A new awesome, Kickstarter-funded bookstore opened in my neighborhood a few months ago. On Friday, they'll be hosting an event for local writers who hang out on Tumblr, and since that group includes me, I wanted to show up. After reading about the work done by warehouse wage slaves, the more I can live locally and spend my money that way, I will.

I wondered whether I should go as an 'aspiring writer' (which sounds both dickish and pathetic, as this super funny post points out) or come clean about who I am and what I write. The other day I called it 'experimental fiction with a queer erotic bent,' and I think that about sums it up. I'm proud of what I write, of the way I write: graphic, honest, poetical.

But be that as it may,  I know it's not to everyone's taste. I am not trying to make a living by eking out words. Perhaps then I would write differently: mass-market, then, or genre-driven. I might be less concerned with PayPal's recent actions against the smut-writing community.

Within these circles, I have heard a panoply of voices; ranging from ew, icky to doesn't affect me to the one which mirrors my own: fuck you, PayPal, you can suck a bag of limp fucking dicks. On this issue there is no counterargument that I can countenance. If you "yes, BUT" about corporate censorship even one time, there is no telling where it will stop, and when it will cease.

Corporations, the reasoning seems to go, are allowed to do what they wish. If they see fit to change their terms of service, indeed they can do so. Unlike a civic organization, they owe the public nothing. The problem is that there are no alternatives — once a monopoly like PayPal is established, it becomes so scarily ingrained in our everyday lives that we can no longer say no. There are no independent alternatives to credit cards, for instance. More to the point, I've heard oh it's fine Amazon is still there, as if this solved the problem.

Stop. Think about what it means for independent authors to be beholden to a single corporate monolith. Go on, I can wait.

The internet has solved the problem of distribution almost entirely. Kudos for that. But if there are not safeguards in place, if this RADICAL DEMOCRATIC SPACE becomes nothing more than place to pin thinspo pictures and insipid inspirational quotes, then we're all fucked.

Don't for one moment think these issues — the tampdown on torrenting, the massive crackdowns against Occupy movements worldwide, the harvesting of data through social applications, and the moralizing actions of fiscal entities — aren't instantiations of a larger trend. A global citzenry stands on the verge of a massive threshold of awakening consciousness and the powers that be are scared shitless.

Yet the issue from the beginning is still there. Unlike, say, ACTA or SOPA or a cool Kickstarter campaign, I don't feel comfortable talking about this issue using my real identity. I might blog or tweet about it using a pseudonym, like  the one I write fiction (or fanfiction) under, but I have zero intention to publicize it on the same Facebook page that my fundamentalist in-laws post sonogram pictures on. How, then, to fight this fight?

Here's a couple of places to get you started.