elmyra

questionoftheday asks: What is your internet history? What websites were you a part of that might not be around anymore, and do you have any fond memories of them?

My answer:

Oh gods, I'm a fandom grandparent at this point. I've been elmyra on the internet since 1997. The very first place I was elmyra in was a tiny German-language MUD I used to play with my friends called Silberland. The name kind of stuck. I remember Usenet (and some German-language Babylon 5 groups) and mailing lists (the German Tolkien mailing list in particular). I was elmyra on LiveJournal. I am elmyra on Twitter, which has been my main online home for over a decade now. Then elmyra became associated with real!me (because Twitter and Facebook are evil and because I started writing about politics), so I tried to keep a separate fannish identity for a while. And now real!me/elmyra is a porn researcher, so I might as well merge them again because it's not like the world doesn't know I look at porn for a living. I'm (sometimes quite creative) variants of Neurotic Squirrel on AO3 and Tumblr, and I have accounts with variants of that on here and on Twitter but I don't use those much. Oh and I think there might still be one on LJ that I've lost access to and was unable to purge. Digital debris and all that. Oh, and I'm also elmyra on AO3, for tag wrangling an non-porn purposes.

I think one of my fondest internet memories is from pre-elmyra, pre-interactive days. You see when I was in highschool (I'm talking 1995-96 here), we had this art teacher who was Canadian and being half the world away from her family, she was quite savvy at internet things. So one day Miss Chai took us all to the computer lab and taught us to use browsers and search engines. Which in turn allowed me to find the Babylon 5 fan site, The Lurker's Guide. And so every morning, I would get into school an hour before class, and go to the library, and sit two computers down from Miss Chai (who was presumably emailing friends and family in Canada), and browse the Lurker's Guide. I think out of all my teachers, Miss Chai probably had the biggest identifiable impact on my life.

Just in case people are still using this to keep up with my actual blog, a bit of a catch-up post. Long time no see, let's go back to September.

I may have done some dramatic readings of Paul Bernal's excellent Mr Gove stories. Dedicated to the teachers among you.

I spent a significant chunk of September talking about the intersection of feminism and digital rights, including at the F-Word, and at the Virtual Gender conference. (Video may or may not work.)

I made a biphobia bingo card. It's been an educational experience.

I shredded a documentary on teenagers and the internet for ORGZine, and then shredded it some more.

I explained how, while biphobia is very much present in the LGBT community, cishet people had their share of it to answer for.

I blogged about women in space for Ada Lovelace Day.

I threw my toys out of the pram over being asked where I was from.

I mused about inclusion within the LGBT/QUILTBAG+ community.

I terrified the ORGZine editor with my assessment of Google's new ToS.

I declared Joss Whedon Cunt of the Day. He deserved it.

I was somewhat snarky about Stonewall's new homophobic bullying campaign and media coverage thereof.

And today I wrote a somewhat harrowing post on Transgender Day of Remembrance, which is tomorrow.

Dear Prime Minister,

We are writing to you about your proposals for default filtering of the Internet.

You have promised parents 'one click to protect the whole family'. This is a dangerous and misguided approach. Focusing on a default on filter ignores the importance of sex and relationship education and sexual health. Worse, you are giving parents the impression that if they install Internet filters they can consider their work is done.

Read more.

We would like you to drop your proposals for default on filtering. We urge you instead to invest in a programme of sex and relationship education that empowers young people and to revisit the need for this topic to be mandatory in schools. Please drop shallow headline grabbing proposals and pursue serious and demonstrably effective policies to
tackle abuse of young people.

Yours,

Brooke Magnanti
Laurie Penny
Zoe Margolis
Charles Stross
Jane Fae
Holly Combe
Jane Czyselska
Milena Popova

It was pointed out to me that I tweet a lot of feminist critiques of pop culture and that some of my followers would like an introduction or 101 of the concepts I use. Be warned: this series of posts will ruin your enjoyment of popular culture forever. You will go back to your favourite movie or book or TV show and it will never be the same. Proceed at your own peril.

The way this is going to work is that I'll cover - briefly - some of the key concepts. I will try to give examples (many bad, hopefully some good), and I will try to link you to some further reading. Let's start by setting the bar as low as it gets, with a couple of numerical methods of analysis: the Bechdel Test, the Austen Exemption and the Sexy Lamp Test.

Read more.

I was on Truthloader's live debate yesterday talking about web filtering and some of the other things this government should be doing instead:

I am a survivor: when I was a teenager, I was sexually abused by an uncle. So when David Cameron proposes a raft of measures which amount to censorship of the internet, all in the name of protecting "our children and their innocence", I find that deeply offensive.

I am not going to tell you about the potential harmful side effects of these measures, or why none of them are actually going to work. Other people can do this far better than me.

Instead, I want to move on this debate. I want to tell you about some of the factors in my environment that made my abuse possible, because maybe that will give Mr Cameron some idea of the real issues he needs to tackle if he wants to protect children.

Read more.

A couple of weeks ago I got my hands on @TwkLGBTQ, a QUILTBAG rotation curation account on Twitter. 10,000 words and 1,500 tweets later...

We started with a discussion of labels.

We talked about coming out as bisexual.

We covered some stereotypes about bisexuality.

We talked about bi invisibility.

We looked at bisexual characters in fiction and bisexual role models in real life.

I mused on the privilege of passing and the burden of invisibility.

We talked about bisexual issues in the workplace.

We also talked about threesomes, promiscuity and the assumption of availability.

I jotted down some thoughts on being intersectionally bisexual.

I covered domestic violence in the LGBT community.

We talked about bisexuality and gender.

And finally I talked about what I'd learned from curating @TwkLGBTQ for a week.

So @drcabl3 asked this morning if the structures of the internet (TCP/IP, http, physical layer, etc.) were inherently patriarchal. There's no way in hell I'm answering that in 140 characters, but I'm not sure if it's a proper blog post either, so I'm going to kick it around here for a while instead and see what happens.

I suspect this is a question you can answer either way based on your definition of terms. I'm also not convinced that it's a testable hypothesis. Is the Gherkin phallic? Hell yes. Would female architects free of millennia-long oppression design yonic buildings? Pass. So as a first answer, I'm going to go with mu.

I'm not a fan of attaching inherent moral value to scientific concepts and technologies. Is nuclear fusion evil because of Mutually Assured Destruction or good because that massive fusion reactor in the sky keeps us alive? Or possibly even evil because the massive fusion reactor keeps us a live and we as a species are a blight on the face of the earth? Mu. In much the same way I'm not convinced that a data exchange protocol can be inherently patriarchal.

Now, our use of technologies, and the social structures we build around them can be patriarchal. Technologies can be used to perpetuate unearned privilege for one group while oppressing others. With the internet, I'd argue that's not been the case so far. I'm biased and Evegny Morozov will almost certainly tell you I'm wrong but I'm inclined to believe that the Internet and the Web have enabled a much greater plurality of views to be much more visible in our society. They have enabled oppressed groups to bridge the chasms of geography, organise, and start making their voices heard. Yes, of course there are forces acting against that in the form of state and other censorship and surveillance, but by and large, so far I'd say oppressed groups have done rather well out of the internet.

Having said that, I see three challenges with how we've structured the technology and how we are using it that could in the end lead to perpetuating oppression.

1. Ownership structures: One of the things that worries me the most is that our entire communications infrastructure that we use for all this wonderful political activity - from the undersea cables to applications like Twitter - is in the hands of private companies. With the exception of a couple of community-run efforts of varying quality and independence (Wikipedia, Mozilla, Dreamwidth, the Archive of Our Own), our entire infrastructure is subject to the whims of the invisible hand. If Twitter decides there's money to be made in suppressing political discourse, or folds because there's not enough money to be made from our updates about sandwiches, we lose a huge amount of investment we've put into it in terms of community building, and we lose access to an absolutely vital piece of infrastructure. If BT decides to throttle the bandwidth of people downloading documents from WikiLeaks (or for that matter people who think Julian Assange should stand trial for rape in Sweden), we might be free to switch ISPs; if the consortia running the undersea cables decide to do the same, we're rather more screwed. I have two partial answers to this challenge - one for the capital-intensive infrastructure like undersea cables and hardware and one for applications and platforms. Net neutrality, ideally enshrined in law and international treaties, is absolutely vital when it comes to the former. Supporting community-run platforms like Dreamwidth and identi.ca and putting in place the right governance structures around those has to be one of the ways we approach the latter.

2. State control: This is of course the Evgeny Morozov side of the argument; that as well as presenting us with unprecedented opportunities, digital technology gives enormous amounts of power to the state. Surveillance has never been so easy - permanently attached to our mobile phones, we carry our very own digital spies in our pockets. Put a little pressure on Google and see search results related to, say, student protests or rape culture disappear from its pages. And yes, some people would notice, and a few would know how to get around that, but the jury's out on whether those would be enough to form a critical mass and inform the rest. This is where digital rights campaigning is vital. You all know the organisations I'm going to direct you to next: the Open Rights Group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EDRi. They're absolutely vital in setting the boundaries for what the state can and cannot do in a digital world, and we need to support them and remain vigilant on that front.

3. Who has the skills/access? And how do we define access? The technology and telecomms industry, as well as certain online spaces, continue to be notoriously male-dominated. Yes, we are making some progress in fixing that, but we are also experiencing significant backlash. Hardware manufacturers still see women as decoration. Anita Sarkeesian dared to imply that she might have an opinion about the representation of women in video games. Only 14 women applied to study Computing Science at Oxford last year (and the success rate for women was less than half that for men). What all of these illustrate is that women are still not quite equal on the internet - either in terms of technology or in terms of the perceived validity of their opinions and experiences. There are two things we've got to do in this area. The first is address the massive problem technology as a sector has in attracting and retaining female talent. That's not a problem with TCP/IP. It's a problem with our education system and media which continue to send the message that what is valued in a girl is pretty passivity, not smart activity; and it's a problem with our technology industry which takes every opportunity it can to snub women as both consumers and potential employees. The second is that we need to admit to ourselves that if women and other minorities are repeatedly and deliberately silenced and dismissed by abusive trolls, we have a massive free speech issue in our community. It doesn't matter if it's the state doing the censoring, or Facebook, or the trolls who tell women they deserve to be raped or killed - the effect is the same. That's not a problem with TCP/IP either - it's a problem with people. Access is not just about having the skills, the hardware and the internet connection. Access is also about feeling safe to speak out. And it's our responsibility to enable that.

Science and technology don't have intrinsic moral values. I find they rarely take sides. It's people that do, and it's people we need to work with to address that.

I've been bad at cross-posting between my blog and my LJ. Here's some stuff you might have missed:

I talked about Digital Colonialism over on ORGZine.

I threw my toys out of the pram over International Men's Day.

I completely failed to not talk about Thatcher. Twice.

And I took a brief look at the UK feminist movement's issues with language and intersectionality, and found us terribly outclassed by a 21-year-old hockey player. Oops.

Let's be clear on one thing here: we have the technology. We have the technology for me to be able to view any piece of digital video ever made, instantly, wherever I want, whenever I want. And another thing: I have absolutely no objection to paying for viewing said digital video; but I do object to so-called content providers taking the piss.

Case in point: LoveFilm vs Netflix

Read more.