Just a quick PSA for the World Science Fiction Convention/ChiCon folx who are attending and I may have told that I would meet up with this year. Unfortunately I have been impacted negatively by the historically bad flash floods and fires in North Texas/the Dallas-Fort Worth metro region while visiting my elderly/mobility disabled mother to watch her house during her reasearch convention travel season. The good news is that both my mother and I are physically safe and the house has been returned to relatively good order, but unfortunately we both are out a lot of time, labor, and (most tragically) eletronics and photography gear.
The good news is that for the first time, ChiCon has helped make WorldCon's fan/fen trakcs and general meetings available online. The newsletters and virtual attendance stuff is all available on the ChiCon Website and, as a queer and disabled attendee and fan, more importantly: the Code of Conduct and accessiblity commitments apply even to the virtual spaces. Unfortunately for me the natural disaster combining with the ongoing issues with KiwiFarms and organized harassment against queer, trans, black, non-white, AAPI, Jewish, Muslim, and semitic-language speaking tehcnologists and futurists has made it more or less impossilbe for me to attend in person or feel comfortable being involved in the escalation processes for incidents involving hate speech at the convention itself. Those of you who know that I have been involved in disaster recovery and content moderation since the 2000s an probably imagine the kinds of things I've seen both during GamerGate and while employed at Google in the Network Infrastructure/Networking R&D groups dealing with queer, trans, non-binary, and broadly not-rich and well connected parts of the incidents that lead to me supporting the Alphabet Women's Walkout, Cancel Maven, Drop Dragonfly, and ultimately refusing to work with certain people inside of Google who were enabling these harassment campaigns via their positions in R&D Management.
2022 has been worse in terms of the kinds of disinformation and flagrant incitement of violence that I've seen online since the 1990s. So I want to state this in no uncertain terms, as an individual and a fan of science fiction and a games developer:
- I do not care how you voted in the Hugos or Nebulae of the past.
- I do not care how you vote in WSFS business meetings, to a large extent.
- I do think that the WSFS's adoption of language supporting Ukraine against the Russian invasion is a good move, full stop.
- I continue to believe that science fiction, science fantasy, and speculative fiction more broadly is a global effort, just like all forms of arts, letters, philosophy, and science. I do not believe that disinformation and discrimination, including providing CDN and DDoS protection services for people who organize campaigns of violence against the disabled, the "retarded" (used advisedly, though it has been directed at me), autistics, women, Jews, Muslims, Athiests, Catholics, Priests, Orthodox Christians, Unorthodox Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Shinto practitioners, Daoists, Quakers, Unitarians, or other objectors to violence and genocide should be treated as "theoretical" threat against scientists, writers, bloggers, podcasters, streamers, or producers of any form of "content", "letters", "games", "toys", or "software" in any sense.
- It has never been "just" trolling.
- It has never been "just" for the lulz when it comes to organizing bombs at MGH/BGH/childrens' hospitals.
- The movement to force Cloudflare to drop hosting services for KiwiFarms has been successful only in forcing the board room of that company to pay attention to its ethical obligations to other clients and peers per its hosting and peering agreements.
- If you attempt to escalate your hatred for queer, disabled, Jewish, Muslim, Asian, Black, Hispanic, or Israeli writers by attacking WorldCon or the Hugos digitally or otherwise, you may get banned from World Science Fiction Society events. This includes spamming chat rooms and most especially trying to bring down streams. Do not do it. Chicagans know how to prosecute and the FBI has a good track record of following up on previous incidents targeting comics events in that city like Midwest FurFest. You will get caught, eventually. You will go to jail. Your favorite poltiico or blogger will not save you then.
To me, the real heroines of Science Fiction have always been the editors, bloggers, zinesters, fans, and letter writers who wanted to imagine a better future for people like me who can't talk well but can write well. Who can sign in terms of language, but have to work for months to say a few syllables correctly in an interview. Time will tell if the Internet infrastructure titans of the 1990s and 2000s adapt to the present realitiy of 2022, rifted by a global war sparked in Ukraine but waged online and off since the early 2010s. I go to conventions for the same reason my grandparents and parents chose to let me read Jim Lovell's memoirs when I was a teen:
We have to imagine a better future for ourselves and for all of creation, whatever we believe. We have to imagine going to the moon as friends, not foes. We have to imagine an Antarctica unspoiled by war. We have to imagine exploring the depths of our own world with the passion and energy that propelled Goddard to work on liquid fuels. We have to dare to believe in our futures and work to build those futures with all the voices and peoples who can dream of peace. In Arts Bacc de moi:
Sempere Aude: ad astra poetica et res publica scientia. Dare to believe in the arts and poetry of the free writers of science.
