Angry White Guys Hacked The Hugos... And Could Do It Again

Description: Close up of of an angry white man telling at the viewer, mouth wide
open & revealing teeth, face contorted into a scowl.

I've previously written about the efforts by the Sad & Rabid Puppies to hijack the Hugo Awards here and here, and Ria Bridges of bibliotropic wrote an epic guest post taking down the Puppy slate and its goals here. Even Game of Thrones series author George R. R. Martin took to his blog to denounce the Puppies, the ideology, the complaints and their goals.

Having successfully gotten the awards slate loaded with their mediocre reactionary choices, these supporters are harassing authors at Worldcon and taking about how they plan to do this all over again next year. But can they? How did this all happen in the first place?

Writing for Yes Magazine,  Mike Schneiderman quotes an author as saying "The Hugo Award process has always been hackable, There was just never anyone narcissistic enough to hack it." and they seem on the money.

Charlie Jane Anders from Gawker's IO9 suggests the Puppies success in stuffing the nomination ballot this year in fact disproves their very basis for existing:

"The [Puppies strategy] only succeeds if all the other nominations are scattered and disorganized. And that kind of disorganization is exactly what we saw in most nominations. It appears that everybody except Beale’s crew simply nominated whatever stories they happened to enjoy in 2014. Had there been a secret left-wing bloc nominating its own stories in lockstep, then Beale’s strategy would have failed."

Could this happen again? Sadly, the answer appears to be yes-- for at least one more year. Commenter eriko on MetaFilter explains:

...unless the SP/RP faction gets bored this year, it'll all happen next year, because there can't be any changes to the nominating process. There are a number of proposals being mooted this year, but regardless of which (if any) pass, none of them will take effect next year because they'll require ratification by the next Worldcon. So, the Hugos will use the same nomination process next year.
What will almost certainly happen, though, is a lot more people will pay attention to nominations next year, for good or ill. 

It's always been known that you could stuff the nominations and easily get a work on the ballot, and with a little effort, take over the ballot. The primary control of this wasn't regulatory, it was social. You just didn't do that --- and for decades, that worked just fine. The social contract that one did not logroll for the Hugo was strong enough that there were fans who were against authors even posting a single "these are my eligible works this year" posts online. I am not one of them, but the moment you post two? You're logrolling and you've broken the contract, and I would not only not nominate you, I'd campaign against you. 

That broke down when the SP/RP came along. They didn't care about the social contract, they easily got enough nomination to take over the ballot, and they did. It did help that, for too long, too many people who claimed to care about the Hugos and who were eligible to nominate didn't. The favorite excuse was "I didn't read a lot" and I kept saying "Doesn't matter. If you read something that you thought was Hugo Worthy, nominate it. If you read more than 5 things in a category that were Hugo Worthy, then you have to choose. Otherwise, nominate just the things you read that you think are worthy. If enough people agree with you, it'll make the short list. If not, it won't -- the 5% rule will make sure of that."They didn't, so between not enough nominations and the SP/RPs, this happened. The nice thing about the old system was it was simple, open, and transparent. The systems being mooted range from minimally effective, like 4/6, to OMG complex -- so much so that it's basically impossible to know if they'll actually fix the problem, but they'll certainly make it fun to figure out the nominations. It's all very....fannish. 

So, again, next year will only be different in the sense that maybe a lot more people will nominate -- for good or for ill. You will be eligible to nominate if you are a member (supporting or attending) of this year's Worldcon, or next year's Worldcon (in KC) or the Worldcon after that (which we find out out where tonight) if you join before the end of this year (basically, if you join this year, this being the year they'd be awarding.) Only members of next years Worldcon (KC) will be able to vote on the final shortlist, but the nomination pool is much larger.

So, what is the Hugo awards committee to do? What about WorldCon attendees?

Reddit: NOT The Front Page of the Internet

Description: A white man yelling and  pointing directly
at the viewer

Reddit, a discussion website with thousands of active sub-forums, bills itself as "the front page of the Internet". But as writer Samantha Allen puts it, Reddit isn't exactly the front page of the Internet for everyone, but rather the front page for a very specific kind of audience that is "mostly young and mostly male". As she puts it:

Reddit is not so much the generic front page of the Internet as it is its spacious, tricked-out man cave: a lot of people can fit inside, but only some people feel comfortable hanging out there. 

...Reddit became a web destination and a traffic powerhouse by virtue of the clicking, viewing, and typing habits of a relatively narrow subsection of Internet users. Seventy-four percent of Reddit users are men, the highest of any social networking website. Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube all come much closer to gender parity. Describing Reddit without making reference to its gender asymmetry is akin to reporting on Pinterest, which is 72 percent female, without noting that the site caters to women... when the CEO of a 74 percent male social network resigns after facing intense criticism from its users—much of it laced with misogyny—they somehow forget to label Reddit, in turn, as "male-oriented." Reddit too often passes in the media as unmarked and neutral territory while sites like Pinterest get pigeonholed as girly.

What this means is that this mis-categorization neatly sweeps a lot of ugliness under the rug, like the flood of misogyny post CEO Ellen Page stepping down, or the proliferation of sub-reddits centered around white supremacist and other hate and harassment groups. As user davidreiss666 puts it:

There were often submissions to backwater hate-based subreddits about Ellen Pao that had comment chains which were all comments about her sex and race. This was well before the blow ups with the mods. Nominally the news story submissions were about her law suit with her former employer, but they were all nothing more than excuses for idiots to gather round an make sexist and racist comments. Subreddits like /r/Coontown, /r/SubredditCancer, /r/Undelete, /r/KotakuInAction, /r/Redpill, /r/GreatApes, /r/European, /r/GreatApes, etc. all made common-cause in the effort to say nasty stuff about Pao. Then when the ruling about FPH was handed down, they made sure to invite all those hate-based users into their idiot-clubhouses.... something that needs to be addressed very quickly are the various hate-based groups which are actively attempting to colonize (their word) parts of reddit. Several hate based groups of white supremacist, neo nazis, holocaust deniers, etc. are setting up shop around Reddit. Right now, /r/coontown almost gets as much traffic as stormfront.org. And that's not including the traffic from all the other racist subreddits on the site. That spike in traffic is the Dylan Roof shooting, and the extra traffic seems to have staying power considering they picked up 4,000 subscribers in two days and another 1k at least since.. If they don't take care of it soon, reddit will soon have the dubious honor of being the most active white supremacist forum on the the Internet.

So it seems that reddit is less like the front page of the internet and more like that basement bar that sometimes has awesome events while everyone pretends not to see the Nazi biker gang in the corner.

Strange Fruit: When Writing Black Experience For A White Audience Goes Wrong

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

-"Strange Fruit", by Billie Holiday and Abel Meeropol

"Strange Fruit" is one of Billie Holiday's most haunting and iconic songs, a haunting and moving metaphor for lynching in particular and racism in general.  The Library of Congress put the song in the National Recording Registry. It's been declared as one of the most important songs of the 20th century. So if you're going to release a comic invoking a name with that weighty a legacy, about an issue as volatile as racism, you want to make sure that you do things right. But even having the best of intentions doesn't mean you can't royally screw things up as comic critic and culture analyst J.A. Micheline writes in "The White Privilege, White Audacity, and White Priorities of STRANGE FRUIT #1":

Writing about Strange Fruit #1 has been a long time coming... since it was announced on February 20th — Dwayne McDuffie’s birthday. For readers who are unaware, Dwayne McDuffie was one of the most prominent black comics writers and, arguably, one of the most prominent black activists working within the industry. He is one of the few faces that looks like mine whose work specifically aimed to promote other faces like mine in the comics — on the page and off it — and for that alone, he represents a lot. And his birthday was the day BOOM! Studios elected to announce that two white men would be writing and drawing a title about the racist South called Strange Fruit.
...No, seriously, stop a second and look at this constellation of events. This comic, announced on Dwayne McDuffie’s birthday, about racism in the South by two white men is being marketed as a “deeply personal passion project.” Do I need to go into why I have some questions about why a story about racism is deeply personal to white people? Do I need to explain why I think that marketing choice was tone-deaf and perhaps even toeing the line into disrespect? Do I need to air my concerns about what that indicates about who this book is being marketed to and why I suspect it is not people who look like me?

The entire article is a great read and review of the comic itself.

I want to add to it that there’s already a comic called “Strange Fruit,” about black history, written and illustrated by black men. http://www.amazon.com/Strange-Fruit-Volume-Uncelebrated-Narratives/dp/1938486293. 

Tumblr user spikedrewthis did a rundown of some of her favorite comics written and illustrated by marginalized people and you can check it out starting with this tweet:
https://twitter.com/Iron_Spike/status/618844573436133376 

And here’s a list of webcomics by black creators: http://pastebin.com/Mh7RV5YY .

Angry White Gamers vs Social Constructs: We Can Do Better

Rust is an indie survival horror game currently in alpha testing on Steam. In a thematic twist that's sort of a cross between Minecraft and Resident Evil, you start the game buck naked and have to craft everything you need to survive, from shelter to the clothes on your back, and try and survive as long as possible. It's a multiplayer game, so if the monsters don't get you, another player might!

 Last week, the developers of Rust issued an update to their game. It has some of the usual features one would expect: bug fixes and the like. It also added a new cosmetic feature: randomized skin tones.

As the developers explain on the official blog:

Everyone now has a pseudo unique skin tone and face. Just like in real life, you are who you are – you can’t change your skin colour or your face. It’s actually tied to your steamid... There’s a lot of skin colours in the world, and it’s really easy to appear racially insensitive when doing this. This is compounded by the fact that everyone is really used to seeing this guy as a white guy, so when you see him as a black guy it feels like he’s just “blacked up“. So we’re spending a lot of time trying to lessen that effect.

So what happened? Players lost their ever-lovin' minds! As Megan Condis writes:

The reactions to Rust’s unprecedented experiment were swift. Many gamers were aggrieved by the skin tone automatically assigned them. Others felt drafted into racial discourses that they preferred to ignore, and lamented the entrance of social justice activism into what they saw as a blissfully post-racial online world. But the backlash only underscored a disturbing reality: By insisting that race doesn’t or shouldn’t exist online, such attitudes ensure an online status quo in which people of color remain marginalized and invisible.

Yes, in addition to the sad but predictable racist reactions, there were also plenty of white gamers who insisted that they didn't have a problem per se with playing a black character, but thought that the randomized possibility of your in game avatar having black skin was forcing racial diversity or taking them out of the game experience by making them play someone that they couldn't identify with. This is a bit of a head-scratcher for me, because if that's how they felt about possibly getting a default character who's black... why wasn't there a similar outcry when the game's avatar was only a default white guy? What about a woman player who must play video games as a male hero? What about a gay or bi gamer playing though a game with romance options that can't romance characters of the same sex?

As Condis puts it, it's due to most white people just sort of unconsciously accepting "white" as "default" because that's also what society does:

The reactions reflect a failure on the part of some gamers to recognize that whiteness is a race at all. These players appear to think of whiteness as a neutral type of embodiment, the universal category of humanity against which all those who do “have” a race (anyone who is not white) are compared.

I agree. Default choices are choices. As a white guy, living in a culture that prioritizes white men, there are lots of things I don't actively have to think of or worry about because I see a lot of people who look like me as the default. I don't have to consider other ways of living in my day to day life-- what it's like to live as a black man, or a gay woman, for example. It's like the fish that lives in the ocean, surrounded by water, not realize what surrounds it. It's this sort of thing that leads to marginalized and minority groups not only being dismissed, but often just flat-out not even being thought of in the first place. As Tauriq Moosa writes in Polygon about the lack of people of color in current AAA title hit The Witcher 3:

Let’s look at a few uncomfortable facts. Almost every Witcher 3 review I came across was written by a white man — excellent writers and all of whom I respect. But games media itself is, like the tech world, a very white-male dominated area. This is why we got a hundred articles confronting the Witcher 3 devs about less pretty grass physics, but not a single article asking them about no people of color. As a person obsessed with graphics... downgrade questions concern me, too. But I’d hope more folk would be asking questions about entire races not existing in a game world and why. But the lack of persons of colour, and the lack of questions about our absence, comes from ignorance rather than animosity. It probably just wasn’t even considered. That is itself the major issue. It’s not just that people of color weren’t in the game, it’s that so few people in the gaming press noticed.

So how and why does representation-- making sure people of color can seem themselves in games matter so much? Why does leaving them out, even it's it's "just an oversight" become so harmful? As Moosa explains:

By creating digital representations of people who aren’t white, it indicates a culture and industry who view us as people. It counters the status quo that dehumanizes us by erasing us or casting us as a non-human. We want to be seen as people, too. There’s little more to it, for me. But seeing angry responses to this simple request speaks volumes about the kind of culture we’re creating by not diversifying races, genders and so on. Consider: In Witcher 3, all humans are white and every other being is non-human. That’s not exactly friendly or inclusive of people of color. A game can include diverse number of monsters, but not a diverse number of skin colours or races for humans? And then we see panic and anger when white gamers may be asked to play as people of color in Rust. The double standard is rarely addressed. Being white is apolitical, being a person of color, even simply by existing, is threatening to some players.

Many geeks and gamers want to uphold the idea of gaming as a welcoming and inclusive hobby. But when when can have a AAA title released with humans and dragons but not a single person of color, or when gamers act like they feel threatened for even having a character avatar whose skin might be a little brown... we're obviously a long ways away.

Fellow white folks: listen to gamers of color. Work to include them. We may not be able to change a bigot's mind, but we can certainly do what we can to make gamers of color amd other marginalized people considered, listened to and welcome so that just existing in this gamer space isn't considered some sort of radical act.