We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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4 Responses
Well it is the Middle East. They have their laws, we have ours, and if they chose to go live over there, they should abide by them–just like we’d expect them not to chop people’s hands off for thieving. I can only expect that a festival held in a country would adhere to that country’s principals, so I think Atwood is being ridiculous. But then she usually is ridiculous.
I think on the one hand I agree with what Atwood is doing, but on the other I think she needs to be more understanding of cultural differences.
Not to mention, it’s not like censorship doesn’t happen everywhere else. How often do you see serious literary events involve pornographic novels? Never? Exactly. I think this has a lot to do with being mad because something in her range of interests has been censored. But I could be wrong…
Possibly pornography isn’t included in lit things because it’s not literature …
And it should never be identified as such.
Well, yes and no. It’s literature, but it’s not necessarily “good” literature. The intentions behind it, etc. But is it possible for there to be good pornographic literature?