2021 Hugos re sponsorships

[psocoptera]

This is absolutely not a statement against people being upset about the Raytheon sponsorship, just a note about something I found personally interesting - my most immediate reaction when people started talking about it was surprise that it was something one could take note of and comment on? Because it was Advertising, and the Thing One Does with advertising is to sort of try to grey it out in your head as much as possible, because you wouldn't want to acknowledge it and actually give it attention/a foothold in your brain. So when suddenly people were like "we can see that, and we don't like it", I was like "whoa, we can *see* that!" before I even got to the whether we liked it part. Now obviously it's easier for me to ignore something like Raytheon given that I know many many more people who work or have worked for defense contractors (or are in/were in the US military) than I know people who have been murdered by US-made weapons - I'm not saying there *are* more, just that I happen to personally know more, so it's very normalized to me - but it made me wonder just how extreme a sponsorship I would have automatically glossed over before I actually noticed and thought to object to it. Like, the Hugos! Brought to you by Barstool and Philip Morris! The Hugos! Brought to you by NAMBLA and the Hitler Youth! I just don't know. (Ok, I would really like to think I would have noticed the Hitler Youth.)

Comments

[psocoptera]

I should maybe disclose here, to be entirely clear, that *I* have been personally subsidized by Raytheon, in that my spouse worked for awhile at one of their subsidiaries, although his project was NSF rather than military. I don't have a problem with that, or with my friends who have made similar choices; I do think that's different from the decision of an international event to accept that sponsorship and branding without the knowledge or agreement of event participants.

[glynhogen]

At least portions of the Raytheon conversation on Twitter were being driven/intensified by some less-than-good-faith actors.

I found the "red carpet" idea weird, because the photos (sans carpet) were already a Thing. After the mental pattern matching for name/degree of evil/etc., my first thought was MRK wrangled some cash when she stepped in to help a con going off the rails; but the "it's DC, nobody thought twice about it" explanation makes some sense.

[crystalpyramid]

I feel like I would not be at all surprised if, say, the American Association of Physics Teachers listed Raytheon among their sponsors at their annual conference. For all I know they do — there's usually a list of sponsors that I usually ignore. But it sounds like SF conventions don't normally have corporate sponsors, so Raytheon maybe had extra power and spotlight as the only one?

[psocoptera]

If someone asserted that every SF convention always has sponsors I would have to go dig around for old programs to have any idea if that was true or not. I mean, I'm pretty sure there's usually some advertising in the program? For something?

[crystalpyramid]

But is it just like other cons, SF magazines, and the local restaurants?

[psocoptera]

Just grey boxes of static (like a tv tuned to a dead channel, heh)

[crystalpyramid]

I might need to get that software upgrade.