A Wikipedia admin is trying to help whitewash the GamerGate article, which is currently critical of the effort to threaten women in the video game industry with rape and murder. He argues (with respect to the Vivian James cartoon) that

one static image cannot readily imply rape

This will probably surprise my readers who are art historians or semioticians, as well as the shades of Picasso, Goya, Rubens, Bernini, and plenty of others.

Besides, he says, the underlying meme was just a “locker room joke.”

Meanwhile, another editor (whose screen name is Japanese) was denounced yesterday as “Shlomo Sheckelstein” and instructed to go back to editing articles about Israeli homosexuals. On 8chan, they’re talk about that editor sitting in his room and counting his “Jew gold.”

What a charming bunch of volunteers! In Wikipedia, I guess you can accomplish great things with the aid of a rogue administrator. How in pursuit of The Wiki Way did we come to this?

Tell me again about the wisdom of crowds, and how the net routes around damage, and how this will end well? It’s been a lousy week: I need a bubbe meisse.

This War Of Mine, a new game game by Grzegorz Miechowski. examines war from the viewpoint of the people caught in the middle. It’s set in a world like WW2 Warsaw, a half-ruined city in which desperate civilians scramble for food, shelter, for anything that can help them manage a few more days.

This might have been a simple romp or a power fantasy, but it’s not. You start in a house with three guys, each with distinct personality and talents. New helpers can arrive with their own talents, and those talents are realistically useful or otherwise. I’ve had a mathematician and a high school principal – splendid folks and good company, but these are not the skills we chiefly need right now. Choices have consequences and the consequences are deep: you can steal stuff, but it makes you feel pretty awful; you can hide from the armed gangs who are threatening people who have nothing to do with you, but you’ll always wonder if there was something you should have done.

Onboarding is not this game’s strength. To preserve the morality of the game, it’s hard to save your progress, to back up and erase your mistakes. That’s perhaps the right answer, but it makes things less fun.

Perhaps that’s part of the point.

Revolution 60 by Brianna Wu is an intriguing hyperfiction performed as an animated film. A tactical team of four (very talented) operatives have been called in to deal with a hijacked space station, working in the service of a AI overseer. Holiday, the player character, is a motorcycle-riding combat specialist. She’s teamed with Valentina, advised by tech-savvy Amelia, managed by a manipulative suit named Minuete, and opposed by a conspiracy we don’t understand.

A good time is had by all.

In formal terms, this is a fairly conventional branching hypertext in which decisions accrete tendencies or stats, and the accumulated stats ultimately determine the ending. That this works at all rests on two piers. First, we’ve got a team of four women whose interactions with each other are complexly nuanced, and the stats play nicely into shifting professional alliances and attitudes. Should Holiday behave “professionally” or should she let her violent roguishness show? Should Holiday flatter management, or should she align herself with her technically-adept peer? These are not melodramatic morality tales, but intriguing choices with consequences, taking us back to the question at the beginning of literary hypertext, “Do you want to hear about it?” and the opportunity to answer, “No.”

Second, we’re not simply telling a gender-switched story (as in Hunger Games, which is to say Robin Hood) or a familiar quest tale that happens to have a female protagonist: we’re actually exploring (fairly) real depictions of office behavior in contemporary business culture, extended to an epic stage. When push comes to shove, should you support your manager, who claims to have special knowledge, or the new girl from MIT, who claims to have a different kind of special knowledge? In the last analysis, you’re unlikely to achieve an ideal fantasy outcome: what shortfalls can you accept? And whom will you sacrifice to get where you want to be?

I’m not sure this is entirely successful as a game or a sustainable model for hyperfiction. But it doesn’t have to be: it’s $4 and it takes a couple of hours. (There’s plenty of replay value – hypertexts demand rereading – so no worries there.) Enjoy it for what it is, and look forward to the next adventure.

Amid much Gamergate foolishness swirling at Wikipedia and elsewhere, I’ve been thinking of ways to re/mediate Gamergate.

When you have a hammer, everything problem looks like a nail. When you have narratology, every problem looks like a plot device.

But seriously: one problem here is narrative: the conflict concerns who is to be the protagonist of this melodrama. And if that were the only conflict – if this were all a game without consequences – that would be dandy.

But what if it weren’t a melodrama? How about a nice Shakespearean comedy: Much Ado About Games, with Zoe Quinn as Hero and Brianna Wu as Beatrice? Or, after A Day At The Races and A Night At The Opera we could have A Midnight At 8chan. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Gamergate PR operation has always been worthy of the Three Stooges with the Marx Brothers thrown in for good measure.

Or how about music theater? I can see a big, serious musical here, something like Oklahoma! or – better – Carousel. As I recall, Carousel has two choruses: New England villagers and Carnival Workers. We could have two choruses too: a chorus of feminist game developers and a chorus of “gamers”.

It won’t stand up to scrutiny, of course, but what’s the use of wondering? And I like the potential for a gender-switched Soliloquy:

As you see, I’m in a rotten mood, but This War Of Mine, a new game game by Grzegorz Miechowski about surviving as a refugee in a place that might be Warsaw in World War 2 promises a light little change of pace.

by Jen Wang and Cory Doctorow

Get the book.

A suburban teenage girl goes online, joins a Massively Multiplayer Roleplaying Game, and discovers that there’s a big and complicated world out there. Before she’s finished, she’s a key figure in a new Chinese labor movement. A power fantasy for a new age, but a good time is had by all.

One of the things I disliked about my early work in picosecond photoacoustic spectroscopy was that, when strangers asked me “what do you do?”, there was no good answer. Either you were self-deprecating, which is a bore, or you try to explain to people, which is annoying, or you oversimplify, which is pretentious. Or you try to find a polite way to say “you wouldn’t understand,” but there is no such way, and so you mutter to yourself that “they aren’t going to understand” and it’s usually true but nobody’s better off.

Nowadays I make software for writers and researchers, software that helps people write articles and books, manage research, plan departments, make investments, design new stuff. But I find that people increasingly assume that all software pretty much exists already and that working on it now is like ditch digging or assembly line work, work that nobody would do unless they had no choice at all. Anyway, all software comes with your computer, except perhaps for those 99¢ app things we don’t let the kids buy.

Maybe I need to find better parties.

Brent Simmons builds the case against else – specifically, the awkwardness of commenting out the else{} clause without fouling up your brackets.

There’s a deeper case we should mention: radical simplification of conditionals. In the old days, nested conditionals were a dime a dozen, and we all learned to build (and debug) trees of if statements nested three our four deep.

We don’t do that anymore.

In fact, lots of people argue that a conditional is too complex if (a) either clause has more than one line, or (b) it has an else{} clause at all. Instead of an else clause:

if(mill()) { 
 drill); } 
else { 
 fill(); }  

we now write a guard:

if (mill()) {
 drill();
 return; }
fill();

Or, if you should never drill if milling fails, move the test to drill()

bool drill() {
 if (!mill()) return false;
  drillSelf();
 return true;
 }

And now you’ve got a simpler guard:

if (!drill()) return;
fill();

In this view, else is a mild code smell.

by Robert A. Caro

Get the book.

Volume IV of this masterful series covers Johnson’s failed campaign for the presidential nomination in 1960, the many miseries of his vice presidency, and the sudden, terrible transition to the presidency that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and that forever transformed the country. Caro’s sources are manifold and his methods scrupulous, which often lands him with a technical problem: there’s so much evidence, and that evidence is so good and so various, that is becomes a challenge to remember why we are reviewing this evidence in the first place. The result is sometimes repetitious, but the story bears repeating.

This is Phil Fish: a case study in internet celebrity. Twenty minutes long, but outstanding craft and a thoughtful argument.

In the GamerGate/RequiresHate/Trolling muddle, I’ve finally learned how to block people in Twitter. This is a good thing to know, as it helps one’s inner light. I’m taking a Twitter Vacation anyway, but blocking helps.

In drafting Bad Faith, I needed at one point to paraphrase a Twitter message from a distinguished colleague whom I had blocked – someone who has accomplished a lot (I don’t recall that we’ve met) and with whom I’d like to have amicably professional relations despite this disagreement. So I googled her twitter handle and mine, figuring that I’d find the tweet in question, check it, and no problem.

Except I got a small hunk of the timeline, and a little ways upstream, after I’d blocked, there was a tweet about race that I’d very much rather not have seen. It was very mild, as things go; Requires Hate would laugh at it as a useless and pitiful thing. And as soon as I saw it, I started telling myself stories: “it might not concern you at all”, “yeah, it’s probably another argument entirely,” “angry people say stuff they don’t mean,” “maybe it’s not quite beyond the pale,” “maybe there’s some prior history.”

Memo for files: never, ever, peer under stones from which you’ve undertaken to avert your gaze.

Stacey Mason, too, is about ready to abandon hope. She offers a general guide on how to argue responsibly.

After months now of particularly draining online discussions conducted in bad faith I find myself lately ready to give up on the Internet.

Meanwhile, I gather some people were baffled by my remarks about knowledge hoarding.

If you know a lead reference that I should know, great: tell me what it is, and give me some idea of how to approach it.… It’s the basic obligation of the scientist: if you know something a colleague needs to know, you succinctly direct your colleague in the right direction.

In school, we learn lessons about deportment and manners and ethics, about sharing your toys and using your fork and doing your own work. As we approach questions of professional ethics and behavior, the instruction becomes more subtle. Some people ignore the lesson at each stage, of course, but I think sometimes people simply don’t receive the required instruction.

I raised a similar question a few years ago about conferences. When you attend a conference, I was taught that any other attendee is entitled to a share of your courteous attention; even (and perhaps especially) young people, students, unattractive people, and people who are unlikely to be of any immediate use to you. Lots of folks thought this absurd and weren’t shy of saying so.

In the sciences, you must never run around shouting, “I know something you don’t know, and I’m not going to tell you!” This is always bad manners, and if you persist it’s also a crime. The whole enterprise of science — that is, Science as an institution — rests on dissemination of knowledge: if you know that someone is making an error, believing a falsehood, or overlooking a vital facet of their problem, you cannot sit there silently. You can’t ignore it because it’s politically inconvenient, or because you like the other person, or because they’ll be angry with you. (If you’re not sure, that’s a gray area, but one must never pretend to be unsure.)

The needs of the proverbial Engineer are a litmus test here. If Professor Jane is making a mistake and you know it and remain silent, and someone designs a bridge that collapses because they relied on Prof. Jane’s result, you are greatly to blame. That you could not have expected this to relate to a bridge is no excuse, nor is the failure of bridges to have been invented when you failed to mention the error. The victims – your victims – will not excuse you because you didn’t actually know someone would someday build that bridge.

There’s also the milder but still stringent claim that the shared pursuit of knowledge imposes. Chaucer famously pins this in his 13th century Professor:

And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.

The point here is not that teaching is a pleasant hobby or a remunerative and comfortable way to earn a nice salary; the point is that getting and sharing knowledge is reciprocal. Everything depends on this: if you have people hoarding knowledge, they aren’t scientists and they aren’t colleagues. They’re mystic wizards in their tower, the allies of myth and superstition and, for all the fun we have with tales of swords and sorcery, they’re always the Enemy.

This obligation is not universal, though I believe the world would be improved were it more broadly felt. We exempt artists because, often, they cannot share what they know. If you ask a chemist, “how did you make that cyclooctatetraene,” she can and should tell you, but we understand that asking Scott Prior, “How did you make Nanny and Rose?” or ask Jo Walton “how did you make Among Others?” the answer is bound to be very partial and inadequate. We also accept that in some walks of life, untruths, exaggerations, and deceptions are more or less acceptable. Politics ain’t beanbag, but when we’re doing research, these are crimes.

And, of course there are limits: life is short, people are busy. A reference or citation to the pertinent work is sufficient, and requires only seconds. If you cannot think of a reference — not even a lead reference — then you don’t know what you claim you know.

If you can provide a reference, and won’t? That’s a misdemeanor. It’s not a terrible crime, precisely, because you can remedy it so easily. And it’s the sort of lapse where your friends can (and should) rush in, covering your lapse and repairing your fault. “I think — correct me if I’m wrong — Mark is thinking of that paper from Chicago, by Perkins and Snodgrass. Or something like that.”

It happens. I’ve probably done it too. But it’s not something to be proud of.

I’ve received a certain amount of email on anonymity and trolls. People have written lots of articles and a few papers — hell, I did a keynote almost a decade ago and I didn’t start the fire — and while a number of correspondents sent interesting discussions of edge cases and boundary conditions, for which much thanks, there’s nothing resembling a persuasive counter-argument in my inbox, much left a disproof. And at this point I’ve heard from some pretty impressive scholars.)

Some people on Twitter were upset by my piece on Trolls, concerned that I was unfamiliar with the literature. Unfortunately, the literature on the topic is broad and shallow: there’s a lot to read, and a great deal of it is very poor.

There is every likelihood that I have overlooked some critical research. I’ve read a ton of Web Science, a good deal of Wiki research, and a lot of the early Weblog research; this topic has been discussed in all of these. I’m familiar with the Hypertext Research literature, which touches this as well. I've been program chair for ACM WebSci and ACM WikiSym and twice for ACM Hypertext, for which I’ve typically read all the accepted papers and the rejects. I’ve read a fair bit by people who don’t publish in these places: Corey Doctorow is one obvious contributor.

But important material pertinent to the topic can appear in all sorts of places I’d miss anything that appeared in law reviews, philosophical monographs, or cryptography workshops. Aaron, whose birthday would have been today, might well have written something important on the topic and stashed it in a white paper in the backroom of some obscure Harvard site. That happens.

Consider: a decent respect to the opinions of mankind. If you know a lead reference that I should know, great: tell me what it is, and give me some idea of how to approach it. Over the years, I’ve done this hundreds of times — perhaps thousands of times. Sometimes the person asking is a famous writer or a distinguished professor, and sometimes they’re a graduate student, and sometimes they’re 14 years old and have an idea for a novel they want to publish and can you help them? It’s the basic obligation of the scientist: if you know something a colleague needs to know, you succinctly direct your colleague in the right direction.

Standing on the Twitter corner and shouting "You’re ignorant but I’m busy” betrays the principles of collegiality and of Science.

Sources for Trolls?

Partly, I’m rehashing my 2005 Blogtalk Downunder argument and adding a specific straw man proposal because otherwise it’s just handwringing. After GamerGate and RequiresHate, the time for handwringing is past.

Partly, I’ve thought long and hard about Stacey Mason’s GamerGate responses, temperate and otherwise. Don’t dismiss these as superficial castings of plagues on both houses: Mason’s arguments are deeper and more courageous than they first appear.

Partly, it’s What I Learned At Swarthmore. You had to be there, but if you weren’t, you might start with the work of Jane Addams and her circle, and reflect on Quaker leadership of Abolition.

Partly, it’s Emerson’s Self-Reliance mediated through Roosevelt’s Fear God and Take Your Own Part and Mamet’s True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor: “Stand up, speak out, and stay out of school.”

Also: a small mountain of Web Science papers on coordination of revolutionary movements (and their suppression) in Egypt, Syria, Libya, China, and elsewhere; Tilmann Altenberg’s intriguing but (in my opinion) wrong-headed study of Jorn Barger; and a good deal of Wikipedia policy discussion with pseudonymous colleagues, some of whom are knowledgeable and thoughtful. And let’s also remember Jorn Barger, Kali Tal, Nirelan, Devorguilla, Director, and all the other skilled trolls I’ve met.

Anonymous internet publication should be legal, safe, and rare.

“Morbus Iff” asserts out that doxxing can break anonymity. We now know, as we did not when I wrote in 2005, that a persistent anonymous identity can potentially be revealed through its social graph, allowing even an honest escrow to be circumvented. I bet this can be addressed, even for persistent identities, by keeping your own friends away from your pseudonym, but I’m not sure we need persistent identities. If the pseudonym is short-lived or seldom used, I can’t see how doxxing is feasible without evading escrow.

It may be necessary in some circumstances to stand anonymously athwart history and yell “Stop!”, but if you need to make it a lifestyle, it may be that you’re doing it wrong.

My foundation here is responsibility. The problem with trolls is that they are irresponsible: they can do great damage, yet suffer no consequences. That this is wrong is a proposition on which most (though not all) of us can agree. That this is inexpedient is now, I think, unmistakably clear. A troll has single-handedly torn a swath through SF/F, one that will take years to repair and which as irrevocably damaged the lives of many artists. A small group of trolls has tied gaming in knots and is causing untold harm.

This has got to stop.

Laura J. Mixon has written a monumental study of one specific troll who has plagued the SF/F writing community for years, a study remarkable for its depth and thoroughness and titled A Report on Damage Done by One Individual Under Several Names. One writer, chiefly known as “Requires Hate” but frequently blogging under other names, has waged a bitter net war against writers she despises, writers who she thinks are racist, sexist, colonialist, and worse. Her denunciations were violent and bitter, prolonged, and intemperate; she wished people ill, she wished them dead, she followed them to other forums and across Twitter. She wrote to conventions to convince them to disinvite speakers, and wrote to publishers to shame them for publishing racist and sexist work. She reduced many writers to tears and inspired at least one suicide attempt.

Kathryn Cramer touched on this:

Over the past five years, women with established careers in the science fiction field have been treated like they are cheap, plentiful, and easily replaced; disposable as light bulbs. And this treatment has come mostly at the hands of other women.

Interestingly, it is now clear that most of the targets of Requires Hate were young women of color.

This chronicle of intemperate and unrelenting attacks, aimed at driving people out of their chosen field, will remind readers of GamerGate. If you’ve been in New Media for a long time, you’ll also remember trolls who wrecked our early communities: Jorn Barger’s demolition of alt.hypertext (and so much else), and Kali Tal’s destruction of the TechnoCulture list.

It’s not that hard to fix this.

1. Anonymous writing should be the exception, not the norm. Write under your own name. Require people writing on your site to write under their own names.
2. When people write anonymously, a link to their real name should be held in escrow. That escrow may be secure – I think it can even be secure against law enforcement – but it should not be inconsequential. There should be several competing registrars, as with internet domains.
3. Registrars may offer a variety of disclosure policies. One might be, “Your identity will remain as secret as we can make it.” Another might be, “Your identity will remain secret until and unless we have reason to believe that your life, or the life of another person, is in danger and disclosing your identity could be of material benefit.” You might be permitted to nominate a delegate with a limited power to authorize disclosure. (I know of a blogger whose weblog has a locked post, with instructions to the ISP to release that file if they are kidnapped or murdered.)
4. I suggest that your first pseudonym have nominal cost, the next costs US$1000, and the next after that costs $10,000. So, even if you have a sock puppet or two, you’ll treat them responsibly.
5. Children are entitled to their first pseudonym on their 13th birthday, and can receive a free replacement on turning 18 (or 21). Childrens’ pseudonym’s have the same privacy as adult pseudonyms, but can be identified as belonging to a minor.

But we also need to understand that the bitter steel of righteous wrath must not be deployed casually. People should have denounced Requires Hate ten years ago; it's one thing to be against racism but it's quite another to be unkind, and while some of Requires Hate’s points may have been worth considering, nobody ever thought they were meant kindly.

Just as, while one can sympathize in principle with the threat perceived by #GamerGate, it’s obvious that the expression was contemptible.

Up with this we cannot put. And it’s not just semi-literate redneck ravings. It used to be just fine for Faulkner to write this:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances…

But of course, what Faulkner was saying here in 1948 is that there was this wonderful moment when you could own people, and when the fight to own people had not yet been lost – when it might still be won. He’s looking back to the moment when the entire South was a safe space for men of a certain kind, and for a time when “every Southern boy fourteen years old” did not include black boys of any age.

Speaking of Brianna Wu, her Revolution 60 is an interesting (and well-written) hypertext fiction.

The best thing you can do for your weblog, web site, tumblr, or social media page is to disable comments. I said that in 2005, and it’s still true.

by Stephen King

Get the book.

The contemporary school story ends with the dissolution of the school, and Stephen King here kicks off a remarkable career with the loving demolition of the school, the schoolchildren, and an entire town. It’s a direct and straightforward book, a simple book really; I wonder whether anyone knew, holding the manuscript back in 1973, what a sensation this would become.