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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6 Responses
I answered "sometimes," because for me it depends on how far the writer goes in "real life" in opposing things I believe in and also on whether or not I detect a blatant agenda that I don't like in the fiction itself.
For example, I don't bother with Card anymore because he went way over the line in his non-fiction work with his nutty hatefulness about gay marriage, and he is so extreme on that that I cannot divorce that fact about him as a person from his work. I still adore ENDER'S GAME, and always will, but he is so crazy politically that I can't feel good reading anything else of his that I haven't already. On the other hand, I used to enjoy as light, somewhat mindless recreational reading Dean Koontz's novels, and I did so knowing all along that he, too, is someone that I have little in common with ideologically. But then I noticed that in recent years he just can't keep the Fox News sound-bite-style politics out of the fiction itself. When I read the third ODD THOMAS novel and it was riddled with words like "Islamo-fascist," I decided I'd had enough. His stuff isn't great "literature" anyway, but it's fun-reading value evaporates the second that blatant references to current events framed in a right-wing style of verbiage start showing up in the fiction.
We're on the same page, then. I put "yes," but that's because every case where someone's politics are so diametrically opposed to my own have resulted in my inability to read their work. People who I disagree with on little things don't bother me, but I can't support homophobes or racists (unless they're dead, in which case I have no issue reading their work as cultural elements).
Thanks for the comment 🙂
I'm a sometimes as well. There are times when I read a book and I have no idea what the writer's political views are, and to be honest as long as it's a good story that I enjoy I don't care. If the beliefs don't colour the writing to the detriment of my enjoyment of the work then it doesn't bother me. If they leak into the book and spoil it for me personally then I'll stop reading work by that particular author.
Elfy: Do you have an issue with an author who writes characters with different political beliefs than your own? Because I don't particularly have a problem with that. I'm more concerned with the personal politics of the author, since my money basically says I support them. If an author writes a character who I disagree with, that's different, since it's for artistic purposes.
Anywho.
I never planned on reading anything by Card or Wright, but I won't read anything by Simmons since he's a horrid person.
How is Simmons a horrible person? I'm no familiar with any controversy related to him…