How Politics Tested Ravelry and the Crafting Community

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/how-politics-tested-ravelry-and-the-crafting-community

by fortran77 • 5 years ago

34 77 5 years ago

brighton36• 5 years ago

I think this is the problem that 'original sin' fixed. It seems that everyone believes they themselves are good. And thus, they know what's good. But, I doubt that any of us are good. And I don't think good objectively exists, in any case.

fortran77• 5 years ago

People don't realize that if you want to be the most inclusive, sometimes your focus needs to be brutally narrow. Stick to yarn and patterns and be scrupulous about telling political discussions to go elsewhere.

nerdponx8• 5 years ago

This.

Political activism is important. Stand up for what you believe in. But political activism does not mix with an inclusive, warm, welcoming hobby community. If you feel so strongly about your political beliefs that you can't let them rest even in your knitting club, then for the sake of the knitting club you're going to either have to turn it into a political knitting club or watch it fall apart. Maybe that's a sacrifice in pursuit of a greater cause.

flir6• 5 years ago

To avoid the subject is to, implicitly, side with the status quo. "Everything is political", even the choice to avoid politics.

KittenInABox5• 5 years ago

I very much agree with this in principle, but I think there are limits to it too. If a user who uses they/them joins your community and talks about yarn and patterns, referring to the user will always be political unless you ignore them or don't use pronouns around them, which is also political. And then whether or not the user is allowed to participate might be political- some users might be highly uncomfortable with a they/them pronoun user even participating and want a community "without those politics".

zefool• 5 years ago

Here is the real clue in the article:

Cassidy has noticed a growing dynamic. “The knitting community has a big issue with people being very concerned that, if they don’t support a callout, they’ll be called out themselves,” she told me. “Not joining it seems scary to people.”

I really have to say, I think this is a bad article. Not because it is badly written, or because it is factually wrong. But because an unfamiliar reader would get the wrong impression about what is really going on.

Ravelry and the knitting community do have a big problem. But it is not primarily with political polarization per se. It's the community-oriented mindset that does not work at scale.

The knitting community is experiencing what we all will experience wherever this mindset becomes dominant: homogenization and the enforcement of conformity. We need distance and live-and-let-live in society. It's not a family.

PeterStuer• 5 years ago

Every problem can be modeled as an instance of a class of problems. This can be useful, but it does also detract from this specific instance of a totalitarian ideological attack on a specific community.

In game theory the 'punish those that do not actively join in punishing outsiders' is a requirement for group stability, and it has been a staple tactic in every totalitarian regime.

smt883• 5 years ago

It's not a family, but it is a republic, and there are people across the country from me who are not letting others live (using their votes).

"Live and let live" doesn't work when we have people trying to deprive us of rights, either with their vote or by doing things like traveling across the country to attack the federal capitol.

busterarm5• 5 years ago

Alternatively, people in Oklahoma and people in New York don't want the same things, don't share the same values and should be free to choose to self-govern in different ways.

"Right to Travel", as in the right to move and relocate between states, is a well-established legal doctrine. Go live where it suits you. Don't force other people to live how it suits you.

willcipriano3• 5 years ago

If it was still a republic people across the country would have little effect on you since a weak federal government would be ineffective in enforcing their mandates if it was able to at all. Instead we have ended up at democracy as Aristotle long ago predicted: "Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms."

busterarm5• 5 years ago

We need distance and live-and-let-live in society. It's not a family.

Get rid of social media. Problem solved. It's putting too many people in proximity who otherwise should and would not be. The end result is always an angry mob.

mbostleman2• 5 years ago

But didn't the problem really escalate when media scaled electronically with radio and television. Those mediums didn't include interaction like social media does, but it seems like the diversity of ideas (at least visibly) is inversely proportional to the scale of broadcasting.

mbostleman2• 5 years ago

I'm reading Gad Saad's The Parasitic Mind at the moment. His metaphor of how parasitic ideas can take hold within a group and then take control of the host seems to be on display here.

KittenInABox5• 5 years ago

Diclaimer: I agree that loudly announcing one's political stance and trying to pursue it in a craft community is often more alienating than inclusive.

However, I want to ask how do we handle things that will always be viewed as political, such as trans or gay people? There is no non-political way to refer to a trans person- either you use a trans persons pronouns or you don't. And if you do either, you're making a political announcement in a group.

rajin444• 5 years ago

There's a reason you don't talk about politics and religion in polite company. You should not be judged for your worldview if it differs from somebody else. The personal should not be political.

duxup• 5 years ago

It would also seem to be one of those situations where a bunch of very active social media folks are used to define a community.

Even in technology focused circles I think you'd get the wrong impression about an entire industry if you just read social media.

I don't know how people get a good litmus test for what a community is up to but conflict breeds lots of activity, you're bound to see a lot of it if enough people participate... but it's hard to really understand what a 'community' is up to beyond that.

ISL• 5 years ago

I recently picked up a copy of Red Color News Soldier from the library, a photojournalist's description of events where call-out mentality is taken to the extreme (many of those who ran the call-outs later suffered brutal call-outs themselves, including the author).

One of my overarching questions as I read was really, "How is it that people come to support these events?" The initial conditions seem to require the right mix of organization, discord, and chaos.

The notion that the question is one of scaling is interesting. It isn't the internet that drives the emergence of large-scale call-outs -- humans have been doing this throughout history. The scaling argument offers a possible framework, i.e., is there a critical scale at which a call-out becomes systemically harmful?

flir6• 5 years ago

Germane: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22240041

I like the model proposed. But... unherd. Read critically.

baryphonic5• 5 years ago

But... unherd. Read critically.

I'm not quite sure I understand. Are you saying this because UnHerd confirms your priors? Or is there some reason to demur on their credibility?

flir6• 5 years ago

It's one of those "follow the money" deals.

The theory's really attractive, I like the theory, but its starting point is to assume everyone acts in bad faith.

twic• 5 years ago

Great header image!

h2odragon• 5 years ago

Surely, other competing "crafting" communities aren't subject to subversion and propaganda from, say, Etsy, for example. Or other, competing, more lucrative organizing efforts.

My wife was a cheerful producer of original knitting patterns, free and commercial, for several years before this stuff started to happen. She just stopped talking about knitting online altogether, for a while. Now she's careful to only post knitting on Facebook to a limited audience.

BitwiseFool2• 5 years ago

I subscribe to the Unix Philosophy when it comes to groups/institutions, "do one thing and do it well" and "It just does exactly what it says on the tin and no more". My ideal knitting community is all about honing the craft and experience of knitting. Politics does not belong in a knitting forum. Besides being irrelevant to needlework, it's the most polarizing and contentious subject for a group to adopt. Why risk a schism, or make people feel marginalized based on an irrelevant worldview?

Sadly, contemporary activists want politics to permeate through every aspect of society because they believe that's the best way to advance their agenda. Maybe they're right, because it forces people to tribalize and it makes the 'enemy' in the culture war easy to rally against.

compiler-guy2• 5 years ago

Knitters often include political messages in their patterns. From rainbows to certain shades of purple to flags to actual text.

So if the site is to allow arbitrary patterns—and that is its whole genesis—it will have to deal with political messages.

paulgb• 5 years ago

That's fine as a Platonic ideal, but I don't understand how you get there in practice. In the context of the OP, is your stance that the pink hats should have been banned from the site because they have a political message?

BitwiseFool2• 5 years ago

Yes, I realize that my conception is a platonic ideal and the real-world application of my ideal is bound to be messy and there will be disagreement. In this situation it would come down to a judgement call.

I would allow the patterns because they are knitting related. I don't want to restrict any user's freedom to upload a pattern - even if it's political. And I don't want to restrict anyone else from downloading those patterns. I suppose my desire to let people share needlework patterns outweighs my desire to exclude politics. I'm more concerned about user behavior around political patterns rather than the political message of the patterns themselves. To this point, I would be weary about any user who starts to agitate and evangelize.

The key is how these users are behaving outside of those particular pattern pages. Are they intentionally trying to inject politics into other knitting discussions? Are they trying to recruit like minded people, or shaming other users who disagree? If so, that's when I would warn the user to stop, and then ban the user if they aren't making a sincere effort to be less contentious.

pixl97• 5 years ago

Some ideas are like viruses, they will spread until the population is inoculated against them. Politics everywhere is one of those current pandemics.

wl• 5 years ago

Among my friends who were big into Ravelry circa 2010, the experience seemed to be: Come for the patterns, stay for the community.

jamesrcole• 5 years ago

Kathrine Jebsen Moore wrote three excellent, eye-opening articles about the knitting wars:

https://quillette.com/2019/02/17/a-witch-hunt-on-instagram/

https://quillette.com/2019/06/07/instagrams-diversity-wars-r...

https://quillette.com/2019/07/28/knittings-infinity-war-part...

compiler-guy2• 5 years ago

[Moving this to a top-level comment because ~everyone is commenting, “Just don’t be political.”]

Knitters often include political messages in their patterns. From rainbows to certain shades of purple to flags to actual text. So if the site is to allow arbitrary patterns—and that is its whole genesis—it will have to deal with political messages.

This isn’t even the old trope, “Everything is political.” This is people making political statements and propaganda via knitting.

Don’t be political is not a great option. The article even talks about the history of hidden messages in knitting. Getting rid of all or even most of it is not an option.

speeder• 5 years ago

The article mentioned a redesign issue with t he site.

I got curious, never been a user of the site, so I went to the login screen, saw the "play" button in the corner, and pressed it.

The animation is nothing special, just using scaling I think to make baloons look like they are moving...

But whoa, how I felt sick looking at it. And I have no clue why, tested a couple more times, press play, get sick, stop animation, I feel fine... The contrast looks fine-ish to me, the drawings are fine, there is nothing flashing, yet as soon I see the baloons becoming big and small repeateadly, I get sick.

I am a designer, so now I am very, VERY curious about how that happened, I searched all over the place but no answers sadly.

How Politics Tested Ravelry and the Crafting Community

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