Deus Ex Machinatio

If It Were Easy...

I've been thinking a lot lately about how much it fucking sucks to be an activist.

No, seriously. It totally sucks, and it does so on two completely independent axes: personal desire and social pressure.

Desire

So there was this whole big racism thing with the movie The Last Airbender, right? The thing is, I really wanted to see that movie. My daughter really wanted to see that movie. I'd long decided not to go, but as the release date grew closer, the quiet inclination to give myself a pass and not walk the talk grew in my heart. I rationalized: Well, maybe I should at least support the franchise of something I loved so much... plus how could I disappoint my little girl? And anyway, who would ever know if I didn't tell them, amirite?

I was relieved from this particular round of soul-searching and second-guessing when the movie came out and all reports were that it was pretty awful. But I'm sure it's going to come up again. Will I live up to my completely self-imposed principles? ...I dunno. 

These inconvenient choices come up nearly every day. Buy the expensive fair-trade item, or save your hard-earned clams and get the cheap one that's just as good, or better? Suffer the heat and save the environment, or pump up the air conditioning? 

Sometimes, doing the right thing is going to mean denying yourself things you want. Bucking the status quo is always, always going to take time, energy, and money. The status quo is, if nothing else, comfortable. That's why it's the status quo. 

But hey, if it were easy, it wouldn't need doing, right?

Social Pressure

Comfort is a funny beast. It keeps us in patterns of behavior, even painful, self-destructive ones, because the agony we know is so very much easier than change, even to something better. 

This scales across the vast spectrum of human experience. It's easier to keep smoking than quit, even if you know it's killing you. Easier to cope with an abusive relationship than DTMFA. Easier to let an offensive comment slip by than piss off a friend or relative or colleague; easier to let injustices stand because fighting it is so much work.

But there are other reasons, too. Fighting the good fight opens up a lot of trouble that life is, frankly, a lot easier without. One person's trying to do the right thing is another's humorless or preachy or boring or too sensitive. You can't say "I think X is racist/sexist/homophobic" without encountering some measure of "Wait, did you just say I'm racist/sexist/homophobic?" 

Too often, that leaves you with another no-win choice: Abandon something you really believe in, or hurt a friend. 

And while Jay Smooth's advice is overall excellent in theory, my experience is that once a conversation gets to that point, telling somebody that you're addressing a behavior and not them as an individual is a losing strategy. They're going to think you're annoying at best, and a pompous pedant at worst. 

But if I may paraphrase Yatima, I'm a chimp like everyone else. I want people to like me. I don't want people thinking I'm pompous or humorless or whatever today's undesirable adjective for activists might be. That's why I call myself a strident feminist -- that's me dismissing my own feminism so nobody else can beat me to the punch. If I say it first, it hurts less when somebody else repeats it, right?

Resolve

I come into the fight for justice and equality from a position of tremendous privilege. Sure, I'm a woman, and there is still sexism in the world. But I'm also white, well-educated, fairly affluent, heterosexual, cis, conventionally attractive, nondisabled... I'm something not too far from the privilege jackpot, frankly. So it's relatively easy for me to talk about issues that don't really impact my life. Because they don't really impact my life! 

But that's what makes it especially important for me to fight the good fight, to the best of my ability. If it's hard for me to say "I think that's kinda racist," how much harder must it be for someone who's actually in the throes of an encounter with racism? And for whom the stakes are likely to be very much higher.

My conscience tells me that I have to do whatever I can to make the world better for everyone -- even if it won't benefit me, even if it might hurt me, because I'm defending the basic humanity of others, and they're in more pain than myself. Gandhi and the King of Pop made the same point -- be the change you want to see in the world.

The good news is... look, I don't have to be totally perfect, and neither does anybody else. The times I quietly let something slip past don't erase the times I speak up. All you can do is your best. Some days your best won't be very good; but something is always, always better than nothing.

Every little bit, drip by tiny drip, helps to change the status quo, and remaps our social comfort zones just a little bit more. It's a slow game -- generational -- but every moment in the game instead of on the bench counts. All we can ever do is try to be a little better than we were before. 

In the meanwhile, it fucking sucks sometimes. Sure, it's easier not to fight. But I don't want to be that person, and I don't want to make that world. So I guess I've got to cope, huh?

Baleeted!

A Reminder

Dear Internet, 

A few weeks ago, I made a present for you. But you might have missed it on Twitter, so I thought I'd mention it here, too. 

The next time you're feeling a little blue or lost, and you just don't know if it's all going to be OK in the end, remember my present: WillItBeOK.com. 

Take care of yourself, and don't let the worry eat you up.

Love,

Andrea

Quitting Facebook

If you've been reading me for long, you know I talk a big game about ideals and activism. I'm all about taking principled stands for what I believe in -- at least in writing. But sometimes, you have to walk the walk, too. That's why I'll be deleting my Facebook account one week from today. 

Facebook has done some tremendous things for me. It's allowed me to connect and reconnect with friends and family I've missed terribly (or never even knew as well as I'd have liked to). And I'm going to regret losing that more than I can say. 

But Facebook has also crossed over so far to the Dark Side that I can no longer defend keeping an account just because it's a convenient method of keeping tabs on my Auntie Jill or my crew from high school. 

Facebook's corporate ethics seem nonexistent. The result is eroding privacy controls, selling out your personal data and habits via your friends, even installing apps to your profile without your knowledge or consent.

I can't condone this. I think Facebook has gone so far that even writing an angry blog post and email campaign just isn't sufficient; why should Facebook care how mad people get, if they still use the service?

So that's it for me. Sayonara, Facebook. I'll miss my friends, but I won't miss you.

Fanfiction: Threat or Menace?

Secret confession time: I used to write fanfiction. Tons of it. And worse than that, I totally wrote Mary Sue fanfic.

You'll have to forgive me. I was fourteen years old, and just doing what came naturally. I didn't even know what it was at the time. In fact, I only recently -- some twenty years later -- realized that's what it was. But me and a friend of mine had torn our way through ElfQuest, and we wanted to be a part of that world. So we wrote and illustrated new stories for the characters we loved in the universe we wanted to escape to.

This wasn't the beginning of my play with other people's IP, either. When I was a mere lass of eight years old, I remember vividly chasing my friends around the monkey bars, pretending I was Princess Leia, and they were Luke Skywalker and Han Solo and Darth Vader. 

Heck, when I was in high school, one of my creative writing teacher's favorite assignments was to have us write what was essentially fanfiction with literary characters -- Jay Gatsby meeting Dracula, perhaps. I recall rewriting the ending of A Tale of Two Cities as one of the high points of my high school literary career. At its heart, it's basically the same thing. Except that under the law, they are very different things indeed.

What brings on this deep, dark secret from the 8th grade? Well, wildly successful author Diana Gabaldon has posted her opinions on fanfiction. She sums up nicely at the beginning:

OK, my position on fan-fic is pretty clear: I think it’s immoral, I _know_ it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters.

She seems to be reconsidering this stance, based on a later post. But she's by far not the only one in the world with that opinion; you might even call it the default starting point, especially for the kinds of major franchises most likely to go full-on transmedia. So I'd like to talk for a bit about intellectual property, copyright law, and fandom. 

Copyright Law Sucks (and Also it Is Way Confusing)

I used to be able to doodle a mean Garfield, back in the day. But while this briefly made me shine in the eyes of my classmates, it also made me a criminal in the eyes of the law. I'd created an unlicensed copy of a copyrighted work! Oh noes! 

Worse, Garfield is trademarked, which brings in a whole different-but-related set of legal knotwork to untangle. And, indeed, this confusion between trademark and copyright is one of the key problems creators, fans, and IP holders deal with today.

Trademark holders can't let you get away with infringement -- like me and my doodled Garfield -- even if they want to. Because if they don't work their tails off to limit infringement, then the one time it legitimately costs them umpteen bajillion dollars, the court is going to laugh at them and say if they cared so much about their intellectual property, they would've nipped this thing in the bud with less-significant cases. 

As a result, it's equally illegal for me to draw Garfield on my math notes, draw Mickey Mouse on a birthday cake, or make a new header for my blog starring the entire cast of Yo Gabba Gabba. 

But is it illegal for me to write a story with Garfield in it?

Maybe, and maybe not. This is where it starts to gets murky, and it's only worse the further you get. If I'm using the character of Garfield to tell just another story starring Jon and Odie, it's probably not kosher. If I'm trying to sell it as a book on Lulu, it definitely isn't. But if I use the character of Garfield and transform the work into something entirely different -- like in Garfield Minus Garfield, for example -- it might be OK. There are cases where all's fair in creation and culture repurposing. 

Creators have used the fair use doctrine to write alternate novels about such famous works as Twilight and Gone With the Wind. If that's not commercialized fanfic, I don't know what is. But it's a gray area if there ever was one; fair use, satire, parody, they're all well and good if that's what you're making, but sometimes fair use is in the eye of the beholder. And if you were the owner of the Margaret Mitchell estate, you, too, might want to suppress the commercial release of such works. 

That's not even getting into the arcane world of movies, music, sampling and clearances. The medium you use to express yourself very much affects what aspects of copyright law you need to know about. I'm not saying you need a law degree to keep it all straight, but it sure would help; and as a creator who, on a good day, is working with several kinds of media at once... man, I sure would like it all to be simpler.

So that's the state of the world. Confusing, growing more confusing by the day. At least it keeps the IP lawyers employed in a down economy.

Transmedia and Fanfic

As I understand it, the entire point of making a transmedia property is depth of engagement. And the primary reason that people write (and read!) fanfiction is because they are so very engaged with a story that they can't bear for it to end, or they want to explore something that happened offscreen, or shine a new light on existing canon, or just plain old put their own faces into a story. 

I'll even go so far as to say that the entire point of transmedia is to build exactly the sort of fan culture in which fanfic and fanart thrive. Speaking as a creator, if somebody is making fanfiction around my work, that means I am doing it right. I'd like to see a lot more of it! 

That said, I also have a vested interest in keeping myself gainfully employed, and profiting from the juicy money-squeezings of my body of work, assuming there ever is such a thing. But where's the line between "paying me homage" and "ripping off my work"?

It's not exactly the letter of the law, but a lot of IP owners have historically put that line at the cash register. You write as much Kirk-on-Spock action as you need to, and they'll look away. And probably shudder a little, while they're at it. Just don't start shopping it around or slap it up on a print-on-demand service. 

That seems fair to me... but even that isn't clear-cut. In a world where a video of a kid hopped up on anesthetic can net six figures, even the line between commercial and noncommercial use starts getting murky. If I put my Kirk-on-Spock in a blog post and I happen to run ads, am I monetizing somebody else's IP? What if it's syndicated or aggregated to a third-party site that runs ads?

Free Culture

The legal solutions I've seen bandied about for these and similar questions usually involve draconian measures to protect copyrighted works from any unapproved use. It's part and parcel of the copyright piracy hysteria we see, and while that's a different ball of wax, it's the same body of law, so it all gets jumbled together.

Look, I don't want to live in a world where nobody can mashup The Beatles and Metallica, a documentary on music sampling simply can't exist because there is no way to get all of the proper clearances, and the age-old practice of playing in another creator's playground is criminalized. I want more creativity, not less.

So how do we fix it? Well, we need to loosen our death-grip on the reins of our IP. A lot.

Creators need to understand that derivative works make them money. When your work is being referenced in a song, a clip, a story, it's assuming cultural knowledge of the original work. Kirk-on-Spock doesn't make sense... unless you've seen Star Trek. And if somebody doesn't have that cultural knowledge, then the allegedly infringing work is actually acting as an advertisement for the original. You can bet paperback sales of Pride and Prejudice went through the roof when Pride and Prejudice and Zombies came out -- and that's a work that isn't even protected by copyright anymore!

Better, understand that volume of fan-generated works are a fantastic barometer for the success and longevity of your IP. Fan-created works tell you the temperature of your fan culture: How engaged they are, what they're interested in, what they hate. A good transmedia creator will even find ways to focus a thriving fan culture's creative energy. I've talked about how this made the Why So Serious campaign such a rousing success, and I stand by that.

So look, fanfiction isn't the enemy. It's definitely not immoral. It might or might not be illegal, but it definitely shouldn't be. And seeing it should make any creator cheer wildly that they've got a hit on their hands.

You can't stop the creative impulse, and I don't know why you'd want to. Find a way to work with it, and everybody wins. Stamp it out, and everybody loses.

Beyond the Brunette, New and Improved!

If you missed my talk at SXSW this year, I've got great news for you -- the full audio of the talk is now online, so I called in a favor from the diversely talented Jim Gramze and arranged for him to magically transform the slides and video into one beautifully orchestrated whole. Behold:

ARGs and Women: Moving Beyond the Hot Brunette from Andrea A. Phillips on Vimeo.

It's almost as good as being there! Except you won't be able to see my rockin' steampunk gloves this way. Too bad for you. 

If you're in the market for something a bit more low-key than this, you can also just listen to the audio, available from SXSW, and the original Keynote slides plus my notes are still on Slideshare. 

I'm really proud of how the talk went, and am always happy to take the conversation further. Let me know what you think!

Beyond the Brunette Online

I've put my slides up from SXSWi 2010 for my talk, ARGs and Women: Moving Beyond the Hot Brunette. I'm not embedding it here, however, because the slides are pretty worthless without my presentation notes, and I haven't worked out a way to get show the slides to display in the way I'd prefer. It's harder than it needs to be because I have embedded video, and Keynote's cutting off a bunch of pie charts when I export to PDF. Grrr. At any rate, I highly recommend you be sure to click on the "Notes on slide 1" tab before you start going through the show.

I do believe SXSW is planning to put up the audio of my actual talk at some point, and when that happens I'll try to put the slides and audio together in a single, perfect show. Until then, we'll all have to settle.

Heroes: Kate Harding

If you haven't heard of Kate Harding, boy howdy are you missing out. Ms. Harding is a blogger and activist devoted to the shocking idea that fat people should be treated like intelligent human beings, and not stupid sacks of moral failure. It's an idea whose time has definitely come.

She founded a blog, Shapely Prose, some years ago, that has been instrumental in forming a lot of my current thinking on feminism, fat, prejudice, and self-acceptance. This was my gateway to such earth-shaking ideas as "Eating a cupcake is not a morally charged act," and "Women should not be obligated to look hot for the benefit of random strangers." Through her blog I learned that people in the overweight BMI category are actually the ones likely to live the longest, and got some amazing perspective on what BMI looks like in practice. It's eyebrow-raising.

That blog is still active, though these days it's run largely by her equally witty co-bloggers; Harding herself has been busy using her pen for the forces of good on such topics as Roman Polanski, plus-size model Crystal Renn, and cyberbullying. Oh, and: She's got a book out.

Kate Harding, y'all. She's smart and funny. She tells it like it is and backs it up with science. She, too, isn't afraid of any consequences for sticking up for herself and what she believes in. 

This post is a part of Heroes Week 2010. Please post a link to a post about your own heroes in the open thread!

See You in Austin!

I am thrilled, boggled, amazed, and other combinations of excited-plus-surprised to say that I'm in the first batch of speakers for SXSW this year, announced today. My topic is ARGs and Women: Moving Beyond the Hot Brunette, and I find the more I think about this subject, the more I have to say about it. 

This will also be my first time at SXSW, so I feel like I need some mentoring. Anyone have any SXSW-related advice for me?

Augmented Reality & the iPhone

Augmented reality still has the aura to it of a far-future technology, something eternally five, ten, even twenty years away. But the truth is that we have the tech right now. I'm sure you've all seen GE's fun augmented reality demonstration. Or maybe Hidden Park. Or how about Kweekies? That's just a trickle compared to the flood we'll be seeing by this time next year.

AR hasn't taken the center stage yet, to be sure; but since it's inevitably coming, this means we're in for this decade's biggest and most significant format war. Forget HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray; who cares about dead media when digital distribution is the future anyway? No, the next big format war is one of platform, and has more in common with Xbox vs. PlayStation, or Mac vs. Windows.

A cabal of high-profile AR developers and researchers have come together to fire the first big shot across the bow in this looming battle. They've written an open letter to Apple asking the company to open up the iPhone SDK to provide developers with a public API to manipulate live video in real time. This is a crucial tool that would make the iPhone a powerhouse for mobile augmented reality applications. If you can't access live video, the device just can't access reality in order to augment it, so to speak.

I don't know if Apple will do it; they're a company that take their walled gardens very seriously. But hey, Apple, I think it would be a foolish business move not to. Developers are on your doorstep begging for the chance to make your device the go-to platform for mobile computing -- and you can give it to them now, not five years from now. How can you possibly turn that down?