i was thinking about the ghosts of fandoms past and i realised that my first proper fandom experience is by now completely wiped from the net thanks to age. i feel i have some responsibility here to document an extremely belated fandom wank so buckle up and let me sing you the song of south park fandom circa 1998-2001
Our descendants will find our songs about butts and preference for thick ones ridiculously quaint, much like the Victorians going apeshit over visible ankles.
#god knows what they will be into #livers maybe
Our constant exposure to pornography and easy smut will numb us to nudity. Eventually the hot new fetish will be gastro shows, where a live holographic display of the performers internal organs.
did you just invent vore
When I was a little kid being allowed to look things up on the internet for the first time, my mom gave me a Talk on Internet Safety. There were Things On The Internet, she explained. Inappropriate Things. Things I Was Too Young To See.
Little me felt that I was a Girl Of The World. I had Seen Things, I pointed out. We had gone to the art museum; we had visited the part with the ancient Greek and Roman statues. I had seen (sotto voce) naked people. Not just in skimpy clothing, or underwear, or even a fig leaf, but entirely naked! There was nothing left for me to see!
My (poor, patient) mother sighed. No, she explained, there were Other Things. Things I Had Not Seen. Things Of Which I Did Not Know. They were on the internet, and I was to avoid them.
It was clear that this was the Parental Final World. But Small Me was left terribly, terribly curious. I’d thought I’d understood how things worked – a picture of a person in regular clothes was modest; a picture of a person in a little less than that, like Marilyn Monroe with her skirt being blown up, was a little bit racy; a picture of a person in underwear was pretty much a sex thing; and a picture of a totally naked person was (if it wasn’t art or anatomy) pornography.
So how could there be something more so than a totally naked person? What could this wrong forbidden inappropriate unnatural thing be?
The sequence so far had made sense! Less clothes, more inappropriate! And eventually you got down to nothing at all at which point you’d seen everything there was to see and nothing was left private anymore and married people could engage in baby-producing activities!
So I mulled this over for a long time. And finally, I came to a conclusion:
Clearly, the next step in the sequence had to be taking off your skin.
This was extremely explanatory! No wonder this Secret Thing was so wrong – you had to skin someone alive to produce it! No wonder they didn’t want kids seeing it – how traumatic! This really was a Perverted Deviance Of Modern Society!
Small Me proceeded to make the obvious series of extrapolations from this. There would be videos of people slowly and sexily removing their own skin, or other people’s skin, of course. There’d be images arranged to look like someone was removing their skin when they really weren’t. Some truly disturbed perverts would be watching videos where the muscle was stripped off, to show organs and bones. And no wonder sex slavery and prostitution were so horrifying, if women were being forced into that.
(Yes. Yes, I was familiar with the concept of prostitution but couldn’t figure out the concept of porn. What can I say; I had a classical education. Turns out one of those comes up in Great Literature a lot more often than the other.)
In any case, Small Me continued to operate under this assumption for quite some time, happy in its explanatory power, and feeling Terribly World-Wise And Jaded. (And occasionally feeling vaguely guilty that clearly I was not nearly so innocent as my mother thought.)
Finding out what pornography actually involved was kind of anticlimactic, really.
This is a project from wayyyy back in 2013, but one that I remain very proud of! Peter Chiykowski’s writing is always compelling and a joy to work from, and he also turns out hilarious comics. Check him out at Rock Paper Cynic!
My latest Locus column, Wealth Inequality Is Even Worse in Reputation Economies, explains the ways in which “reputation” makes a poor form of currency – in a nutshell, reputation doesn’t fulfill most of the roles we expect from currency (store of value, unit of exchange, unit of account), and it is literally a popularity contest where the rich always get richer.
Reputation economics are closely bound up with the idea of “meritocracy,” itself a convenient, self-serving delusion that effectively declares the system to be fair because the people on top believe it to be.
Meritocracy and reputation economics were the subject of my debut novel, 2003’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which, ironically, is often held up as an example of “utopian” fiction.
The story of ‘‘meritocracy’’ – a society that migrates wealth, status, and decision-making power into the hands of the most capable – is seductive. Rich people love the idea of meritocracy, because the alternative is that their lion’s share is unfair, the product of luck, or, worse, cheating. But many of meritocracy’s losers love it, too. In the words of John Steinbeck, ‘‘Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.’’
Meritocracy is a tautology, of course. There’s no objective measure of ‘‘merit’’ so there’s no way to know whether your society is meritocratic or not. Every famous, powerful, rich person owes their status to a combination of skill, luck, and persistence. The best luck of all is to be born to fortunate circumstances, well fed and well educated and well loved. We know for a fact that billions lack some or all of these forms of luck, and among those people are innumerable potential Stephen Hawkings and Steve Jobses and Albert Einsteins. The fact that Jobs was born to a Syrian refugee and that Hawking struggles with a debilitating illness just shows you how fickle luck is – unless you believe that evolution produced exactly one brilliant tech entrepreneur in the ranks of Syrian refugees and one brilliant scientist with ALS, then you have to believe that the others just didn’t get quite so lucky.
It’s bad enough when the meritocratic delusion takes root in a money-driven economy, but reputation’s one percenters are even more toxic. They can go spectacularly bankrupt, financially ruining their investors, and promptly raise another fortune to gamble on.
