefits.
Lately, I have been contemplating leaving Facebook for good. Incidents like this just nudge me a little further towards doing that.
ITEM THREE: And then there was the matter of D.G. Valdron’s essay on Medium.com.
On February 18, Mr. Valdron, who describes himself on the website as a “Canadian Speculative Fiction and Pop Culture writer”, published an article that was ominously titled “Moral Compromise and the Lesson of the Hugos”.
Mr. Valdron, in an imperious and somewhat solemn tone, vaguely (and, mind you, without attribution) outlined the problems regarding the Chengdu Worldcon:
In 2023, the World Science Fiction Convention was held in Chengdu, China.
This was a little bit controversial, given the Chinese government’s genocidal actions regarding Ughyers and Tibetans, their authoritarian police state shtick, etc. But everyone went along with it. Why rock the boat?
The problem came with the Hugo Awards.
Now, the thing with the Hugos, is that everyone submits nominations, the Hugo Awards Committee vets the nominations, and a final list gets put out for the fans and convention members to vote on by secret ballot. Now, that’s how I understand it. I might have gotten some detail wrong, but I believe that’s the gist. It doesn’t matter.
Here’s what matters:
The Hugos were corrupted. The Hugo Awards Committee turns out to have been screening out the works of American, English and Chinese creators, on behalf of the Chinese government. Basically, anyone whose novel or background was critical of the Chinese government, or even politically sensitive, like mentioning Tibet, was dropped from the list.
But you know what strikes me?
It’s how trivial this is.
Forgive me, I’m sure it’s important to the people involved. Careers and friendships ended, a community rocked.
But let’s get a grip. Most people in North America have never even heard of the Hugos. Most people in North America are not science fiction writers, or readers. Hell, most people in North America are not readers.
The Hugos aren’t the Nobels, or the Pulitzers. In the larger scheme, they’re a minor award, restricted to a literary/social subculture which might result in a few extra sales and an ego boost.
No one’s life was at risk. No one’s freedom was imperiled. No huge sums of money, no public safety.
This was a small trivial thing.
In my cynical side, I suspect that most times, people would make the wrong moral choice, but hopefully, in the face of more pressure, or intimidation or incentive than this. Maybe I just want people to suffer more.
Anyway, we’ve been down this path before you and I. Sorry to belabour it. How we treat each other is a hobby horse of mine. I’ve had my tests, and I’ll have more. I’ve dealt with them.
What about you?
I’m SO GLAD you asked, sir.
Now, to be fair, Mr. Valdron is entitled to his opinion. And granted, what happened with the Chengdu Worldcon and the 2023 Hugo Awards is definitely not as important as the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, the current battle between democracy and fascism in the United States or our ever increasing concerns over climate change and various environmental crises all over the world.
What really ticked me off about D.G. Valdron’s article is his rather cavalier attitude towards what happened, the Hugo Awards and general air of disapproval of the fandom that supports it.
Fantasy, science fiction and horror is, despite the bleating of insufferable academics and mainstream literary critics, a vital part of the tree of literature, and whose roots run a millenium or two deep.
Modern sff literature (and fandom) started over a hundred years ago when teenagers in the US and United Kingdom began to correspond, meet, talk and write about their mutual fascination.
And out of those meetings came conventions, cosplay, and generations of aspiring publishers, writers, editors, artists, game creators, filmmakers, and commentators, like myself.
I have had the privilege of growing up in a period of this history to witness sff grow from being considered a freakish sideshow to becoming a dominant force in world culture.
And the Hugo Awards, for better or worse, have provided all of us with an invaluable anecdotal, year by year snapshot of what people thought about fantastic literature and the visual arts. Readers, writers, editors, artists and publishers look to it as a bellwether of the field’s vitality.
So, no this is NOT “a small trivial thing,” Mr. Waldron.
And I find it very disappointing to see a member of our own community like yourself thinking so little of the situation as to look down your nose at the sff fandom and its history under the pretense of high handed criticism.
There is a term for this Mr. Waldron.
It is called “bad form”.
ITEM FOUR: Having a little notoriety in your life can be fun. I have been a fan guest of honor at three conventions (Windycon in 2019, Astronomicon in 2021 and Confusion in 2023), a panelist art auctioneer at local, regional conventions and at Worldcons. I’ve been nominated for a Hugo Award twice (and may have even won one).
But speaking personally, I don’t go out of my way to seek it out. I know myself well enough to know that if my ego were well fed on a regular basis it would be to the detriment of myself and my family and friends.
So, as you can well imagine my quandary as the Chengdu Worldcon story grew exponentially, my name (as well as my co-author, Jason Sanford) popped in all sorts of media outlets like the Guardian (UK), NBC News, the Associated Press and the New York Times among others.
I was even interviewed by Andrew Linbong for National Public Radio, which, as a listener of fifty-plus years, was the thrill of a lifetime as far as I’m concerned.
But, there’s a downside as well. While I and Jason received universal praise for our reporting, we were also reminded that there are a lot of cranks out there who were more than willing to let the air out of tires, so to speak.
There were several that stood out; sff author Larry Correia was irked because of Jason and I had previously reported on and commented negatively against his involvements in the Sad/Angry/Rabid Puppy wars a decade ago. Frankly, having someone like Correia upset with me is a badge of honor as far as I’m concerned. (See my post on Bluesky.)
My partner Juli alerted me that some wag on Reddit had heard my interview with Dave McCarty and had come to the startling conclusion that I was actually in cahoots with him to cover up his complicity in the scandal. To which I replied that he had obviously seen far too many episodes of The Traitors reality competition show to be reasoned with.
I was very heartened when I read that both Samantha Mills (author of the acclaimed short story “Rabbit Test”) and Adrian Tchaikovsky (who wrote The Children of Time series) had both decided not to acknowledge their Hugo Awards in the wake of the Chengdu scandal.
Adversely, I received a bit of backlash from some people once I let it be known that I was going to keep my Hugo Award more as a keepsake and family heirloom than a personal achievement.
I might have felt the same way as Ms. Mills and Mr. Tchaikovsky if I was sitting at home watching the Hugo Awards Ceremony at home and found out later that my presence on the ballot was dubious at best and that many Chinese writers and fans were most likely disenfranchised from the process.
But, I went to China, had the time of my life, made the speech of my life and felt a close affinity for this award I thought I had rightly won. If anything, I wanted to be reminded of the trip, the people I met and befriended and the devastating revelations that followed.
Well, for a very vocal fringe minority of people, keeping this Hugo Award was tantamount to rooting for Lex Luthor, killing baby seals, helping the Houston Astros win the 2017 World Series or actually being a communist.
I laughed off nearly all of this outrage as either sour grapes, jealousy, pettiness or “virtue signaling”. In the course of all of this sturm and drang, I posted the following on Bluesky:
This generated a (unnecessarily snarky) response from @afab boyfriend:
It’s responses like these, that seemingly come out of the social ether that occasionally bother me, referring back to my general unease about social media. I don’t know this person and they CLEARLY don’t know me and yet it seems my comment struck a nerve that needed a pointed response. And I get it; I admit that in the past, I too, have sought out people I don’t know to comment on how reprehensible I thought their opinions or positions were, but tried to do so from a reasonable point of view and not to make it personal enough to hurt someone’s feelings.
THIS comment was meant to be both condemning AND personal.
But, I decided to take the high road:
I followed that up with:
Case Closed, @afab boyfriend.
ITEM FIVE: Last week, this happened:
My response was:
Two things happened after I posted this; two days later, on Sunday March 10th, I fumbled my understanding of GMT time and Eastern Daylight Time (DAMN YOU AGAIN, DST) and as a result, both Juli and I logged onto the Glasgow Worldcon site three hours too late to nominate anything for this year’s Hugo Awards for the first time in more than a decade.
Even more ironically, I began to hear from friends and acquaintances who openly stated that despite my recusal of future nominations in my speech at the Chengdu Hugo Award Ceremony and my public statement on March 8th, people were still nominating me in the Best Fan Writer category.
Their reasons ranged from they viewed my “win” in Chengdu as invalid and they wanted me to have another chance or that my works from 2023 were quite worthy of consideration.
I have to admit that the idea of being nominated again in light of what happened last year excites me, but the other side of that coin brings feelings of despair.
Do I actually deserve another nomination? Would I be depriving someone else of a nomination? And, what if I get that email in the next week or so; am I allowed to change my mind?
My partner Juli says that she will abide by and support any decision I make, which is one of the many reasons why I love her so much.. The few friends I have asked about this dilemma all said I should take the nomination.
Right now, I have no idea what I should do.
Watch this space, readers…
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Has your Hugo been repaired and returned to you yet?
OK, after LITERALLY sleeping in the matter, I have decided that the fairest thing to do is to follow the example of the Hugo, Girl crew and decline a Hugo Award nomination this year and make myself eligible for only one additional year in 2025.
Laura: Other than receiving an email request to verify my current home address three weeks ago, I have not heard anything about when I (or anyone else) will be receiving our awards. Which is a shame because every time I walk into my local Kroger’s or library I have to tell all of my friends that it hasn’t arrived yet…
Thank you for all you’ve done for fandom, Chris
(2) Groups are one of the few things I like about Facebook. But some of them are run badly. That looks like one of them.
(3) What the front lawn?!
Dear Chris,
Tumult always seems to erupt around you. I guess that means you’re a mover and a shaker. Maybe that’s why you got nominated in the first place.
I’ve never understood why people get upset when you talk. You speak your mind, which is absolutely the right thing to do. And more to the point, you always speak your mind in a friendly tone, and with a willingness — even an eagerness — to hear what others say back to you.
I want you to have a Hugo, even if it’s just a memento of the fun you had in China. I want to see it on your bookshelf, and tease you that I’m hugely jealous that you got one before me (or, alas, maybe instead of me). I want you to go down in the annals of the CFG for your ‘Chinese Hugo’ alongside our dear Lou Tabakow’s ‘Hugo for the best unpublished story’. So, keep the Hugo (assuming it ever arrives) and ignore the jerks (even if they’re everywhere).
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Yowza,
I got noticed! And rebutted! And complained about! By a guy who mispelled my name, I used to take that personally, but never mind. And my tone and attitude was criticized.
I have definitely not made a friend. Well, I’ve gotten this far in life without making any, this would have been no time to start.
On the other hand, I’m astonished whenever anyone reads anything I write. So while I’ve made Mr. Glyer unhappy, I’m kind of amazed he bothered.
I guess, the thing with me, is that I’ve left teeth in parking lots, I’ve had to fight for my life literally, I’ve been threatened in a variety of contexts. I’ve seen pain and misery. We’re all fragile creatures and bravery is a hard thing, especially when it comes with a real price. There are times and places where doing the right thing will result in getting the snot kicked out of you, or losing your job, or outright misery. Intimidation is a real thing.
There’s a lot of intimidation and coercion going on these days. Online death threats are now commonplace. We are supposed to live in fear of social media swarming and cancel culture. Literally anything you ever say is now on record to be picked apart.
Consider the Washington Science Fiction Association’s treatment of Mr. Glyer, random punishment, visited arbitrarily, without recourse or explanation, without appeal, all behind a screen of plausible deniability. Well, there’s censorship for you. That’s intimidation. That’s a lesson being doled out to Mr. Glyer and the rest of us.
Mr. Glyer is lucky, he has this forum that he can fight back on, and let people know how he’s been treated. Maybe he’ll embarrass them and they’ll think twice about doing it next time.
Or maybe they won, the faceless arbiters showed their power, they rid themselves of a headache, the message went out to everyone else to mind their manners. That last part is what worries me.
It reminds me of the final lines in the Coen Brothers ‘Burn After Reading’ where the CIA officials, with no idea what just happened or why says “Well, I guess the lesson here is not to do whatever it was that we did.”
Well, that’s a chilling message. But that’s censorship and self censorship for you. Arbitrary power used arbitrarily, people get punished for unclear reasons, everyone is intimidated into being a little more careful, because no one is sure where the lines are. I’ve seen it in a variety of situations, in and out of the community.
Mr. Glyer objects to my describing things as trivial. That seems to annoy him no end. That’s completely fair by the way, he has every right to be upset. If you love something, if it matters deeply to you, then a dismissal like that is deeply offensive. In the larger scheme of things, the Washington Science Fiction Association doesn’t register as a blip. Membership and participation, being in that community meant something to him. Their actions hurt him.
So with that in mind, I’ll apologize to him. Myself, I love stupid trivial things, I love things that no one else cares about, things so fragile they can be crushed and forgotten instantly by callous people. But I still love them and cherish them. It’s okay to cherish small things. And I suspect I’m insulting him again, so I’ll stop.
What I come back to on stuff like this, is that no one held a gun to McCarty’s head. No one called him up and gave him orders. He wasn’t threatened or intimidated. There was no pressure. He had a little bit of power, and he used it, quietly, behind the scenes, to do what he thought power wanted. That’s not actually all that different from what the Washington Science Fiction Association, or their silent arbiters, did to Mr. Glyer.
I’m not sure what to call it. Acts of moral cowardice by McCarty and the Association? Or perhaps lack of accountability on their part, where they make arbitrary and punitive decisions? Or arbitrary misuse of power?
Or a form of censorship, where instead of self-censorship, these very low level gatekeepers silently and arbitrarily police us all making decisions without explanation or recourse enforcing some vague ill-defined brush stroke of a line in the sand so the rest of us get the message.
What I come back to, over and over, is that the more easily these things happen, the more easily they will happen. If we’re all allowed or willing to be intimidated when there are no real consequences, how the hell can we be brave and stand up for what’s right when the stakes get real – when you’re in a parking lot with shitkickers, or standing up in a room full of people to insist on the right thing knowing that you might not have a job after that?
Mr. McCarty caved with no pressure at all. The Washington Science Fiction Association arbitrarily punished Mr. Glyer with no pressure on them at all. People are not well served by this. If ‘they’ can get away with bullying at these levels then can we find integrity at any level, or is it just kicks in the head all the way up.
It seems to me that we have to take a stand and demand some integrity and accountbility.
I certainly hope that Mr. Glyer rakes the Washington Science Fiction Association over the coals. Maybe they’ll be more careful how they treat people the next time something like this comes up.
And if we’re not friends, well, Mr. Glyer is in good and vast company in that respect.
D.G. Valdron
Uhm… Is anyone going to tell Mr. Valdron…?
I don’t consume much fan writing, so i am certainly neglecting many other writers, but Chris Barkley’s columns are always informative, entertaining, and free of snark. He absolutely deserved a Hugo.
@Anne Marble: the single most stupendous example of “let ME point out the error YOU made” followed up by a behemoth of the writer’s own blooper that I have ever seen! Extra points from the judges for long-winded self-congratulatory back-patting.
I say no in the sense of any direct message to Mr. V. But I would bet he has clicked to get comments emailed to him. So it would be interesting to see when the penny drops!
Chris made a one letter typo 2 times out of 7. But this person completely misspelled Barkley every time! 😛
(2) Partly because of Facebook’s handling of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, its subsequent data breaches, and its ultimatum last year that you could only continue using Facebook if you either paid a subscription (on which basis your personal data would supposedly not be [mis]used) or allowed Meta to use all your data as it pleased, I daectivated my account in November. Earlier last year, I’d deactivated my Twitter account due to the growing toxicity on that platform and the frankly bizarre management of its owner. It’s been very liberating!
(3) Mr Valdron seems not to understand that when you not only allow, but also actively participate in, censorship and exclusion in one context, it becomes easier to do the same in other contexts. Censorship and exclusion in any situation is never trivial.
Mr. Valdron, you might want to look at the header and see who actually wrote this post….
Mr. Valdron: Never let anyone accuse you of being a careful reader. We’ve all got your back on that score.
@robinareid
It was … fascinating (to use a term known to genre fans).
@Greg Fewer
I don’t blame you.
Chris, thanks for the update. That is a lot. I think you should accept a nomination if one comes, but I know that whatever you decide will be well thought out and appropriate and in the highest interests of fandom.
Chris, I could not disagree more with you on the matter of DST. I LOVE IT. Because I am a very serious night owl — since childhood and even more as I age. So it fits my schedule when I roll out of bed at the crack of 2 PM. And I’ve never lived north of 40 degrees latitude.
But they better not make it permanent, because I am old enough to remember the one year they did that during the oil crisis under Nixon, and DAMN it was dark and cold waiting for the school bus in the morning in Nov/Dec. Mom drove me on many of those days for safety reasons.
However, I’m glad you’ve decided to restore yourself for one more year of Hugos, which I will be voting in. And you’ll richly deserve it even more after this year. I disagree with you on many things (see 1st para), but have never doubted your integrity.
Fie on Washington SF’s page, fie and all the LOLs in the world to Valdron (maybe learn to read before you write?), eyeroll and snerk to “afab boyfriend”, and every possible fie to Dave Quisling and the rest of the non-Chinese Hugo committee.
I can’t believe Waldron hasn’t deleted his comment yet, or begged Mike to (or Chris, lol). Maybe he’s too busy getting dental work. Either from parking lot brawls, or putting his foot in his mouth so deeply. I co-sign @robinareid’s comment entirely.
@Lurkertype: Hey, I remember that too! Mothers created a rota to walk the young folks to school (no buses when I was that age – and just to reinforce how different things were then, I walked home every day for lunch), and we all were given flashlights to make us more visible.
But that could be handled by changing school hours in winter, rather than changing the clocks, couldn’t it?
DST or EST—just pick one and stick with it.
@andrew @lurkertype
I remember that year too – I was in community college and had a 7am class. Missed a lot of sunrises…
I’d rather have permanent standard time. “Daylight savings” is a PITA if you’re in, say, west Texas, which is on Central despite being too far west for it, and it’s dark at 8am most of the year, and light until 9pm in summer.
(My natural sleep cycle seems to be roughly midnight to 8am. Good luck finding anything that fits.)
Laura: Your comment on Valdraeiun’s faux pas was definitely my favorite. Thanks for the chuckle.
@Jeff 😀
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(1) Well, I spent five years working as a carpenter. We saw more injuries in the week or so after the time changes than any other time. (This is a well known phenomenon, BTW.) So yeah, time changes can be fun if you work at a desk or go to school, but they suck if you’re working a job where you have to worry about actual physical injury.
(2) Facebook is basically designed to encourage bad behavior, because the more outraged we are the more we look at it. Until we finally get sick of the constant outrage, and leave Facebook and outrage behind forever….
To be honest I was surprised when you started publishing your column, So Glad You Didn’t Ask, on the WSFA Facebook page. I read it here, there it’s just something long that gets in the way of my catching up with what’s going on with WSFA and Capclave.
And it dilutes the brand. A monthly column published in File 770 gives it the importance it deserves. Publishing it yourself everywhere, it’s just everywhere. I want to see it here. I don’t always agree with you, I’m always interested in your opinions.
[Disclaimer: until about a decade ago I was active in WSFA]
Instead of nominating our esteemed Mr. Barkley for a Best Fan Writer do-over, hopefully somebody had the good sense to nominate Chris and Jason’s https://file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censorship-and-exclusion/ for Best Related Work?
It’s eligible next year – and it’s on my list
Dan Harper wrote Facebook is basically designed to encourage bad behavior, because the more outraged we are the more we look at it. Until we finally get sick of the constant outrage, and leave Facebook and outrage behind forever….
This. The original Facebook business model was “you tell us about yourself, and we’ll make money from that any way we can, and keep it all.” Later that expanded to “and we’ll also track everything you do on the web, whether you have an account or not, and if you do visit we’ll try to keep your attention any way we can so we can show you more ads.”
Oh, and the justification for all of this was that a more connected world would magically become a kinder, gentler, better world. That’s working out, um, nicely.
Jim Janney
It’s a very sound business model when you think of Facebook as a business.
Facebook is free to users, it’s paid for by advertising – quelle horreur! Targeted advertising is far more valuable. The more information they collect the more targeted the ads and the more income generated. (They do need to be more transparent about what they track and how to opt out.)
Look, people see Facebook as a public service, not a business and that businesses requiring money. We’ve outraged when it does something that doesn’t fit our assumption. For example you’re upset that Facebook keeps all the ad revenue, when you get past the Facebook is Evil meme it’s obvious.
How people use this free service, the things they say, the way things spread, that’s on us. People who prompt or promote outrage get more and more ‘likes’ and followers.
@Elspeth Kovar: I have always thought of Facebook as a business and it is obviously a very sound business model, at least for Facebook. For the users, not so much, but there’s a reason Zuckerberg called them “the dumb fucks”. And the promotion of outrage is not an accident but a deliberate feature of the Facebook algorithm, to maximize “engagement”, as Facebook calls it, and to make it as addictive as possible.
“How people use this free service, the things they say, the way things spread, that’s on us.”
That’s like what the British might have said, if they bothered to justify it at all, when they opened up China to the opium trade. And the Rohingya might have a different opinion.
I read several of DG Valdron’s Medium pieces and found him refreshingly free from artifice, and also well-grounded in practical reality.
This, to me, is someone who knows about self-deception and slippery slopes.
A more complete biography appears here. On the strength of the sources I’ve read, I will be purchasing his The Mermaid’s Tale.
Can we forgive the guy one easily-committed reading error? Every time I open F770, it says up the top, plain as plain, “Posted on [date] by Mike Glyer” and I have to remind myself, “No wait, it COULD be a guest piece; better check,” and I’ve been coming here for way longer than Den Valdron has, probably.
@Shrinking Violet:
I will give you that we shouldn’t judge D.G. Valdron by this post alone. If his works are good for him and his readers.
But I disagree that it was an easy error. I give you that some text you have to look closer to find out who wrote them, but here? With a picture and personall context of this post? I think it is very easy to see that this wasn’t written by Mike and it makes Valderons comment that was imho not very good look very bad.
@Chris M. Barkley
I think the decision of the makers of Hugo, Girl is a very good reaction to the problems of last years Hugos and following it is a good move. Btw has any western Hugoawardwinner goten a nondamaged Hugo this year?
@jim jammey
I started to write a response, which turned into two responses because two different things, I’ve put it aside as an essay to work on for my pleasure. Why so long? It’s easy to make statements, the responses are about people. I’ll use just one, personal, example for the first part, addiction, that’s still going to be long.
My mother was addicted to Facebook. She’d never heard of it until my father died and her favorite nephew (ex-husbands side) who’d known him called within 12 hours. A call from him out of the blue was almost magic. Accomplished because his wife had seen it on Facebook and woke him up, 4:00 AM Geneva time to tell him. Then a friend posting on my page asked me to pass along a blessing. She’d never heard it and it was exactly the comfort she needed. So I helped her set up an account and the final years of her life she checked FB three, four times a day. Friends she couldn’t see anymore stayed in touch. She was closer to my brother than since he left for college because of things he and his wife posted, even just the sharing of everyday things, photos of spring coming to the woods behind his home. I didn’t know anything of his travels, now she was the one to keep me up to date. Yes, one of the groups she subscribed to was about cats but who doesn’t want humor in their life?
At the other end of addiction are those who check it constantly. We’ve gone from 24 hour news to 24 hour feed and the same urgency that if you’re not watching all the time you’re going to miss something. And having FB meant never again risking moments when you felt all alone, now it’s a habit. I finally laid down the law with a friend, who did have interesting things and mutual communities to follow: the moment I sat down his phone was face down on the table. But in the evenings if he chortled he had to show me.
For most people Facebook is what it claims to be communities. Knitters share everything from a major story to the latest stitch plus everyday comments about their lives. Or the ones talking about specific games, overlapping into other games. Communities overlap, people meet each other – I’d seen it on my oft-neglected page. Addiction and engagement may have been used at the beginning, that’s not why people are addicted and engaged.
….
Outrage, the other side of the coin, may be part of the algorithm to but that’s not why it’s happening in much larger, multiple overlaps, communities. The outrage I have seen, and despaired of, happens when one person with a number of followers says something, one or more followers are infected, and it spreads like a virus, people firing off comments and emotional impact building as it goes. Post a link to an article or column, it’s shared, soon everyone has seen it, the link dropped, expanding into people who have no context. In many the original is paraphrased, meaning lost, and that’s what spreads.
Write something that can be even possibly be stretched to be interpreted as anti-something, if someone does a day or so later it’s an international fact.
It’s impossible to stand up to the outrage we deal with, and logic is no help. In smaller areas it may get you denounced, destroy your reputation as someone to listen to, at the very least people are going to pile on. Stand up to an accusation of anti-something and clearly you’re anti-something. Even buying the book is supporting the anti-something.
We can’t blame all our ills on a company, it’s a cop-out. I wish we could, they caused the problem, they have to fix it. Because I don’t see any way we can.
Ironic is that the forever-young, always trusty, outrage on Facebook is saying something about Facebook.
@Elspeth Kovar
Not wrong. One of my nearest & dearest takes red lights at intersections, drivers who cut in, etc. as a personal affront. Trying to reason with him? Useless; the whole world is against him and now I’m part of the problem as well.
Aggrieved people everywhere! It’s exhausting! The fact that Facebook, to cite just one instance, is making bank on it? Adds insult to injury, haha, I crack myself up.
“Only a white man would have you believe you could cut a foot off the top of the blanket, sew it onto the bottom of the blanket, and you’d be left with a longer blanket.”
It is amazing thins “wisdom” is going around and people believe it. I don’t think the Indians are so stupid to say it. It is wrong analogy. A better one is this: if half of your blanket is on the floor, would you pull it up to cover your shoulders?
If you want to argue against the change of time, better base your argument on the diminishing economic effects of the change. Remember, that when the time change was introduced, people were using oil lamps (and oil was very expensive, if you are villager that works day and night) and cheap electricity was nonexstent. You may want to think also why the people who work the fields wake up in some ungodly hour. My country used to grow a lot of tobacco, this means going out at 4-5 AM to pick it up in the natural light. And people would go to seep at 9 PM at the start of the evening twilight.
Another argument would be the interconnectivity of the world – back then nobody cared if the time difference with some country in the opposite hemispehre was 2 or 4 hrs. Now it matters for flights, phonecalls, videcons, production line deliveries…
These are the true arguments against the time change and not this supposed “wisdom”.
At the end the pro/con time change comes to money – if it helps to save or not. This is where the true arguments are. Of course the arguments above might be invalidated if the oil prices go up again and we don’t have cheap electricity, especially from renewable sources. So, pls don’t forget villagers with their oil lamps just yet.
PS One more thing to ponder: imagine a place like Arizona and then imagine a 12 hr change. So the “active” time is in the cool hour of the day/night. 🙂 Would you mind the darkness if you don’t have to keep your car’s AC on for 8 hrs? If I remember correctly, an average car AC accounts for 1/4 to 1/3 of the gas usage…