The digital closet, p.26
The Digital Closet, page 26
1. Vigilance and Accountability through Data Collection We—and by this I mean the alliance of people willing to work toward queering our internet architecture—need more, better, and longer duration data on internet censorship. While we could demand this from companies themselves—or we could demand that our governments demand it on our behalf—it is unlikely that they will provide it. The possibility of spammers reverse engineering their filtration systems from this data will endanger their ad revenue too greatly for them to provide this information willingly. If it cannot be obtained by demand, it ought to be collected independently by research centers, universities, and community members. Some initial efforts have been made in this direction, but they are not well funded or robust enough. Ideally, everyone on social media would know where to go and how to submit a report of the overzealous censorship of sexual speech. With a large enough dataset, we can make much more convincing arguments; we can demonstrate that heteronormativity is not a glitch but a feature of the internet.
2. Initiate a Public Discourse on Sexual Speech We need to be having a much more robust conversation about what constitutes pornography, in which contexts, when it is actually in the best interests of children and adolescents to censor it, and how best to do so. This conversation needs to better reflect LGBTQIA+, sex-positive, and sex-critical voices. We need to figure out what values we actually share and examine how they intersect with civic justice. We need to consider the evidence we have about sexual speech and pornography in particular in doing so.
3. More and Better Evidence on the Impact of Sexual Speech Throughout my research for this book, it was a struggle to connect the incredibly heterogeneous and siloed empirical evidence that came to bear on sexual speech online. This is no wonder, as disciplinary boundaries often prevent the very confluences of ideas necessary to address a problem like this. This is only exacerbated by the difficulty of getting funding for and internal review board (IRB) approval for studies on the impact of sexual speech, especially when they examine people under eighteen years old. It would be helpful if we advocated for more, better, and reproducible studies of the impact that sexual speech has on people that are then confirmed through multiple repeat trials. This same energy ought to be applied as well to researching the material impacts of online sex work so that we can better understand the needs of digital sex workers. The social sciences are particularly well equipped to do this if we make it a priority.
4. Anti-Censorship Commitment In 2007, Google shareholders voted down a sweeping anti-censorship initiative.12 Similar initiatives have been introduced at or suggested to other internet platforms to no avail. We ought to press these companies to reconsider anti-censorship commitments and press our governments to put similar commitments into legislation and bureaucratic regulations as well. While anathema to shareholders, these commitments easily fit within the techno-libertarian, free speech–oriented ethos of the technology sector and can be argued for on grounds that are thus familiar to tech executives. Extracting a specific commitment to protecting LGBTQIA+ discourse online would be particularly beneficial, as they can be brought to bear as pressure on companies to redress grievances more quickly and thoroughly.
5. Better Adjudication Mechanisms One of the more opaque aspects of content moderation online is the adjudication mechanisms available to people who believe their content was blocked unjustly or in error. The accounts that I came across repeatedly showed tech companies sending out mixed messages, repeatedly sending vague form letters in response to each complaint, or ignoring requests for adjudication altogether. We ought to advocate for more carve-outs for LGBTQIA+ discourse and sexual speech and specific channels of adjudication for content that may have been blocked due to heteronormativity and/or homophobia. This is a rather low-cost solution and fits within the content moderation workflow that already exists at most tech companies—it is a simple matter of prioritizing and escalating LGBTQIA+ content to the more senior and better trained moderators and/or instating targeted carve-outs to preserve LGBTQIA+ discourse. These costs, it could be argued, would easily be offset by the benefits of avoiding the embarrassing public relations nightmares of censoring clearly nonpornographic LGBTQIA+ content.
6. Demand AI Explicability Big data and AI ethics are rapidly growing discourses that increasingly stress the need for neural network explicability and interpretability. Some computer scientists argue that this will unnecessarily handcuff the development of AI systems.13 However, it is the only means for having a public discourse on such systems. Recent trends in neural network research have begun to demonstrate methods for feature visualization and attribution in neural network applications.14 We ought to demand that companies applying machine learning and neural networks to content moderation institute more robust feature visualization and attribution and make these outputs publicly available so that we might better understand how their algorithms are working and offer constructive criticism for improving them.
7. Demand “Human Algorithm” Explicability In the wake of the content moderation scandals that surrounded the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook introduced transparency measures to its content moderation policy making. This first step is applaudable and ought to be replicated industry-wide. It needs to be taken further though, and further transparency ought to be granted to the public or nonprofit industry watchdogs who can keep track of who is making content moderation policies, who is influencing these policy makers, and who is enacting these policies and making decisions about individual pieces of content. Moderation of sexual content ought to be further prioritized, with more care and consideration given to policy making and more training being given to content moderation laborers. Ideally, this would also include location or cultural context being factored into decision-making. Further use also ought to be made of the click-to-reveal dynamics implemented at companies like Facebook for potentially gory photos, allowing borderline sexual content to persist on the site behind a click-through barrier or even behind age verification, though this latter is rife with its own problems.
8. Reinstate the Off Button Google SafeSearch and other companies that host but mask pornography on their platforms need to reinstate a full opt-out option. All content on these platforms should be indexed and searchable with the same ease, and the decision of when to show or not show “pornographic” results ought to be left to users rather than keyword and behavior-based predictive analytics. Gating pornography behind a select few keywords puts mainstream heteroporn producers at an undue advantage, as they can leverage their technological prowess, access to corporate lawyers, and advertising capital to make sure their content is “optimized” to show up first in any content search. This seems like a relatively simple to implement and cost-effective solution and thus is a demand worth making. Similar demands ought to be made if other platforms can be convinced to host sexual speech behind click-through or age verification barriers, though, as of now, this demand pertains mostly to Google.
The Revolutionary Response to the Digital Closet
The revolutionary response to the digital closet encompasses those strategies that aim for changes that are much more difficult to achieve or need to occur over a longer time frame. The revolutionary response needs to remain flexible and responsive to social contexts and the needs of the marginalized. It is particularly difficult to imagine because we are all fed a narrative of the inevitability of our current technologies and the impossibility of thinking outside the frameworks of the nation-state and capitalism. That said, it is worth staking out some initial thoughts on what such a response might look like, even though it will inevitably fall short. Toward that end, here are some action items that might help us orient a revolutionary response to the digital closet, each of which requires a more or less radical break from our current ideology and the current state of affairs.
1. Defund the Police Following the calls of the Black Lives Matter movement and other social justice organizers, we ought to make defunding the police a core strategy. The particular focus ought to be on defunding vice squads that enforce prostitution laws and criminalize sex work, as well as the branches of the Justice Department now focused on the overbroad enforcement of FOSTA. Where police departments continue to exist, we might also follow New Zealand’s model and train police officers to be more accountable and available to LGBTQIA+ and sex worker communities so that they can have equal access to protection under the law. Extending that concept, police also ought to be better equipped to handle the types of online harassment that digital sex workers might face, including things like trolls and stalkers.
2. Legalize Sex Work Online and Offline A tightly coupled second aim ought to be to legalize sex work, both online and offline, in recognition that the criminal justice system is not the appropriate apparatus to address the material ills of sex work. This has the added benefit of creating a loophole in FOSTA, which notably does not apply in Nevada because of state legislation on prostitution there. While a more revolutionary approach would be to demand this at the federal level, it also works as a revisionist approach, as the same idea can be applied at local and state levels perhaps more immediately.
3. Make Sex a Concern for the Welfare State Again, following the trends in the current progressive movement of demanding an expansion to the welfare state—including universal health care, sweeping environmental regulations, unemployment insurance, and so on—we might add to that list that sex be treated as a public health concern and an important prong of the welfare state. I mean this both in a rehabilitative sense—offering social services like housing, health care, food, job training, education, and so on, to sex workers (regardless of whether they agree or intend to exit sex work)—and in a more proactive and positive sense. By the latter, we might begin to think about fulfilling, enjoyable, diverse sex as part of what it means to live a healthy and happy life. We might radically expand and diversify sex education, not only in public schools but also in public discourse through public service announcements and other informational campaigns. We might aim to become the society we already imagine ourselves to be that can openly talk about sex and sexuality in a productive, informative, transformative sense. Needless to say, I imagine this in an anti-heteronormative and feminist sense that would highlight increasingly things like consent and mutual pleasure.
4. Direct Action through Community Organizing While this is less difficult to imagine as many LGBTQIA+ and sex worker communities are already engaging in the practice, we might imagine radically expanding our communal capacities to address our concerns directly without the need to appeal to state or corporate powers. I am thinking here of the sex worker activist groups AIDS Myanmar Association, Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad, and the Thai group Empower or trans and queer community groups looking to address violence without recourse to police like Safe Outside the System Collective of the Audre Lorde Project in New York City; For Crying Out Loud!, Communities Against Rape and Abuse, and the Northwest Network of Bisexual, Trans, Lesbian and Gay Survivors of Abuse in Seattle; Creative Interventions and Generative Somatics in Oakland; Community United Against Violence in San Francisco; and Philly Stands Up!15 In particular, we can look to The Revolution Starts at Home and the Creative Interventions Tool Kit as inspiration for how community problems can be solved by committed community members engaging in direct action.16 I think this is a model we might look to expand on and develop.
5. Make Communications Infrastructures and/or Social Media Platforms into Public Utilities It has always struck me as odd that among the demands made by progressive organizers that turning phone and ISPs and now social media platforms into public utilities was not a more prominent demand. It is nearly impossible to access state services or maintain gainful employment without maintaining perpetual internet and mobile phone connectedness, and it has become increasingly difficult to navigate higher education and the workplace without using social media. Internet and telephone services definitely present themselves as public utilities, as increasingly do social media platforms and other technologies, such as Google Search. We might take that model to rethink technology’s place in our society and either demand public ownership or an extremely restrictive private licensing agreement where companies are allowed to provide the service for limited profit but under tight constraints aimed at the public good. This goal would subsume similar but smaller-scale goals like reinstituting net neutrality or extending net neutrality to mobile communications. The result may be universal and free access to phone and internet communications and tighter regulations on content moderation policies—making them responsive to our needs rather than advertisers’ brand images.
6. Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism In the end, many of the strategies here are interconnected with and dependent on a much larger revolutionary movement toward the overthrow of global capitalism and its attendant imperialist nation-states. With power concentrated in the hands of either, we’re left to fend for ourselves and take what moderate revisions we can get. While it may be a yet to be imagined -ism that gives shape to an allied intersectional revolutionary movement like this, to me, it looks like for now the closest concept we have to imagine a society that can meet these demands of radical democracy, robust social welfare, and freedom of self-expression is communism—particularly of the variety often memed about in earnest on the internet, Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. Let’s all blast off together.
Acknowledgments
There is no one I could possibly thank more than my wife and partner Bethany Monea, who listened to me talk about this book incessantly, gave feedback on multiple drafts, and encouraged me to keep going even when I felt like procrastinating. Without her, this book would certainly not exist. I’d also like to thank my family for providing me with the love, support, and distraction of life outside academia that made writing a book like this possible, including Paul Monea, Christian Monea, Heidi Bradshaw, Ben Bradshaw, Brooke Monea, Blake Monea, Bubba Douglas, Paul Monea (Sr.), Michele Reber, Robb Reber, Sean Reber, Brandon Reber, Ben Rudick, Sarah Fink, and Jim Rudick. I’d like to particularly thank Cindi Rudick who helped keep me grounded and gave me the confidence to keep going, even when I doubted my ability to complete this project.
This project would have long ago stalled out were it not for Benjamin Peters, whose sage advice and selfless willingness to help me shape the initial ideas and structure the book proposal made this book possible. He is a continued inspiration for me and the regulative ideal that I try to meet as a scholar. I cannot thank him enough. I’d also like to thank David Weinberger for going through countless iterations of the proposal with me until I had finally figured out exactly what I was writing and how to (with any luck) make it interesting and accessible to broader audiences. Gita Manaktala has been all that I could ask for in an editor: open, kind, supportive, and encouraging. All of this was greatly appreciated as a scholar working on my first manuscript who had very little idea of how things worked going into this process. Lastly, from MIT, I’d like to thank my wonderful reviewers, who hopefully will read this, as it’s my only chance to tell them how generous, insightful, and inspiring their feedback was on my manuscript. They helped to make this book better and to make me a better writer.
I’d like to thank George Mason University, including the College for Humanities and Social Sciences, the English Department, and the Cultural Studies Program for giving me the time and freedom to pursue this book project. I cannot imagine a better environment in which to write my first book. Deb Shutika and Denise Albanese selflessly protected my time as a junior faculty member and made sure I had time to complete this project. Paul Smith, Jessica Scarlata, and Hatim El-Hibri have all been close confidants throughout the process and provided invaluable insight into the project and the publication process. I’d also like to thank my PhD seminar students for agreeing to read and give me illuminating feedback on the manuscript, including Muna Al Taweel, Angela Barajas, Terilee Edwards-Hewitt, Jason Grant, Travis Lamken, Luma Mousa, Kylie Musolf, Mark Peterson, Maillim Santiago, Ian Sinnett, Srishti Sood, Pavithra Suresh, Chelsea Triggs, Mariah Wakefield, and Wenzhu Xu. Kylie Musolf’s detailed feedback in particular helped shape my revision plan for the book.
I’d also like to thank my friends and colleagues who listened to me talk about the book, attended my presentations, and helped me work out some of the ideas that initiated the project, including Charlie Strong, Scott Sundvall, Josh Coleman, Chris Drain, Jessa Lingel, Ezekiel Dixon-Román, Ken Pinion, David Parisi, Mel Gregg, Sarah Sharma, Jeremy Packer, Kyle Stein, and Hollis Griffin. Last, but certainly not least, I’d like to thank the journalists and community activists who tirelessly archived and wrote stories about the censorship of LGBTQIA+ content online. Violet Blue’s and Samantha Cole’s work were both invaluable for me, and I cannot thank them enough for it.
Notes
Introduction
1. Nicholas Carlson, “Well, These New Zuckerberg IMs Won’t Help Facebook’s Privacy Problems,” Business Insider, May 13, 2010, accessed January 25, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5.
2. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019); Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2019).
