The core is “the deepest frame in the call stack of the mind”. This is a pretty bad metaphor on Ziz's part. The call stack exists in the CPU—it functions during the dynamic execution of the program.
Imagine you're reading Wikipedia. You start by reading about one topic, then click a link, then click another, then start branching off, opening tabs. If you were diligent, you'd read every last tab you had opened, closing them to go back to the last one. Eventually, you'd read your way back down "the stack" to the first article you started on, and finish reading that one *last*.
The deepest frame of the call-stack is the first loop booted, and the last loop finished before shut-down.
So this isn't just about a static hierarchy, like layers of an onion. It's about agency choosing next actions, entering into higher levels of temporary *activity*, then returning back down low again.
So how does this dynamic stack build itself up, and wind itself down? Once over life? Each time you wake up? If the core rapidly changes its mind, it basically severs a connection to everything else higher-up, leaving it stranded in memory. This makes sense for, say, abandoning responsibilities by doing something radical on the low-end of your execution stack (suicide attempt, running away without notice, etc.)
The stack of loops we might posit compromise our "stack" don't just exist in our head. They exist in co-relation with our society and with our environment. The loops of checking your mail every day, starting a new "play my bills" loop for every bill you find, turning to the next envelope, finishing the mail, etc.—these are a relation to the outer world.
I don't see this metaphor applying as a theory of mind at all. It makes no sense as a description of inner-psychology: unless you are depressed and need a million hoops in your brain to jump through before you climb out of bed: something like a prospective anticipation of commitments to come instead of actually living through those commitments. It's more practically a theory of embodied social being.
Good write up on the Zizians! I didn’t know about the parallels between their movement and occultism. Their belief system must feel really interesting if you’re autistic because I just don’t get it.
Finally, something that correctly ties the OTW's genesis to freaking Fanlib and Astolat's "What if we...owned the servers?" moment instead of claiming it was all about Strikethrough. (I was there, Gandolf.) In some regards, the rise of AO3 played its own part in eroding the gift economy and feeling of fandom as a community. Instead of dozens of fragmented fandom archives made using Automated Archive or just hand-coded HTML, all loosely connected by web rings, with individual fans more closely tied to the infrastructure and each other, you had one big central location that made posting works easy.
I don't know if I would "blame" AO3 for that-- simply because the infrastructural changes of online communities at that time made it somewhat inevitable that this would happen. I think without it it might even have been accelerated, since it would mean all platforms that hosted fanworks were commercialized. It seems like this was an inevitable shift that was going to happen, especially with the new waves of fans and the spread of 'feral' fandoms outside of even AO3.
However! I do think AO3 accelerated and exacerbated the "fan as consumer" approach, and the entitlement of wanting something just so, browsing tags and demanding certain characterizations etc. And the attempts to boycott certain writers/tropes just like customers trying to steer a company in a direction they want--something I'm planning on writing on at some point, too. (Then again, I experienced that on LJ, too...) I think we're still in the middle of seeing a lot of these shifts so who knows where we'll end up.
Tumblr and the like really lowered the barrier to entry, so it's not so much that I blame AO3 as I recognize its part, however unintentional, in the seeming abruptness of the cultural shift (which I agree was pretty much inevitable). There were so many pieces to it: Racefail and its fallout, the crumbling of LJ, the rise of Tumblr and its ease of use compared to Dreamwidth, the increased cost of hosting your own site, middle-aged burnout (or death, in some cases) of the old guard, the rise of smartphones (and the Kudos feature as the lazy fan's way of sending feedback, of which I am guilty as sin, and which at least one person I knew actually quit fandom over), Fifty Shades of Filed Off Serial Numbers, the rise of streaming services and binge viewing on your own schedule vs. weekly viewings...the list goes on and on and on.
To play devil's advocate for the sake of discussion: what about fanfiction.net or newsgroups? Or I remember these directories that had pages with ff/fan art. Centralization isn't always a bad thing! The joy I felt the first time I went to ff.net.... it made my life so much easier LOL. Or the first time I found a directory, even.
Centralization has a lot of advantages! While you do have a single point of failure, you also have far less risk of linkrot and sites or journals just vanishing. I remember going back through old pre-AO3 bookmarks in a fit of nostalgia and realizing how much is just lost to time. (Or, in the case of Fandom Wank, robust servers. Oh, to have those archives and all the receipts on people who've since failed upwards and made names for themselves outside of fandom.)
Fanfiction.net is interesting to me. I'm from the late mailing list/early LJ era of fandom, and most of the people I knew, myself included, who posted at all at the Pit of Voles (affectionate) mostly abandoned it when they cracked down on NC-17 fic. After that, I only went there for the fandoms that existed there and almost nowhere else, and I didn't engage beyond reading. For me, and for a lot of my friends (many of whom are older than me and came of fannish age during the 'zine era), it's a foreign country we'd occasionally visit, but one where we never did learn the language.
I feel like there's really not as much written as there should be about the culture at FF.net, in part because most of the hardcore acafans were, well, from that mailing list/LJ part of fandom (which was the same part that made up the founders of the OTW), and they studied what they knew. I'd love to see someone really dig into it, if for nothing else, but so that I could actually understand it.
The core is “the deepest frame in the call stack of the mind”. This is a pretty bad metaphor on Ziz's part. The call stack exists in the CPU—it functions during the dynamic execution of the program.
Imagine you're reading Wikipedia. You start by reading about one topic, then click a link, then click another, then start branching off, opening tabs. If you were diligent, you'd read every last tab you had opened, closing them to go back to the last one. Eventually, you'd read your way back down "the stack" to the first article you started on, and finish reading that one *last*.
The deepest frame of the call-stack is the first loop booted, and the last loop finished before shut-down.
So this isn't just about a static hierarchy, like layers of an onion. It's about agency choosing next actions, entering into higher levels of temporary *activity*, then returning back down low again.
So how does this dynamic stack build itself up, and wind itself down? Once over life? Each time you wake up? If the core rapidly changes its mind, it basically severs a connection to everything else higher-up, leaving it stranded in memory. This makes sense for, say, abandoning responsibilities by doing something radical on the low-end of your execution stack (suicide attempt, running away without notice, etc.)
The stack of loops we might posit compromise our "stack" don't just exist in our head. They exist in co-relation with our society and with our environment. The loops of checking your mail every day, starting a new "play my bills" loop for every bill you find, turning to the next envelope, finishing the mail, etc.—these are a relation to the outer world.
I don't see this metaphor applying as a theory of mind at all. It makes no sense as a description of inner-psychology: unless you are depressed and need a million hoops in your brain to jump through before you climb out of bed: something like a prospective anticipation of commitments to come instead of actually living through those commitments. It's more practically a theory of embodied social being.
Good write up on the Zizians! I didn’t know about the parallels between their movement and occultism. Their belief system must feel really interesting if you’re autistic because I just don’t get it.
Finally, something that correctly ties the OTW's genesis to freaking Fanlib and Astolat's "What if we...owned the servers?" moment instead of claiming it was all about Strikethrough. (I was there, Gandolf.) In some regards, the rise of AO3 played its own part in eroding the gift economy and feeling of fandom as a community. Instead of dozens of fragmented fandom archives made using Automated Archive or just hand-coded HTML, all loosely connected by web rings, with individual fans more closely tied to the infrastructure and each other, you had one big central location that made posting works easy.
Thank you!!
I don't know if I would "blame" AO3 for that-- simply because the infrastructural changes of online communities at that time made it somewhat inevitable that this would happen. I think without it it might even have been accelerated, since it would mean all platforms that hosted fanworks were commercialized. It seems like this was an inevitable shift that was going to happen, especially with the new waves of fans and the spread of 'feral' fandoms outside of even AO3.
However! I do think AO3 accelerated and exacerbated the "fan as consumer" approach, and the entitlement of wanting something just so, browsing tags and demanding certain characterizations etc. And the attempts to boycott certain writers/tropes just like customers trying to steer a company in a direction they want--something I'm planning on writing on at some point, too. (Then again, I experienced that on LJ, too...) I think we're still in the middle of seeing a lot of these shifts so who knows where we'll end up.
Tumblr and the like really lowered the barrier to entry, so it's not so much that I blame AO3 as I recognize its part, however unintentional, in the seeming abruptness of the cultural shift (which I agree was pretty much inevitable). There were so many pieces to it: Racefail and its fallout, the crumbling of LJ, the rise of Tumblr and its ease of use compared to Dreamwidth, the increased cost of hosting your own site, middle-aged burnout (or death, in some cases) of the old guard, the rise of smartphones (and the Kudos feature as the lazy fan's way of sending feedback, of which I am guilty as sin, and which at least one person I knew actually quit fandom over), Fifty Shades of Filed Off Serial Numbers, the rise of streaming services and binge viewing on your own schedule vs. weekly viewings...the list goes on and on and on.
To play devil's advocate for the sake of discussion: what about fanfiction.net or newsgroups? Or I remember these directories that had pages with ff/fan art. Centralization isn't always a bad thing! The joy I felt the first time I went to ff.net.... it made my life so much easier LOL. Or the first time I found a directory, even.
Centralization has a lot of advantages! While you do have a single point of failure, you also have far less risk of linkrot and sites or journals just vanishing. I remember going back through old pre-AO3 bookmarks in a fit of nostalgia and realizing how much is just lost to time. (Or, in the case of Fandom Wank, robust servers. Oh, to have those archives and all the receipts on people who've since failed upwards and made names for themselves outside of fandom.)
Fanfiction.net is interesting to me. I'm from the late mailing list/early LJ era of fandom, and most of the people I knew, myself included, who posted at all at the Pit of Voles (affectionate) mostly abandoned it when they cracked down on NC-17 fic. After that, I only went there for the fandoms that existed there and almost nowhere else, and I didn't engage beyond reading. For me, and for a lot of my friends (many of whom are older than me and came of fannish age during the 'zine era), it's a foreign country we'd occasionally visit, but one where we never did learn the language.
I feel like there's really not as much written as there should be about the culture at FF.net, in part because most of the hardcore acafans were, well, from that mailing list/LJ part of fandom (which was the same part that made up the founders of the OTW), and they studied what they knew. I'd love to see someone really dig into it, if for nothing else, but so that I could actually understand it.