Hugonian politics
Apr. 14th, 2015 12:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacYesterday I wrote on the place of women on this year's Hugo ballot. Today I have some thoughts on the process that I haven't yet seen voiced by anyone else.
I think there are two separate issues here, that should be distinguished even by those who condemn the Puppies on both, because they're distinct problems needing distinct solutions.
One of these is the substantive issue of the nature and quality of Hugo nominees. My feelings on this are actually rather murky, in part because I fail to understand exactly what the Puppies' complaints are, and I'll deal with this later if at all.
The other is the procedural issue of slate voting for the Hugos. I hope that those condemning this procedure would feel the same were the slate of an opposite political complexion, though I have no confidence that all of them would.
Let us be clear that voting by the popularity of the name on the ballot, rather than the quality of the work, is far from unknown in Hugo history, and that informal boosterism to get nominations also has a long pedigree.
But the only time before the Puppies that there was a successful formal campaign to nominate a work - a volume of L. Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth for Novel in 1987 - this was widely derided and the book came in behind No Award on the final ballot. Last year's Puppy nominees did badly also, the most notorious of them, Vox Day's novelette, also finishing behind No Award.
And this year was the first time an entire slate of nominees for most of the places on the ballot was offered. Let's be equally clear on that. There is all the difference in the world between the long-standing tradition of informal lists of "Good Stuff to read" that don't even match the number of slots on the ballot and a formal slate bearing the introduction, "They are my recommendations for the 2015 nominations, and I encourage those who value my opinion on matters related to science fiction and fantasy to nominate them precisely as they are."
And, with few exceptions, that slate, with help from its largely overlapping colleague, dominated the entire nominated ballot. I think the statistics, to be released later, will prove that this wasn't because there were more ballots from Puppies than non-Puppies. I think it was because the first ballot is "first five past the post" and the Puppies were organized and voted for a slate, while the non-Puppies voted as individuals and scattered their vote.
There have been various procedural rules changes proposed to deal with this, but they all seem rather complicated. And, as so often with military and police operations, the planners seem to forget that they're not fighting a natural disaster or wild animals. Their opponents are intelligent agents who can modify their plans in response to yours. When the French built the Maginot Line, the Germans simply went around it.
Slates and elections are a political issue, and I'm a political historian, so I ask myself: when in history has a non-partisan polity been transformed by the abrupt introduction of a slate?
Answer: New Zealand, 1890. British Columbia, 1903.
Prior to those dates both British colonies, as they then were, had very small settler communities, as the Hugo-voting fannish community is small. Voting for the colonial legislatures was non-partisan and done on a personal basis. (B.C. was part of the Dominion of Canada, which had federal political parties, but the political affiliations of B.C. politicians on a federal level had no impact on provincial politics. Still doesn't, for that matter.)
There were political tendencies and opposing policies, to be sure, just as there are in fandom. As George R.R. Martin has pointed out, the Puppy Wars are a continuation of the Old Wave v. New Wave struggle that dates back in the SF field over half a century now. Many individuals have planted themselves firmly on one side or another of that divide, and received or been withheld votes on that basis, but it's never been consistent, formalized, or all-encompassing.
Same thing was true in the colonies. Opposing governments succeeded each other, but individuals worked with other individuals on any basis of agreement they could find, and often the same people would be found voting for or against succeeding groups.
And then, in the years I mentioned, somebody in each colony formed a slate. Founded a formal political party. Ran candidates in an election with the party label. And won.
What did the opposition do? Well, they had to form a political party too. (In B.C., this actually happened just before the 1903 election.) And from then on, politics in these polities was conducted on a political party basis. Like it or not, the era of personal voting was over.
That may be true for the Hugos. I think there are two courses of action here.
1) You can try to rewrite the rules to ban slates. I don't think you will succeed. Slate advocates will find a way around the rules. Maginot line. The fathers of the U.S. Constitution thought they had eliminated political parties, and they were pretty smart guys, but in that respect they failed.
2) Or you can form a counter-slate. Many people are doing so, even among those who claim to oppose a counter-slate. They're launching a campaign to vote for No Award. That doesn't help them with next year's nominations, but for the current election, No Award is their counter-slate candidate, whether they think of it as one or not.
That's it.
I think there are two separate issues here, that should be distinguished even by those who condemn the Puppies on both, because they're distinct problems needing distinct solutions.
One of these is the substantive issue of the nature and quality of Hugo nominees. My feelings on this are actually rather murky, in part because I fail to understand exactly what the Puppies' complaints are, and I'll deal with this later if at all.
The other is the procedural issue of slate voting for the Hugos. I hope that those condemning this procedure would feel the same were the slate of an opposite political complexion, though I have no confidence that all of them would.
Let us be clear that voting by the popularity of the name on the ballot, rather than the quality of the work, is far from unknown in Hugo history, and that informal boosterism to get nominations also has a long pedigree.
But the only time before the Puppies that there was a successful formal campaign to nominate a work - a volume of L. Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth for Novel in 1987 - this was widely derided and the book came in behind No Award on the final ballot. Last year's Puppy nominees did badly also, the most notorious of them, Vox Day's novelette, also finishing behind No Award.
And this year was the first time an entire slate of nominees for most of the places on the ballot was offered. Let's be equally clear on that. There is all the difference in the world between the long-standing tradition of informal lists of "Good Stuff to read" that don't even match the number of slots on the ballot and a formal slate bearing the introduction, "They are my recommendations for the 2015 nominations, and I encourage those who value my opinion on matters related to science fiction and fantasy to nominate them precisely as they are."
And, with few exceptions, that slate, with help from its largely overlapping colleague, dominated the entire nominated ballot. I think the statistics, to be released later, will prove that this wasn't because there were more ballots from Puppies than non-Puppies. I think it was because the first ballot is "first five past the post" and the Puppies were organized and voted for a slate, while the non-Puppies voted as individuals and scattered their vote.
There have been various procedural rules changes proposed to deal with this, but they all seem rather complicated. And, as so often with military and police operations, the planners seem to forget that they're not fighting a natural disaster or wild animals. Their opponents are intelligent agents who can modify their plans in response to yours. When the French built the Maginot Line, the Germans simply went around it.
Slates and elections are a political issue, and I'm a political historian, so I ask myself: when in history has a non-partisan polity been transformed by the abrupt introduction of a slate?
Answer: New Zealand, 1890. British Columbia, 1903.
Prior to those dates both British colonies, as they then were, had very small settler communities, as the Hugo-voting fannish community is small. Voting for the colonial legislatures was non-partisan and done on a personal basis. (B.C. was part of the Dominion of Canada, which had federal political parties, but the political affiliations of B.C. politicians on a federal level had no impact on provincial politics. Still doesn't, for that matter.)
There were political tendencies and opposing policies, to be sure, just as there are in fandom. As George R.R. Martin has pointed out, the Puppy Wars are a continuation of the Old Wave v. New Wave struggle that dates back in the SF field over half a century now. Many individuals have planted themselves firmly on one side or another of that divide, and received or been withheld votes on that basis, but it's never been consistent, formalized, or all-encompassing.
Same thing was true in the colonies. Opposing governments succeeded each other, but individuals worked with other individuals on any basis of agreement they could find, and often the same people would be found voting for or against succeeding groups.
And then, in the years I mentioned, somebody in each colony formed a slate. Founded a formal political party. Ran candidates in an election with the party label. And won.
What did the opposition do? Well, they had to form a political party too. (In B.C., this actually happened just before the 1903 election.) And from then on, politics in these polities was conducted on a political party basis. Like it or not, the era of personal voting was over.
That may be true for the Hugos. I think there are two courses of action here.
1) You can try to rewrite the rules to ban slates. I don't think you will succeed. Slate advocates will find a way around the rules. Maginot line. The fathers of the U.S. Constitution thought they had eliminated political parties, and they were pretty smart guys, but in that respect they failed.
2) Or you can form a counter-slate. Many people are doing so, even among those who claim to oppose a counter-slate. They're launching a campaign to vote for No Award. That doesn't help them with next year's nominations, but for the current election, No Award is their counter-slate candidate, whether they think of it as one or not.
That's it.
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no subject
Date: 2015-04-14 06:47 pm (UTC)Myths about the other group and why their own group is better: "We want science fiction to be fun and they want to take away other people's enjoyment of life" versus "They're all straight white men who want to exclude everyone who's not like them" (this part is a lot like the two claims in GamerGate, so I think the comparisons are unavoidable);
Myths defining their own group: "We're upholding critical standards of good writing" versus "We're speaking truth to power, as members of a group that's excluded and held in contempt."
I don't think any of them is strictly true. At best they all seem like convenient oversimplifications, useful to mobilize people for a two-sided conflict.
As a hard-core libertarian, I find fandom a bit unrelievedly progressive (though of course that's been true since the days of Wells and Gernsback), and I sympathize with the political urge to shake things up and have more ideological diversity (as well as ethnic, sexual, and sexual preference diversity); see Jonathan Haidt's discussion of academic political culture for a parallel. On the other hand, I'm not a fan of most of this year's nominees; my literary tastes run in different directions, and I wouldn't vote against my own personal tastes for the sake of political advocacy. On the other other hand, the No Award proposal sounds a bit too much like "scorched earth."
But perhaps, if there are still Worldcons seventy-five years from now, the current clashes will sound as strange as the banning of the Futurians does now, and be as little remembered except by people with a peculiar interest in fannish history.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-15 04:10 pm (UTC)The push for No Award is very personal and very diverse; it's not a matter of a few voices calling for No Award.
This is partially because it's long been known that the -only- punishment for breaking the "Thou Shall Not Campaign for a Hugo" commandment is preferentially placing candidates below No Award regardless of literary quality. It's hardly a new rule.
I'm not sure why you think changing the rules -- not to ban slates (pretty much impossible except as an advisory matter) but to make them have less relative power--is impractical. The Founders were smart people, but we know a lot more about voting theories now then they did (see their use of First Past the Post in elections, which explicitly favor 2 party systems; if we had a preferential system of any sort, we'd have a lot more party movement and diversity.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-15 04:55 pm (UTC)You're also in agreement with me on the second matter. I said I don't think you can ban slates; you say it's "pretty much impossible" to ban slates. That's an agreement. You can prevent them doing again exactly what they did this year, but they can modify their tactics. You can put hurdles in their way, but they can go around those hurdles. Attempts to allow them but reduce their power are, as I noted further above, intimidatingly - and consequently inadvisably - complex.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-21 04:50 pm (UTC)The fundamental issue that people have with the SP campaign isn't that it's a slate (ie, that it's a set of candidates that people tend to vote together or not at all). Yes, yes, they say that, but that's just what makes it break the nomination rules. (note: break, not violate).
The fundamental issue is that it's a campaign. Once people are successful campaigning for hugos, or worse, as in this year, to keep competing ballots off the ballot, it will never stop.
No Award is a "slate" in that people who vote it for certain categories have it dominate their nominations. Although frankly, slates are meaningless for the votes, so this isn't even a valid statement -- there is a slate for the final vote, and it consists of each candidate + no award in any order you choose.
But it's not a campaign, even though people have "campaigned" for it. The response is far too diverse and broad for it to be the result of any of the campaigns, rather than the existing meme that campaigning threats to the Hugos have to be responded to by No Award, as has been true for over 25 years.
Your statement re "they'll only go around your rules" is just laughably false. It assumes that campaigns have infinite power -- rather than, as any political group has, just the power to abuse holes in the rules. Make the rules better (ie, have less holes while still fulfilling their central goals) and slates become much less able to abuse them.
Obviously, if a campaign has infinite numbers, money, and interest, then you can't defeat them directly (instead, you have to wait for them to get bored). But there's no evidence that that's the case, rather than a small number of people (250, at highest estimate) abusing rules that were never designed to resist abuse.
That any fix to the rules would also make them -generally- better i.e. produce more representative ballots that are resistent to accidental slates (like the Buffy and Dr. Who crows deciding on their three favourite episodes, and managing to get all of them nominated, or Seanan McGuire listing what she did last year and her fans nominating the ones they liked, resulting in multiple nominees in the same category from the same group of nominators) is if anything central -- the fact that this would make the Hugos less vulnerable to deliberate hijack from a motivated campaign is a bonus.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-21 06:09 pm (UTC)Absolutely not. So absolutely not that I can't even imagine how you could get that impression.
"The fundamental issue .. isn't that it's a slate .. but that's just what makes it break the nomination rules."
The breaking of the rules is what makes this the fundamental issue. That it's not a technical legal violation is a distinction that only the Puppies themselves think has any saving grace.
"The fundamental issue is that it's a campaign."
That's a necessary condition for the list to have been a slate. If someone publishes his complete list of personal nominations but doesn't try to campaign for it, it's not a slate.
That it's a campaign by itself, without it being a slate, is not the fundamental issue. There have been campaigns for Hugo nominations before now and, with one only partial exception, they never aroused significant fuss. That's because they focused on persuading people already likely to vote to focus their nominations on one candidate whom they already knew and liked. (TNH's first Fan Writer nomination in 1984 was campaigned for this way.)
The only major fuss over a campaign was the one which got one of L. Ron Hubbard's bricks on Best Novel in 1987. That was because it was focused on recruiting a bunch of outside voters who'd mechanically nominate it. But it was not a slate, and the fuss was nowhere near as great as this. The incident was sufficiently minor, and it failed badly enough, that no action was then taken to prevent a recurrence.
"The response is far too diverse and broad for it to be the result of any of the campaigns"
That doesn't make it not a counter-slate. A successful campaign in real-world politics will be diverse, and it will include votes from people who are not primarily motivated by the campaigning. What the "No Award" campaign isn't is a conspiracy.
"the existing meme that campaigning threats to the Hugos have to be responded to by No Award, as has been true for over 25 years."
I know of no such existing meme, and I've been following the Hugos for a lot more than 25 years. The only "threat" to the Hugos of this kind was the aforementioned Hubbard. That was more than 25 years ago, and the response to it was not "No Award" but the other four, more deserving nominees. Traditionally, "No Award" is a response to a nominee list which sucked because there was nothing good out there, not to a threat caused by campaigning. It's also worth noting that this, too, has not been a notable problem for a lot more than 25 years.
" It assumes that campaigns have infinite power -- rather than, as any political group has, just the power to abuse holes in the rules."
It does not assume infinite power. It assumes exactly what you say it does, the power to abuse holes in the rules. What you can't do is plug all the holes, not without destroying the award. You can plug this particular hole. You can make it harder to exploit other holes. But there will always be other holes that can be exploited. The small numbers of the Puppies is not relevant: they're a large enough number in this polity, even though they're a minority. (Check out the history of the so-called Bolsheviks.) The Puppies can always give up trying, but if they don't - and Vox sure doesn't sound as if he intends to give up - you're reduced to plugging holes every time one is exploited. That gives the impression that it's the rule-makers who are gaming the system, and is one particular case of "destroying the award."