User:Eleanorg/thesis/draft1.1/Intro

Abstract

London Indymedia recently shut up shop, claiming that the task today is not encouraging DIY publishing, but "curating from within the sea of content". As curation becomes central to (post-)digital publishing, those of us interested in collaborative production need to ask how these curatorial decisions are being made, and what assumptions about negotiation and agreement are encoded in collaborative software. I will look at these questions from a feminist angle, drawing specifically on feminist theories of consent, to evaluate collaborative publishing models from an ethical perspective.

The thesis draws on personal interviews with feminist activists, who are struggling to articulate new models of (sexual) consent. I look in detail at emerging proposals, which critique the slogan "yes means yes" and articulate radical models of consent as an ongoing collaboration. I then ask how these speculative models for sexual consent might apply to collaborative decision-making in publishing. Specifically, I examine how a feminist tolerance for indecision and inaction might inform curatorial and design decisions. I report from the Libre Graphics Research Unit's recent lab "Collision 1" in Brussels, discussing the Collision project as a concrete example. I will give a feminist slant to the Collision project's claim that in design, "tension is deflated through erasure, simplification and filtering", and I will propose some answers to its question, "what would be ways to articulate collisions, instead of avoiding them?".

Introduction

[Introductory sentence: the importance of consent in democratic decision-making as opposed to 'democratic' curation algorithms; importance of 'yes']

But of what does this 'yes' consist?

Some of the most nuanced and challenging theories of the 'yes' are emerging from a field of activism for which the meaning of consent is of central concern: the feminist movement against sexual violence, and its complementary campaigns for consent. Standing in opposition to a culture in which "a deal is a deal, no matter how reluctantly, grudgingly, or desperately one side accepts it" (Millar p.37), feminists stress not only that "no means no" but that a reluctant yes, silence and "maybe also means no". (hugo s; OUSU; yes means yes, rtn?)

Here the meaning of "consent", initially appearing as a straightforward alternative to the distortions of the vote, is thrown into question. What exactly is consent? How must it be communicated? Must it be an act, or can it be a state of mind? And is reluctant consent still valid? The results of consent, then, also vary depending on the question and the algorithm used. (Wertheimer)

On the other hand, the feminist movement's celebrations of consent go under the mottos "yes means yes" and "consent is sexy". (yes means yes; consent is sexy) At first glance, this simultaneous problematising and celebration of consent is a contradiction, to say the least. In investigating this apparent contradiction through conversations with people active in the field, I have discovered a rich debate in which the work of resolving these questions gives rise to more radical theories of consent, which can usefully inform other fields.

This difficult theoretical work - being done within the meetings, workshops and discussions of the feminist movement - offers valuable conceptual tools, which can be fruitfully exported to other settings in which the aim is to foster egalitarian collaboration. The sexual scenario, under the intense scrutiny of feminist questioning, throws into sharp relief the nuances involved in the process of establishing agreement. In this scenario the wording of a sentence, or the flicker of an eyelid, can mark the difference between democracy and disaster. It is not surprising, then, that it is in the high-stakes theorizing of this scenario that we find some of the most exquisitely nuanced and ethical theories of consent. Far from being inapplicable to other social scenarios, these hard-won theories are readily applied to other democratic settings in which, where they seem less pressing, the nuances of the 'yes' can be easily overlooked. (suzanne h; clare c interviews)

After exploring in detail the conceptual work on consent that is happening within the feminist movement, I will look again at the problem of group decision-making, and use feminist theories of consent to evaluate various consent-based systems. I will look, specifically, at the example of collaborative online publishing. Just like face-to-face decision-making systems, online tools mediate our encounters, and encode certain models of what 'consent' and 'consensus' are.

If the software we use to collaborate encodes certain models of consent, and if our model of consent is rendered up for grabs by feminist critique, then two questions arise. Firstly, what would a radical model of consent - one which gets beyond the problematic conservatism of "yes means yes" - look like? And secondly, is it possible to use such a model for collaborative publishing?