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Posts Tagged ‘aftermath’

How to Start

Hi, friends. Been a while.

Those of you in America: we’ve had a rough week. I’m scared for my friends. I’m scouting options. I’m trying, as Al Giordano has suggested, to clean my house.

Part of that includes starting up this blog again.

I’ve been heartened by the instinctive response I’ve seen from my communities: friends reach out to friends, not only to reaffirm connection and seek warmth, but to pool resources, and advice, and options. We’re all of us better than any of us. That’s a start.

We need to start.

I don’t have answers. The answers I do have, aren’t optimistic, but they aren’t final, either. If you’re curious, head over to Twitter: I’ve been spending far too much time there in the last nine days, passing around information that seems useful. I’m trying to resist answers, and lean into process.

A cloud of thoughts follows. Read these as my letters to myself—personal goals, issues, concerns:

  • There is a great deal to be done. A good tactic for the near future would be to regard any suggested course of action as if it were prefaced, in good faith, with: “in addition to the range of other things you are and should be doing, how about also trying…” Nothing is enough. I doubt the writer of that thinkpiece believes the course of action they recommend would, by itself, save the world. Beware of “one neat trick,” “one cool hack.” They cheapen the work. Consider, as you critique, that despair is an agent of stasis. It is the friend of the powerful.
  • Invest in information security. The Feminist DIY Guide to Cybersecurity is a good place to start. Also consider the Signal messaging app, for end-to-end encrypted texts and phone calls. Technology will not save you. It will not save your friends. It will not even protect your individual data against a dedicated state. But encryption, broadly adopted, makes the job of the surveillance state harder. Its job should be as hard as possible.
  • Invest in the integrity of your information. By which I mean, at least in part: journalism. Seek independent local outlets if you can find them, and international outlets too. Also: find friends who know what’s going on. Lean on them.
  • Talk to your representatives. Even if you didn’t vote for them. Their phone lines are whiskers with which they feel the world. If you do not brush them, they will not feel you.
  • If you don’t like the world you see outside your window, run for local office. Or, find someone who’s running for local office who cares about you, and cares about your friends, and support them. Even if you do sort of like the world you see outside your window, consider doing this anyway, because if you don’t, the people who don’t like that world, will step up. If you are a Democrat, or a progressive of any stripe, this is the area at which you and your party are weakest. Invest in the ground. You live on it. Join your local community. You live there. You are not afloat in Twitter. You are not meme magic. You have a body. Remember here that when I say you, I mean I. I am writing this story because I need to read it.
  • One error progressive folk in the US make, maybe an error US folk make generally, maybe a human error, is to assume some big hero will come along and fix our shit. We reinforce this tendency with heroic education, focusing on great leaders and hinge events; we reinforce it with storytelling. We assume the courts will save us. We assume the President will. Historically, the courts have been for property, against human beings. (Historically, courts have made human beings property.) The increasingly Imperial presidency has always been worrying, but especially so now.
  • Especially if you, like me, are a straight white dude working in a city, with family back home—there are ways to reach out to conservative family. it depends on the situation, but I’ve started by sharing my fear for my friends’ well-being. Emphasize ties. Easy for family to ignore this or that removed, mediated fact. Harder to ignore “my friends are in danger.”
  • People handle this moment in different ways. Respect the difference. Respect the grief, and its processing. But we will have to braid ourselves together to get through this. Be ready to braid with people whose priorities you don’t share. One fear I have of the months to come, arises from the difficulty of this braiding.
  • Identity statements work. They told us, in the campaign, to say things like “thank you for being a voter,” to reinforce the person’s conception of themselves as a voter. It occurs to me that statements like “Fuck you for being a racist” probably have a similar effect. I don’t know what to do with this, because racism and other forms of kyriarchy are real problems, and played an enormous and insidious role in this election. But language is a tool, and one of its uses is persuasion. I need to get better at persuasion.
  • We need a vision of a future society. I can articulate a vision of a future culture: one sheltering and celebrating and upholding people of all backgrounds, faiths, languages, races, genders. But a vision of future society—a sense of how those people live, what they feel, what they strive for, day by day, how the food gets to their mouths—something to reach toward—that’s lacking. Authoritarian regimes take power based on appeal to a vanished and largely imagined past—so they crash, spectacularly, over time, because the one truth about all human societies ever built, is that they failed. We have not yet built one that succeeds. We have to envision such a thing to strive toward it. That positive vision will be harder, and more important, than ever, now.
  • We also face a philosophical challenge. If meaning comes from context, then those who control context control meaning. Is there a way out of that trap? Is there a way out that doesn’t involve retreating to Enlightenment positivism, or games of ideal form?
  • Listen.
  • How can we protect our friends?

I have other thoughts, but they will take time.

The most heartening piece of text I’ve read in the last week, was this small bit from Nnedi Okorafor. Specifically the second sentence:

Slightly Better WorldCon Wrapup

Con is awesome, and con is weird, and con is cool.

… I’ve stared at that sentence for a while wondering what to add, but there’s too much.  To me, WorldCon was a more intense, vaster version of the experience I have at ReaderCon and World Fantasy: constantly surrounded by people who care about the writing and reading of genre.  I met people I’ve wanted to meet for years—whose work I’ve followed for decades, in some cases, and for those of you keeping track at home, I don’t go back that many decades.  I broke through some old-school inveterate shyness and actually introduced myself to people whose work I admired; I shared drinks with Hugo nominees and winners, cartoonists and novelists and magazine founders and screenwriters and editors and Redditors and fans.  I met new writers from China, and if all goes well I’m actually going to start translating some stories from Chinese—something I should have done a long, long time ago but always held back on for lack of knowing the right people.

Cons are in a lot of ways like the beginning of sophomore year of college—you see people you love after long absences, and you meet a whole bunch of new people too just because of the sheer post-hiatus chaos.  The social energy is palpable, and new communities are formed in the heat of compression.  And these communities endure—people come back, year after year, con after con.  They strain their budgets because they feel a bond with the others they’ve come to know.  Some members of the group of fans who came to the first WorldCon, back in 1939, still come to this day!  There are fans who predate Pearl Harbor.  Think about that for a second.  People who remember the year The Left Hand of Darkness was published.  For whom Zelazny is a living memory—hell, for whom Fritz Leiber is a living memory.  I met authors’ parents, and editors’, who’ve been coming to the con for longer than I’ve been alive.  That community is powerful, and durable, and wonderful, and beyond any price.  It is itself the living memory of the genre I love, and in which I’ve chosen to tell my stories.  I was on a panel with Ben Bova, who told stories about John W. Campbell and a young Jerry Pournelle!  There was a bridge of the original Enterprise on display—a copy made for promotional purposes when the show was first on the air!  I stand in awe.

Now, community isn’t some magic word that means ‘perfect’—small farm towns can be loci of love and fellow-feeling, but they can also harbor horrors, and often, maybe most often, they do both at once.  In a way the WorldCon attendee group seemed less diverse than a major media con like SDCC—there seemed to be fewer people whose skins weren’t white, for one thing.  Men also outnumber women, though I don’t think SDCC does better on that score (can’t find statistics for WorldCon; San Diego Comic Con skews 60% male, vs. an average 49% in the US population).  Looks like the community could do a better job of reaching out to those it claims to represent—that is, all fans everywhere, regardless of nationality, gender, or ethnic background—and exciting them enough to come to WorldCon and join in.

Age is an interesting topic here.  I saw some talk today on the internet about the aging of science fiction fandom, but I don’t remember a lot of gray hair at NYCC or SDCC—in fact, with the world population aging overall I’d be surprised if the big comic/media and gaming conventions didn’t have an attendee age much lower than the national average.  (This site indicates that SDCC average attendee age falls in the 16-34 bracket, so let’s be bad statisticians and take a midpoint of 25, while median US age is 36.8; I wonder what the median WorldCon attendee’s age is?  It’d have to be 49 or higher to be as divergent as our super-statistically-reliable median age of SDCC attendees…)  I wonder—don’t know, mind, just wonder—the extent to which perceived age difference between WorldCon and SDCC isn’t so much that the young people aren’t around as that the older folks are.  Which, of course, is part of that wild and awe-inspiring living memory I mentioned before.  An interesting topic for further study.  Demographers, start your engines!

Anyway, all this is a sidebar to the true point.  Attending SDCC and sundry I can struggle to find human beings to connect with in the mess of media; I do, and it’s a great deal of fun, but damn if I don’t feel the marketing crosshairs of a billion brands settle on me soon as I walk through the doors.  That’s part of the plan, after all.  We go to big media conventions to see crazy stuff and meet people, and also to walk in the presence of small gods—Lord Nintendo and Lady Legendary Pictures and Sir Lucasfilm and Lord Has of Bro.  Attending WorldCon I felt more like I sat down at a large fire surrounded by very cool people, ready to chat, make friends, tell stories, share drinks.  I made great friends—not least the other Campbell nominees, Mur and Chuck and Stina and their families, and David and Steve and Justin the other folks from r/fantasy, John and Patrick and the rest of the SF Signal crowd, Steve of Elitist Book Reviews, Shaun of Skiffy and Fanty, and a ton of people from Tor, and of course Valya and Nancy, and Editors Without Parallel Marco and David, and I shook hands with Howard Tayler and with Phil Foglio and John Scalzi and Saladin Ahmed and I met Elizabeth Bear and Scott Lynch in line for drinks and Elizabeth Bear said she really liked my book, like in person and spontaneously, and I hung out with Nick Mamatas and Paolo Bacigalupi and Jason Heller at an airport and I was in the nominees audience for a Campbell Award with my wife and I went to the after party and and oh god I’m going to stop now or else I’ll overload my keyboard with excitement.

Con’s awesome, and con’s weird, and con’s cool.  I probably should have left it at that.  If I had, I wouldn’t have missed fencing tonight, that’s for sure.