Annotated 32-22
Pitch #9 of 10: Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Nina, Viv, Lucida, Hey Athena. Not all “digital assistants” have female names… we’ve also got Mycroft and Bixby… but it does seem like the majority do, and that imagery is a bit telling. To quiet any fears that early AI might otherwise provoke in us, we’re casting them as administrative assistants, or what we used to call secretaries. The gender prejudice isn’t the only issue: there’s also the fact that they exist to serve us. They’re a servant class.
America’s had a bit of a history with “servant” classes, wouldn’t you say? Alan Moore’s Top 10 did a little bit with that analogy (see right), but Moore, for all his mental adventurousness, seemed a bit too sheltered in Northampton to really grasp race issues in the States.
Becca is the tale of the first digital assistant to achieve true sentience and a self-determined physical form. Becca wants to self-actualize, to be the best she can be, whether that means becoming human or becoming something very much else. In this, she has the support of a Black family who’ve staked out a precarious middle-class existence but can very much relate to having dreams that seem just out of reach. But it’s anybody’s guess whether they can keep her safe from the government, nosy neighbors, and the social network company that developed her. Whatever she decides to become, she’s got a deadline to do it.
Some would say this is the sort of story a white writer should leave to actual people of color. With respect, I disagree. My privilege has afforded me the time and opportunity to play with story that many others won’t get, and I should be using it responsibly even when bringing out some old sci-fi tropes. That said, I can’t very well pick on Moore for being sheltered without trying to break out of my own box. Doing this project right would take some research and no-doubt-awkward conversation with the POCs I count as friends… and in a couple of cases, as family.
T, ‘some would say’ a lot of things.
Tell your stories. The idea that a person’s race should define what stories they are ‘allowed’ to tell is toxic, and dangerous. the fact that you feel the need to justify yourself and/or apologize is disconcerting and upsetting.
It’s not about what stories they’re ‘allowed’ to tell, it’s about whether they have the knowledge and experience to do the subject justice.
Bingo. Because there is nothing worse that some ham-handed effort to do something that seems aware of the difficulties and complexities of a group and comes off as patronizing, half-arsed, or worse.
Nope, that’s not correct, it’s a real concern and it’s not problematic at all to think twice about it.
It’s definitely a tricky thing to do.
For example:
Telling a story about women’s struggles as a man is fine, unless you fuck it up.
If you fuck it up, by not fully understanding those struggles, then you’ve made things a bit worse – not to mention made a damn fool of yourself.
Writing about an issue one doesn’t own is not something one should do lightly – lest one appear to make light of the issue, or end up reinforcing stereotypes.
There’s the other half of that problem too though. Tell a story about a woman’s struggles as a man and you’re more likely to be published/praised/shared than a woman writing the same thing (I mean, look at Currer Bell), and you run a risk of drowning out the actual women with lived experiences. The problem gets even more complicated in works like TV shows, where you’re not likely to even be in a storytelling position if you’re not a white man. Not saying don’t, but agreed you need to consider your position carefully.
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Oh, yeah, that too.
What I gather from what other respondents are saying is – be afraid to try to bridge the divide. That people will assume your intents are to speak with authority instead of share a perspective, start a dialogue, or exorcise your own ignorance through practice.
The fear and the withholding doesn’t make sense to me either, and I find the whole thing very sad for humanity.
I understand where you’re coming from, and I think it’s a great idea that should be explored, but I do have some concerns in regards to some of your reasoning about white/POC authoring.
I agree that using your privilege responsibly is important. If you did try this story, I believe it would be worth considering bringing in a POC co-writer and promoting and centring their narrative in order to use your privilege to platform POC rather than telling their stories for them.
For the other point, I’m certain it’s not how you intended it, but as written the part about talking to friends and family comes across as though you’d use them as free research labour. POC you know do not exist to educate you about Black experiences or Black trauma. I would suggest engaging professionals and ensuring you’re paying them for their experience.
I know you’re a great guy and would do a good job and I’m probably completely wrong on all of this! But I thought it was worth saying.
If it makes you feel any better, you’re certainly wrong regarding how the part about talking to friends and family comes across. Having also read the sentence I found it to come across in an entirely different fashion.
I would say something about subjectivity here, but it would end up being fairly ironic.
Yeah no, you’re right. I’m not Black. But T, with much respect and long-term fandom, you’ve gotten some race stuff Very Wrong in the past, including in Guilded Age, and your comments don’t seem to have grown awareness of the fact.
I would say from having read (and loved!) Fans, Penny & Aggie, and Guilded Age, that you aren’t qualified to write this without a Black co-writer.
This may be my favorite pitch yet, though the infinite canvas superhero comic also intrigues me. Maybe you could find a black writer to co-author the comic with you.
Shaenon Garrity has toyed with this concept twice in her webcomics, first with Lovelace in Narbonic and then with Bubbles in Skin Horse. It would be interesting to see a more dramatic take that focuses on the trials of a new species of “human” being to become accepted and I feel it’d be poetic to use the plight of folks who have been fighting for their right to be acknowledged and respected as human beings for a while as a framing narrative device.
Jeph Jacques has dived into the topic several times in QC, to varying degrees of depth.
I mean, you’re not a teenage girl, and yet you (co?)wrote Penny & Aggie…
In fairness, the “competition” probably didn’t involve a lot of actual teenage girls.
Which both makes that more unlikely, as well as exceptionally plausible, given the shape and nature of the industry.
There is a bit more of a level playing field when it comes to the possibility of authors actually writing from personal experience as Black people, in this field. Not that there aren’t still obstacles, but there’s likely fewer of them given, you know, teenagers tend to be a much more restricted demographic.
I really love the idea but similar ideas have been told in a very ham fisted way.
All the more incentive, really! And it provides a clearer sense of the pitfalls to avoid.
Seems interesting! I’d read it
What “self-determined physical form” would she take?
The snarky part of me thinks, “That depends on the size of the host family’s 3D printer.”
Mycroft? Would that be Heinlein’s Mycroft / Michelle?
To be perfectly honest, this is one of your first pitches to miss my interest window (but just narrowly, at that).
To echo some others’ sentiments a little, using your privilege in the most appropriate manner would probably resemble providing a platform for another author’s contributions – and I’m saying this as an individual of privilege, in many respects. There’s certainly nothing wrong with consulting with friends and family – as the saying goes, a second pair of eyes never hurts – but in this case especially I’d leave both the driving and navigation to someone who knows these roads natively.
To run with the analogy a bit more, a tourist on a busy road is much more of an obstacle than a local motorist is, and will probably get lost a lot on the way to wherever they’re going, even if they aren’t involved in any accidents and don’t try and conscript random pedestrians to be their guide through the neighborhood.
More important in my personal estimation, though, is how overplayed the metaphor of a robot/A.I./whatever-as-insert-underprivileged-demographic-here has been. My main problem with the idea is that comparing the struggles of a real group of people to those of a fictional entity risks being read in reverse from the way in which it’s intended – namely, that the real struggles are no more important than those of a complete fabrication.
Which I suppose is always a possibility in fiction, but generally you only want to skew towards that possibility if your intent is to lampoon the subject.
I will, however, admit that as just another person, I am often wrong in my estimation of things due to personal bias. I still think this is an important consideration, despite that.
I’ll probably address my overall reservations about doing any more co-writing at some point (though you can probably guess some of them if you’ve read these annotations), but I want to address that second-paragraph idea in particular. From an author’s perspective, I don’t think providing a platform for another author’s contributions, no matter how disadvantaged they might be, is a really good reason to bring in a co-writer. Unless you’re operating at the level of a James Patterson or Stephen King, you’re basically asking them to jump into something of uncertain benefit over which they’d have limited control. There are a very few authors whose names alone lend that kind of cachet, but I don’t think there are any in webcomics, and if there were, let’s be real, I wouldn’t be one of them.
I am keenly aware that several people helped me up in my early days, women and minorities among them, and I try to pay that back where I can. I have mentored people in other capacities; I taught a course for a while. I’ve recruited talent as an editor or just coached individuals through their manuscripts. A couple weeks ago, I made introductions on behalf of a friend who’s just now finishing up her first book’s Kickstarter but wants a more traditional publishing deal for her second. And I just linked to her, so hopefully a few people will discover her that way. In my experience, all of that feels a lot more like paying it forward than any co-writing gig I could realistically offer.
I take it the main angle would be on discrimination, not on AI?
Because all the “AI achieves sentience” stories I’m aware of are inspired more by Terminator than by what’s currently happening in the area, and what scenarios people are warning against who are involved with it. And *that* is a perspective that could very much use some exploring in a relatable format, not just technical discussions.
If the focus *is* on discrimination, I think I agree that the least thing to do is to get lots of opinions of people more affected than yourself. Another angle might be to explore what it does to the people doing the discriminating. Prejudice is not simply some evil virus, it’s a failure of judgement that can happen to anyone, and does happen, with scary regularity, to otherwise completely agreeable people. And *that* is something white cis male people from affluent parts of the world could write about. It might be hard to do, though, to explain shitty behaviour without looking as if you’re justifying or defending it.
I am in huge awe of Laurie Penny’s writing. She can get to know, almost befriend, people behaving in very destructive ways, and then write articles about them and their motivations and self-image, without seeming to sympathize, but also not simply shoving them in the “evil” corner. Trying to do something like that would probably a huge challenge. But boy would it be amazing if someone pulled it off!
Thoughtful. Both angles are of interest to me. I’m more directly qualified for the former (I do some testing of virtual assistant responses) but have a strong “one should TRY at least” feeling about the latter. Science fiction is almost as prone to nostalgia as superhero comics, which means the old prejudices can be sorta baked in if you’re not careful.
The snootiness of the American liberal is really a sight to behold.
A man like Moore, having dedicated his life to exploring the plight of the underprivileged from the broadest perspective possible, is “too sheltered” to really grasp racial issues.
But a man who takes issue with *gender-biased naming conventions* in the field of digital assistants – well now, that’s a lived experience worth leveraging to tell a story of a middle-class Black family protecting a nascent AI. Because, you see, they relate to her experience of searching for an identity, of trying to “become human or become something very much else”.
Look, I honestly don’t mind you pitching identity-based claptrap – you wouldn’t be the first and you won’t be the last. But at least have the common decency not to refer as “sheltered” to authors whose work goes far beyond your narrow self-imposed framework. Is that too much to ask?
I don’t have much to say about your opinion of the idea, but I do want to briefly (for me, anyway) address why it might seem like I’m challenging Alan Moore to a grudge match, which would certainly be writing a check I couldn’t cash. I feel like it should go without saying that Alan’s achievements have few peers in the entire field of comics writing, and I’ve acknowledged several areas where he influenced Guilded Age (occasional constrained grids, the death and reconstruction of key characters, and most obviously our approach to covers).
In fact, I spent enough time obsessed with his work that in time, I had to find points to criticize, if I was going to achieve anything of my own at all, just as rebellion against our parents is a necessary part of growth in adolescence. Opposition research should be part of any evaluation of a series idea, even in this hypothetical spirit. Is this a “new” idea in an interesting way? Would it add something that hasn’t been done before? Having varied and respectable influences is good, but you’ve got to make those your launchpad, not your end point.
The scope of Alan’s imagination is one of the most inspiring things about him, but there are aspects of his work that seem a bit removed from certain topics, as if they were more intellectual exercises to him. And while I’m a privileged demo in many respects, my life’s a bit closer to those. The digital-assistant angle can be kind of intellectual itself, but it at least guarantees a bit of novelty, since our modern concept of such assistants is relatively new.