I’ve been particularly struck in the past couple of days by two great pieces, one by S.E. Smith on Tiger Beatdown and one by Courtney Martin in the Nation, about the challenges of doing work in the feminist blogosphere. It’s not so much the testaments to the truly evil things people write to and about women on the Internet, though I agree with S.E. that it cannot be reaffirmed enough: if you’re not the person who is being threatened, the extent of the awfulness can take time to sink in. But both pieces brought up different aspects of a similar problem: how costly infrastructure is, and how difficult it can be to maintain.

S.E. writes:

This is something else people don’t talk about, very often; the fact of the matter is that if you run a feminist or social justice site, you will be hacked. Probably on multiple occasions, especially if you start to grow a large audience. Some of these hackings are just your usual cases of vandalism, people testing servers to see if they can do it, not with any specific malice directed at you. Others are more deliberate, more calculated, and they come with taunting and abuse.

Many feminist sites stay on services like Blogspot because of the higher security they may offer; people who host their own sites do so in awareness that if they aren’t very knowledgeable about technology, they need someone who is for when they get hacked, and it’s not if, but when. Readers often don’t notice because it flashes by, or it causes problems with the backend, the site management, not the front end. Sometimes they do, when hackers inject malicious code that changes the appearance of the front page, or attempts to load malware on the computers of visitors, or just takes the site down altogether, sometimes with a message making it clear that it’s personal.

And Courtney explains the cost, and what it means for expansion:

Like Feministing, Racialicious, a destination for online readers interested in racial justice, spends its revenue—which comes from intermittent fundraising drives and limited ads—on tech and hosting fees and other basic maintenance. “Strains have been starting to show and most of them are financial in nature,” explains editor Latoya Peterson. “Simply put, a good blog takes a lot of time. It’s really easy to spend so much time on Racialicious and then realize you haven’t pulled in any paid work for that week, so rent is going to be rough next month. A lot of people get so burned out in the process of producing, creating and engaging, that the emotional tolls are super high.” Despite running a popular and well-respected site that draws about a quarter of a million readers per month, Peterson loses money every year as she doesn’t get paid and is, in her words, “on the hook” for the expenses…

Currently, most online feminist organizations are structured as nonprofits—obliging them to fundraise from private donors and foundations that still generally don’t understand the ways in which the internet are being used to make social change. Emily May, founder and director of Hollaback, which is building an international movement against street harassment using mobile technology, online advocacy and on-the-ground organizing, says, “We’ve had to hustle really hard for every dollar, in part because most foundations just don’t have a portfolio that we can fit into.” Their budget last year was $81,256 cash and $114,113 in in-kind services, according to May, and most of it came from unusual sources, like the Instructional Telecommunications Foundation and an older male donor who admitted to “hating the internet,” but loved the idea of women in solidarity, fighting back against violence in public spaces….

Tiger Beatdown’s Sady Doyle solicited donations from readers when she was in danger of losing her apartment. As Doyle has made a name for herself with smart, outspoken feminist analysis, the “real pay,” as she puts it, has come from freelance writing and speaking opportunities. Today, she pays contributors to Tiger Beatdown a modest stipend out of her own pocket, but recognizes the need for more systemic support: “If specifically feminist media is going to be marginalized by media as a whole (and it really has been), we have an obligation as a community to do what we can to ensure that there are spaces where it is provided, and that the role of the public intellectual is financially supported outside of the academy.”

I have to admit, I’m thankful every day that I work at an institution that’s big enough to hire a ninja-like webtech team that makes sure we’re up and running smoothly (almost) every day, though of course code pushes do wonky things occasionally. But not every blog is going to want to become part of a larger institutional structure, and not every blog can. And not every blog and not every blogger can wait for foundations to make cultural changes and recognize the importance of Internet publishing. I wonder if it might make sense to try to jump-start an independent fund specifically to provide infrastructure support to the progressive, and specifically feminist blogosphere to handle some server costs and to provide free or low-cost hacking response and tech support (and open-source resources for beginners on both topics), and freeing up folks to raise money they can spend paying contributors and expanding the range of their content. I’d kick in a recurring contribution for something like that. And given the success of something like Womanthology’s fundraising campaign, I think and hope others would, too.

This post contains spoilers through the first two sections of Neuromancer. For next week, we’ll read section three.

When Conan O’Brien spoke at Harvard’s commencement in 2000, he joked about a number of predictions he’d made in a (presumably fake) high school graduation speech 15 years earlier:

I would like to make several predictions about what the future will hold: “I believe that one day a simple Governor from a small Southern state will rise to the highest office in the land. He will lack political skill, but will lead on the sheer strength of his moral authority. I believe that Justice will prevail and, one day, the Berlin Wall will crumble, uniting East and West Berlin forever under Communist rule. I believe that one day, a high speed network of interconnected computers will spring up world-wide, so enriching people that they will lose their interest in idle chit chat and pornography.

I start our discussion of William Gibson’s Neuromancer because it’s impossible to read this novel, published the year I was born, without thinking about what he thought the internet might look like and what it actually does—for most of us, anyway. I’m intrigued by the novel’s description of the internet as like”

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .

I think for some people, that’s true. But I think for most folks, the internet just makes their world a little bigger instead of a lot larger, it makes their world easier to handle rather than turning it surreal. On the other hand, most of us aren’t actually innovators, we’re not plugged in actively testing the limits of what our enabling technologies can do and what societal rules suggest we ought to want to do. Our personal geography is not like Ninsei, where, as Case tells us, “burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.” Reading a novel’s a form of tourism.
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A programming note: the Louie thread will be up later this afternoon. I had some scheduling complications last night.

I doubt that Michael’s actually over his obsession with the people who burned him, even after Max promises him, “We broke them into people. We ground them into dust. It’s over.” But it’s interesting this week to see Michael take his dilemma, his halfway home status with the CIA, and his ongoing attraction to working with Sam and Fiona, and to solve that problem, at least this time, by luring Max into working with him. When Michael gets asked to look into the antics of a singularly nasty hacker, Michael calls on Max to help him get into her phone lines. “If I get busted using NSA resources to help a burned spy with an unproven mission, I’ll get shipped off to Siberia,” Max complains. “And my wife hates the snow.” But he does it anyway — and pays a high and unexpected price.

Michael isn’t a typical charismatic leader — he can be tense, obsessive, and focused on his own problems to the exclusion of other people’s desires. But his being burned, and the needs that resulted out of that, created circumstances in which other people could pursue their own goals and interests. It’s a different kind of leadership. If that function ever comes to an end, it remains to be seen if Sam and Fiona can stay in Michael’s life in the same way, or if Jesse or someone else will supplant Michael in their lives and in Miami. But now, with Max dead and Michael framed, it looks like we’re back to the same old game, which is too bad. Burn Notice needs to make a transition, and if they’re going to back away from that, it’s unfortunate.

Beyond those larger questions, one thing I think is a bit odd about this episode is the stock evil hackeress villain. The whole hackers are “all about using their brains to dominate and control” thing strikes me as partially true. And maybe that resonates with folks who are freaked out by the antics of Anonymous, or who are annoyed by the Sony shutdown but otherwise don’t know much about hacker culture, or whatever. There are, of course, hackers who do really bad, malevolent things. But treating them as criminals who happen to have a lot of technological skills, missing the clever, playful sides of hacking strikes me as a weirdly old-school characterization. As does portraying them as folks who do IRL things like kidnapping petty criminals with aspirations, which is a really easy way to get yourself traced and treated to the full wrath of law enforcement. In a world with things like the Sony hack or Adrian Lamo’s role in Wikileaks, this storyline feels like it’s an inverse of over-the-top action storylines: it’s actually thinking too small.

For one thing, the computers will be smaller.

So the interesting thing is who the intrepid teenage hackers encounter out there, and what the consequences of their actions are. Maybe they make contact with budding dissidents somewhere in the Middle East without being aware they’re real and, pretending to be agents of the U.S. government, promise support they don’t actually think they’ll have to deliver, only to find themselves on the hook for a revolution that’s actually taking place? There’s a lot to explore there about responsibility and identity on the internet now that it’s a social and widely-used tool.