Aaron Bady brilliantly sums up how bleakly bad the direction of this season has become.

You might say: but they have to finish it up! They can’t possibly go for another six seasons at the same pace! Or you could be like the director of episode six, Alan Taylor, and say “Oh, who cares about distance and plausibility, you guys all love the show no matter what.”

I felt compelled after watching episode six to draft a completely plausible rewrite that would: a) fit in the same number of episodes; b) be no more expensive than what was on screen; c) require no one to act like an idiot or to do things that are wildly implausible.

So here we go.

This is to me the most important kind of “textual poaching”, basically how fans demonstrate a kind of ghostwriting of the main text. Not the extensions of fan-fiction or shipping, but a sober critical re-examination of how another text was possible even given the material limitations on its production.

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Last season: After the Battle of the Bastards, Sansa flat out tells Jon Snow that she thinks she should be the Lady of Winterfell and he should be her general. The bannermen unfortunately screw it up and proclaim Jon Snow King of the North. He tries to appoint Sansa instead but they won’t have it. Sansa begins to brood and plot on how to become Queen, believing Jon is simply too much of a fuck up as a political leader. (Davos tells her about the events at Castle Black.) A minor adjustment, but an important one.

Episodes 1-3:

Arya kills the Freys. She visits Hot Pie while trying to decide what she’s going to do next, and hears about the current events at Winterfell, resolves to go there.

Daenerys lands at Dragonstone. She very sensibly moves her Dothraki and Unsullied primarily to the mainland and has them range threateningly towards the southeastern edges of King’s Landing. Her Tyrell and Dornish allies insist she immediately assault King’s Landing. Tyrion and Varys point out casualties and genocide and all that. The Tyrells and Dornish, annoyed, say that they’ll siege KL from the west, and when they’re in place, she’ll close the trap to the east.

They question Tyrion’s reliability and loyalty and demand that he prove he’s safe by sacking Casterly Rock. He agrees rather enthusiastically–he’s always hated the place anyway. DT and Tyrion agree to send some Unsullied fast march. Tyrion cautions against sending Tyrell and Dornish forces via ship, because “there’s an enemy fleet out there, we think”. Ellaria and Yara ignore him–what a twerp.

Euron ambushes them. The Unsullied take Casterly but they’re under attack from the sea–and they’ve got no artillery because the castle’s been stripped. Cersei and Jamie wipe out the Tyrells. DT despairs–are there no good allies for her in this shitty place?

Jon Snow, meantime, broods about zombies and sends *Davos* south to beg for the Dragon Queen’s help. To Sansa’s frustration, Jon Snow won’t talk much with his bannermen or give inspirational speeches–she has to do all the politicking. There are bannermen who are beginning to doubt–they don’t believe in the zombie thing, they think somebody’s got to solve the food thing.

Arya returns. She’s a bit disconcerted to find Sansa more or less in charge. Jon welcomes her but is plainly distracted and disconnected.

Sam’s plot as-is, including the magical Mormont cure, which is delivered by the end of Ep 3.

Episode 4:

Loot Train. Mormont arrives at Dragonstone and there is much rejoicing. Davos arrives and DT and Tyrion wonder if they have a two-front battle on their hands or an even better alliance than they had before. But he wants help with zombies! This is stupid! Daenerys finally agrees: she won’t go herself with her dragons, because who knows what the dangerous Cersei Lannister might do. She says: ok, I will send my very best friendzone Jorah Mormont north to investigate. If he says: there are zombies! Yow! Then I come with dragons.

Davos says: ok, I will come back too–but first I want to go fetch a kid from KL that I know, and I’ll smuggle a message to Jamie Lannister written by Tyrion telling them to surrender, put ’em off guard, right? Jamie Lannister receives the letter. Qyburn later steals it from him and shows it to Cersei.

Sam leaves the Citadel.

Sansa decides to have a disloyal bannerman punished harshly when he is heard openly speaking against the Starks. (Littlefinger put him up to it.) Arya witnesses the punishment without seeing the original provocation and becomes convinced that Sansa is damaged and is endangering the Starks.

Episode 5

Guess who’s coming to dinner? The Hound, Beric and Thoros show up at Winterfell. Sansa and Brienne do not trust them, throw them in jail. Arya is conflicted. But spying around she begins to discover what is making the bannermen restless: it’s Littlefinger. She consults with Sansa and hears the truth about what happened in Episode 4. She and Sansa ponder what to do–they can’t displace Jon or act completely independently of his nominal authority! But Jon won’t talk, he’s still obsessing about the zombies.

Davos, Jorah and Gendry show up. They decide to go to Castle Black with Hound, Beric, Thoros to show Jorah some zombies. Jon insists he has to come. Sansa is worried–does she have the authority to hold off the restlessness, esp. if Littlefinger is up to no good? But the Knights of the Vale are especially uncertain in their loyalty, and she needs them.

Jon and Company leave for Castle Black.

Bran returns about two hours after they leave and does all the weird stuff about seeing his sister’s trauma, etc. Littlefinger gives him the dagger and gets freaked out.

In meantime, Dany roasts the Tarlys and Tyrion is of many minds.

Cersei and Jamie have a conversation about a baby and loyalty.

Episode 6

They get to Castle Black. There’s a guy dying of cholera. Dolorous Edd says, wait a day to see a zombie. Jorah sees a zombie and says, fine, let’s send the raven to DT. The horn blows. There’s a giant army of a million zombies at the gate. They change the message to the raven, HELP NOW.

DT comes north with three dragons–Jorah says! And yeah, zombies are real, she roasts them, and then, bam! the Night King wounds but doesn’t kill Viserion.

The Magnificent Seven go out the gate in a doomed attempt to save the wounded dragon by keeping the zombies off of it. Much battle, DT is freaked out and just stays perched on the wall in terror. But after Thoros dies and some redshirts she sees that Viserion is going to die no matter what. She risks it and goes in with Drogon to choppa them out. They all get on the dragon–including dumbfuck Jon Snow–and the Night King gets ready for his second kill of the day. Then Benjen shows up and does the heroic last stand thing and distracts him. DT and the Magnificent Six escape intact on Drogon. They fly to Winterfell to confer.

When they arrive, the castle has erupted into unrest because Littlefinger has made his big play–he’s trying to force Sansa to marry him and to overthrow Jon. Littlefinger didn’t really plan on two dragons arriving, though.

Episode 7

Cold open: Arya takes out Littlefinger. Sansa and Li’l Mormont talk the bannermen down. Jon bends the knee to DT, DT appoints Sansa Queen of the North and asks Jon to come with her south as her chief general. They do goo-goo eyes at each other and then sneak away that night to consummate their relationship.

Ravens arrive: Euron has landed Iron Islanders at Casterly Rock to kill the Unsullied, Cersei is burning all the crops of the Reach and the Riverlands to force everyone to surrender. DT decides she has to go south and try to convince Cersei to sign a truce, and to bring Jon Snow with her. Jon surprises everyone when he leaps on Rhaegon and is able to ride him. Suddenly, Bran rolls into the courtyard to explain the real story and suddenly Sam and Gilly show up to say, “Yeah, that’s it man, it turns out Jon is a Targ.” Jon and DT look at each other and realize that they are nephew and aunt.

Just then, everyone senses that something strange has just happened–the winter wind blows insanely, there’s a bizarre light in the skies, and an odd howling noise. Turns out the Night King just used zombie Viserion to destroy the Wall. Castle Black is a ruin.

Jon and DT tell Sansa: you hold out as long as you can. We’ll be back with the biggest army we can get and two dragons. Sansa, Arya, Sam, Beric, etc., get ready for a big last stand. The Hound asks to go south–“I hear my brother is still around, the cunt.”

FIN

My first thought would be that calls for the resignation of the Silliman House masters at Yale are dangerously disproportionate to the email that they wrote in response to polite guidance from the Yale administration. I’ll come back to why that disproportionate response worries me so much later in this essay.

And yet I don’t entirely agree with the way that Erika Christakis chose to come at the issue. I wish everyone could back up a step so that the entire discussion is not about free expression vs. censorship or between safe spaces and stereotype threats. Once the discussion has locked into those terms, then the “free speech” advocates are stupidly complicit in defending people who show up at parties in blackface or are otherwise costumed or having themed parties with deliberately offensive stereotypes. Once the discussion has locked into those terms, people who want to say that such stereotypes have a real, powerful history of instrumental use in systems of racial domination are forced to understand that advocacy as censorship–and are also unable to leave space open to hear people like Erika and Nicolas Christakis as making any other kind of point.

The real issues we should be talking about are:

1) The concepts of appropriation and ownership. This is where moves are being made that are at least potentially reactionary and may in fact lead to the cultural and social confinement or restriction of everyone, including people of color, women, GLBQT people, and so on. In some forms, the argument against appropriation is closely aligned with dangerous kinds of ethnocentrism and ultra-nationalism, with ideas about purity and exclusivity. It can serve as the platform for an attack on the sort of cosmopolitan and pluralistic society that many activists are demanding the right to live within. Appropriation in the wrong institutional hands is a two-edged sword: it might instruct an “appropriator” to stop wearing, using or enacting something that is “not of their culture”, but it might also require someone to wear, use and enact their own “proper culture”.

When I have had students read Frederick Lugard’s The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, which was basically the operator’s manual for British colonial rule in the early 20th Century, one of the uncomfortable realizations many of them come to is that Lugard’s description of the idea of indirect rule sometimes comes close to some forms of more contemporary “politically correct” multiculturalism. Strong concepts of appropriation have often been allied with strong enforcement of stereotypes and boundaries. “Our culture is these customs, these clothing, this food, this social formation, this everyday practice: keep off” has often been quickly reconfigured by dominant powers to be “Fine: then if you want to claim membership in that culture, please constantly demonstrate those customs, clothing, food, social formations and everyday practices–and if you don’t, you’re not allowed to claim membership”.

And then further, “And please don’t demonstrate other customs, clothing, food, social formations and everyday practices: those are for other cultures. Stick to where you belong.” I recall a friend of mine early in our careers who was told on several occasions during her job searches that since she was of South Asian descent, she’d be expected to formally mentor students from South Asia as well as Asian-Americans, neither of which she particularly identified with. I can think of many friends and colleagues who have identified powerfully with a particular group or community but who do not dress as or practice some of what’s commonly associated with that group.

What’s being called appropriation in some of the current activist discourses is how culture works. It’s the engine of cultural history, it’s the driver of human creativity. No culture is a natural, bounded, intrinsic and unchanging thing. A strong prohibition against appropriation is death to every ideal of human community except for a rigidly purified and exclusionary vision of identity and membership.

Even a weak prohibition against appropriation risks constant misapplication and misunderstanding by people who are trying to systematically apply the concept as polite dogma. To see one example of that, look to the New York Times article, which describes at one point a University of Washington advice video that counsels people to avoid wearing a karate costume unless you’re part of the real culture of karate. But karate as an institutional culture of art and sport is already thoroughly appropriated from its origins in Okinawa, and it was in turn an appropriation of sorts from Chinese martial arts–and no martial arts form in the world today is anything even remotely like its antecedents in practice, form or purpose. Trying to forbid karate costuming to anyone but a truly authentic “owner” of the costume is a tragic misunderstanding of the history of the thing being regulated. It’s also a gesture that almost certainly forbids the wearing of a costume that has a referent that is not wholly imaginary. If a karate outfit is appropriation for anyone but a genuine Okinawan with a black belt, then so also are firefighters, police, soldiers, nurses, doctors, astronauts and so on. Even imaginary characters are usually appropriations of some kind of another, drawn out of history and memory.

It is precisely these kinds of discourses about appropriation that are used by reactionaries to protest Idris Elba being cast as Heimdall, or to assert that a tradition of a particular character or cultural type being white or male or straight means it must always be so. It might be possible to configure a critique so that appropriation from below is always ok and appropriation from above is never ok, but that kind of categorical distinction itself rests on the illusion of power being rigid, binary and fixed rather than fluid, performative and situational.

What I think many activists mean to forbid is not appropriation but disrespect, not borrowing but hostile mockery. The use of costumes as weapons, as tools of discrimination. But it’s important to say precisely that and no more, and not let the word appropriation stand in for a much more specific situational critique of specific acts of harmful expression and representation. “Appropriation” is being used essentially to anticipate, to draw a comprehensive line proactively in order to avoid having to sort out with painful specificity which costumes and parties are offensive and which are not after the fact of their expression.

2) But this leads to my second point: “appropriation” is being used for the convenience of custodial authority, for the use of institutions, for the empowerment of a kind of kindly quasi-parental control over communities.

Institutions–like college administrations and particularly the legal advisors they employ–don’t like situational judgments, they don’t like critiques that apply with strong force in some situations and don’t apply at all in others. So they often seek to rework demands for change into rules and guidelines that can be applied evenly to all subjects at all times. That’s one reason why appropriation as a concept at least has the potential to force people to perform the identities they claim according to a pre-existing sketch in the hands of institutional power.

Custodial authority in this respect and many others is a danger for other reasons. Here I can’t do much more than echo Fredrik deBoer’s warning against “University Inc.”: the custodial university quickly becomes the neoliberal corporate university. On some campuses, student activists are incidentally or accidentally strengthening the capacity and reach of custodial power over faculty, staff and students alike. Among other consequences, this change in academic institutions often puts faculty from underrepresented groups at much more intense risk: student activists are sometimes accidentally undercutting one of their most cherished objectives.

Even when the people in the crosshairs do not have that vulnerability, they have the basic vulnerability that all working professionals have in the disastrous political economy of early 21st Century America. In the Christakis’ case and many others, I feel as if simplistic ideas of asymmetrical power and “punching up” are being used to overlook the potentially disastrous consequences of introducing greater precariousness into the lives of middle-aged professionals. Sometimes the consequences of failed leadership is sufficient cause to warrant making an individual’s life precarious, and sometimes the asymmetry of power is enough that one can sleep easy about the consequences–say, with the resignation of the University of Missouri’s president, who I think we can say will in fact land on his feet. But often not. What’s being said to the Christakises in those videos is serious business, and I don’t know that those saying it seem to realize it is, even though many of them clearly feel with legitimate passion that what was said by Erika Christakis is also serious business that makes them feel unsafe in a place where they prize a sense of security. It’s a cliche, but here something of “two wrongs don’t make a right” is important.

This is also a concern about the future of academic institutions themselves. This is the other problem with some of these protests. I feel badly for everyone today in that everything they write on social media, every protest they attend, every response they give, has some chance of being seized upon by commenters all over the world. Nobody was looking at my college life with that kind of attention. But for anyone who aspires to political action,even action as intimate and simple as seeking personal safety and happiness, they have got to pay attention to the infrastructure surrounding that action, and to the consequences that will flow from it. Bit by bit, protests that seem to assert that yes, the university is indeed a world completely apart from the social and cultural realities around it, add fuel to the fires being set by reactionary politicians all around the United States. Bit by bit, protests where the rhetoric that is meant to be strictly local but is turned national or global end up looking tone-deaf or disproportionate. This could be a learning experience: liberal arts learning is supposed to increase the capacities of students to speak, think, write and act in the world around them. But for it to be a learning experience, in some cases students (and faculty) will have to treat the question of how a particular claim will sound or mean outside of the local context seriously. And they will need to think very carefully about matching critical demands to visions of proportionality that sound reasonable to more than just the group at hand.

3) This leads in turn to my third point. What is going on with struggles over Halloween costumes and much else besides within college and university culture has implications for the futures of liberal arts-educated students. And they are not the implications that are commonly drawn either by “free speech advocates” or by defenders of current campus activism.

“Free speech”, broadly speaking, is not what is at risk in most campus disputes. Occasionally it is to some extent: that’s how I interpret the seriously misconceived protests at Wesleyan recently against the student newspaper. Even in the case of Wesleyan, however, the initial impulse to inhibit or constrict what can be said gave way to something more managerial and neoliberal, this time not from administration but from student leadership itself. The student assembly proposed cutting the funding of the paper in the name of a drive for efficiency, having it “compete” for positions against others with an inbuilt incentive-based reward for incorporating diversity.

What I think that move suggests is that some of the drive for cultural transformation, with its constant turn towards custodial forms of managerial and institutional power, may be in danger of turning away from an ideal of creating safety and security for all towards an ideal of governance over others. That the struggles now underway have at least some danger of congealing into an intramural struggle for elite power in the political economy to come. On one side, the future economic elites: the students from selective institutions feeding into the finance industry and Silicon Valley. On the other side, the future cultural managers and bureaucrats: the students from selective institutions feeding into consultancies, non-profits, risk management administration, human resources, into the civic middlemen of a future capitalism.

Where that danger becomes clearest is precisely in the talk of guidance and guidelines, suggestions and “soft rules”. Not so much in the talk itself, but in who the talk is aimed at. Free speech advocacy tends to see every guideline from an institution as a law, and turn to a libertarian vocaculary to contest it. The issue is less the making of law and more the incipient character of class hierarchy in the political economy to come.

One of the things that I heard coming from a substantial wave of student activism here several years ago was that they held themselves to be already knowledgeable about all the things that they felt a good citizen and ethical person should know. It was the other students, the absent students, the students who don’t study such subjects, who worried them. And some of the activists had a touching faith in a way in the power of our faculty’s teaching to remake the great unwashed of the student body. If only they took the right classes, they’d do the right thinking. As one Swarthmore student in spring 2013 said in the group I was in, “I can’t believe there are students here who graduate without having heard the word intersectionality.”

This moment worried me, even though it is important as always to remember: this was a young person, and I said things under similar circumstances that I would be deeply embarrassed to hear quoted directly back to me. It worried me because I hear that same concern a lot across the entire space of cultural activism, both on and off-campuses.

It worries me first because that student and many similar activists are wrong when they assume that what they don’t like in the culture is a result of the absence of the ideas and knowledge that they hold dear. Far more students here have been in a course where concepts like “intersectionality” come up than this student thought. All political ideologies in the contemporary American public sphere, from the most radical to the most reactionary, have a troubling tendency to assume that agreement with their views is the natural state of the mass of people except for a thin sliver of genuinely bad actors, and therefore where a lack of agreement or acceptance holds, it must be because the requisite knowledge has been kept from the masses. This is a really dangerous proposition, because it blinds any political actor to the possibility that many people have have heard what you have to say and don’t agree for actual reasons–reasons that you’ll have to reckon with eventually.

It worries me second because I think some activists may be subconsciously thinking that if they can sufficiently command custodial or institutional power, they will not have to reckon with such disagreement. Not only does that mistake custodial power as permanently and inevitably friendly to their own interests, it is where the temptation to use class power against other social groups will enter in, has already entered in.

This is what worries me most. The thing that I wish that student had recognized is that some of the people that he wishes knew the word intersectionality already know the reality of it. They might not have the vocabulary he does, but they have the phenomenology right enough. Perhaps more right than the student did.

I worry, as in the case of Halloween costumes and much else, that at least some cultural activists are setting themselves up as future commissioners of culture over other social classes and their worlds, that this is as much about admonishing people “out there” for their failure to use the right terms, for their outre mannerisms and affect, for their expressive noncompliance. That this is all about kids who will become upper middle-class (or rich) through access to education judging and regulating kids who will not have that status or education, no matter where the educated kids started in life. That making blanket policies about Halloween costumes and much else might become a building block of class differentiation, part of a system of middle-class moral paternalism.

That’s what an earlier generation of cultural activism left me doing as a young graduate who wanted to be an “ally”: piously correcting people outside of my immediate social universe whenever life put me into close contact with them. Often when it was the most innocent and well-intended on my part, it gave the greatest offense, as when I once started talking about the importance of working-class unionism with my non-union working-class cousins that I was meeting for the first time at my paternal grandfather’s house.

At least in some cases, the entire infrastructure of current cultural activism is disabling the need for careful listening, for patience, for humility, at the moments where it is needed most, particularly within the ethical commitments that many activists themselves treasure and articulate. That’s why guidelines and rules and custodial dictates and finger-wagging about general concepts like appropriation are a problem: they take what is profoundly situational and circumstantial and turn it systematic. They interrupt rather than intensify attention. They make a spectrum of expressive practice into a right-wrong binary.

We need to tell someone thinking of wearing blackface to a party to absolutely stop right there and think again. We need to tell someone planning a fraternity party with a “gang theme” to cut that shit out or else. Neither of those moments is meaningful expression or harmless fun, and there needs to be no room for them. But we also need to not give ourselves permission to piously tell the kid in the karate uniform that they’re appropriating someone’s culture, or to inform the guy in the cowboy uniform that cowboys were nothing but agents of genocidal conquest.

We need to not self-nominate as authorities over culture, especially the speech and cultural activity of people whom we arrogantly judge don’t know as much about it as we do. We need to be in culture, in circulation, even acting through appropriation and imitation, a part of the crowd and not above it. We are all dancers, not choreographers; our only choreographer is the endless, ceaseless and sometimes abrasive motion of human thought and expression in a never-simple world.

Doyle uses the Glen Ridge rape case, particularly the relationship between an infamous lyric in a Beastie Boys’ song and the actions of one of the rapists, to offer an olive branch to artists and performers. I’m compressing a long and careful development of the argument of the piece, but fundamentally the analysis goes like this: activists know that the artists are “good people”, but if so, when you find out that the content of your expressive work is in the heads of “bad people” or is associated with “bad actions”, you should want to avoid that content in the future. Doyle couches this almost as a secular concern for the souls of artists and performers: “it must be one of the worst feelings in the world”, to discover that something you sang or joked or wrote or painted has been cited by or admired by a person who associates that cultural work with their own commission of evil.

The essay is very careful in the early going to avoid simplistic claims about causality. The content of expressive culture doesn’t cause bad actions to happen, Doyle initially acknowledges. The lyric didn’t cause the rape, it just informed it, gave it substance, suggested its horrific specificities. But by the end of the essay, that’s no longer the case: bad culture not only causes harm to the feelings or subjectivities of some who encounter it, but we’re back to the content of culture causing people to have explicit thoughts, thoughts that have tangible ideological intent to discriminate or harm. (A “man who believes all black people are criminals is going to shoot an unarmed black man”.) I think here Doyle demonstrates what has become a characteristic view of a lot of current identity-based activism: that discrimination, oppression and racism originate from the hidden interiority of individuals, that “bad action” is located in “bad thinking” and “bad personhood”, that bad thinking has a kind of explicit propositional character, and that its propositional content bad is a concentrated, distilled form of everyday language and representation. By the end of the essay, Doyle isn’t worrying about whether that shooter has a song lyric playing in his head when he shoots, but whether the song lyric got him to shoot when he wouldn’t have otherwise done so.

So by this point, the olive branch is this: if you don’t want to be the person who causes someone to do evil, then listen to us when we tell you that what you just said or performed or visualized is going to cause someone to do evil. Because, Doyle says, we know (we think we know) that you aren’t evil. It is almost a doppleganger of the debate on guns: comedians and others are portrayed as if they believe jokes don’t hurt people, people hurt people; Doyle is offering them the chance to think that it’s just jokes, jokes or art or culture as a technology that is separable from the personhood of its maker. You, she argues, can know that “some people are flammable” and you, she argues, can “be careful about where the spark lands”.

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Put in this fashion, this is another round in a venerable debate about the responsibility of artists for the consequences of their art. A thought which, I have to confess, first fills me with a certain degree of professorial and middle-aged weariness. It is not that I want citations galore, but I do wish we could get some degree of acknowledgement that this is an ongoing conversation where many good points and difficult experiences have already been had. This does not mean it is impossible to come to new understandings, to move ahead, and every generation also has to undertake its own encounter with fundamental human problems. But just knowing that you are not the first to think these things tends to moderate the degree to which you speak as a missionary might speak to a heathen, as if you’re delivering a message that up to this point has never been heard. That’s especially important if you mean to offer an olive branch. We don’t hate you as a person, we just hate your jokes! is an easier message for a comedian to take, I am guessing, if it is offered as the latest modest turn of a familiar dilemma.

But this point opens up into another landscape of difficulty for this kind of argument. First, Doyle’s approach strikes me as a fairly typical example of the way that current activism has amended a postmodern approach to interpretation and hermeneutics, I think in some ways without knowing that something’s been left out. Foucault announced the “death of the Author”, which to simplify somewhat meant in his thinking and much of other postmodernist or poststructuralist theory, that to understand what a text meant had little to nothing to do with discovering what the producer of that text thought that it meant. For all sorts of reasons: the producer was no longer understood to be a masterful individual agent in control of their own consciousness and intention: power and culture and institutions and history all radiated through the Author like light shining through a prism and thus spoke within whatever the Author produced. But also: the audience, the reader, the viewer, determined what the text meant, and determined that within the circumstances of a single moment of interpretation. It could mean one thing today and another thing tomorrow even to the same person, it could mean one thing before it was used or cited or deployed and another thing after it was used, it could mean two things at once or ten things, it could mean nothing fixed or determinate at all. The text could be paired with another text and change meaning; it could mean something different in a library or a bookstore or read aloud on a tape; it could mean one thing if it was held by a preacher and thrown into a fire and another thing if it was read lovingly to a child in front of a fireplace. I caricature a bit: postmodern approaches to interpretation did not hold, as they are often accused of holding, that texts meant everything or nothing, that signifiers floated utterly free. But it was important in this style to say that meaning was a very large, messy and protean space even for the most seemingly banal or straightforward texts, and that context mattered as much as text, that saying that a certain work always meant something no matter where it was or who was reading it, was a kind of folly.

The postmodern emphasis on language preceding and shaping thought and thought shaping action is intact in this new activist stance, but not the indeterminacy and multiplicity of meaning. And the Author has been brought forth from his grave, but not entirely to a new life. Doyle, like many, argues that the meaning of culture is often quite determinate, and it should be determined not by an act of discerning interpretation but in relationship to a set of social subjects. E.g., meaning still resides in that sense with the audience and with usage and context, but only some audiences and some contexts. Only two audiences have authority to make meaning, in this view: the people who use expressive culture deliberately as a weapon and the people who are wounded by that weapon. The Author is being forgiven here: the Author does not wound. The Author is only the blacksmith who makes the sword on an anvil. Whether the sword is wielded by the righteous or the wicked, or left above the mantlepiece, is not the Author’s will–unless he deliberately peddles it to the wicked.

Anyone else who claims, however, to see the sword as spit for grilling meat, or as a fashion accessory, or as demonstration of metallurgical skill, or as a symbol of aristocratic nostalgia, or as a visual stimulus for writing fantasy novels, or as one of a class of crafted objects, etc., is being ruled out of bounds. Those other meanings and interpretations are unavailable if there is someone somewhere who has been wounded.

Let me try to make the problem more concrete and responsive to Doyle’s argument. Doyle focuses on the documented presence of a lyric about sexual assault with a baseball bat in the thinking of a young man who sexually assaulted a woman with a baseball bat. The first problem with that focus is, “What do we do about the presence of that lyric in the minds of so many who never did anything of the sort?” This point needs to be made carefully, because lurking behind it is the callowness and stupidity of slogans like “All Lives Matter”.

This is a genuine mystery if the argument is made that words and texts and performances do have (or can have) a singular meaning and do reliably serve as the predicate of bad thinking, bad personhood, and bad action. When media critics predict, as they have for decades, that the representation of violence in media will create violent people and violent action in some sort of rough tandem (the more of the first, then the more of the latter) and that doesn’t happen (it didn’t happen), that should mean that the initial assertion that the representation of violence has a fixed meaning and a fixed relationship to self-fashioning is just plain wrong. What it means is that if there’s more violence represented and less violent action that many people consuming that violent media are interpreting it and understanding it in ways that don’t actually incline them mimetically towards what they’ve seen, towards enactment. It means, well, that lots of things are happening when that media is consumed, and not just lots of things across the whole society, but lots of things in every single person.

When I’ve gotten into debates over the years with violence-in-media activists, one of the responses I often hear is, “Well, we’re not concerned with what well-educated, economically comfortable people in stable homes think when they watch violent media, we’re concerned about it as a contributing factor to violence in impoverished, marginalized and unstable homes”. At which point, my response is that “violent media” is being used as a substitute and alibi for poverty, inequality and injustice. It’s being made to stand in for the whole because the whole is perceived as too big and too difficult to attack. If that move were really about a strategic subdivision of a complex problem into small and manageable ones, it might be ok, though even there the whole point of thinking strategically is to prioritize, and violent media’s negligible and difficult-to-demonstrate contribution to violent action should be a low priority even in that context. But the problem is that small and manageable tasks should require small and manageable contributions of labor. Trying to cleanse the culture of violent video games or shows–or to get comedians to stop telling offensive jokes–is not a small or manageable task. So what happens is that the strategy swallows the whole; the small task comes to stand in for the entirety of the problem. Violent media become the way that one set of critics talk about poverty, and so they stop naming poverty for what it is. The enormity of structure disappears from view and becomes equivalent to the manageable choice of what to watch or play that night, or how to film a particular scene. In making a big problem open to our agency as individuals, we flatter ourselves too much. It’s as much an entrepreneurial or self-promoting move as it is a practical one.

Let me raise one last thought to trouble Doyle’s point. People who do evil sometimes leave in their wake considerable evidence about what they were watching, what they were listening to, what they liked and identified with in culture. The story is often told, for example, that Richard Nixon watched “Patton” and was profoundly influenced by it in his decision to illegally invade Cambodia. This story is often compared with the fact that the same film supposedly played a key role in getting the Israeli and Egyptian delegations to agree to the Camp David accords. Same film, seen in very different ways by different individuals and in different contexts. Score one for postmodernism, or maybe just old-fashioned critical analysis. It’s fair to say, “If someone tells you they were hurt by a joke, you should listen”. If there’s a fire where your sparks fell, pay attention. But it’s equally fair to say, “If someone else grabs the spark and builds a warming campfire with it, or cooks a meal over it, or makes a light from it, take note of that.” And equally fair to note that lightning starts fires too–and strikes in ways that no one expects.

After all, in the wake of some of the evil things that people have done, the archives of culture they leave behind often contain texts and songs and performances and images that none of us would intuitively see as a predicate of that evil. Much as I find clowns scary, I would not say that John Wayne Gacy’s obsession with clowns can be predictably “read out” from the art of clowning, nor that clowns ought to take their makeup off as a result. Murderers, rapists, bigots: populate the rogues’ gallery as you will, and you will find that what they viewed and heard and read are often not at all obviously tied to their actions. If you understand social evil as originating from bad thought and bad language and bad culture, and you keep finding that the inventory of social evil’s cultural world is brimming over with much more than you expected, you either have to decide that your understanding of the relationship between representation and action is too simplistic or that there is far more that artists and writers and comedians should have to be responsible for not painting or writing or saying. I think that’s the prospect that makes Patton Oswalt angry and other comedians afraid.

But there’s another mirroring complexity worth respecting: that the inventory of people who have fought for social justice–or who have suffered social injustice–is often also more capacious and contradictory than you’d expect if you think there’s a close relationship between social action and cultural consumption. That people suffering oppression sometimes see meaning and possibility even in texts that are very literally dedicated to that oppression, that the richness and indeterminacy of meaning flows in many directions.

The unpredictability of meaning, in so many different ways, suggests that our first and last response to it should be humility, should be a kind of principled uncertainty about what we think a joke will mean, can mean, has meant. Which is an uncertainty that should afflict comedian and critic alike. You might indeed be showering sparks on flammable people, or even calling down the lightning in an open field. But equally what looks like a spark might be a light in the darkness, or a warming memory of a distant flame. We should not manage that uncertainty by requiring everyone to perform and listen while covered in fire-retardant foam.

Or to think that the problem is just Gawker, its history and culture as an online publication. There’s something to that: Gawker writers and editors have often cultivated a particularly noxious mix of preening self-righteousness, inconsistent to nonexistent quality control, a lack of interest in independent research and verification, motiveless cruelty and gutless double-standards in the face of criticism. All of which were on display over the weekend in the tweets of Gawker writers, in the appallingly tone-deaf decision by the writing staff to make their only statement a defense of their union rights against a decision by senior managers to pull the offending article, and in the decision to bury thousands of critical comments by readers and feature a miniscule number of friendly or neutral comments.

Gawker’s writers and editors, and for that matter all of Gawker Media, are only an extreme example of a general problem that is simultaneously particular to social media and widespread through the zeitgeist of our contemporary moment. It’s a problem that appears in protests, in tweets and blogs, in political campaigns right and left, in performances and press conferences, in corporate start-ups and tiny non-profits.

All of that, all of our new world with such people in it, crackles with so much beautiful energy and invention, with the glitter of things once thought impossible and things we never knew could be. Every day makes us witness to some new truth about how life is lived by people all around the world–intimate, delicate truths full of heartbreaking wonder; terrible, blasphemous truths about evils known and unsuspected; furious truths about our failures and blindness. More voices, more possibilities, more genres and forms and styles. Even at Gawker! They’ve often published interesting writing, helped to circulate and empower passionate calls to action, and intelligently curated our viral attention.

So what is the problem? I’m tempted to call it nihilism, but that’s too self-conscious and too philosophically coherent a label. I’m tempted to call it anarchism, but then I might rather approve rather than criticize. I might call it rugged individualism, or quote Aleister Crowley about the whole of the law being do as thou wilt. And again I might rather approve than criticize.

It’s not any of that, because across the whole kaleidoscopic expanse of this tumbling moment in time, there’s not enough of any of that. I wish we had more free spirits and gonzo originals calling it like they see it, I wish we had more raging people who just want the whole corrupt mess to fall down, I wish we had more people who just want to tend their own gardens as they will and leave the rest to people who care.

What we have instead–Gawker will do as a particularly stomach-churning example, but there are so many more–is a great many people who in various contexts know how to bid for our collective attention and even how to hold it for the moments where it turns their way, but not what to do with it. Not even to want to do anything with it. What we have is an inability to build and make, or to defend what we’ve already built and made.

What we have is a reflexive attachment to arguing always from the margins, as if a proclamation of marginality is an argument, and as if that argument entitles its author to as much attention as they can claim but never to any responsibility for doing anything with that attention.

What we have is contempt for anybody trying to keep institutions running, anybody trying to defend what’s already been achieved or to maintain a steady course towards the farther horizons of a long-term future. What we have is a notion that anyone responsible for any institution or group is “powerful” and therefore always contemptible. Hence not wanting to build things or be responsible. Everyone wants to grab the steering wheel for a moment or two but no one wants to drive anywhere or look at a map, just to make vroom-vroom noises and honk the horn.

Everyone’s sure that speech acts and cultural work have power but no one wants to use power in a sustained way to create and make, because to have power persistently, in even a small measure, is to surrender the ability to shine a virtuous light on one’s own perfected exclusion from power.

Gawker writers want to hold other writers and speakers accountable for bad writing and unethical conduct. They want to scorn Reddit for its inability to hold its community to higher standards. But they don’t want to build a system for good writing, they don’t want to articulate a code of ethical conduct, they don’t want to invest their own time and care to cultivate a better community. They don’t want to be institutions. They want to sit inside a kind of panopticon that has crudely painted over its entrance, “Marginality Clubhouse”, a place from which they can always hold others accountable and never be seen themselves. Gawker writers want to always be “punching up”, mostly so they don’t have to admit what they really want is simply to punch. To hurt someone is a great way to get attention. If there’s no bleeder to lead, then make someone bleed.

It’s not just them. Did you get caught doing something wrong in the last five years? What do you do? You get up and do what Gawker Media writer Natasha Vargas-Cooper has done several times, doing it once again this weekend in a tweet: whomever you wronged deserved it anyway, you’re sorry if someone else is flawed enough to take offense, and by the way, you’re a victim or marginalized and not someone speaking from an institution or defending a profession. Tea Party members and GamerGate posters do the same thing: both of their discursive cultures are full of proclamations of marginality and persecution. The buck stops somewhere else. You don’t make or build, you don’t have hard responsibilities of your own.

You think people who do make and build and defend what’s made and built are good for one thing: bleeding when you hit them and getting you attention when you do it. They’re easy to hit because they have to stand still at the site of their making.

This could be simply a complaint about individuals failing to accept responsibility for power–even with small power comes small responsibility. But it’s more than that. In many cases, this relentless repositioning to virtuous marginality for the sake of rhetorical and argumentative advantage creates a dangerous kind of consciousness or self-perception that puts every political and social victory, small and large, at risk. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s marriage decision, a lot of the progressive conversation I saw across social media held a celebratory or thankful tone for only a short time. Then in some cases it moved on productively to the next work that needs doing with that same kind of legal and political power, to more building. But in other cases, it reset to marginality, to looking for the next outrage to spark a ten-minute Twitter frenzy about an injustice, always trying to find a way back to a virtuous outside untainted by power or responsibility, always without any specific share in or responsibility for what’s wrong in the world. If that’s acknowledged, it’s not in terms of specific things or actions that could be done right or wrong, better or worse, just in generalized and abstract invocations of “privilege” or “complicity”, of the ubiquity of sin in an always-fallen world.

On some things, we are now the center, and we have to defend what’s good in the world we have knowing that we are there in the middle of things, in that position and no other. To assume responsibility for what we value and what we do and to ensure that the benefits of what we make are shared. To invite as many under our roof as can fit and then invite some more after that. To build better and build more.

What is happening across the whole span of our zeitgeist is that we’ve lost the ability to make anything like a foundational argument that binds its maker as surely as it does others. And yet many of us want to retain the firm footing that foundations give in order to claim moral and political authority.

This is why I say nihilism would be better: at least the nihilist has jumped off into empty space to see what can be found when you no longer want to keep the ground beneath your feet. At least the anarchist is sure nothing of worth can be built on the foundations we have. At least the free spirit is dancing lightly across the floor.

So Gawker wants everyone else to have ethics, but couldn’t describe for a moment what its own ethical obligations are and why they should be so. Gawker hates the lack of compassion shown by others, but not because it has anything like a consistent view about why cruelty is wrong. Gawker thinks stories should be accurate, unless they have to do the heavy lifting to make them so.

They are in this pattern of desires typical, and it’s not a simple matter of hypocrisy. It is more a case of the relentless a la carte -ification of our lives, that we speak and demand and act based on felt commitments and beliefs that have the half-life of an element created in a particle accelerator, blooming into full life and falling apart seconds later.

To stand still for longer is to assume responsibility for power (small or large), to risk that someone will ask you to help defend the castle or raise the barn. That you might have to live and work slowly for a goal that may be for the benefit of others in the future, or for some thing that is bigger than any human being to flourish. To be bound to some ethic or code, to sometimes stand against your own desires or preferences.

Sometimes to not punch but instead to hold still while someone punches you, knowing that you’re surrounded by people who will buoy you up and heal your wounds and stand with you to hold the line, because you were there for them yesterday and you will be there with them tomorrow.

In long-running conversations, I’ve generally supported both the violence that GoT is known for and the brutal view the show takes of social relations in its fantasy setting, particularly around gender. Complaints about its violence often (though not invariably) come from people whose understanding of high fantasy draws on a very particular domestication of the medieval and early modern European past that has some well-understood touchstones: a relentless focus on noble or aristocratic characters who float above and outside of their society; a construction of violence to either formal warfare or to courtly rivalry; a simplification (or outright banishment) of the political economy of the referent history; orientalist or colonial tropes of cultural and racial difference, often transposed onto exotic fantasy types or creatures; essentially modern ideas about personality, intersubjectivity, sexuality, family and so on smuggled into most of the interior of the characters.

These moves are not in and of themselves bad. Historical accuracy is not the job of fiction, fantasy or otherwise. But it is also possible that audiences start to confuse the fiction for the referent, or that the tropes do some kind of work in the present that’s obnoxious. That’s certainly why some fantasy writers like China Mieville, Phillip Pullman and George R.R. Martin have various objected to the high fantasy template that borrows most directly from Tolkien. It can lead to a misrecognition of the European past, to the sanctification of elitism in the present (by allowing elites to see themselves as nobility), and also simply to the reduction of creative possibility. If a fantasy writer is going to draw on history, there are histories outside of Europe–but also early modern and medieval Europe suggest other templates.

Martin is known to have drawn on the Wars of the Roses and the Hundred Years War (as did Shakespeare) and quite rightly points out when criticized about the violence in Game of Thrones that his books if anything are still less distressing than the historical reality. It’s a fair point on several levels–not just ‘accuracy’, but that the narrative motion of those histories has considerable dramatic possibility that Tolkienesque high fantasy simply can’t make use of. Game of Thrones is proof enough of that point!

But GoT is not Tuchman’s Distant Mirror nor any number of other works. A while back, Crooked Timber did a lovely seminar on Joanna Clarke’s novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Most of the commenters focused on the way in which the novel reprises the conflict between romantics and utilitarians in 19th Century Britain, and many asked: so what do you gain by telling that story as a fantasy rather than a history?

To my mind, you gain two things. The one is that there may be deeper and more emotional truths about how it felt to live and be in a past (or present) moment that you only gain by fiction, and that some of those in turn may only be achievable through fiction that amplifies or exaggerates through the use of fantasy. The second is that you gain the hope of contingency. It’s the second that matters to the last episode of Game of Thrones.

Historical fiction has trouble with “what if”? The more it uses fiction’s permission to be “what if”, the more it risks losing its historicity. It’s the same reason that historians don’t like counterfactuals, for the most part: one step beyond the moment of contingency and you either posit that everything would have turned out the same anyway, or you are stuck on a wild ride into an unknown, imaginary future that proceeds from the chosen moment. Fantasy, on the other hand, can follow what ifs as long as it likes. A what if where Franklin decides to be ambassador to the Iroquois rather than the French is a modest bit of low fantasy; a what if where Franklin summons otherworldly spirits and uses the secret alchemical recipes of Isaac Newton is a much bigger leap away, where the question of whether “Franklin” can be held in a recognizable form starts to kick in. But you gain in that move not only a lot of pleasure but precisely the ability to ask, “What makes the late colonial period in the U.S. recognizable? What makes the Enlightenment? What makes Franklin?” in some very new ways.

Part of what governs the use of fantasy as a way of making history contingent is also just storytelling craft: it allows the narratives that history makes available to become more interesting, more compressed, more focused, to conform not just to speculation but to the requirements of drama.

So Game of Thrones has established that its reading of the late medieval and early modern brings forward not only the violence and precarity of life and power in that time but also the uses and abuses of women within male-dominated systems of power. Fine. The show and the books have established that perfectly well at this point. So now you have a character like Sansa who has had seasons and seasons of being in jeopardy, enough to fill a lifetime of shows on the Lifetime channel. And there is some sense of a forward motion in the character’s story. She makes a decision for the first time in ages, she seems to be playing some version of the “game of thrones” at last, within the constraints of her role.

So why simply lose that sense of focus, of motion, of narrative economy? If Monty Python and the Holy Grail had paused to remind us every five minutes that the king is the person who doesn’t have shit on him, the joke would have stopped being funny on the second go. If Game of Thrones is using fantasy to simply remind us that women in its imagined past-invoking world get raped every five minutes unless they are plucky enough to sign up with faceless assassins or own some dragons, it’s not using its license to contingency properly in any sense. It’s not using it to make better stories with better character growth and it is not using it to imagine “what if”? If I want to tell the story of women in Boko Haram camps as if it were suffused with agency and possibility, I would rightly be attacked for trying to excuse crimes, dismiss suffering and ignore the truth. But that is the world that we live in, the world that history and anthropology and political science and policy and politics must describe. Fiction–and all the more, fantasy–have other options, other roads to walk.

There is no requirement for the show to have Sansa raped by Ramsay Bolton, no truth that must be told, not even the requirement of faithfulness to the text. The text has already (thankfully!) been discarded this season when it offers nothing but meandering pointlessness or in the case of Sansa, nothing at all. So to return suddenly to a kind of conservation of a storyline (“False Arya”) that clearly will have nothing to do with Sansa in whatever future books might one day be written is no justification at all. If it’s Sansa moving into that narrative space, then do something more with that movement. Something more in dramatic terms and something more in speculative, contingent terms. Even in the source material Martin wants to use, there are poisoners and martyrs, suicides and lunatics, plotters and runaways he or the showrunners could draw upon for models of women dealing with suffering and power.

Fantasy means you don’t have to do what was done. Sansa’s story doesn’t seem to me to offer any narrative satisfactions, and it doesn’t seem to make use of fantasy’s permissions to do anything new or interesting with the story and the setting. At best it suggests an unimaginative and desperate surrender to a character that the producers and the original author have no ideas about. At worst it suggests a belief that Game of Thrones‘ sense of fantasy has been subordinated to the imperative of “we have to be even grosser and nastier next time”! That’s not fantasy, that’s torture porn.

That’s how I feel about writing about what’s going on with what has stupidly become known as “Gamergate” in the last month or so. (The title itself flatters the pretensions of the worst people drawn to it.) I really don’t want to, I’ve been trying to avoid it, but this whole thing is not going to go away. The truth is, for those of us who know both the medium and its audiences, the last month is not a sudden rupture that changed everything. It’s just an unveiling of a long-festering set of wounds.

That dense nest of pain and abuse raises such complex feelings and interpretations in me. I hardly know where to begin. I’m just going to set out some separate thoughts and hope that they ultimately connect with one another.

1) If there is such a thing as “a gamer”, meaning someone defined in part by their affinity for video and computer games as a cultural form, I’m a gamer. Games have been as important to me as both a leisure activity and a source of inspiration and imagination as books. Before I ever venture any deeper into the stakes of Gamergate, my most elemental reaction is raw disgust with other gamers who have the unmitigated arrogance to represent their feelings, their reactions, their ugliness as “what gamers think”, as if they’re the “us” being put upon by some other “them”. On several forums that I used to frequent before this last month, I’ve had the displeasure of reading other long-time participants anoint themselves as the representative voice of “gamers”. My first impulsive thought is always, “Look here, sonny jim, I was playing Colossal Cave Adventure on the campus network in 1983, and Apple Trek on an Apple IIe when you weren’t even a lustful thought in your parents’ minds, so don’t say anything about what real gamers think. I didn’t vote for you. You don’t represent me. You don’t represent most of the people who play games.”

2) As a result of my background, at academic meetings about digital culture and games, I’ve often identified myself, somewhat jokingly, as a “native informant” rather than a scholar who comes to games as an object of study with no prior affinity for them. (Which of course earned me a pious, self-righteous correction at one meeting from a literary scholar who wasn’t aware that I also work on African history about how I might not know that the word ‘native’ has a complex history…) In that role, I’ve often found myself suggesting that there were insider or “emic” ways to understand the content and experience of game and gameplaying that many scholars rode roughshod over in their critique of that content. In particular, I’ve tried to suggest that there are dangers to reductive readings that only take an interest in games as a catalog of racialized or gendered tropes whose meaning is held to be understood simply from the act of cataloging. Equally, I’ve observed that seeing games as directly conditioning the everyday social practices and ideologies of their audiences (particularly in the case of violence) is both demonstrably wrong as an empirical argument and is also a classic kind of bourgeois moral panic about the social effects of new media forms, something that often leads to empowering the state or other forms of authority in very undesirable ways. I’ve argued, and still would argue, that at least some kinds of mobilizations through social media against racist or sexist culture are both too simplistic in their interpretations of content and counterproductive in their political strategies. I’m not going to stop arguing that certain kinds of cultural activism are stuck on looking for soft targets, that they avoid the agonizingly difficult and painstaking work of social transformation.

But this is another reason I hate the people associated with “Gamergate”. They are working hard to prove me wrong in all sorts of ways. I’d still argue that the kind of tropes that Anita Sarkeesian has intelligently catalogued are subverted, ignored or reworked by the large majority of players, but it seems pretty undeniable at this point that there is a group of male gamers whose devotion to those tropes is deeply ideological in the most awful ways and that it absolutely informs the way they think of themselves across the broad spectrum of their social lives, including their real relationships to women. It seems pretty undeniable at this point that there are men who identify as “gamers” who are willing to threaten and harm simply to protect what they themselves articulate as a privileged relationship to gaming.

3) But then, my protestations about complexity have always been checked by my own experience as a game-player and as an academic thinking about games. I’ve always known that the “Gamergate” types were out there in considerable numbers. Ethnographic studies of game culture have been thinking about this issue for years. Players themselves have been thinking and talking about it, every time they’ve tried to think of ways to defeat griefing, ways to keep female players from being harrassed, ways to make more people feel comfortable in game environments.

In one of my essays for the now-defunct group blog Terra Nova, I noted how odd it was to find myself in virtual worlds like Ultima Online and World of Warcraft playing alongside teenagers and adult men that I intuitively recognized as the kind of people who had bullied me when I was a kid. Profane, aggressive, given to casually denigrating or insulting others, enjoying causing other people inconvenience and even real emotional pain, crudely racist, gleefully sexist. Not all of them were all of that, but many of them were at least some of that. In many environments, there were enough men like that to ensure that everyone else stayed away, or avoided many of the supposed affordances of multiplayer gaming. But maybe this is part of the problem, that geeks and nerds, especially those of us who identified that way back when it got you a lot of contempt and made you a target for bullies, convinced themselves that being victimized automatically conferred some kind of virtue you on you. Maybe the problem is that I and others always felt that “Barrens chat” was the work of some Other who had infiltrated our Nerd Havens, when in fact it was always coming from inside the room. I remember once in junior high school when the jocks were bullying a mentally disabled kid by shoving him inside the shed where all the equipment was kept and then holding the door closed on him. They yelled for a couple of the geeky kids, including me, to come help them keep the door shut while the boy cried and banged and tried to get out. And it was so uncharacteristic for the jocks to ask us to join in that we almost did it just out of relief at being included.

Being a target doesn’t vaccinate you against being an abuser later on. In fact, it creates for some gamers a justification for indulgent kinds of lulz-seeking bad behavior, a sort of lethal combination of narcissistic anarchism with the sort of revenge-fantasy thinking that’s normally only found in the comic-book monologues of supervillains.

4) What I’ve seen since “Gamergate” became a thing is that some of the older male gamers who have always been clear that they were just as annoyed by subliterate teenager brogamers on XBox Live, that they also hated griefers and catasses in MMOs, that they also think badly of the most creepy posters on Reddit, lots of these guys who postured as being the reasonable opponents of extremists of any kind, have turned out not at all the disinterested or moderate influence they imagine themselves to be. I’ve watched guys who claim to think that everyone’s being overexcited by this controversy becoming profoundly overexcited themselves, and very much in a one-sided way against “games journalists”, “neckbeards”, “feminists”, “the media”, “social justice warriors” and so on. At around the one-hundredth post professing not to care very much about the whole thing, you have to turn in your “I don’t care” card. Most of them say, half-heartedly, that of course it’s bad to harass or issue death threats, with all the genuine commitment of Captain Louis Renault saying he’s shocked about the gambling in the backroom of Rick’s Cafe Americain. They usually go on to specify a standard for harassment that disqualifies anything besides Snidley Whiplash tying Penelope Pittstop to the railroad tracks, and a standard for “real death threats” that disqualifies anything that doesn’t end with someone getting killed for real.

I can’t quite say I’m shocked by these non-shocked people, but I have found myself deeply disturbed to see significant groups of formerly reasonable-signifying male posters in various forums accepting without much dissent sentiments of tremendous moral vacuity like, “If you post feminist criticisms of games, then you just have to expect to get harassed and attacked” or “Well, some guy on XBox Live threatened to rape me during a game of Call of Duty, you just shrug it off”. I’ve been wondering just how wrong I am about people in general online when I think the best of them, or how misguided I am to try to see the most interesting possibilities in how someone else thinks, if it turns out that when the crunch comes, the people I’ve thought would have their hearts in the right place are instead too busy frantically defending their right to download Jennifer Lawrence nudes to care about much else.

5) The assertion by many “Gamergate” posters that they represent the economic lifeblood of the gaming industry is just demonstrably wrong. And this is an old point that should have long since had a stake driven through its heart. The current criticism is focused on various indie games, which the gamergaters charge wouldn’t get any attention at all if “social justice warriors” weren’t promoting them. But the fact is first that the most economically successful games in the history of the medium have not been made with the sensibilities of the most devotedly “gamerish” game-players in mind. Moreover, the history of video and computer games is full of interesting work that didn’t cater to a narrow set of preferences. Today’s “indie games” have many precursors. Arguing for the diversification of tropes, models, mechanics is good for gaming in every possible way. It’s not that companies should stop making games for these “gamers”, it’s more that the major commercial mystery of the gaming industry is that so MANY games should be made for them, considering how much money there is to make when you make a good game that appeals to other people too or instead. Maybe this is what accounts for the intensity of the reaction right now, that we are finally approaching the moment where games will be made by more kinds of people for more kinds of people. Fan subcultures are often disturbingly possessive about the object of their attachment, but this has been an especially ugly kind of upswelling of that structure of feeling.

6) Many of the most strident gamergate voices are bad on gender issues but they’re also just a nightmare in general for everyone involved in game development (except for when they ARE game developers). These are the guys who hurl email abuse and death threats when they don’t like the latest patch, when they think a game should be cheaper (or free), when they have a different idea about what the ending to a game should be, when they don’t like a character or the art design or a mechanic. These are the people who make most games-related forums a cesspool of casually-dispensed rhetorical abuse. These are the people who make it a near-religious obligation to crap on anything new and then to be self-indulgently amused by their own indiscriminate dislike. So much of the fun–the enchantment–of gaming has already been well and truly done in by gamergaters in other ways: they have destroyed the village they allegedly came to save. Much of what they do now is a bad dinner theater re-enactment of the anti-establishment sentiments of an earlier digital underground, one that elevates some of the troubling old tendencies and subtexts into explicit, exultant malice.

———————

History 82
Histories of Digital Media
Fall 2014
Professor Burke

This course is an overly ambitious attempt to cover a great deal of ground, interweaving cultural histories of networks, simulations, information, computing, gaming and online communication. Students taking this course are responsible first and foremost for making their own judicious decisions about which of many strands in that weave to focus on and pursue at greater depth through a semester-long project.

The reading load for this course is heavy, but in many cases it is aimed at giving students an immersive sampler of a wide range of topics. Many of our readings are both part of the scholarship about digital culture and documents of the history of digital culture. I expect students to make a serious attempt to engage the whole of the materials assigned in a given week, but engagement in many cases should involve getting an impressionistic sense of the issues, spirit and terminology in that material, with an eye to further investigation during class discussion.

Students are encouraged to do real-time online information seeking relevant to the issues of a given class meeting during class discussion. Please do not access distracting or irrelevant material or take care of personal business unrelated to the class during a course meeting, unless you’re prepared to discuss your multitasking as a digital practice.

This course is intended to pose but not answer questions of scope and framing for students. Some of the most important that we will engage are:

*Is the history of digital culture best understood as a small and recent part of much wider histories of media, communication, mass-scale social networks, intellectual property, information management and/or simulation?

*Is the history of digital culture best understood as the accidental or unintended consequence of a modern and largely technological history of computing, information and networking?

*Is the history of digital culture best understood as a very specific cultural history that begins with the invention of the Internet and continues in the present? If so, how does the early history of digital culture shape or determine current experiences?

All students must make at least one written comment per week on the issues raised by the readings before each class session, at the latest on each Sunday by 9pm. Comments may be made either on the public weblog of the class, on the class Twitter feed, or on the class Tumblr. Students must also post at least four links, images or gifs relevant to a particular class meeting to the class Tumblr by the end of the semester. (It would be best to do that periodically rather than all four on December 2nd, but it’s up to each of you.) The class weblog will have at least one question or thought posted by the professor at the beginning of each week’s work (e.g., by Tuesday 5pm.) to direct or inform the reading of students.

Students will be responsible for developing a semester-long project on a particular question or problem in the history of digital culture. This project will include four preparatory assignments, each graded separately from the final project:

By October 17, a one-page personal meditation on a contemporary digital practice, platform, text, or problem that explains why you find this example interesting and speculates about how or whether its history might prove interesting or informative.

By November 3, a two-page personal meditation on a single item from the course’s public “meta-list” of possible, probable and interesting topics that could sustain a project. Each student writer should describe why they find this particular item or issue of interest, and what they suspect or estimate to be some of the key questions or problems surrounding this issue. This meditation should include a plan for developing the final project. All projects should include some component of historical investigation or inquiry.

By November 17, a 2-4 page bibliographic essay about important materials, sources, or documents relevant to the project.

The final project, which should be a substantive work of analysis and interpretation, is due by December 16th.

Is Digital Culture Really Digital? A Sampler of Some Other Histories

Monday September 1
Ann Blair, Too Much to Know, Introduction
Hobart and Schiffman, Information Ages, pp. 1-8
Jon Peterson, Playing at the World, pp. 212-282
*Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars From Gutenberg to Gates, pp. 1-82
Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet, selection

Imagining a Digital Culture in an Atomic Age

Monday September 8
Arthur C. Clarke, “The Nine Billion Names of God”, http://downlode.org/Etext/nine_billion_names_of_god.html
Ted Friedman, Electric Dreams, Chapter Two and Three

Film: Desk Set
Colossus the Forbin Project (in-class)
Star Trek, “The Ultimate Computer” (in-class)

Monday September 15
Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think”, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
Paul Edwards, The Closed World, Chapter 1. (Tripod ebook)
David Mindell, “Cybernetics: Knowledge Domains in Engineering Systems”, http://21stcenturywiener.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Cybernetics-by-D.A.-Mindell.pdf
Fred Turner, Counterculture to Cyberculture, Chapter 1 and 2
Alex Wright, Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age, selection

In the Beginning Was the Command Line: Digital Culture as Subculture

Monday September 22
*Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late
*Steven Levy, Hackers
Wikipedia entries on GEnie and Compuserve

Film: Tron

Monday September 29
*John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider
Ted Nelson, Dream Machines, selection
Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence, selection
Neal Stephenson, “Mother Earth Mother Board”, Wired, http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

Monday October 6
*William Gibson, Neuromancer
EFFector, Issues 0-11
Eric Raymond, “The Jargon File”, http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html, Appendix B
Bruce Sterling, “The Hacker Crackdown”, Part 4, http://www.mit.edu/hacker/part4.html

Film (in-class): Sneakers
Film (in-class): War Games

FALL BREAK

Monday October 20
Consumer Guide to Usenet, http://permanent.access.gpo.gov/lps61858/www2.ed.gov/pubs/OR/ConsumerGuides/usenet.html
Julian Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace”
Randal Woodland, “Queer Spaces, Modem Boys and Pagan Statues”
Laura Miller, “Women and Children First: Gender and the Settling of the Electronic Frontier”
Lisa Nakamura, “Race In/For Cyberspace”
Howard Rheingold, “A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community”
Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen, selection

Hands-on: LambdaMOO
Hands-on: Chatbots
Hands-on: Usenet

Monday October 27

David Kushner, Masters of Doom, selection
Hands-on: Zork and Adventure

Demonstration: Ultima Online
Richard Bartle, “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades”, http://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

Rebecca Solnit, “The Garden of Merging Paths”
Michael Wolff, Burn Rate, selection
Nina Munk, Fools Rush In, selection

Film (in-class): Ghost in the Shell
Film (in-class): The Matrix

Here Comes Everybody

Monday November 3

Claire Potter and Renee Romano, Doing Recent History, Introduction

Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, short selection
World Wide Web (journal) 1998 issues
IEEE Computing, March-April 1997
Justin Hall, links.net, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zQXJqAMAsM&list=PL7FOmjMP03B5v3pJGUfC6unDS_FVmbNTb
Clay Shirky, “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality”
Last Night of the SFRT, http://www.dm.net/~centaur/lastsfrt.txt
Joshua Quittner, “Billions Registered”, http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds_pr.html
A. Galey, “Reading the Book of Mozilla: Web Browsers and the Materiality of Digital Texts”, in The History of Reading Vol. 3

Monday November 10

Danah Boyd, It’s Complicated: The Social Life of Networked Teens
Bonnie Nardi, My Life as a Night-Elf Priest, Chapter 4

Hands-on: Twitter
Hands-on: Facebook
Meet-up in World of Warcraft (or other FTP virtual world)

Michael Wesich, “The Machine Is Us/Ing Us”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
Ben Folds, “Ode to Merton/Chatroulette Live”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bBkuFqKsd0

Monday November 17

Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble, selection
Steven Levy, In the Plex, selection
John Battelle, The Search, selection

Ethan Zuckerman, Rewire, Chapter 4
Linda Herrera, Revolution in the Era of Social Media: Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet, selection

Monday November 24

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, selection
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think, selection
Mat Honan, “I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook For Two Days”, http://www.wired.com/2014/08/i-liked-everything-i-saw-on-facebook-for-two-days-heres-what-it-did-to-me

Hands-on: Wikipedia
Hands-on: 500px

Monday December 1

Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom, selection
Gabriella Coleman, Hacker Hoaxer Whistleblower Spy, selection
Andrew Russell, Open Standards and the Digital Age, Chapter 8

Adrian Johns, Piracy, pp. 401-518

Hands-on: Wikileaks

Film: The Internet’s Own Boy

Monday December 8

Eugeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here
Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything, selection
Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? , selection

If you have a wide enough range of social groups and people represented in your feeds, you will sooner or later hear one group of people saying some of the things in an untroubled or unselfconscious manner that fuel anger over in another group. Very rarely will the two groups actually be talking to each other, however, unless you choose to identify yourself as the Venn overlap and expose them to one another. Most of us know that little good can come of that: more typically, if you’re in basic agreement with the angry people, the simultaneity of conversations may spark you to unfriend or unsubscribe.

You have to have a really wide-ranging network of social media contacts or a really expansive taste for political and social variety to encounter certain overlaps. Almost everyone in my Facebook network is careful about any comments on race or expresses strongly within one major discourse that is critical of racial supremacy and racial injustice, for example, which I’m sure says something about my own professional and personal identity. Generally, I only see some of that overlap when one of my few friends who has a sizeable following to the right says something that seems too liberal in racial terms for the rest of his or her followers.

One place where I do see circles like this in my feeds are two rivalrous groups that are deliberately working to avoid any kind of intimate or insider understanding (and thus possible sympathy) for one another. The obvious case is Palestinians (and their sympathizers) and Israelis (and their sympathizers), but in a more quotidian vein I see it between faculty and administrators (though the latter group tend to be much more circumspect about expressing anything in social media, which I think is a pity).

Where I’m more likely to see this kind of overlap is in comments about body size/body image, mental health, parenting and family, age and youth, and in certain discourses about gender but not others. If I had to sum it up, in conversations about other people that concern attributes and experiences that are historically associated with the private, domestic and personal.

One example. What I see in this instance is one cluster of people for whom the existence of judgmental comments about body size and shape are powerfully explained by their views about social justice and discrimination. And then another group of people who unselfconsciously talk about weight and body size and exercise in terms of public health and private happiness. The second group is barely aware that the first group exists, and if they were aware, would regard them as risible or extreme. The second group is also often politically progressive and regard their views on body size and health as an outgrowth of other commitments they have to avoiding mass-produced food, to self-care and autonomy, to environmental justice and much else.

As an overweight person, I’m sympathetic to the first group. I’m often a bit stunned at how colleagues and acquaintances I know who would absolutely flip out if anyone “microaggressed” in their presence about race, gender or sexuality have zero problem asking me about my diet, commenting on my weight, wondering whether I’m healthy, or in one case, poking my in my belly several times during a conversation and saying, “How about that, eh?”

On the other hand, for all sorts of reasons, I don’t really feel like signing on with the conventional set of moves made within identity politics on this issue. Much of that is that I’m not really the kind of person who suffers serious consequences of body-image, body-shape discrimination: as always, white men get away with stuff that other people can’t. But it’s also that I just am not prepared to identify with or claim anything that’s based on the fact that other people feel it’s ok to be stunningly rude and actually touch my body, even though I find that always annoying and sometimes emotionally distressing.

I am more interested in figuring out what’s going on in this and many other cases, and the assumption that this is part of a coherent structure for the maintenance of discriminatory power seems premature, to interfere with that investigation.

It’s relevant today with the undercurrent here and there of a few people expressing anger with Robin Williams for committing suicide rather than sadness. We hear that kind of expression about public figures, more or less depending on how what they did relates to conventional wisdom. Why didn’t this person do that? Why is that person doing that thing? What’s wrong with them? Sometimes the discourse is fairly unanimous that it’s ok to pass judgment (say, on Justin Bieber); sometimes the discourse is fairly unanimous that only an asshole would say something like that (say, on Robin Williams). The most interesting cases for me are when it’s not only evenly divided, but the two groups are not really talking to one another.

There are days where I feel a sort of generic libertarianism is the right answer to all of this discourse, to all those circles in my feeds where someone is concerning themselves with another person’s body, behavior, looks. Just tend to your own knitting, judge not lest ye be judged, beam in your eye, all that.

But not only is that an impossible prescription to live up to, it’s too incurious. Why do circles form where it’s not only permitted but almost mandatory to pass judgment on some group or behavior? The conventional answer in most identity politics is that the judgments are produced by an infrastructure of stereotypes that is a functional part of structures of discrimination. E.g., that dominant groups use such judgments (and communicate them through microaggressions) in order to buttress their own power and status.

I think that’s part of the story, but when you wander away from the histories and structures whose connections to power and injustice blaze in neon, when you wander into that more personal, domestic, private space, I think some other dimensions crop up as well.

When the streams do cross and someone in a group or a discussion suddenly says, “Actually, I feel pretty hurt or offended by the way you folks are talking about this issue, because I’m actually the thing you’re talking about”, what happens? Sometimes people make non-apology apologies (“sorry that you’re offended”), sometimes people double-down and say, “You’re crazy, there’s nothing offensive about talking about X or Y”. A turn or two in the conversation, though, and what you’ll often hear is this: “Look, I just care about you and people like you. So I want to help.” (Or its close sibling: “Look, not to insult you personally, but people like you/behavior like that costs our society a lot of money and/or inflicts a lot of pain on other people. Don’t you think it would be better if…”)

I’d actually like to concede the sincerity of that response: that we get drawn into these discussions and the judgments they create out of concern for other people, out of concern for moral and social progress. That we feel passionately about people who let their children go to the park by themselves, about people who train their children to go hunting, about people who are overweight, about people who drive big SUVs, about people play their radios too loudly in their cars, about people who buy overly expensive salsa, about people who play video games, about people who raise backyard chickens, about people who demand accommodations for complex learning disabilities, about people who follow the fashion industry, about people who post to Instagram, about people who feed their kids fast food twice a week to save time, and so on.

I’d like to concede the sincerity but the problem is that most of these little waves of moral condemnation or judgmental concern don’t seem to be particularly compassionate or particularly committed. The folks who say, “I just want to help, because I care about you” show no signs of that compassion otherwise. They usually aren’t close friends to the person they’re commenting on, they usually have little empathy or curiosity overall. The folks who say, “Because I care about progress, about solving the bigger problem” don’t show much interest in that alleged bigger problem. The person who hates the big SUVs because they’re damaging the environment is often environmentally profligate in other ways. If the SUV-judger is consistently environmentally sensitive, some other aspect of their concern for the world, their vision of a better society, may be woefully out of synch or weakly developed.

The people I know who really care about others generally aren’t the people going on Facebook to say, “Man, I’m sick of people hiding behind claims of depression” or “If I meet another mother who thinks it’s ok to bring cupcakes to my child’s class, I’m going to go berserk”. The people I know who are really think about incremental moves to improve the world don’t get hung up on passing judgments on someone they’ve witnessed fleetingly in public.

I’m in strong agreement with the idea that there is no such thing as “reverse racism”, if by that we mean the capacity for a white person to suffer systematic consequences for being white. Even if a white person works in a specific context where the professional consequences of felt animus towards whites might have an impact on them, that’s still a very limited and constrained kind of consequence.

But any single individual can deliver emotional suffering to any other individual, sometimes consciously and directly, other times without any awareness of doing so. My feeds are lighting up right now with very well-meaning people reminding everyone that middle-aged men, including white and wealthy men, are both prone to depression and prone to keeping their feelings private. The categorical part of that point is sociological. It’s the same way that we rightfully identify the problems that our society suffers from and ought to confront. But the compassionate part of that point might be to think about specific individuals with whom we’re in specific social connection. To be aware that we can always hurt someone else, that we have hurt someone else. Sometimes that’s not our fault, and sometimes what we said was needful or important or defined own freedom to express and imagine and explore. In a world full of familiar strangers and strange friends, there’s no way to anticipate all the minds and hearts that might be touched by what we say and do. There are ways, though, to be mindful of the possibilities.

This is something that many of us found out in the first wave of going online. The classic sequence was that first we all self-disclosed and felt a sense of intimacy, but not because we knew the other people in the conversation as people. We did it because a sense of anonymity: talking with a million other strangers was like shouting across a cliff in a wilderness. Who was there to remember? And then we discovered that the familiar strangers could actually reply and engage in dialogue. Some of them said things that we hated or disagreed with, so we unloaded on them with greater and greater intensity. Many of us still do that in various online hang-outs. Sooner or later, most of us discovered the hard way that a person on the other end was real. Sometimes we found, painfully, that their reality was radically other than their online persona. That the person who engaged everyone with their tales of being victimized by a family member or otherwise was the victimizer, the person dying of cancer wasn’t, the person who spoke with authority knew nothing. Sometimes we found, equally painfully, that the person we’d attacked or disparaged or belittled was writhing in emotional pain about it. Or that someone we’d never thought we were attacking had felt that way.

Social problems, oppression, injustice: we shouldn’t apologize ever for trying to engage them and change our world. When we justify what we say because we claim to have a sense of compassion: I just want people to be well, I just want children to be raised in a way that makes them happy and strong, I just want people to be more considerate of others, I just want people to know that actions have consequences? Then I think we have to be sure that it’s compassion we’re speaking from, rather than an insecure attempt to assure ourselves of our own superiority to others. Compassion, it seems to me, grows not from judgment but curiosity. Not from certainty, but humility. I’d love to see social media feeds where the Venn overlap on “curiosity” and “humility” in my various circles was one hundred percent.

Ruth Vitale, the anti-piracy executive covered in the article, suggested that the falling production of movies is a sign of the damage that piracy (in the “culture of theft” model) is inflicting on the industry.

What if the entire debate is a misfire? What if the 1990s were a final apex decade of a leisure-oriented, consumer-driven society? The last time a middle-class existed and was working to earn more time at home, more time to themselves, more time to consume culture? The last time there was enough money (fueled by debt) to support the mass consumption of leisure? What if piracy is the canary in the coal mine for the growth of income inequity and the collapse of white-collar labor? What if no one has the time to really consume more than a small fraction of even the diminished current output of the media industries, because they’re working longer hours just to keep from getting fired or even just to make ends barely meet? What if no one has the money, because of flat salaries and debt loads?

At that point, debating piracy per se is sort of like getting caught up in managing the ecological future of polar bears without noticing that you’re dealing with a very small part of a very big story. More importantly, it’s not just victims of income inequality that need to defend themselves against the new gilded age: if mass-consumer corporations want to have a future, they had better throw in with a broad “middling class” while there’s still time.

Frank follows a path through thinking about the state of science in American life that I encounter at lot at Swarthmore and institutions like it, especially but not exclusively among our students. The story is told as a tale of decline: once Americans trusted and valued science, and now increasingly they don’t, putting not just individual issues at risk but the entire practice of scientific inquiry.

In some measure that story is incontestably true. For me the most visceral gut-punch truth of it is to watch some of old animated and documentary presentations that used to appear on Disney’s television showcase that were unreservedly committed to the proposition that American modernity and prosperity were synonymous with science, and that was about as close to a consensus artifact as you could ask for.

Or was it? That’s the problem with the story that Frank tells. What he doesn’t know–and maybe none of us can be sure about–is whether all that’s changed is that the Americans who do not trust, value or practice scientific inquiry and knowledge are now politically or socially empowered in a way that they weren’t in the heyday of mid-20th Century high modernism. Did people listen to scientists in the 1950s because they had to, because science had a strong kind of authority within civic and political institutions that were themselves far less inhibited about imposing their general authority on the population? Did people who never really accepted or trusted scientific perspectives just decide to shut up and knuckle under in order to get their professional credentials or to be accepted in a much more conformist middle-class culture?

I’m inclined to think that in some sense denial and opposition to science is not a new social movement enabled by new political ideologies and forces but a sensibility with a much more continuous underground history that traces all the way back to the first third of the 20th Century, at least in the United States. Which, if true, has huge implications for saving what Frank calls “the tradition”: it means that this is less a matter of returning to a venerable and venerated way of living and more a question of doing a kind of work that was never done in the first place, which is rolling up some collective sleeves and making the case for science (and maybe other kinds of knowledge, academic and otherwise) within the terms of the everyday culture and social lives of Americans. It doesn’t mean conceding to those terms but it does require understanding them and sorting out the reasons and roots that have given rise to them. That’s a kind of work that I think many contemporary scientists and academics are profoundly unprepared to do–but if the tradition is to be a living one (in a way that perhaps it never was), that’s what is required.