Up Front by Emma Hart

It's so difficult to be properly politically correct these days. Trying not to offend people is practically a full-time job – unless you take the easy way out and just don't ever say anything. Particularly, never call anyone anything.

Ranginui Walker was quite right in last week's Media Seven when he talked about the power of naming things, how that lets us own and define them. The names we use for things demonstrate our respect for them, how we feel about them. Part of the battle for traditionally disempowered groups has been to have the right name used for them. Sometimes, even your allies get it wrong, and you have to gently correct them:

Language is fundamental to giving trans people the same respect that cis people take for granted. It signals how the speaker sees trans people, and can shape the views of both speaker and audience… everyone who identifies as a woman is a woman, and everyone who identifies as a man is a man.

It's particularly easy to see the power of naming when someone is getting it wrong on purpose. The recent trial of Angie Zapata's killer has been a clear and ugly example. The killer refers to his victim as 'it', but that's not as chilling as the behaviour of the prosecutors:

Family members and friends echoed repeatedly, "my sister," "Angie," one by one on the stand Friday as public defenders Annette Kundelius and Brad Martin questioned them about "Justin."

By their deliberate choice of name and pronoun, they constantly reminded everyone involved that this person was not normal, not properly female. I get pissed off enough when people call me 'Mrs Dearden'.

There's a great game you can play with media naming, too. Take an article, and replace problematic identifiers (terrorists, gang members, beneficiaries, you get the idea) with the word 'people'. Here's a randomly-chosen example from Stuff's world news today:

Pakistani forces backed by jets and helicopter gunships have begun an offensive against people in a valley just 100 km northwest of the capital, Islamabad, part of a new campaign to halt the rapid advance of the people.
Military spokesman Major-General Athar Abbas said he expected it would take up to a week to clear an estimated 500 people from Buner district

So we're aware of the power of naming, we're all pretty decent people, and we want to get our naming right. We want to consider the rights and needs of people in minority groups, but then Dame Cath Tizard comes along in that very same Media 7 episode and points out that actually 'older people', as a monolithic group that all want the same things, don't exist.

The problem with labelling, however well-intentioned, is that it's reductive. (See how, when we moved from positive to negative aspects, I switched from 'name' to 'label'? Two different names for the same process: one good, one bad.) It's our brains being lazy, basically. Once you pop a label on something, you don't have to think about it any more. It goes from being 'that tall thing with all the leaves that leans slightly left because of all the wind that the cats sharpen their claws on' to being 'tree', and therefore the same as all those other things called 'tree'.

And maybe there's nothing wrong with that when it comes to trees. If we didn't have convenient labels like that we'd never get through a sentence. But when it's 'old people', or 'women'? It's really easy to listen to one person from that group and think you know what they all think, what they all want.

Then there's the pressure to conform within the group, and the arguments about who gets to be a part of it. So while it's really interesting to consider the idea of who gets to decide who can call themselves a feminist when the idea can be kicked around calmly and rationally, the flip side isn't hard to find:

there came a point where the strife over who gets to call themselves a feminist and who does not became utterly not worth it to me. It’s that simple really… Do I still feel like a feminist a lot of the time? Yep. Do a whole lot of other people still think of me as a feminist? Yep. But so much strife over a word? Why?

…at this point I could personally care less if people call themselves a feminist, a FM feminist, an ex-feminist, a real feminist, a pro-porn feminist, or the Grande Empress of South Beach. I couldn’t give a flying fuck through a donut as to who says who and who are not "real feminists". That game is never going to end, and the prizes suck.

People who should be allies because they believe in many of the same things, fighting amongst themselves over who owns the label.

I've found my own way to simplify this: I just don't care. I don't care if people call themselves (or me) feminist or not. I just care about what they believe in and what they fight for. I don't care which letter goes first: whether it's LGBT or GLBT or even BGLT, though the one thing we all appear to be able to agree on is that it's never the T. That's a waste of energy that could better be spent arguing about whether we want gay marriage or not.

Wait, sorry, I said 'gay marriage'. That should be 'same-sex marriage':

"gay marriage" is all about the gays, while "same sex marriage" is inclusive of bisexuals. However, whenever I bring this up, I feel like I’m being stupid and nit-picky. After all, we're talking about the big picture here. I'm sensitive to this difference because of my whatchamacallit identity, bisexual.

'Whatchamacallit identity' is a great label, I'm having that. We need our labels after all, our names, but we also need, just every now and then, to remember that the name is not the thing.

Unless you're the Green Onion Slave Girl.

Nobody's ever offered me the choice of cleaning the back seat of a Holden Kingswood with my tongue or going to the optometrist, but if they did I'd have to think about it. My deep-seated fear of optometry is a hang-over from childhood, when the eye test filled me with dread, the only test I could walk into knowing I was going to fail. The only thing that scared me more was going to the dentist.

As an adult, having grown and supposedly hardened up, I’ve tried to find ways to deal with those ridiculous fears. Combating the dentist-fear was easy: I just don't go. If I want to pay someone to cause me pain, there are much more interesting ways. The optometrist is a little more problematic, given that I need to see.

I know it's dumb. It's not like having my eyes tested hurts or anything, I just really hate it. As a kid, I cheated on the test. Here's a tip: if you want to assess a kid using one eye chart, don’t sit them in that room with the eye chart before the exam. For years I could recite the two standard charts (the one that starts with the big E, and the one that starts with the big A) off by heart.

And yes, I know it's an assessment and cheating at it is totally pointless. In my defence, they did punish me for failing. Optometry in the seventies was a disaster. I remember being offered the full choice of girls' frames when I was six: brown tortoise-shell, or pink tortoise-shell. I looked like a complete dork.

The normal bother and anxiety with testing was slightly aggravated this time, I have to admit. I had this sneaking suspicion that something wasn't quite right. For a couple of months now, my right eye has been giving me problems. It's not so much not being able to focus. It’s more as though that one eye is displaying the world 800 by 600, while the other eye is doing 1024 by 768. I find myself reading recto pages with my verso eye.

Eye exams are still a drag. For a start they involve taking off my glasses, something that makes me feel more naked and vulnerable than actually being naked and vulnerable. And they involve lots of conversations that go like this:

Clearer on the green or the red?

Red.

Clearer on the green or the red?

Red.

Clearer on the green or the red?

Red.

Really?

There must be other applications for optometric testing. "Alright, now I’m going to apply a Keynesian filter to your economy. Does that make it better… or worse? Better… or worse?"

By the time I'd been in the chair for an hour and a half, I had a splitting headache and I had no idea any more if it was better or worse or destroying Tokyo. At that point if you'd have suggested trying on a poll tax I'd have given it a go. It wasn't helping that the optometrist kept looking puzzled, hmming, trying things again and then writing furiously.

It turns out there's nothing wrong with my right eye. It's perfectly healthy. It just doesn't see. There's been a large deterioration in my sight in just that one eye in the last few months, and they want me back in another month to see if it's still getting worse. Once again, I am the type of interesting medical specimen that makes health professionals say 'hey, come and have a look at this!'.

When I was a kid, I used to walk around the house with my eyes closed, practicing for when I went blind. My mum once found me walking straight at a brick wall blindfolded, testing the theory that pressure on my pineal gland would tell me where the wall was. There are very few things I enjoy doing that aren’t sight-dependent. I'd really rather be deaf than blind, except for occasional moments when I'm, say, listening to Aretha Franklin sing.

Having spent thirty years preparing myself somehow hasn't made increasing my font sizes and wearing the kind of glasses that could stop bullets any easier. I can touch-type with frightening efficiency, though, so I’ll still be able to write, just not to read what anyone else says. I think that means I qualify for a Herald column. I'll let you all know when I start interviewing for an amanuensis. The first thing she can do is go to my optometry appointments for me.

It was still morning the first time someone said to me, 'did you hear about Amazon?', and I wasn't quite up to dealing with complete sentences yet. The rest of yesterday was spent watching #amazonfail spread across Twitter like a highly contagious rash.

It was authors who noticed it first. Mark Probst is the author of The Filly, a young adult novel featuring a gay teenage romance. His blog was the starting point of what has become, for Amazon, a Perfect Shitstorm:

On Amazon.com two days ago, mysteriously, the sales rankings disappeared from two newly-released high profile gay romance books: "Transgressions" by Erastes and "False Colors" by Alex Beecroft. Everybody was perplexed. Was it a glitch of some sort? The very next day HUNDREDS of gay and lesbian books simultaneously lost their sales rankings, including my book "The Filly." 

Losing the sales ranking is important – books with higher sales rankings are more visible on the site and easier to find. Books were also not turning up in searches. Best sellers suddenly disappeared from the Best Sellers list. Why? Probst wrote to Amazon and asked.

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
 
Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Fair enough, perhaps. But The Filly isn’t adult material. Even more strangely, there was still plenty of adult material on Amazon with its rankings intact. Ron Jeremy's The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz retained its ranking. Stephen Fry's Moab is My Washpot did not. Of these two titles:
How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale – Jenna Jameson
and Anything Goes – John Barrowman
one lost its ranking and the other one didn't. Care to guess? Children's books were affected, as well as literary classics, but there was one thing almost all of them had in common.

So 'adult' doesn’t appear to be sufficient explanation. Last night, Amazon's story changed.

Amazon Director of Corporate Communications Patty Smith e-mailed Jacket Copy. "There was a glitch with our sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed," she wrote. "We're working to correct the problem as quickly as possible."

That's a relief. It's just a glitch. A sexuality-sensitive glitch. They probably hadn't realised there was a glitch when they emailed Mark Probst. Or when they emailed author Craig Seymour over a similar issue. In February.

Here's my story: I'm the author of a memoir, All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C. (Atria/Simon & Schuster), which is about my journey from grad student to stripper to entertainment journalist to college professor. … imagine my shock, back in early February when the "Amazon.com Sales Rank" completely disappeared from the Product Details of my book. The book also disappeared from the search listings, so that if a customer looked up "All I Could Bare by Craig Seymour" on the Amazon home page, nothing came up.

Craig has a timeline of the run-around Amazon gave him over this issue, including their eventual admission that his book had been de-ranked because it was classified as Adult.

#amazonfail was joined by #glitchmyass.

As <a href="http://jezebel.com/5209088/why-is-amazon-removing-the-sales-rankings-from-gay-lesbian-books
" target="_blank">Jezebel points out, the effect of de-ranking all the GLBT titles is pretty chilling.

due to the removal of sales rankings, the first title that pops up when one searches "homosexuality" on Amazon is the aforementioned A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Also in the top 10 when one searches for "homosexuality:" Coming Out Of Sexuality: New Freedom For Men And Women, Can Homosexuality Be Healed?, and When Homosexuality Hits Home: What To Do When A Loved One Says They're Gay

Clearly, the glitch isn't attached to the 'gay' tag, because it's only affecting pro-gay titles. Clever glitch.

You can see a partial list of affected titles here, which with any luck will be of archival value after Amazon fixes the glitch. Note that in most cases, the love that dare not speak its name is unaffected in the Kindle version. Or you could check Amazon for the tag amazonfail, which was bringing up nearly a thousand titles the last time I checked.

This may not be as simple as it seems, however. There's a pretty compelling theory emerging from someone who worked for SixApart during Livejournal's strike-through controversy. He thinks they've been trolled: someone is tagging LGBT titles as adult, over and over again or in a small-but-troubled wingnut group, until Amazon's automated filter de-ranks them.

this troll was perpetrated on a weekend AND a holiday, when Amazon's customer service would be operating on a skeleton crew and most of those who would be able to fix the problem would be at home and possibly unavailable or on vacation. Also, like Nipplegate and Strikethrough, this troll pits a marginalized and activist community against a big company, with the Internet and all its various discussion media (in this case, blogs and Twitter) as the facilitator.

The slight problem with this theory is that I checked a number of those titles, and they weren't tagged as adult, or with any other 'rude sexy' tag, just GLBT tags.

This morning, a hacker (warning: offensively stupid) stood up and said, hey, it was me, isn't it hilarious? He explained how he'd done it in enough detail for someone else to suggest that he was talking crap.

I emailed Amazon last night, and expected to wake up to at least an Amazon press release. The closest they've come is this email response, which contains neither an explanation of what happened, nor the word 'sorry'.

If they have a trigger that delists a book on the basis of user input, then they're relying on the Wisdom of Crowds. Pity that sometimes that wisdom is indistinguishable from the stupidity of the lynch mob. It's a system hanging out to be gamed.

Some variant of the trolling explanation does seem likely, but that doesn't let Amazon off the hook. If this is what happened then it was Amazon's attempt to censor adult material that allowed it to. Censorship is a tool superbly fitted to the hand of the bigot.

Like any geek, I have topics I'm obsessive about. Unlike most geeks, one of mine is web community comment moderation policies. So I was interested in Julie's post at The Hand Mirror over the weekend, and the comments it elicited.

It also reminded me that I promised you a Guide to Destroying a Thriving Internet Community, and I like to keep my promises. (Also, I take requests and dares. I didn't get where I am today without people saying 'what the fuck are you doing?'.)

Moderation is for Pussies.

Become a free speech advocate. Let anybody say anything in any way they choose, no matter how big of a dickwad it makes them – and by extension you – look. Sure, you'll end up actually losing speech as users walk away from the bear pit, but those losses will be pretty much invisible. Suggest that anyone who objects to the resulting flood of personal abuse that they harden the fuck up and learn to take a joke.

Further tips on how to manage this approach can be found here: Derailing for Dummies. As a community manager, this guide will help you identify particularly destructive tactics commenters can use to make your community a stressful nightmare. What you do about it depends on your community, because sometimes the best approach is the exact opposite of the above. It may be that you have, somehow, managed to build a community which operates well through peer pressure. Your commenters have constructed a discourse* so healthy that it actively discourages ass-hattery. In this case, you'll have to take a different tack.

Moderation in Moderation is for Pussies

Become a benevolent dictator. Quash all whisper of dissent, even in its most polite and considerate form. Justify this as protecting your poor delicate readership from triggering, derailing and trolling. Ruthlessly police on-topicality. Have entire lines of argument that are forbidden, because 'we’ve had that discussion before'. (This will keep happening if there's an obvious hole in your argument, strangely.) The delete button is your friend. Alternately, put every comment through moderation. That way, nobody even sees what you delete. The best I've ever seen this done was by someone who replied to comments she left in moderation, allowing herself to abuse people who were unable to defend themselves.

If your community is less robust, you can get away with less extreme measures.

Try to be all things to all people. Every time somebody comes along and suggests the community should be something other than it is, change to accommodate them. Say you write a sports blog, and every now and then someone complains that you talk about a popular sport too much. Stop doing it. Okay, you'll alienate all the people who turned up to discuss that in the first place, but you'll keep the new guy happy for the couple of days they hang around before finding something else to complain about. After all, it's the internet: it's not like they could go and find another site that already does what they want, or even set up one of their own. It's your job to accommodate their needs.

Change is a great tool for pissing people off even in a strong established community. If you're really thriving, try changing platforms every six months or so. The uncertainty and disruption this causes, combined with the way it distracts your staff, should really test your users' patience. Less drastically, try changing your colour scheme and shifting all the buttons to interesting new places every month or so.

Attitude matters, too. On no account display a sense of humour. Feministe's current Next Top Troll competition, for instance, is clearly far too constructive, using the most extreme displays of troll-y idiocy to unite its community. My favourite is Joe, who makes some very cogent points about censorship:

you have been reported i am prepared to sue you because the minute you didnt post my comment you violated free speech and human rights. thats right i know lawyers

Total lack of sense of humour combines nicely with the Benevolent Dictator approach. Any time anyone makes a joke, no matter how obviously it's a joke, tell them off for being insensitive. Particularly to minority issues. Particularly if you’re not actually a member of that minority. After a couple of goes, people will be too scared that they'll put a foot wrong to have any fun at all.

Don't be innovative, either. When xkcd brought in a moderation bot that simply deleted any comment that had been made before, the novelty garnered publicity and engaged a community keen to play with the new toy. Whether it worked or not was almost irrelevant. But see how I used the word 'play'? That's almost humour. Being a part of your community needs to feel like work.

Managing an internet community can be a stressful and time-consuming job. Just imagine how much easier it would be with no users. Following these easy steps should have you there in no time at all.

* For those of you playing the Pretentious Wanker Drinking Game, I just said 'discourse'.

Warning: This piece contains near-toxic levels of in-joke. Reader wtf-ing is inevitable.

We sat with our backs leaning against the stone of the Bridge of Rembrance, watching the crowd go by. After a moment, my companion stopped frailing his banjo, fished in one of his pockets, and brought out a zip lock bag with a couple of pills in it. "Want some?"

"Bob," I said sternly, "where’d you get those?"

He shrugged defensively. "From Dad’s friend, Uncle Alan."

I nipped the bag out of his fingers and over-armed it off the bridge, where the nor'wester took it dancing down the river. "Dude, I said, don't trust that bastard an inch. Fucker told me to fix last week and then dropped the OCR a whole point three days later. Anyway, where'd I tell you to get your gear, young man?"

"From Uncle R-"

"Ah!"

He stopped, and then remembered. He’s a quick learner, that boy. "From the Point Chev pharmacy."

I ruffled his hair affectionately. "Good lad. Anyway, what would your Dad say?"

Bob picked idly at his banjo strings. "I dunno. He hasn’t been the same since, y'know, the accident."

I sighed, and lit another cigarette, pausing to give the finger to the disapproving old biddy who glared at me. I wasn't smuggling Black Sorbranies into the country to take any shit from nuns. "Tragic waste, that. And so weird, that his prototype generator for extracting energy from the sewage in the Avon would just explode like that. Still, at least he lets me babysit now." I frowned, briefly disconcerted. "Did we remember to bring him in off the porch before we left? I can't remember. Never mind, it doesn’t look like rain. Now, what would you like to do? We could go over to Manchester Street and talk to the sex workers, or we could go across the road to the Strip and watch the drunks punch each other."

Bob pinched one of my fags while he thought about it. I considered telling him off, but if he was serious about that career in country music he was probably going to need to smoke a whole lot more of the things. Anyway, if his mother hadn't wanted me to be his moral guardian, she shouldn't have eaten all that unpasteurised cheese. Tragic waste. Especially just after she won the Nobel Prize for Linguistics.

"Maybe we could go to a play or a gig or something," Bob ventured.

"Pah," I said dismissively. "What are you, a Wellingtonian? You know what happens if we stop throwing bottles at tourists and tipping cows. Do you want your rugby team to lose all time? Do you?"

"No," he muttered, lowering his head so his hair fell around his face and emphasised his Byronic good looks.

"Good then, stop being so bloody soft. Come on."

We got our feet, and Bob's face lit. "Look, there’s Kate!"

"Ssh," I hissed, ducking down. "She’ll hear you."

"She's your daughter, why don’t you want to talk to her?"

"It's awkward. I owe her some money," I admitted. "It was a tough year. My book didn't sell very well. I don't s'pose your dad has anything lying around he doesn't remember writing?"

"Nah, don't think so."

"Oh well." I peered across the road around him. "Dear god, what the hell is she wearing? That's way too much cleavage, and if she bends over… wait a minute, that's my dress! No, not the bloody Nissan Skyline, honey, show some class. Go for the Saab, go for the Saab… that's my girl."

Once she was gone, we set off again, clattering our way through a carpet of discarded nitrous bulbs. There seemed to be an even higher degree of muntery about than usual. A few faces I recognised suggested we were about to have one of those 'ex-Christ's lawyer-boy' versus 'ex-St Bedes cockies in for the weekend' fights break out, and while I enjoyed the scoring system (some arcane combination of 'people put in the emergency room' plus 'girls got off with' multiplied by 'number of ancestors on First Four Ships plaque' minus 'number of mates passed out on road' divided by 'arrest record') I had a duty to protect Bob. Even if he was taller than me these days.

"Change of plan, my young shaver."

"I told you not to call me that."

"Sorry. Anyway, let's go to that coffee house by the Arts Centre. You can explain your music to uni girls and I can talk about the development of science-fiction in the Victorian period to that weird guy with the long hair and no shoes."

Bob perked up. "Okay. But do you promise not to lick cream off anything this time?"

"Almost, Bob. Almost."