Workers of the World Unite: An Old School Marxist Analysis of FanLib vs. Fandom

Workers of the World Unite: An Old School Marxist Analysis of FanLib vs. Fandom is a post by lilithilien at life_wo_fanlib.
The post has 100 comments.
==Some Topics Discussed==
* AO3
* Fanfiction.Net
* archives
* FanLib
* Fandom and Profit
* Gift Economy
* cultural appropriation
==Excerpts from the Post==
==Excerpts from Comments: Page One==
* comment by liresius ("Well said! I'm so happy to read an analysis from this perspective, as it's the process and community that I have thought is most at risk from FanLib.")
* comment by kerravongenius ("I'm as far as you can get from being a Marxist (being a British monarchist), so I can't quite accept that analogy, but I agree with a lot of what you say.")
* comment by phoenixwish ("Alienation has always been one of my favourite parts of Marxist theory, so I can't believe I didn't connect the dots until now.")
* comment by ingriam ("I dissagree with Marxist theory on some fundimental points, but Fanlib gives me the heebies. And you've made some very good points there.")
* comment by chebonne ("I am one of those "fringe people" that has been mentioned, and I know how difficult it is to build a social circle, especially when you don't contribute to the fandom in any hands-on way except with comments and as a beta.")
* comment by somedaybitch ("i believe they get it intellectually, but since "it's" not their goal, or, i don't know, their raison d'etre i guess, we [fandom and Fanlib] seem end up talking at cross purposes. i think the core difficulty is that the sides are almost apples and oranges, in that Fanlib is a business venture but fandom is a passionate pastime, an armchair hobbyist love affair, and those two world views don't necessarily mix in all proportions. and i think it's made more complicated not just because Fanlib's pretty arrogant in their lack of research and default assumptions, but there IS a percentage of fans out there that are, i don't know, almost not fandom in the way that we define it. there *are* people that want what Fanlib is offering, that *do* think what Fanlib is doing is cool, that don't self-identify with the established fandoms and archives and journaling sites, and that's giving Fanlib validation of their model. so, i don't believe that they [Fanlib] "don't get" the difference; i think they simply don't get why we wouldn't want to blend them - business and pastime.... there's nothing wrong with capitalism, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to make money, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to make money by trying to tap a zeitgeist, if you will. it's Fanlib's execution that's the problem. it's their dismissiveness of fandom's pre-existing societal rules, and their unwillingness to recognize that they are treading in dangerous waters, waters that fans have tried very, very hard to not swim in, that's the problem. they're lack of definitive, specific answers just comes across as patronizing and makes it all worse. and i probably explained that rather poorly, for which i apologize in advance. i'm not trying to pick a fight or start a wank. i just don't see them as "the enemy". they're a potential problem, in that two worlds are colliding in a way that maybe ought not collide, but i don't think they're "bad" guys.")
* comment by sarcasticchick ("as a whole in a truly capitalist society, there is nothing wrong with what fanlib is doing. they are in it to make money. just like everyone else in the society. viewing the fanlib situation through marixst shades, however, applies a different tone. fanlib are the wealthy leaders and fandom are the poor workers working devalued jobs profiting the leaders. fandom has about as an egalitarian society as you can get -altho you could argue the political nature of the SuperAuthors of various fandoms - stuff is produced at no cost and no profit, people can view it at no cost, and the return is free (recs, reviews, requests - hah! i created my own 3Rs of fandom). there is an entire society existing in fandom, one that is self-sufficient and places a value on 'production' superceding monetary incentive.")
* comment by lilithilien ("As for positioning them as bad guys or the enemy ... well, that wasn't the intention of my post, and honestly I think they're doing a fine job of that themselves. I do believe that, in their world view, they're acting rationally and (somewhat) intelligently in capturing what they see as lost revenue. "All you silly fanfic writers, don't you know you could be making money on this?" But because they're not able to capitalize on the process that goes into the end product, they devalue it—and we (or the fans that they will attract) have to be taught that the actual process of creating stories within a community is not important. That's the alienation of our work, and that is what we're not accepting.")
* comment by somedaybitch ("... the 'what we stand to lose here' - i don't agree with because we [and by 'we' i mean those who choose not to participate in Fanlib - which is, i think, any fandom netizen with even half a brain] aren't in danger of losing anything; FanLib, imho, can't take fandom away from us by anything they do. their existence doesn't threaten ours. [hold on, keep reading. :D] what they *do* threaten is the, in lots of places, already tenuous relationship fandoms have with creators. but even then, i don't know that Fanlib is any more dangerous, say, than a group of Laurel K Hamilton fans refusing to acknowledge the author's stance on fic of her characters and writing it anyway. Hamilton throwing a c&d at a fan, or even bringing litigation against someone for a fic - or an archive for housing it - isn't going to bring the totality of fandom crashing down around our heads, you know? so, imho, Fanlib isn't any *more* dangerous than the position we're already in. does that make sense? [and please keep reading before you kill me with the candlestick in the library. ;)] what i think is wrong with Fanlib, or rather is dangerous about Fanlib, is that it's a serious problem for the newbies, the less than cautious, the young or unwise, the less experienced in fandom that don't get the place they could be putting themselves in by participating in Fanlib's model.")
* comment by lilithilien ("so again, it's not that the core idea is bad, in and of itself, it's that Fanlib seems to not care about our concerns, refuses to answer direct questions with direct answers, and is doing so in a very arrogant and condescending manner. This I do not agree with. My argument is that the two systems are irreconcilable. It doesn't matter how nicely they speak to us. It doesn't matter how airtight their TOS are. (Yes, child labor laws and the 40 hour week are improvements, vast ones. But can they lessen the basic alienation of workers from what they produce? No, because the system is fundamentally based on a means of production that requires that alienation.) The very that that FanLib does – commodify fanfic – is inherently opposed to what we do in the fandom community.")
* comment by elisi ("And not many people outside fandom appreciate that smooth transition from "mindless" television to critical theory. Indeed. But it's not about the subject, it's about the way we think and approach something.")
* comment by turelietelconta ("Yes, there were a lot of tie-in novels, of the shows, but if the fans were given the chance of selling their fanfiction, too, wouldn't a lot have done that? At the time before the community was established, and before the authors knew what it could be like.")
* comment by alex quine ("FanLib has difficulty engaging with this area of fandom because it doesn’t want to ‘engage’ - because that implies a give and take and at the heart of FanLib’s aims is a struggle for power. FanLib sees this as being primarily a struggle for power over product (fic and fans), when it's in reality more of a Titanic and iceberg situation – the visible ‘product’, the fic, is the visible tip of the iceberg. What's below the waterline is the bulk of the fannish experience which is the pleasure of 'process'. The myriad interest areas of fandom create their own processes/micro-climates that support their chosen ways of living/obtaining pleasure. We choose our way of pleasure, our process, as carefully as we do our OTP. We choose LJ or Yahoo groups or The Pit or to build/subscribe to more individual sites/archives - we create a process that contains the mix of reading/reccing/writing/social interraction/challenge/mutual support that suits us. The end usage of the fic will be a large part of the process for some and less so for others, but the key is that 'we' control our choice of process. Potentially giving up the power over the process is what rankles - not the only thing, obviously. In the end, I can't help feeling that FanLib's founders have under-estimated, amongst 'many' other things, the extent to which the flexibility of the process feeds the creativity, contributes to the product. Perhaps we shouldn't be concerned about FanLib after all? It seems to be steaming ahead, heading for the iceberg all on its own.")
* comment by lilithilien ("I love the iceberg analogy! I can see FanLib steaming ahead, thinking that with their money and shinies it's just a matter of time before they're through this rough patch with the pesky LJers. But we're not going anywhere.")
* comment by half elf lost ("Enjoyed the iceberg analogy very much, my friend, and I think it's likely that FL will have a short run at being famous, then die a quiet, gurgling end where no one really notices that it's finally gone.")
* comment by stewardess ("This reminded me of a recent National Geographic article on European settlers remaking the environment in the New World. As a child in school, I was taught the English survived because Native Americans taught them how to "live off the land." But the English survived because they permanently altered the land, wiping out the ecosystem that had supported Native Americans for thousands of years... I believe Chris Williams intends to profit from fanfiction by destroying the way it is currently created and distributed, because it's a necessary step before he can rake in the dough. I enjoyed your essay very much. But overall I find the subject depressing, because it brings me back to what almostnever said two weeks ago, that the commercialization of fanfiction is inevitable. There are a lot more greedy selfish businessmen like Chris Williams out there. We may keep FanLib from destroying our gift economy, but there will be others. I want a socialist economy with free education and healthcare for all. I never thought I might have to add free porn to that list. :D")
* comment by silverspar ("I don't see Marxism as particularly organic, but I find this post and all the discussion interesting and worthwhile (so bravo!). For me (libertarian-inclined) Fanlib is no better than fraudsters and thieves, attempting to twist the sincere enthusiasm of fans so that they can profit from shows/movies/novels they do not have rights to make money from.")
* comment by mmoneurere ("I also wonder whether fandom might be modeled not as a Marxist but as an anarchist system -- given the awareness of the fandom "gift economy" of fanfiction and fanart in particular, the paradigm of scarcity is almost irrelevant for fan communities, particularly online (though the concrete "entrance cost" of internet access is a major limit on the extent of this economy). Of course, whether you're operating from a Marxist perspective, an anarchist one, or (as in my case) somewhere in-between, the capitalist model of value (personified in this case by FanLib) needs to create an artificial scarcity in order to inflate its own profits by manipulating the social relation of "value" with regards to (in this case) fanfiction.")
* comment by antonia tiger ("I wrote fanfics more than 20 years ago. There was a barrier then, in the cost of producing print fanzines. Fanfic zines were sold to cover costs. You even had works edited (and, I recall, one of mine needed the edit). The Internet, by allowing distribution and duplication for costs too small to individually account for, has changed the world of fanfics. It's changing a lot of other stuff. And Fanlib can be seen as coming out of the same frantic struggle to preserve an old market as did the DMCA and the Sony rootkit. The fanfic community has found ways of replacing the old zine editors, and some of those ways are creeping into the world of traditional fiction-writing. A bunch of us here have read one author's books as they were written, giving feedback on how the story worked, and it's not so different from a few fanfics I've been involved with. (Though the sex in the fanfics was a lot more prominent.) But physical books still need the traditional supporting structure. Print-on-demand fills an essentially economic niche: a particular combination of set-up costs and per-copy costs. When I turned the crank on my not-very-enchanted duplicator, I knew what the stencil cost, and I was sending out enough copies that the total run cost less than photocopying. But I never figured in the cost of getting ink out of one's fur. Anyway, I ramble. But the Internet has changed fanfic publishing, and the corporate world is scared of that change.")
* comment by lilithilien ("The Internet, by allowing distribution and duplication for costs too small to individually account for, has changed the world of fanfics. It's changing a lot of other stuff. And Fanlib can be seen as coming out of the same frantic struggle to preserve an old market as did the DMCA and the Sony rootkit. Yes! This is my very my favourite rant: traditional information gatekeepers/copyright holders don't know have a clue how to deal with new technologies. I know how this works in the music world more than in publishing, but in music the labels who aren't evolving are going to have a real hard time. Rather than embracing technological change, they cling to the royalties that trickle in and scream "mine mine mine!" But for those who used traditional means of publishing to create zines (definitely a labour of love, I salute you!) there was never an expectation of making a huge profit. Breaking even was cause for celebration, right? These guys, though ... *shakes head* They want to take the products we've created and price them to make a profit. It's just not on. To survive in this new economy, it makes more sense for businesses to invest in the structure that enables that flow of information (LiveJournal, Yahoo, or much as I hate to say it, even MySpace) than to try to control the end product.")
* comment by antonia tiger ("One thing is that there are at least two different models of fandom and fanzine. The first to evolve, over 70 years ago now, developed fanzines from circulated letters, and the history of that goes back a lot further. It's not something I'm informed on, but I've seen passing mentions of the concept in connection with pre-USA colonial politics, and the process of scientific development in Europe. And, as a letter, fanzines weren't seen as something to be paid for with money. In the media fandoms, where the fanfics blossomed, the model was influenced by the idea of the fanclub; paid-for membership with a newsletter as one of the benefits. In some ways that makes sense. There's a different balance, a more one-to-many structure. There's still the gift economy element, but the fanfic that pays for the zine is a much bigger effort than a letter-of-comment. Anyway, that's my take on what I recall of the fandoms of the Eighties, those last years before the Internet exploded across society. And, in the UK at least, it was hard to get at the originals. Home video recording was a little-known technology when Blake's 7 was being broadcast. In the UK, repeats were rare. One of the motives for fanfics was to fill the emptiness. Now an American fan can BitTorrent Doctor Who and, taking advantages of timezones, watch the latest episode as part of his routine Saturday evening. And maybe that's a reason why fanfics have changed. There isn't the need for a fanfic as a substitute for a fondly recalled, and unobtainable, original."
* comment by norton gale ("Marxist theory is a perfect way to analyze what Fanlib is attempting to do to fanfiction - commoditizing it! In short, finding a way to market and sell something that was previously free, and attempting to seduce fanfic writers and readers with a "value proposition" (that term's got to be straight out of the business plan) including (as you say) fetishized shiny objects instead of true fandom community. We write stories to freely share ideas; Fanlib is co-opting our work for its own profit and using it to attract advertisers to sell their products. Fanlib's got it wrong. People don't write fan fiction because they want to get closer to the canon creators and "touch the stars." As you said, it's about participating in a community outside the market economy, and crossing boundaries that mainstream writers don't dare approach -in short, it's all about coloring outside the lines.")
==References==
Category:Archives
Category:2007 Meta
Category:Meta on Journal Sites
Category:Fandom & Profit Meta