trochee

My speculations on the previous post about the Amazon adult-categorization fail were incorrect. (but then, they were just that -- speculations. Hope nobody bet long on my speculations.)

In fact, it was an ontology bleed failure, where somebody "accidentally" lumped together the terms "sexuality", "gay", "erotic" and probably "gender" with ~~"porn"~~ "adult".

So yes -- not overt homophobic censorship on Amazon's part. But also no darknet, as I had speculated. Or none that Amazon will cop to, which is as good as the same for now.

However, I stand beside the major concern: we are not, as a culture of readers and internet-users, very far from a cascaded door-slamming of homophobia: it's not an accident that this particular ontology bleed happened. It's not like somebody went into the database and accidentally decided that "entomology" belongs in "cooking"; that would have provoked (at most) a single boingboing article about the tastiness of fried locust and a global giggle about the chuckleheaded algorithm that got us that one.

No, this ontology bleed happened because a lot of people (including at least one ontology editor and the QA team standing between him [or her] and the door) find that it's reasonable to lump "gay" and "porn". Sexuality, and especially gay sexuality, as I mentioned in the earlier post, is -- for these programmers, and for much of our culture -- something to be protected from, something to be quarantined and hidden from "normal" people, where "normal" is understood to be read as "straight", without even needing a wink and a nod.

Amazon has little to be proud of here -- they screwed up in letting the ontology bleed happen in the first place, and they bobbled the response until late Monday on a "twitstorm" that began on Saturday, and AFAIK there has been no actual apology (the beginning of an explanation, yes, but no apology). As Daisey says: heads will probably not roll; "like any behemoth, there's little accountability outside the bubble,"

For me, "#amazonfail" has been a reminder to take my head out of the narrowcast of my own friends-list and feed-reader, and to remember that I actually live in a culture that remains quite hostile to queer folk. My speculation about some co-ordinated action from this hostility was wrong -- but a useful reminder that co-ordinated action is not necessary when straight privilege blindly gives the same outcomes. To repeat myself from a comment on the previous post: "it's easier to spit on people when you're standing on the top of the hill."