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Anne Kustritz, Identity, Community, and Sexuality in Slash Fan Fiction: Disclaimer: it can be difficult to review a book in which you appear as an actor, at least in a supporting role, so take this for what it’s worth. Rather than trying to identify “the” meaning of slash, Kustritz looks at “some of slash’s central preoccupations within a framework focused on multiplicity to demonstrate that while symbolism attached to the body has powerful cultural significance, rapid creative cycles moving toward a multiply-defined and constantly revised end may be the only true norm in a writing community predicated upon diluting the authority of any one artistic vision.” The “5 things that never happened” format, for example, “radically refuses definitive resolution and invokes a profound ontological uncertainty,” imagining many equally happy—or terrible—lives. Among other things, that means that “equality” in slash, while significant, “cannot maintain an undisputed or coherent position of ethical authority,” among other things because “multiple retellings undermine closure, thereby destabilizing moral weight granted to endings by the narrative form,” and also because individual authors’ visions of “equality” “varies significantly.” Even if what is commercially viable changes, slash will still matter because of its “openness to endless additional experimentation,” especially related to “the meanings a given era associates with anatomy and sexual life.”
Kustritz characterizes the OTW as “a hegemonic player,” asserting fan fiction’s legitimacy in existing legal terms, which I think is a fair characterization; to me, the liberal and the radical can reinforce each other’s power. She characterizes the figure of the “pirate” as a more disruptive one, which doesn’t accept corporate terms of engagement or offer a particularly clear path forward (which is not necessarily a criticism, but if you want to make change, it can be). Although the OTW sometimes explains that fans as a group are “good consumers,” I would emphasize that consuming is not what makes us valid—we’re legitimate because we’re people and they create things. I think we can avoid “respectability politics” by defending fans who make shocking stuff, even if we also point out that fandom is economically valuable to corporate copyright owners. But those are two different axes of respectability.
She also discusses fans’ well-justified distrust of copyright owners and digital platforms, which make relying on fair use sometimes seem risky (which is why we have AO3 to stand up for it!). Fans largely disparage people who try to bring in “the authorities” to resolve disputes—but that doesn’t mean we can stop them from doing it, as various painful events in Chinese fandom show.
Christian B. Long, Infrastructure in Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic Film, 1968–2021: If you enjoy, as I do, sentences like “I Am Legend’s hopeful ending depends on the imagination of a particular kind of utopian space that simultaneously roots salvation in some forms of infrastructure while glossing over the practical matter of the construction and maintenance infrastructure requires,” then this is a book for you!
Alfred L. Martin, Jr., Fandom for Us, by Us: The Pleasures and Practices of Black Audiences: Working from the author’s own fandoms, Martin explores how Black fandom makes classed distinctions and engages in consumer activism to support “good,” “family-friendly” Black content and to canonize particular fan objects, here Misty Copeland, Black Panther, The Wiz, and The Golden Girls, centering Black joy. He notes that “representation” matters, but can never be perfectly “right” because representation is always a simulacrum and therefore can never be unquestionably “real”; representation also requires an audience, and therefore depends on reception, so it can only work for a particular audience; and, for a Black audience, representation is likely to be entangled in double consciousness, “partly judged on how others (especially white viewers) will make meaning from texts.”
Although he focuses on joy, he also emphasizes pain as a verb, as in to take pains: “Black folks use their money to support Blackness via Misty Copeland and Black Panther in the hope that their capital will result in industrial change: more Black ballerinas [particularly in mainstream white spaces] and more high-budget Black-cast films. Black fandoms labor to canonize The Wiz as a representation and centering of specific Black cultural tastes. Black fans labor to read The Golden Girls Blackly to make it resonate. Thus, the ‘pain’ associated with Black fandoms is a political fandom rooted in a way to make media resonate and center Black cultural competencies.” For me, the discussion of The Wiz was particularly illuminating—he recounts how the white reception at the time saw it as a cult film, “so bad/strange it was good, while Black audiences saw it as canonical, a Black-cast film without Blaxploitation.” By contrast, The Golden Girls could be read “within Black structures of meaning and feeling,” including verbal sparring; the multigenerational and friendship-based living arrangements were familiar.
Martin argues that the Black canon he discusses “is interested in the ways these texts get used and reused in everyday life as a whole text, rather than one that requires remixing for its pleasure.” I find that pretty interesting, given that Misty Copeland is a performer who regularly interprets canonical works; that his Black Panther chapter includes things like kids dressing up as characters from Wakanda; and that The Wiz is a transformative work. But we all see different things in our fandoms.
Carrie M. Lane, More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn’t Working: Fascinating book about the history of personal (home and office, not union) organizing as a profession dominated by women, mostly white, and its relationship to all the stuff we own and the precarity of American life, influenced by the author’s participant observation. Organizing has appeal as a career for women for whom conventional workplaces were insufficiently flexible, and also lets them help other women whose own lives are too inflexible, bleeding off some of the tension caused by the systemic problems we face.
Although the mountains of stuff we have are easy to blame on consumerism, Lane argues that “organizers offer forms of care and connection hard to come by in today’s society.” One reason we have so much stuff is that we have so many fewer people in our lives. We have to handle by ourselves many tasks that would have been handled by family, government, employers, or community in the past. And American individualism frames reliance on others as weakness.
Also, we engage in “wishful shopping,” “purchasing items that stand in for the activities [we] would like to do or the people [we] would like to be.” This makes decluttering psychologically fraught: Getting rid of those items is symbolically “ ‘to murder the version of ourselves we envision using it.’” Thus, one primary function of an organizer is to handle the items, which makes them easier to dispose of; telling the organizer the story of the items can also help the client (almost always also a woman) feel better about getting rid of them. Professional organizers fall within a category of expert service workers offer “the sort of assistance, empathy, and connection many Americans so desperately desire” and generally love their work, finding in it autonomy, mastery, the satisfaction of helping others, and social engagement, as well as money.
At the same time, self-employment brings its own challenges—they’re always hustling. And it’s harder for women with young children, without spouses, from poorer communities, and/or who aren’t white.
The history involves an attempt to professionalize starting in the 1970s. I didn’t know that in the early 20th century, secretaries were sometimes known as “office wives.” In order to lay claim to a higher status, many organizers— “then and now—refuse to do more than cursory cleaning on the job.” They also analogized their work to that of doctors and therapists, “albeit at the expense of potential solidarity with similarly female-dominated occupations.” Lane notes, however, that doctors do not refer to themselves as “professional doctors,” nor are there “professional lawyers.” Instead, those professions rely on their histories and credentials, which organizers initially lacked. Early organizers claimed gender as an asset, but also accepted raced and classed ideals of professionalism that privileged full-time work and dividing work from home life, demeaning “dabblers”; these ideals were inherently more difficult for women with children to satisfy. Still, these ideals of a collaborative culture had many attractions, including that members of an industry could succeed together rather than competing, especially since there was so much work to go around. But they often framed unwillingness to charge a high enough rate as a gender-specific flaw: “professionalism was framed as a non-gendered set of beliefs and behaviors, unprofessionalism was understood as the province of women.” Meanwhile, the few male organizers “tend to garner a lot of praise and positive attention,” while Black women organizers often feel isolated, even after 2020 and a lot of talk about becoming more inclusive.
Organizers end up choosing between different kinds of insecurity—traditional paid employment is incompatible with the other kinds of unpaid work they’re expected by their families and others around them to perform, but to be “professional” they often “internalized the idea that working long, unrestricted hours and being constantly available to clients is what it takes to run and grow a successful organizing business.”
I found Lane’s descriptions of the organizing process itself to be fascinating: “physically distancing clients from their possessions; encouraging clients to focus on their present-day needs and priorities, rather than imaginary future ones; creating space for clients to dwell on their feelings about a particular object—to tell its story—before releasing it; and asking clients to consider who might need or enjoy a specific item more than the client themself, thus transforming the act of discarding unwanted goods into a gesture of generosity and compassion.” The basic idea is straightforward—group, sort into types, get rid of a bunch, put the remains back in useful places—but has to be customized, especially since “seeing everything laid out in front of you also brings home the reality of how much you actually own.” The organizers Lane worked with didn’t like reality organizing shows because of how clients were treated: they didn’t like yelling at clients and preferred to convince them to part with items, including by getting them to take photos as mementoes. Apparently, it can be helpful to think about the feelings of the object, especially for people who hoard or are chronically disorganized, who “tend to personify things anyway,” and “especially when dealing with items that had been gifted or inherited.” This provides “permission to get rid of an object while also affirming that the client was a good person who valued their relationships and organizers often asked if the giver would have wanted to burden the client with the object.” But it’s not a good idea to set an item aside to sell or give later—it should go when you make that decision, and can just foist a decision onto someone else. Instead, organizers keep lists of local charities handy and know who needs or accepts what. “[A] dog lover, for instance, might be more moved by the idea of donating surplus sheet sets to an animal shelter than to Goodwill.”
Organizers also focus on feelings about space: “how it will feel to be able to walk through the guest room without having to navigate stacks of boxes,” or “what you’ll also want when you want this item” to decide what to store together. This is emotional labor: “relationships that are intimate but not equal, genuine but temporary.” Unlike many other emotional laborers, though, organizers are “self-employed, earn high hourly wages, and have similar class backgrounds to the clients they serve.” Lane writes that she was “struck by how rare it was to hear organizers frame their clients as entitled or overly demanding.” Instead, they saw their clients as “deserving of support and assistance due to the many demands placed on clients’ time and energy.” They would often give special low rates when they saw someone as specially in need.
I also learned that, as a rule, “organizers discourage clients from buying organizing products” because “most people who decide to hire an organizer already own more organizing products than they need.” People with pantries shown in magazines and TV shows are likely to have full-time staff. And an organizer can deliver that message with more conviction: “If even an organizer can’t achieve that ideal, it must be okay.” Capitalism’s reliance on women’s unpaid work is running the tank dry. Organizers help some, at the margins, but they can’t fix that.
Brian Klaas, Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us: If you like evo-psych stuff, this is a readable summary of a lot of research about the ways that power corrupts and the mechanisms that can fight corruption.
Random tidbits I found interesting: The Stanford Prison Experiment is justly famous, but recruiting materials that replaced the line “for a psychological study of prison life” with the phrase “for a psychological study” turned out to recruit a less disproportionately sadistic batch of students.
Klaas thinks that weapons (and alliances) were an evolutionary turning point. With thrown/ranged weapons, size becomes less important; toddlers shoot and kill someone about once a week in the US, while “the idea of a baby chimpanzee accidentally killing an adult is ludicrous.” (But with alliances, chimps can still have coups.) Hunter-gatherers, Klaas contends, needed to fight to preserve a lack of hierarchy, with rituals including insulting the meat brought back by hunters and rotating arrowheads so that kills would be attributed to multiple people (arrowhead owner and arrow firer). But complex hierarchies did evolve and warfare favored societies with more soldiers, and thus more hierarchies. (For an alternate view, David Graeber is good; you don’t have to buy into all the evolutionary psych stuff to find useful mid-level observations about what works, and doesn’t, to control corruption.)
Policing: Right now, policing attracts bullies, bigots, and sexual predators. Advertising it with pictures of tanks and assault vehicles attracts a particular kind of person, and shapes their behavior once arrived. Departments that buy the most surplus military gear “killed more civilians to begin with and saw the numbers of civilians that they killed in a given year rise significantly after the military equipment arrived.” By contrast, New Zealand advertised for recruits showing charming, nonviolent scenes of helpers helping people, and saw (Klaas says) substantial success.
Who gets trusted with power? In a white-dominated society, baby-faced black people seem less threatening, and are therefore more able to attain power than less baby-faced black people. But baby-faced white CEOs are perceived to be weak.
What about what happens to people who get power? Power corrupts, but perhaps not as much as we think: Politics is full of hard choices, and powerful people just have to make more decisions that involve harm than non-powerful people. For example, Lincoln functionally bribed representatives to get the Thirteenth Amendment passed (not to mention his other compromises). But there are also plenty of ways in which power distorts decisionmaking, including “authoritarian learning.” As we’re seeing now, and as discussions of cults have long noted, the authoritarian demands obedience to bizarre whims, because agreeing to something objectively ridiculous (like Pete Hegseth) shows loyalty. And this requires constant escalation: “if the lies don’t get more extreme, your loyalty tests become useless.”
Power also gives people more opportunities to take risks. And it leads them to be more willing to do so, to seek rewards, and to self-promote. They believe (falsely) that they can control the risks they’re taking. Also, they swear more, interrupt others more, stereotype more, use less moral reasoning, and are more judgmental of others’ behaviors, even when they do the same things. By contrast, powerless people are “cautious, trying to protect what they already have.”
Klaas has some suggestions for combating these problems, including picking citizens at random to advise on public policy, since they’d be more geared towards compromise and less prone to corruption. He notes that some banks require employees in sensitive positions to take two weeks of consecutive vacation time each year. The replacement can check on their work to make sure there’s no ongoing fraud. The German federal government has designated certain posts in the civil service “as particularly prone to embezzlement, bribery, or corruption. For those positions, nobody can occupy a given role for more than five years.” Switching partners can also decrease the rates of corruption, since repeated interactions increase trust—including the trust necessary to break the law. This turns out to be true even in a higher-corruption state like China.
More generally, Klaas suggests that policy postmortems should scrutinize the decision-making process much more carefully, rather than prioritizing results and outcomes, since people in power are “good at creating narratives that cast them in a better light than reality. They’re skilled at making us think they did a good job even when they screwed up.” And human oversight is important—although there are sociopaths who lie easily, there are lots of people who will confess, or even just behave themselves, if they feel watched. But the key here is to turn the panopticon inside out: it’s not the people on the bottom who should be constantly surveilled, but the people in power.
Of course, we’re headed in the opposite direction, with the death of local newspapers—directly correlated with a rise in corruption. Klass reports that, in India, “ordinary people can report extortion via a website called I Paid a Bribe.” And Bangalore managed to improve its driving test bribery problem with electronic sensors and videotape of the tests. But people are creative: “when election observers are deployed, rigging usually spikes in nearby precincts that aren’t monitored.”
How about cops? One suggestion: start small. A policy against letting cops take even free coffee might sound tough, but it is a base to build on. Then, do integrity tests, or stings, run by other cops. They have to be random. “If you do five hundred random integrity tests a year, thousands of cops are going to think they’ve been tested.” Although constant surveillance has harmful effects, “randomized integrity testing for those who have plenty of opportunity to cause serious harm is usually justified.”
Kustritz characterizes the OTW as “a hegemonic player,” asserting fan fiction’s legitimacy in existing legal terms, which I think is a fair characterization; to me, the liberal and the radical can reinforce each other’s power. She characterizes the figure of the “pirate” as a more disruptive one, which doesn’t accept corporate terms of engagement or offer a particularly clear path forward (which is not necessarily a criticism, but if you want to make change, it can be). Although the OTW sometimes explains that fans as a group are “good consumers,” I would emphasize that consuming is not what makes us valid—we’re legitimate because we’re people and they create things. I think we can avoid “respectability politics” by defending fans who make shocking stuff, even if we also point out that fandom is economically valuable to corporate copyright owners. But those are two different axes of respectability.
She also discusses fans’ well-justified distrust of copyright owners and digital platforms, which make relying on fair use sometimes seem risky (which is why we have AO3 to stand up for it!). Fans largely disparage people who try to bring in “the authorities” to resolve disputes—but that doesn’t mean we can stop them from doing it, as various painful events in Chinese fandom show.
Christian B. Long, Infrastructure in Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic Film, 1968–2021: If you enjoy, as I do, sentences like “I Am Legend’s hopeful ending depends on the imagination of a particular kind of utopian space that simultaneously roots salvation in some forms of infrastructure while glossing over the practical matter of the construction and maintenance infrastructure requires,” then this is a book for you!
Alfred L. Martin, Jr., Fandom for Us, by Us: The Pleasures and Practices of Black Audiences: Working from the author’s own fandoms, Martin explores how Black fandom makes classed distinctions and engages in consumer activism to support “good,” “family-friendly” Black content and to canonize particular fan objects, here Misty Copeland, Black Panther, The Wiz, and The Golden Girls, centering Black joy. He notes that “representation” matters, but can never be perfectly “right” because representation is always a simulacrum and therefore can never be unquestionably “real”; representation also requires an audience, and therefore depends on reception, so it can only work for a particular audience; and, for a Black audience, representation is likely to be entangled in double consciousness, “partly judged on how others (especially white viewers) will make meaning from texts.”
Although he focuses on joy, he also emphasizes pain as a verb, as in to take pains: “Black folks use their money to support Blackness via Misty Copeland and Black Panther in the hope that their capital will result in industrial change: more Black ballerinas [particularly in mainstream white spaces] and more high-budget Black-cast films. Black fandoms labor to canonize The Wiz as a representation and centering of specific Black cultural tastes. Black fans labor to read The Golden Girls Blackly to make it resonate. Thus, the ‘pain’ associated with Black fandoms is a political fandom rooted in a way to make media resonate and center Black cultural competencies.” For me, the discussion of The Wiz was particularly illuminating—he recounts how the white reception at the time saw it as a cult film, “so bad/strange it was good, while Black audiences saw it as canonical, a Black-cast film without Blaxploitation.” By contrast, The Golden Girls could be read “within Black structures of meaning and feeling,” including verbal sparring; the multigenerational and friendship-based living arrangements were familiar.
Martin argues that the Black canon he discusses “is interested in the ways these texts get used and reused in everyday life as a whole text, rather than one that requires remixing for its pleasure.” I find that pretty interesting, given that Misty Copeland is a performer who regularly interprets canonical works; that his Black Panther chapter includes things like kids dressing up as characters from Wakanda; and that The Wiz is a transformative work. But we all see different things in our fandoms.
Carrie M. Lane, More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn’t Working: Fascinating book about the history of personal (home and office, not union) organizing as a profession dominated by women, mostly white, and its relationship to all the stuff we own and the precarity of American life, influenced by the author’s participant observation. Organizing has appeal as a career for women for whom conventional workplaces were insufficiently flexible, and also lets them help other women whose own lives are too inflexible, bleeding off some of the tension caused by the systemic problems we face.
Although the mountains of stuff we have are easy to blame on consumerism, Lane argues that “organizers offer forms of care and connection hard to come by in today’s society.” One reason we have so much stuff is that we have so many fewer people in our lives. We have to handle by ourselves many tasks that would have been handled by family, government, employers, or community in the past. And American individualism frames reliance on others as weakness.
Also, we engage in “wishful shopping,” “purchasing items that stand in for the activities [we] would like to do or the people [we] would like to be.” This makes decluttering psychologically fraught: Getting rid of those items is symbolically “ ‘to murder the version of ourselves we envision using it.’” Thus, one primary function of an organizer is to handle the items, which makes them easier to dispose of; telling the organizer the story of the items can also help the client (almost always also a woman) feel better about getting rid of them. Professional organizers fall within a category of expert service workers offer “the sort of assistance, empathy, and connection many Americans so desperately desire” and generally love their work, finding in it autonomy, mastery, the satisfaction of helping others, and social engagement, as well as money.
At the same time, self-employment brings its own challenges—they’re always hustling. And it’s harder for women with young children, without spouses, from poorer communities, and/or who aren’t white.
The history involves an attempt to professionalize starting in the 1970s. I didn’t know that in the early 20th century, secretaries were sometimes known as “office wives.” In order to lay claim to a higher status, many organizers— “then and now—refuse to do more than cursory cleaning on the job.” They also analogized their work to that of doctors and therapists, “albeit at the expense of potential solidarity with similarly female-dominated occupations.” Lane notes, however, that doctors do not refer to themselves as “professional doctors,” nor are there “professional lawyers.” Instead, those professions rely on their histories and credentials, which organizers initially lacked. Early organizers claimed gender as an asset, but also accepted raced and classed ideals of professionalism that privileged full-time work and dividing work from home life, demeaning “dabblers”; these ideals were inherently more difficult for women with children to satisfy. Still, these ideals of a collaborative culture had many attractions, including that members of an industry could succeed together rather than competing, especially since there was so much work to go around. But they often framed unwillingness to charge a high enough rate as a gender-specific flaw: “professionalism was framed as a non-gendered set of beliefs and behaviors, unprofessionalism was understood as the province of women.” Meanwhile, the few male organizers “tend to garner a lot of praise and positive attention,” while Black women organizers often feel isolated, even after 2020 and a lot of talk about becoming more inclusive.
Organizers end up choosing between different kinds of insecurity—traditional paid employment is incompatible with the other kinds of unpaid work they’re expected by their families and others around them to perform, but to be “professional” they often “internalized the idea that working long, unrestricted hours and being constantly available to clients is what it takes to run and grow a successful organizing business.”
I found Lane’s descriptions of the organizing process itself to be fascinating: “physically distancing clients from their possessions; encouraging clients to focus on their present-day needs and priorities, rather than imaginary future ones; creating space for clients to dwell on their feelings about a particular object—to tell its story—before releasing it; and asking clients to consider who might need or enjoy a specific item more than the client themself, thus transforming the act of discarding unwanted goods into a gesture of generosity and compassion.” The basic idea is straightforward—group, sort into types, get rid of a bunch, put the remains back in useful places—but has to be customized, especially since “seeing everything laid out in front of you also brings home the reality of how much you actually own.” The organizers Lane worked with didn’t like reality organizing shows because of how clients were treated: they didn’t like yelling at clients and preferred to convince them to part with items, including by getting them to take photos as mementoes. Apparently, it can be helpful to think about the feelings of the object, especially for people who hoard or are chronically disorganized, who “tend to personify things anyway,” and “especially when dealing with items that had been gifted or inherited.” This provides “permission to get rid of an object while also affirming that the client was a good person who valued their relationships and organizers often asked if the giver would have wanted to burden the client with the object.” But it’s not a good idea to set an item aside to sell or give later—it should go when you make that decision, and can just foist a decision onto someone else. Instead, organizers keep lists of local charities handy and know who needs or accepts what. “[A] dog lover, for instance, might be more moved by the idea of donating surplus sheet sets to an animal shelter than to Goodwill.”
Organizers also focus on feelings about space: “how it will feel to be able to walk through the guest room without having to navigate stacks of boxes,” or “what you’ll also want when you want this item” to decide what to store together. This is emotional labor: “relationships that are intimate but not equal, genuine but temporary.” Unlike many other emotional laborers, though, organizers are “self-employed, earn high hourly wages, and have similar class backgrounds to the clients they serve.” Lane writes that she was “struck by how rare it was to hear organizers frame their clients as entitled or overly demanding.” Instead, they saw their clients as “deserving of support and assistance due to the many demands placed on clients’ time and energy.” They would often give special low rates when they saw someone as specially in need.
I also learned that, as a rule, “organizers discourage clients from buying organizing products” because “most people who decide to hire an organizer already own more organizing products than they need.” People with pantries shown in magazines and TV shows are likely to have full-time staff. And an organizer can deliver that message with more conviction: “If even an organizer can’t achieve that ideal, it must be okay.” Capitalism’s reliance on women’s unpaid work is running the tank dry. Organizers help some, at the margins, but they can’t fix that.
Brian Klaas, Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us: If you like evo-psych stuff, this is a readable summary of a lot of research about the ways that power corrupts and the mechanisms that can fight corruption.
Random tidbits I found interesting: The Stanford Prison Experiment is justly famous, but recruiting materials that replaced the line “for a psychological study of prison life” with the phrase “for a psychological study” turned out to recruit a less disproportionately sadistic batch of students.
Klaas thinks that weapons (and alliances) were an evolutionary turning point. With thrown/ranged weapons, size becomes less important; toddlers shoot and kill someone about once a week in the US, while “the idea of a baby chimpanzee accidentally killing an adult is ludicrous.” (But with alliances, chimps can still have coups.) Hunter-gatherers, Klaas contends, needed to fight to preserve a lack of hierarchy, with rituals including insulting the meat brought back by hunters and rotating arrowheads so that kills would be attributed to multiple people (arrowhead owner and arrow firer). But complex hierarchies did evolve and warfare favored societies with more soldiers, and thus more hierarchies. (For an alternate view, David Graeber is good; you don’t have to buy into all the evolutionary psych stuff to find useful mid-level observations about what works, and doesn’t, to control corruption.)
Policing: Right now, policing attracts bullies, bigots, and sexual predators. Advertising it with pictures of tanks and assault vehicles attracts a particular kind of person, and shapes their behavior once arrived. Departments that buy the most surplus military gear “killed more civilians to begin with and saw the numbers of civilians that they killed in a given year rise significantly after the military equipment arrived.” By contrast, New Zealand advertised for recruits showing charming, nonviolent scenes of helpers helping people, and saw (Klaas says) substantial success.
Who gets trusted with power? In a white-dominated society, baby-faced black people seem less threatening, and are therefore more able to attain power than less baby-faced black people. But baby-faced white CEOs are perceived to be weak.
What about what happens to people who get power? Power corrupts, but perhaps not as much as we think: Politics is full of hard choices, and powerful people just have to make more decisions that involve harm than non-powerful people. For example, Lincoln functionally bribed representatives to get the Thirteenth Amendment passed (not to mention his other compromises). But there are also plenty of ways in which power distorts decisionmaking, including “authoritarian learning.” As we’re seeing now, and as discussions of cults have long noted, the authoritarian demands obedience to bizarre whims, because agreeing to something objectively ridiculous (like Pete Hegseth) shows loyalty. And this requires constant escalation: “if the lies don’t get more extreme, your loyalty tests become useless.”
Power also gives people more opportunities to take risks. And it leads them to be more willing to do so, to seek rewards, and to self-promote. They believe (falsely) that they can control the risks they’re taking. Also, they swear more, interrupt others more, stereotype more, use less moral reasoning, and are more judgmental of others’ behaviors, even when they do the same things. By contrast, powerless people are “cautious, trying to protect what they already have.”
Klaas has some suggestions for combating these problems, including picking citizens at random to advise on public policy, since they’d be more geared towards compromise and less prone to corruption. He notes that some banks require employees in sensitive positions to take two weeks of consecutive vacation time each year. The replacement can check on their work to make sure there’s no ongoing fraud. The German federal government has designated certain posts in the civil service “as particularly prone to embezzlement, bribery, or corruption. For those positions, nobody can occupy a given role for more than five years.” Switching partners can also decrease the rates of corruption, since repeated interactions increase trust—including the trust necessary to break the law. This turns out to be true even in a higher-corruption state like China.
More generally, Klaas suggests that policy postmortems should scrutinize the decision-making process much more carefully, rather than prioritizing results and outcomes, since people in power are “good at creating narratives that cast them in a better light than reality. They’re skilled at making us think they did a good job even when they screwed up.” And human oversight is important—although there are sociopaths who lie easily, there are lots of people who will confess, or even just behave themselves, if they feel watched. But the key here is to turn the panopticon inside out: it’s not the people on the bottom who should be constantly surveilled, but the people in power.
Of course, we’re headed in the opposite direction, with the death of local newspapers—directly correlated with a rise in corruption. Klass reports that, in India, “ordinary people can report extortion via a website called I Paid a Bribe.” And Bangalore managed to improve its driving test bribery problem with electronic sensors and videotape of the tests. But people are creative: “when election observers are deployed, rigging usually spikes in nearby precincts that aren’t monitored.”
How about cops? One suggestion: start small. A policy against letting cops take even free coffee might sound tough, but it is a base to build on. Then, do integrity tests, or stings, run by other cops. They have to be random. “If you do five hundred random integrity tests a year, thousands of cops are going to think they’ve been tested.” Although constant surveillance has harmful effects, “randomized integrity testing for those who have plenty of opportunity to cause serious harm is usually justified.”
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