Endings to be useful must be inconclusive. – Samuel R. Delany
It’s a good thing that this year wasn’t nearly as hard for me personally as the past three were, because it has been absolutely catastrophic for sex workers as a group. And since we’re the canaries in the civil liberties coal mine, that presages bad times on the horizon for everyone, especially (but not limited to) marginalized communities, who always suffer most when government declares war on human rights. When FOSTA was enacted and a full-scale attack on Backpage was launched back in the spring, whores and our allies warned the rest of y’all that it was only the beginning of an all-out assault on the internet, which politicians in the US and Europe have been trying to bring under government control for a quarter-century now. And if FOSTA isn’t reversed, that assault will succeed; its censorship provisions have already frightened dozens of web platforms into shutting down, and those which haven’t are either self-lobotomizing or attempting to turn their sites into massive walled gardens, like AOL writ large across what was once a free and open internet. It’s inevitable that new platforms will appear in countries which are interested in neither US sex hysteria nor European attempts to police human emotions, suppress speech and enrich corporate copyright holders, but in the meantime things may get a lot worse before they get better. So I suggest you enjoy your parties tonight and resolve to persevere in the coming year, because I don’t think it’s going to be very much fun for anybody.
