Chaia Eran - חיה ערן (she/they) 🏳️⚧️✡
@chaiaeran.net
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Esoteric goth-y femme. Occasionally speedy. Liker of randomizers. Queer Jewish gremlin. 🏳️⚧️ Website at chaiaeran.net גלות ייד. דארטן, ווו מיר לעבן, דארט איז אונדזער לאנד דעלך סני לחברך לא תעביד. העם דורש פלסטין חופשי
![there are a variety of problems—or, perhaps, just one big problem with many facets—that sour the concept and rhetoric behind the .furry TLD for me.
i would like to start with the fact that to speak of communities “forced to hop from platform to platform, bending to the whims of those seeking to profit from their engagement” and therefore assert the need for “digital sovereignty within our community” is to make a political statement. and yet for all the truth underlying this statement, the people behind the current .furry TLD do not seem to actually grapple with the politics that should follow from it—or even recognize that this is a political statement in the first place, requiring political interventions to fully realize. rather, it seems that the .furry TLD is being stewarded by a governing body with an with an essentially laissez-faire, apolitical attitude despite the fact that it also represents something that has potential to become load-bearing subcultural infrastructure.
this is a possibility that, frankly, should scare the shit out of all of us.
consider this question, for example: ‘digital sovereignty’ on whose terms? it is well and good to be a “community-rooted organization” or to be “for furries, by furries”—but what do these practically mean for the subculture and its participants? because here we are speaking of a project asked to represent the totality of our subculture while also holding a de facto natural monopoly and a de facto captive market. there can, for all intents and purposes, be only one .furry TLD stewarded by one governing organization—and this TLD and its governing organization consequently inherits an immense coercive and definitional power over what is and is not legitimized as ‘furry,’ whether it actively and consciously chooses to wield these powers or not. does this not seem like something whose governing body should be democratically and collectively accountable to the subculture? [...]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:6aybno3ecyn6tt5mzjqncsmg/bafkreiaob2qjn5ho7wbhe3s3dria7fvb35hvxgzhx6nr76cebdbpmzgvyq)
![more to the point, who deserves representation in the decision-making of this “community-rooted organization”—who actually falls under this slogan of “for furries, by furries”—and who pointedly does not? which aspects of ‘the community’ will actually have a place in .furry and its governance, and which will be deprioritized or cast aside? or will ‘the community’ even have a place or a say in the current and future governance of the TLD—will it instead be, as Jo Freeman might put it, a structure of “the strong [and] the lucky” who happened to move first?
what i am getting at here is that “apolitical” infrastructure and governance is a contradiction in terms. even supposing this was not the case, however, i would still completely reject the notion that either infrastructure or governance can remain “apolitical” when they also serve the role of gatekeeper—when they assume a place in our subculture where their decisions could, would, and in some respects already do exert influence over defining what is and is not subculturally legitimized—like a .furry TLD would and does. the .furry TLD, then, is a result of political choices. how it has structured itself and who it listens to is a political choice. and in fact, consequential political choices about the nature of our subculture—and about what or who we are willing to accept as within its bounds—are not only being made through its structure as we speak, but in some cases have already been made. these decisions, worse, are being made by a handful of actors who seem to not even realize they are effectively making such decisions on our collective behalf.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:6aybno3ecyn6tt5mzjqncsmg/bafkreidgwgrsox5n3vmcyvez4o7w7p4plif3smzbaxydqfkwrqpj2lz2pq)
