My speculative-fiction-based provocation for the AoIR 2019 “fuck the system” roundtable
I did a talk in a panel re: the Tumblr NSFW ban (which I’ll post later) and participated in this roundtable at my most beloved conference - AoIR2019 this year. Both were fun and led to amazing conversations, but “Fuck the System” was particularly awesome, because it was incredibly well attended, and included so many interesting comments and contributions not just from the speakers, but also from the audience (the pic is about half of the room doing their version of ‘fuck the system’).
My amazing colleague and co-author Emily van der Nagel created a great twitter thread from the round table, which the Thread Reader App unrolled for everyone’s reading pleasure. Anyway, here is my provocation.
Like many of us, I was very frustrated with Tumblr’s choices in December of 2018. So I thought that it might be worth engaging in some speculative fiction thinking on what social media would be like if it did not try to deplatform sex every time someone pointed out a platform has a nazi problem. Because it really seems kind of Pavlovian by now – we say: “hey, uh … you have these people advocating for hatred or genocide.” And they say: “titties, titties, omg I saw nipples, THINK OF THE CHILDREN!” It’s kind of the inverse of that old movie Wag the Dog. Instead of faking a war to cover up a sex scandal, social media platforms seem to be faking a sex scandal every time they need to cover up how their platforms are used for disseminating hate.
Speculative fiction builds on approaches like socio literary techniques, speculative design, design fiction, creative prototyping, speculative science fictions etc. (i.e. Future oriented methods of Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour. Speculative science fiction (Annette Markham and Kseniia Kalugina, 2017) Design fiction and creative prototyping techniques (Burnam Fink 2015) ‘socio-literary techniques’ (Bennett & Clark Miller, 2008)). These are methods for harnessing socio-literary imagination, and they sometimes work with prompts developed from existing knowledge and literature. I too came up with prompts: First I asked some of my Facebook friends to fill out a Facebook profile for someone who would post sexually explicit content on Facebook Second, I asked some of my friends, who are at least hobby level creative writers, to imagine that all sexual content has been banned everywhere on the internet for 10 years, and then to write me a short vignette from the perspective of a content moderation AI, a sexdoll, a priest, etc, there was a whole list
Based on this, I want to briefly go through the imaginaries about Facebook with sex, the whole internet without sex, and Tumblr with and without sex, and see where we end up, provocation wise.
Let’s start with the Facebook profiles. It seemed that people thought that it would be either:
young, kind of ditsy, not very career-oriented women, who are into nightlife, witchcraft, Charli XCX and 24-hour champagne diet”
completely nondescript successful men
or these incel-y young men, who have 73 Reddit profiles and post 4 different kinds of anti feminist quotes who would post sexual content on Facebook.
That was very brief, but let’s move to the narratives.
I had a story from the POV of a priest, a 50 year old woman, a 50 year old man, and a sex doll in a post internet sex ban world. Here’s what I picked out from these:
The priest story communicated...
... certain relief to be able to live in the world where a celebrity boob selfie is not going to commandeer attention.
... worry that life without flirting on Facebook would be sad - and the presumption that not being able to post sexual content on the internet also means no flirting is interesting here
... Finally, this story ended with a question: “But is a cat sad to be castrated?” – which tells us that an internet with no sexual content equals castration.
The 50 year old woman POV story painted a very evocative picture of going in circles and how rhetorical leaps are made by those governing our internet. I think my favorite part of this story was how the author linked declaring young women’s exposed bodies on social media explicit content with the feeling she had when she was “young, and full of uncomfortableness with your own body” until she gathered up her guts to take off her bikini and swim naked and laugh
The 50 year old man POV story, I think, was perhaps the most surprising for me. In it the protagonist tells a story of how he remembers masturbating furiously all night before the ban went into effect, and how hard it was for him to get off or get or keep an erection for months after the ban. But then spring came, women wore yoga pants, so all he needed to do now was to sit on his window, stare and masturbate. During summers he went to the beach, and during winters he just had to recollect a mental image from the summer. So basically the porn ban made him a raging peeping tom.
Finally the sex doll POV story told a tale of a male owner, who used scream at her and pull her hair, but since the ban of sexual content on the internet, he has been getting calmer and gentler. Just rubbing his finger over her nipples makes him sigh happily. He has named the doll Helena and likes sleeping with it. “I think he loves me” the story ends.
Ok, so let’s now look at Tumblr CEOs blog post about the NSFW ban. He says, multiple times, that they have thought really super very hard about it and Tumblr with sex is:
not positive
does not have deep sense of community
does not feel like a safe space for creative expression and self-discovery
and makes it impossible for Tumblr to fulfill their “promise and place in the culture”, to “grow” and “evolve”, to “have an impact on the world”, and to create a place where more people want to express themselves.
It is unclear what these big promises are that Tumblr feels it has made to “the culture” or what impact it is planning to have on the world.
The updated community guidelines, however, assure us, that throwing sex out of the window “negates the need for Safe Mode.” When there was porn you could at least opt out of seeing it, but everyone must see the hateful content that remains on the platform.
So putting all of this together, and trying to imagine social media WITH sex, we get this bizarre, but not entirely useless picture, which I hope can be used to start more conversations or ask consequent research questions.
Sex on social media, according to this speculative fiction exercise, is:
like being able to swim naked and laugh
like being led around by your dick - uncomfortable, but you’d rather keep it than be castrated
keeps men from stalking and peeping on women on the streets
but also trains men to be really aggressive and rough at sex
allows young women to get attention, and they like it
men just like it
young incel men weaponize it
but it makes tumblr feel really unsafe and doesn’t allow it to fulfill their huge promise towards the future of Culture.