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Hoo boy, the OTW has had a rough couple of weeks. Can I first confess a teeeensy bit of schadenfreude, because some of what I've been waving my hands around all Cassandra-like about for years now it turns out is actually coming to pass (The code is a mess! The organization is in shambles!) when it felt like people looked for every opportunity to label on their fingers the reasons why AO3 was superior to any independent site a stupid fan (like me!) might want to set up because of its institutional heft. I said this, not even six months ago: "But I am most comfortable with governance that takes into account local needs and culture. I also think it is downright empowering to take care of yourself and your community rather than relying on someone else, no matter how benevolent they are ... or seem." Seem! Heh. But that aside.
To sum up the OTW's very bad no-good month: There was the whole AI kerfuffle that I wrote about in my last post. From May 17-30, End OTW Racism waged a campaign (which seems to have been pretty successful) to call attention to the fact that the OTW has gone three years without doing much of anything toward fulfilling their promises to address racism within the OTW. Then there's the former volunteer who spoke out about problems on the Policy & Abuse committee and has subsequently been vaguely accused by the Legal team to have attacked hundreds of volunteers with CSEM. Combined, this all seems to have had the effect of exposing multiple problems with how the OTW is run and governed.
Truly, I want the OTW/AO3 to be successful. It would be a disaster (and I don't think that's too strong a word) if AO3 in particular were to fail. My gripe isn't with OTW/AO3 (which has been consistently clear across the years that they do not wish to centralize fandom unto themselves) but with the people who worship at the altar of OTW/AO3 to the extent that they think there should be nogod archive but theirs. I'm hoping that whatever shit needs to be gotten together at the OTW can be gotten together for them to pull out of this funk they're in.
Because I'm interested in fanworks archives generally, I've been following everything that's going on with growing interest, and of course lots of people are expressing what they'd hope to see change. But some of those things would make the OTW ... not the OTW. By which I mean that the core purpose of the organization would be changed.
Abigail De Kosnik in the book Rogue Archives classifies online archives (focusing on fanfic archives) in three ways: universal archives, community archives, and alternative archives. (She rather breathlessly asserts that AO3 is all three, which I don't agree with. Her barely suppressed adulation of AO3 is one of my chief critiques of the book.) Alternative archives don't really come into play here, but the other two do. De Kosnik defines universal archives as those that employ
Community archives, on the other hand, work
Community archives, in other words, store the works of communities that would not typically be included in libraries, traditional archives, etc.: like fanworks. Universal archives try to collect everything.
I think a lot of the struggle with OTW/AO3 comes down to the fact that OTW has created AO3 as a universal archive, when what people want (or think they are getting) is a community archive. And this is nothing new. I've been making the case for small archives for some time now on the basis that they solve the problems of people like antis who want a fandom environment sanitized of certain materials that they find "problematic" or "objectionable" by allowing them to have what they want while leaving the rest of us alone. I used to roll my eyes at some of the archives in Tolkien fandom with their stuffy no-fun-allowed policies until I realized that they did a lot toward giving fans (like Christian fundamentalists) with whom I'd rather not interact a place to keep themselves busy. Community archives also, of course, give fans who want to share a community with likeminded fans that opportunity as well. (The SWG would be such an example. When I entered the Tolkien fandom in 2004, fanfiction archives were inundated with Lord of the Rings stories. I didn't dislike LotR or fanfic about it, but I wanted to discuss and create and share with other Silmarillion people and built the SWG for that purpose.) In all, community archives collect the works of a community and are much more sensitive to the needs and culture of that community in a way that universal archives—where the completeness is part of the point—cannot be.
And it's important to realize that the OTW/AO3's role as a universal archive is central to its existence. Its raison d'être is preserving any and all fanworks. If we cast our minds back to 2007ish, when the OTW was in its infancy, Fandom was at a particularly delicate point in its history. The internet was beginning to get big ... and profitable. Fandom had been kind of humming along in its hokey homespun communities, not really being noticed ... until it was, and the platforms where those communities resided suddenly went, "OH. Advertisers may not be keen on having their product appear alongside Harry Potter porn," not to mention the fundagelicals who thought stopping The Gay Agenda was on order of achieving peace between Israel and Palestine. The OTW was formed in the crucible of those purges and censorship, when the possibility of having no place to share certain fannish content was a very real possibility. And thus it prioritized the exact opposite: complete openness to ALL fannish content. (Dreamwidth—formed at the same time, though using a for-profit model—had similar goals, coming out of the same historical context.) "We own the servers!" was the mantra. In other words, we (fans) held our own destinies (and fanworks) in our very own little hands.
OTW asserts its purpose as a universal archive at multiple points across its sites and history:
Openness to any and all fanworks sounds lovely in theory, though I think we're beginning to see that, in practice, it can feel far less appealing, especially when it becomes the only option. The last quote continues thusly: "When it comes to which fanworks are allowed on AO3, there will always be significant tension between maximum inclusivity of content and making the Archive a welcoming space for all fans." Significant tension, indeed!
I want to be clear at this juncture that I stand with the larger goal of End OTW Racism: Three years is unacceptably long to wait for something to be done, and what the OTW promised (and what End OTW Racism is attempting to hold them accountable for) has little to do with the content of the archive; only one of their four demands ("A content policy on abusive (extremely racist and extremely bigoted) content") has anything to do with the fanworks themselves. I don't want to allege that the OTW Board is maliciously refusing to act, but I do think that promises were made with the expectation that words would be enough and no one would remember, oh yes, you did say you would do these things too. I think they're guilty of the sin of many privileged people: assuming a pat on the head and pretty words will suffice. Turns out they won't. But I digress.
We are seeing on AO3 what a universal archive looks like. It accepts AI-generated "fanworks." It allows content that is unapologetically racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, etc. Usernames and userpics can include hate speech. GIFs that appear to involve CSEM must be proven to involve minors before they are removed. (This policy has since changed.)
One volunteer describes moderation on AO3:
Again, this is intentional; none of this is surprising; this is the reason the OTW and AO3 exist.
Remember that universal archives, according to De Kosnik's definition, don't just archive everything but "present all the texts as equally valuable." The OTW was founded on the belief that fanworks and fan history have value and are worth preserving without judgment as to content or quality. Inherent in the prioritization of fanworks is the relegation of the interests of fans to secondary status. This is not a judgment, just a statement of fact. In discussing the OTW's ideal around the value of all (truly ALL) fanworks, I keep coming back to the ACLU, which prioritizes civil liberties, even to the extent of defending the rights of reprehensible people, groups, and causes. Similarly, defense attorneys prioritize the ideals of due process and "innocent until proven guilty" for all persons to the extent that they will use the system to maximize gains for offenders at the expense of victims. I do not think it is wrong to place ideals at the helm and think that ideals-driven organizations and people are necessary to provide the balance needed in a just system. But we also cannot pretend that people aren't harmed when ideals are treated with the greater reverence.
I think many fans instinctually privilege the needs and feelings of fans over the value of fanworks and have trouble viewing issues through the lens used by the OTW. Take, for example, racist harassment. A user posts overtly racist fanworks and makes persistent racist comments on other fans' work. For most fans, the answer seems simple: Ban that person. They are not a benefit to the community, and the harm they are doing to other fans far outweighs whatever benefit their presence may bring.
But when prioritizing fanworks, this person becomes more valuable as a creator of fanworks. Their fanworks and comments become artifacts documenting fan history and culture. After all, racism is a part of fandom; if we are treating all fanworks as valid and valued, this user's work becomes important evidence of a particular perspective, however reprehensible, and is part of the complete picture of what it means to participate in fandom in early 21st century. We imagine future historians, looking at AO3 for evidence of racism, finding none, and concluding there was none because it was deleted from the archive. How often do we look back at historical documents with a sort of detachment, failing to fully recognize how shattering the words we're reading may have been to their recipients at the time?
This is neither a critique nor a pardon of the OTW/AO3. It simply is. It is the organization's mission to preserve, equally, all fanworks. This mission is usually irrelevant to fans, who use AO3 with the same expectations that they might a community archive ... irrelevant, anyway, until it's not, until the fan is the one being harassed, wondering why a userpic featuring a Nazi broken cross doesn't violate the rules, wondering why fanworks that clearly attack fans of color are being allowed to stay up.
Of course, part of this comes from the increasing consolidation onto AO3 in recent years, which amplifies the detrimental effects a universal archive will have on some of its users. It's one thing if AO3 is but one of several places where people go to read fanworks. It's quite another when, for a fan of color, the only place you can read fanworks for your fandom is on a site whose purpose forbids it from addressing works and comments that do you harm. I've heard the argument being made that, since people use AO3 as a social site, then it should shift toward policies more in line with what is expected of a social site; after all, it's not like other universal archives like Project Gutenberg and Archive.org come with social features like AO3 does. There is definitely something perilous in the unbridled archiving of everything coupled with the ability of people to interact over that content. Certainly, it would be the OTW's prerogative to choose to make that shift as a social site, but they've also made clear that they have no plans to do so. Perhaps AO3 should have offered fewer "social" features, but hindsight and all that: They do, and they are committed to their mission as a universal archive.
Some of this too comes from Fandom's history being one of community archives until AO3. The culture around fanworks is not one of universality, even among fans who proclaim openness. There has been no universal archive until AO3; archives were always governed by a blend of specialization (defining what they allow) and restriction (what is off-limits). And this culture remains: just look at any fandom event (many of them hosted on AO3), and nearly all address prominently what is allowed and what is not. Fans are culturally primed to draw these boundaries and not think much of it. It is no wonder, then, that fans come to the OTW and AO3 with this same mindset of "we can say 'no' to this and 'yes' to that." It is no wonder that they are perplexed and dismayed when this assumption is met with, "Actually it is 'yes' to anything that we can legally say 'yes' to."
This is ultimately not a post with solutions. I wrote it across a couple of days to get out of my head the various thoughts that have been swirling and which I've written down incompletely in other places. Usually, this is the point where I make the case for small archives, and I do think that more community archives (of varying sizes) are needed, but that's really not a fair expectation to set right now, when very few options exist for actually building such a thing if you are a fan who is not a coder. As I've said in previous posts, I do think this is changing and I hope to devote some of my summer break to helping that change along, but it will not be the overnight option that I expect many fans want/need right now. (We've had a few people join the SWG in recent days, for instance, with the stated purpose of archiving somewhere outside of AO3, but most fandoms don't have an SWG.) We will likely need to go back to being inventive and organizing around what we want to see in fandom, which is ironically right where we were in 2007, when the OTW was born out of fandom discontent.
To sum up the OTW's very bad no-good month: There was the whole AI kerfuffle that I wrote about in my last post. From May 17-30, End OTW Racism waged a campaign (which seems to have been pretty successful) to call attention to the fact that the OTW has gone three years without doing much of anything toward fulfilling their promises to address racism within the OTW. Then there's the former volunteer who spoke out about problems on the Policy & Abuse committee and has subsequently been vaguely accused by the Legal team to have attacked hundreds of volunteers with CSEM. Combined, this all seems to have had the effect of exposing multiple problems with how the OTW is run and governed.
Truly, I want the OTW/AO3 to be successful. It would be a disaster (and I don't think that's too strong a word) if AO3 in particular were to fail. My gripe isn't with OTW/AO3 (which has been consistently clear across the years that they do not wish to centralize fandom unto themselves) but with the people who worship at the altar of OTW/AO3 to the extent that they think there should be no
Because I'm interested in fanworks archives generally, I've been following everything that's going on with growing interest, and of course lots of people are expressing what they'd hope to see change. But some of those things would make the OTW ... not the OTW. By which I mean that the core purpose of the organization would be changed.
Abigail De Kosnik in the book Rogue Archives classifies online archives (focusing on fanfic archives) in three ways: universal archives, community archives, and alternative archives. (She rather breathlessly asserts that AO3 is all three, which I don't agree with. Her barely suppressed adulation of AO3 is one of my chief critiques of the book.) Alternative archives don't really come into play here, but the other two do. De Kosnik defines universal archives as those that employ
comprehensive archiving, a process that strives to collect as many cultural texts as possible, to make all the texts equally accessible to the public, and to present all the texts as equally valuable. (75)
Community archives, on the other hand, work
to assemble and preserve texts that originate from, or bear direct relevance to, cultures that have been historically marginalized in traditional memory institutions. (75)
Community archives, in other words, store the works of communities that would not typically be included in libraries, traditional archives, etc.: like fanworks. Universal archives try to collect everything.
I think a lot of the struggle with OTW/AO3 comes down to the fact that OTW has created AO3 as a universal archive, when what people want (or think they are getting) is a community archive. And this is nothing new. I've been making the case for small archives for some time now on the basis that they solve the problems of people like antis who want a fandom environment sanitized of certain materials that they find "problematic" or "objectionable" by allowing them to have what they want while leaving the rest of us alone. I used to roll my eyes at some of the archives in Tolkien fandom with their stuffy no-fun-allowed policies until I realized that they did a lot toward giving fans (like Christian fundamentalists) with whom I'd rather not interact a place to keep themselves busy. Community archives also, of course, give fans who want to share a community with likeminded fans that opportunity as well. (The SWG would be such an example. When I entered the Tolkien fandom in 2004, fanfiction archives were inundated with Lord of the Rings stories. I didn't dislike LotR or fanfic about it, but I wanted to discuss and create and share with other Silmarillion people and built the SWG for that purpose.) In all, community archives collect the works of a community and are much more sensitive to the needs and culture of that community in a way that universal archives—where the completeness is part of the point—cannot be.
And it's important to realize that the OTW/AO3's role as a universal archive is central to its existence. Its raison d'être is preserving any and all fanworks. If we cast our minds back to 2007ish, when the OTW was in its infancy, Fandom was at a particularly delicate point in its history. The internet was beginning to get big ... and profitable. Fandom had been kind of humming along in its hokey homespun communities, not really being noticed ... until it was, and the platforms where those communities resided suddenly went, "OH. Advertisers may not be keen on having their product appear alongside Harry Potter porn," not to mention the fundagelicals who thought stopping The Gay Agenda was on order of achieving peace between Israel and Palestine. The OTW was formed in the crucible of those purges and censorship, when the possibility of having no place to share certain fannish content was a very real possibility. And thus it prioritized the exact opposite: complete openness to ALL fannish content. (Dreamwidth—formed at the same time, though using a for-profit model—had similar goals, coming out of the same historical context.) "We own the servers!" was the mantra. In other words, we (fans) held our own destinies (and fanworks) in our very own little hands.
OTW asserts its purpose as a universal archive at multiple points across its sites and history:
The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms. (What We Believe)
--
We’d like to be fandom’s deposit library, a place where people can back up existing work or projects and have stable links, not the only place where anyone ever posts their work. (FAQ, "Is the OTW trying to replace all other archives?")
--
AO3 was designed specifically with maximum inclusivity of content in mind, and we remain committed to that principle. (Statement from the OTW Board of Directors, Chairs, and Leads
--
Our goals as an organization include maximum inclusivity of fanworks. This means not only the best fanworks, or the most popular fanworks, but all the fanworks that we can preserve. (AI and Data Scraping on the Archive)
Openness to any and all fanworks sounds lovely in theory, though I think we're beginning to see that, in practice, it can feel far less appealing, especially when it becomes the only option. The last quote continues thusly: "When it comes to which fanworks are allowed on AO3, there will always be significant tension between maximum inclusivity of content and making the Archive a welcoming space for all fans." Significant tension, indeed!
I want to be clear at this juncture that I stand with the larger goal of End OTW Racism: Three years is unacceptably long to wait for something to be done, and what the OTW promised (and what End OTW Racism is attempting to hold them accountable for) has little to do with the content of the archive; only one of their four demands ("A content policy on abusive (extremely racist and extremely bigoted) content") has anything to do with the fanworks themselves. I don't want to allege that the OTW Board is maliciously refusing to act, but I do think that promises were made with the expectation that words would be enough and no one would remember, oh yes, you did say you would do these things too. I think they're guilty of the sin of many privileged people: assuming a pat on the head and pretty words will suffice. Turns out they won't. But I digress.
We are seeing on AO3 what a universal archive looks like. It accepts AI-generated "fanworks." It allows content that is unapologetically racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, etc. Usernames and userpics can include hate speech. GIFs that appear to involve CSEM must be proven to involve minors before they are removed. (This policy has since changed.)
One volunteer describes moderation on AO3:
The default assumption is that anything not forbidden in the TOS is allowed. This is one of the things that "maximum inclusiveness of content" means. AO3 will err on the side of allowing rather than forbidding, keeping rather than deleting, and not acting rather than acting.
Again, this is intentional; none of this is surprising; this is the reason the OTW and AO3 exist.
Remember that universal archives, according to De Kosnik's definition, don't just archive everything but "present all the texts as equally valuable." The OTW was founded on the belief that fanworks and fan history have value and are worth preserving without judgment as to content or quality. Inherent in the prioritization of fanworks is the relegation of the interests of fans to secondary status. This is not a judgment, just a statement of fact. In discussing the OTW's ideal around the value of all (truly ALL) fanworks, I keep coming back to the ACLU, which prioritizes civil liberties, even to the extent of defending the rights of reprehensible people, groups, and causes. Similarly, defense attorneys prioritize the ideals of due process and "innocent until proven guilty" for all persons to the extent that they will use the system to maximize gains for offenders at the expense of victims. I do not think it is wrong to place ideals at the helm and think that ideals-driven organizations and people are necessary to provide the balance needed in a just system. But we also cannot pretend that people aren't harmed when ideals are treated with the greater reverence.
I think many fans instinctually privilege the needs and feelings of fans over the value of fanworks and have trouble viewing issues through the lens used by the OTW. Take, for example, racist harassment. A user posts overtly racist fanworks and makes persistent racist comments on other fans' work. For most fans, the answer seems simple: Ban that person. They are not a benefit to the community, and the harm they are doing to other fans far outweighs whatever benefit their presence may bring.
But when prioritizing fanworks, this person becomes more valuable as a creator of fanworks. Their fanworks and comments become artifacts documenting fan history and culture. After all, racism is a part of fandom; if we are treating all fanworks as valid and valued, this user's work becomes important evidence of a particular perspective, however reprehensible, and is part of the complete picture of what it means to participate in fandom in early 21st century. We imagine future historians, looking at AO3 for evidence of racism, finding none, and concluding there was none because it was deleted from the archive. How often do we look back at historical documents with a sort of detachment, failing to fully recognize how shattering the words we're reading may have been to their recipients at the time?
This is neither a critique nor a pardon of the OTW/AO3. It simply is. It is the organization's mission to preserve, equally, all fanworks. This mission is usually irrelevant to fans, who use AO3 with the same expectations that they might a community archive ... irrelevant, anyway, until it's not, until the fan is the one being harassed, wondering why a userpic featuring a Nazi broken cross doesn't violate the rules, wondering why fanworks that clearly attack fans of color are being allowed to stay up.
Of course, part of this comes from the increasing consolidation onto AO3 in recent years, which amplifies the detrimental effects a universal archive will have on some of its users. It's one thing if AO3 is but one of several places where people go to read fanworks. It's quite another when, for a fan of color, the only place you can read fanworks for your fandom is on a site whose purpose forbids it from addressing works and comments that do you harm. I've heard the argument being made that, since people use AO3 as a social site, then it should shift toward policies more in line with what is expected of a social site; after all, it's not like other universal archives like Project Gutenberg and Archive.org come with social features like AO3 does. There is definitely something perilous in the unbridled archiving of everything coupled with the ability of people to interact over that content. Certainly, it would be the OTW's prerogative to choose to make that shift as a social site, but they've also made clear that they have no plans to do so. Perhaps AO3 should have offered fewer "social" features, but hindsight and all that: They do, and they are committed to their mission as a universal archive.
Some of this too comes from Fandom's history being one of community archives until AO3. The culture around fanworks is not one of universality, even among fans who proclaim openness. There has been no universal archive until AO3; archives were always governed by a blend of specialization (defining what they allow) and restriction (what is off-limits). And this culture remains: just look at any fandom event (many of them hosted on AO3), and nearly all address prominently what is allowed and what is not. Fans are culturally primed to draw these boundaries and not think much of it. It is no wonder, then, that fans come to the OTW and AO3 with this same mindset of "we can say 'no' to this and 'yes' to that." It is no wonder that they are perplexed and dismayed when this assumption is met with, "Actually it is 'yes' to anything that we can legally say 'yes' to."
This is ultimately not a post with solutions. I wrote it across a couple of days to get out of my head the various thoughts that have been swirling and which I've written down incompletely in other places. Usually, this is the point where I make the case for small archives, and I do think that more community archives (of varying sizes) are needed, but that's really not a fair expectation to set right now, when very few options exist for actually building such a thing if you are a fan who is not a coder. As I've said in previous posts, I do think this is changing and I hope to devote some of my summer break to helping that change along, but it will not be the overnight option that I expect many fans want/need right now. (We've had a few people join the SWG in recent days, for instance, with the stated purpose of archiving somewhere outside of AO3, but most fandoms don't have an SWG.) We will likely need to go back to being inventive and organizing around what we want to see in fandom, which is ironically right where we were in 2007, when the OTW was born out of fandom discontent.
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Date: 2023-06-08 03:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-06-09 01:13 am (UTC)Incidentally, AO3's rating/warning policy requires tagging for "underage" fanworks but not those that use dehumanizing slurs and other content. I've seen this proposed as a solution to the issue of racially harassing fanworks (that they be required to carry an appropriate tag), and I think could be a reasonable solution that both upholds the archive's core purpose and protects fans from content that is in fact traumatizing for them to view.