In contrast to the relatively harmonious deployment of OurChart.com as a user-generated, fan-driven, for-profit corporate promotion, new media marketing company FanLib's dramatic descent into infamy stands as an object lesson in unsuccessful exploitation of fan labor. Beginning in 2003, the start-up licensed custom software for running online fan writing contests to entertainment concerns including HarperCollins Publishers and Showtime. In addition to these commissioned projects, FanLib launched a commercial fan fiction archive in 2007, offering its industry partners the opportunity for "integrated customized marketing... capitalizing on existing communities around media" (Nicole). To build interest in the site, the company issued flattering invitations to visible influencers and prolific writers in fandom, but as the people they courted started investigating the business behind the emails, the sense that it was instigated by outsiders and motivated by profit quickly raised hackles. Henry Jenkins summarized the facts that emerged in this grassroots probe, which sent FanLib's image and credibility among their target users into a downward spiral:
To FanLib, the vast commons of freely exchanged fanworks perhaps appeared as if it simply lacked a businessperson with the savvy to privatize it. But in fact, creative fandom has a rich tradition of conceptualizing its labor in ways that reject financial profit as a criteria for value (although I must emphasize again that this does not place it in outright opposition to capitalism). For this reason, fan production is often understood as a women's "gift economy" or, in the words of Karen Hellekson, a "gendered space that relies on the circulation of gifts... that deliberately repudiates a monetary model (because it is gendered male)... to permit performance of gendered, alternative, queered identity" (116). This stance is practical as well as principled, because "at the heart of this anticommercial requirement of fan works is fans' fear that they will be sued by producers of content for copyright violation" (114). Abigail De Kosnik has advocated against this position, writing that since "FanLib will not be the last attempt to commodify fan fiction" (119), fans risk "waiting too long to decide to profit from their innovative art form, and allowing an interloper to package the genre in its first commercially viable format" (120) -- or even worse, "fan fiction may not be monetized at all... [and] only the corporate owners of the media properties that fic authors so creatively elaborate on will see economic gain" (124). The two sides of this debate seem to claim, respectively, that creative fandom is threatened by capitalist procedures like payment or that it is threatened by NOT accommodating these procedures. I would counter that, in either scenario, fans work and profit from their work in some way (remember that the wage no longer defines productive labor), and the crucial question is not whether this work is financially compensated but whether the conditions of this labor are free and fair. In this view, all options would ideally be open to fan communities as they negotiate norms for a changing media ecology, and it is problematic if the industry precludes in advance either the preservation of a gift economy or the extraction of income (futures that are not mutually exclusive within the diversity of fan formations). Because these negotiations are currently in process, Marxist analysis is critical to mediating today's struggles over fan labor.
In this regard, we can take a cue from Lilithilien, who posted "Workers of the World Unite: An Old School Marxist Analysis of FanLib vs. Fandom" in "Life Without FanLib." She asserts that, according to Marx,
FanLib was emphatically not going to take any legal risks on behalf of the fans here, leaving the writers libel [sic] for all legal actions... all for the gift of providing a central portal where fans could go to read the "best" fan fiction as evaluated by a board of male corporate executives... [who] talked about making fan fiction available to "mainstream audiences," which clearly implied that the hundreds of thousands of fan fiction writers and readers now were somehow not "mainstream"... they over-reached in asserting their rights to control and edit what fans produced... [and finally] the company only made things worse for itself by responding to the criticism in ways which fans considered haphazard and patronizing... (source)While FanLib was blundering its appeal to the established fan community, this community was organizing to publicize its objections, reassert its values, and advocate for its interests. On LiveJournal, a group called "Life Without Fanlib" was soon set up to track the issue and host a firestorm of discussion. According to FanLib's behind-the-scenes promotional materials, they promised to "Produce consumer-generated media that is ready for the marketplace. The result: More value for marketers, more manageability for producers" (McNamara). The company found that it was not as effortless to commodify, monetize, and manage this surplus labor as they had speculated.
To FanLib, the vast commons of freely exchanged fanworks perhaps appeared as if it simply lacked a businessperson with the savvy to privatize it. But in fact, creative fandom has a rich tradition of conceptualizing its labor in ways that reject financial profit as a criteria for value (although I must emphasize again that this does not place it in outright opposition to capitalism). For this reason, fan production is often understood as a women's "gift economy" or, in the words of Karen Hellekson, a "gendered space that relies on the circulation of gifts... that deliberately repudiates a monetary model (because it is gendered male)... to permit performance of gendered, alternative, queered identity" (116). This stance is practical as well as principled, because "at the heart of this anticommercial requirement of fan works is fans' fear that they will be sued by producers of content for copyright violation" (114). Abigail De Kosnik has advocated against this position, writing that since "FanLib will not be the last attempt to commodify fan fiction" (119), fans risk "waiting too long to decide to profit from their innovative art form, and allowing an interloper to package the genre in its first commercially viable format" (120) -- or even worse, "fan fiction may not be monetized at all... [and] only the corporate owners of the media properties that fic authors so creatively elaborate on will see economic gain" (124). The two sides of this debate seem to claim, respectively, that creative fandom is threatened by capitalist procedures like payment or that it is threatened by NOT accommodating these procedures. I would counter that, in either scenario, fans work and profit from their work in some way (remember that the wage no longer defines productive labor), and the crucial question is not whether this work is financially compensated but whether the conditions of this labor are free and fair. In this view, all options would ideally be open to fan communities as they negotiate norms for a changing media ecology, and it is problematic if the industry precludes in advance either the preservation of a gift economy or the extraction of income (futures that are not mutually exclusive within the diversity of fan formations). Because these negotiations are currently in process, Marxist analysis is critical to mediating today's struggles over fan labor.
In this regard, we can take a cue from Lilithilien, who posted "Workers of the World Unite: An Old School Marxist Analysis of FanLib vs. Fandom" in "Life Without FanLib." She asserts that, according to Marx,
capitalism deprives our work from being the expression of our creativity and self-realization... This is what FanLib wants to do with fan-created stories... The only use they have for stories (their "value proposition," as they keep saying) is as products to be utilized and commodified. In this effort, we are merely workers in their fanfic factory. This is pure and simple fetishization -- the rewards FanLib offers are a stand in for what we (or at least some of us) really want: good stories to read, a receptive audience for what we write, and a place where our creativity and uniqueness is valued. (source)For Lilithilien, that is, there is more at stake in the expropriation of fan labor than whether or not fans are the ones reaping the profits. She urges us to consider what may be lost if fanworks are reified as commodities and the value of fan communities is mystified so that it appears to be commercial rather than social. Before fans either reject or embrace capitalism's terms for participation in the media economy, then, we should assess our structural position within this system as workers. FanLib's emphasis on "mainstreaming" fan fiction evokes the multiple axes of domination that constrain working conditions, and the normative assumptions of the "mainstream" seemed to persist unmarked in the company's willful ignorance of their repugnance to many fans. These assumptions include equivalences between market price and value, between value and public recognition, and between recognition and hierarchical authority, and as Hellekson suggests, they are entangled with patriarchal and heteronormative coordinates of gender and sexuality. One of FanLib's ads vividly illustrates the clash with the feminist and queer ethos that delineates the fan fiction subculture in question: the "Pink Guy/Blue Dude" image [Figure 12], which figured "Life without Fan Fiction" as a skinny, nerdy boy and "Fan Fiction at FanLib.com" as a muscular, shirtless man, implied that FanLib's corporate model masculinizes an activity that is otherwise markedly effeminate. This offended a predominantly female community that nurtures alternative and perverse expressions of gender and sexuality, raising ire at the insinuation that FanLib's macho brand of commodification is the only legitimate way to envision fanfic. Fandom's response was to form, through grassroots mobilization online, a non-profit organization with the mission of protecting the self-valorization of this anticommercial, egalitarian commons (a project I will explore in section C/3). As for FanLib, their archive was shut down in prelude to a buyout by Disney in 2008 (Ali), no doubt rendering them a success in their terms whether or not the site was able to recoup its 3 million in venture capital, which seems unlikely (Cygnet). In order to untangle the competing conceptions of fan labor embodied in FanLib and The L Word's promotions versus a subcultural gift economy, I will now turn to Marxist theories of the antagonism between workers and capital.
