Family Matters: How Geek Communities Turn Dysfunctional

“My people!”

If you’ve ever followed Twitter as your friends walked into a conference or convention, you’ve seen this. Someone sees a fellow cosplayer, a T–shirt from their favorite obscure fandom, 201–level discussions of issues that are ignored in mass media, or even the simple lack of the background nonsense they deal with everywhere else, and they are home. They’ve found their people.

“Our baby!”

A software startup, a magazine, a political campaign, an event, or an organization—there is nothing quite like seeing all your hard work and sacrifice build something new. Creation is a heady thing that only becomes more intoxicating when shared. When you create together, you don’t have to wait for the final product to exult. You can celebrate each accomplishment, each step of realized potential, as your baby comes to be.

In these family–like, affinity–based, collaborative creative spaces, we often use the language of family. We take our lonely pursuits and turn them into opportunities to connect. We use the world’s indifference and hostility to spur the building of spaces where we belong. We create bonds that can, in the best of times, give us what family gives.

Unfortunately, many of the problems of these spaces are the problems of family as well. We pressure each other to conform to the way “we” do things, whether our traditions are helpful or harmful. People play favorites, both in relatively harmless and grossly toxic ways. Abuse is perpetrated, both among peers and across inequities of position and resources. We protect the family as a unit over the individuals who make it what it is.

Most of all, we have deep emotional investments that make addressing these problems more complicated.

So begins my new essay for issue #3 of Uncanny Magazine, published today. You can read the whole essay here. Only half the issue is currently available online, but if you’re taking Tempest Bradford’s reading challenge, the editors of Uncanny will send you this full issue for free. Just ask them for it.

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Family Matters: How Geek Communities Turn Dysfunctional
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2 thoughts on “Family Matters: How Geek Communities Turn Dysfunctional

  1. 1

    In the comic book community, this was tagged long ago as the problem of Cat-Piss Man. A writer back in the late nineties (I believe) wrote a brief about why comic shops were having so much difficulty, and he highlighted the Cat-Piss Man issue. He talked about a single shop, that had a customer who was surrounded by a miasma that really did smell like his cat used his dresser drawers as its litter box. He would come in, hang around for hours, and while no one really wanted to talk to him, they also wouldn’t tell him to shove off.

    And it wasn’t just the hygiene issues that were the problem. He was ‘socially inept’, arguing about minutae and trivia that even hard-core fans usually found dull, and acting as a gatekeeper on what constituted a ‘real fan’. He would derisively comment about other customers’ selections, interrupt in conversations unbidden.

    Oh, and yeah, he’d leer at anyone even remotely presenting as female who dared to enter the shop in the first place, often going so far as to shadow young women as they went around the store (which, when you’re in your mid-twenties and the young women in question were in their teens…).

    But because he was ‘our kind’, ‘one of us’, he was not called on for his conduct; he wasn’t even given some gentle advice about showering and personal space.

    Now, here’s the thing. After the post appeared, it quickly became commonplace for people who had read it to go into their own shop and mention the column. Nine times out of ten? The owner would comment, ‘Oh, yeah, I know that guy.” Not, “I read that column”. No, they immediately were able to peg the moniker to one of their own customers–the traits described were that common as fitting at least one regular in any comic shop of note.

    It’s worth noting that comic book shops are now very, very rare. Sure, there were other market forces at play. But the unwillingness to deal with unpleasant members of the Tribe was very much part of it.

  2. 2

    In the comic book community, this was tagged long ago as the problem of Cat-Piss Man. A writer back in the late nineties (I believe) wrote a brief about why comic shops were having so much difficulty, and he highlighted the Cat-Piss Man issue.

    That would be Paul T Riddell, writing for Savant, which no longer exists. The original essay is available as message #4 on this thread, however.

    It goes along nicely with the Five Geek Social Fallacies essay, I think.

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