On being 'controversial'

What should writers do

I’ve already talked about Vocal in this post. I don’t want to give the impression that I have something against the platform - in fact, I enjoy it. It’s niche and self-absorbed, but that can be said of most of writers’ spaces.

The issue today is completely different. Around one month ago, I published this small poem, ‘Men like us’. It’s a short, armchair contemplative piece about humanity’s favorite hobby, inflicting pain on one another.

It’s not particularly scathing, and I don’t believe it says anything that far better people have already said. You’re free to go read it for yourself at the link above.

On both sides of any rifle

there always were men like us.

I said, tapping in a certain disillusionment.

The community on Vocal seemed to like the poem, and it did receive moderate success. Until, at least, I noticed this banner popping up above it:

This gave me pause. Again, the poem is not graphic in any way. There are direct mentions to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the Palestinian massacre, yes, but nothing that you could call compromising.

If anything, I think I deserve a content warning because I’ve never known war and I still decided to post my thoughts about it. But the overall message of the piece boils down to:

I’m tired of the current discourse; i’m disgusted by war; and I would like people to acknowledge that humans can be victims or executioners, sometimes both, regardless of nationality

Or, to a more basic level,

people dying = bad

Now I don’t regard this to be a very polarizing message. From a moral standpoint, I’d say most people would agree that random mass killings of civilians are generally a bad thing.

And yet, the content warning stands.

Recently I’ve written a scifi short story, ‘the silent tenant’, which was short listed for a major prize. As speculative fiction often does, it uses an imaginary setup to talk about something close and dear to us. The gist of it is that people are quite happy to turn a blind eye to human suffering, especially when it provides useful commodities.

This has countless applications. We could talk about the human and ecological cost of coltan mines that provide for our gadgets, we could talk about suicides in smartphone factories or textile workers burning alive in their sweatshops. Last but not least, my country recurring habit of supporting and selling weapons to autocratic regimes also was on my mind when writing the piece.

I don’t dislike the short story’s message. But it’s so wide, it can mean so many things, that I can’t help but feel that’s so incredibly generic. “Things are bad,” complains the writer, without pointing to what is bad, and who is doing it (mind me, it still beats mindless escapism).

I have a feeling that had I been more precise, the short story would have been labeled as ‘too political’ and discarded. I made the almost subconscious choice to water down the theme because I knew who I was writing for. As the saying goes, when you look into the abyss [the publishing industry] the abyss looks into you. And it does change you.

This long preamble serves as a practical lesson. There is a trend - a strong trend - towards the sanitization of content. It sometimes shields itself under the guise of ‘content warning’, although this is a false flag operation. I frankly don’t believe that my mild take on war being horrible can traumatize a war victim.

It is not about protecting the end user, it’s about protecting revenue. Going back to the wording of that content warning on Vocal: ‘the views and opinions expressed are of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Vocal’.

Of course they don’t. I’m not a staff member. Of course when I write something, it represents at best my views. In a perfect world, such inane warning wouldn’t be needed.

But we are not in a perfect world, and companies need to distance themselves to whatever might scare advertisers and investors, i.e. the general public. Of course, this is nothing new as well. It’s rather the de facto standard in places like Youtube.

All you need is a nudge.

A banner that says, ‘this opinion might be controversial’. Notice how ‘controversial’ is not a value judgement. It doesn’t mean bad. But we, as writers, operate in a world where systems are ever-so-gently nudging towards the uncontroversial, the mild, the sanitized. Soon enough you internalize the knowledge that if you dare too much, if you express to much, if you open yourself up to criticism (because of course, your opinion isn’t necessarily a good one), you might end up losing viewership, readers, opportunities.

And so we start coating our works in layers upon layers of indirection. There’s a time and place to write our trite fantasy stories where cartoonishly evil dictators are overthrown. But there should always be time and space to write about the real evils without self-censoring.

I know I’m not the best in keeping this balance. But if you’re a writer, chances are you were aware of this issue too, on some level. Knowing that you have a problem, they say, is the first step to solve it.