I've always said that DNI isn't about actually setting boundaries anymore, it's virtue signaling- as much as that term has been co-opted in loathsome ways by vile people, it has some use here.
If you put 'racists dni' in your bio, a racist isn't going to see it and go 'aw, nuts! i have to go away now' like Swiper the Fox. Either they're not self-aware of their own racism ('i have black friends!') or they are aware, and they're going to interact double because they see you as a target now. Same with homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc. etc. And for less high-stakes criteria- if you have 'dni if you like Sword Fantasy 3: Return Of Sword Fantasy', its fans are just going to not bring up that they're fans to you, because that's a silly thing to unperson someone about. You're better off saying 'i have SF3ROSF tags muted, please don't talk to me about it'.
The use of a label like that isn't to ward anyone off or to do any good, it's to show to your friends 'i support the right social causes! i promise!!!', which is maybe a symptom of a greater problem the internet (especially young gen z) has with prioritizing the appearance of purity and goodness over actually doing what's right
When it comes to, like, retroactively adding tumblr posts to have 'terfs go to hell' in big flaming letters, that does something. If the post has been co-opted by a group who you disagree with, adding explicit messaging against them will stop it spreading in their circles (and possibly cause some infighting, if they're extra-extremists and even an accidental show of disloyalty is enough to get someone on the shitlist). But the bio list is useless- sometimes worse than useless, honestly.
If I could control the layout a bit more, Kossai's whole post would go here. It's great, faer wording is phenomenal and I can't really expand on it. Scroll back up and read it again. In the accepted format of the DNI, there's a lot of really easy ways to accidentally do harm to people you would otherwise get along with.
Here's a story I tried to tell about that, and then it turned into a longer, more generalized rant.
The other day, in a discord server I'm in, someone came in discussing a tumblr anon who accused them of having anti-intersex messaging in their bio. A younger person, well-intentioned and not meaning to say such a thing at all. We clowned on the anon for a while because they were being a presumptive asshole and a loser. But then we looked into what could have made them think that, and discovered that the poster had this site in their bio:
You can see what happened, obviously. Someone saw 'pro amab trans men/afab trans women', and recognized it as phrasing used to harass and exclude intersex people. Like with what Kossai spoke about, someone tried to be progressive and instead hurt a bunch of random strangers while not even connecting with their intended target.
But also... What an unpleasant little pill of a site! Here's a not-so-brief digression of everything I take issue with:
- The elaborations on racism are, admittedly, decent. It's a more comprehensive list than you see in other places. Unfortunately, as we've discussed, the racists in question do not care. What this list primarily serves to do is hide the rest of the site. Start off with something that looks well-researched and non-objectionable, and a decent amount of people won't scroll, won't read the rest. They'll just assume they agree with everything and copy the link. (Remember that. That's a surprise tool that'll help us later.)
- I do like that later down the list it has both anti-semitism and zionism as 'bad people' categories. That's the one unequivocally good thing about this site. But honestly, why bother with separate categories for specific denominations? Just lump everything into one big 'xenophobia' section. Minimize the amount of time bad actors need to spend reading before they put you on their shit list, and maximize the amount of time a good-faith reader spends decoding the structure and therefore can put on their Being A Good Person Today timesheet. That's what these things are headed towards.
- The anti-lgbtq+ section is a similar 'the -phobes don't care' issue, but it's also the start of the site... devolving into weirdness. For example, it says "anti non-she/her lesbians or non-he/him gays", and then in the very same section, says "pro mspec lesbians or gays". I might be wrong, but... aren't those the same thing????? Why does this contradict itself? Is it banking on the two sides not recognizing each other's phrasing? Who wrote this??? Why are some controversial identities okay, but some aren't? Isn't 'gender and sexuality is an individual deep experience and labels are just words approximating it' one of the core tenets of the movement here? Etc, etc, etc. TLDR: weird pair of things to include. Makes me wonder about this list's development.
- List Item 2 applies here again to separating transmisogyny from the greater homophobia section... but there's also a weirdness to it that the previous one doesn't get. Islamophobia being specified separate from racism kind of makes sense. But separating this from the rest of the queer community is accidentally kind of sus.
- Speaking of contradictions: 'anti self-diagnosis' and 'pro endogenic systems' is another moment where it takes both sides of an issue and uses clever phrasing to disguise it. Which is it? Do you think people should or should not have to meet a strict set of clinical standards in order for you to respect them as neurodivergent? 'No one should have to spill all their life details and personal information to strangers on the internet in order to be true to themself. Unless it's this one category. Then they have to show me their papers.' like
- What is the new society movement??? Who are marcos and duerte????? This is a very America-centric list, for the most part (relevant post), so a sudden moment of what turns out to be very specific Filipino politics stands out as odd. Like, if you're going to be international, why doesn't this list also say 'Tories'? I looked up a basic overview of this stuff, and from what little I have time to find, I don't think I disagree with them being placed on a 'bad political movements' list. But it makes me wonder if everyone using this site in their twitter bios did the same, if they looked up what they were promoting and decided whether they agree with it.
- And finally, it ends with the "pro ship" section. Just riddled with problems that I think stretch across the aisle, regardless of your stance on the actual PrOsHiP dEbAtE. That's actually kind of impressive. And I don't know how to make sublists on cohost, so they all get their own entries. Yay.
- Firstly, it presents all its list items as equal sins, which I can't get behind. 'you sexualize minors' is maybe not the same thing as 'you like steven universe'. Elaboration on everything I just said in the following bullet points.
- Secondly, there's some very telling language here. 'You romanticize problematic media.' is the sentence of all time. Say you don't know what the word 'romanticize' means without saying it. Ah, yes, I fantasize about people going to the library and picking up books that other people disagree with. It's never used to mean 'stereotype and glamorize complex topics down to a simplified, marketable shadow of its former self' anymore, it's used to mean 'wrote about it once' before beginning the unpersonning. 'You romanticize problematic tropes in media' sounds suspiciously like the take of someone who thinks depiction = endorsement, that if you write someone getting hurt it means you secretly want to hurt people. Which is, as always, suspiciously close to the people who want to ban books that discuss racism and homophobia in schools... Litmus test for sanity here, ask for an opinion on Huckleberry Finn. (And this isn't even getting to the 'different types of literature have different purposes and different target audiences' thing.)
- Thirdly, the use of 'problematic' is similarly... well, problematic. What does that mean to you? Does that mean 'depicting anything that would be bad in real life, regardless of how it's framed'? Is this written by the kind of person whose takeaway from Lolita is 'wow, they should lock up Vladimir Nabokov, what a sicko'? Or from Sweeney Todd? 'Problematic media' is going to be different for everyone, it's not the kind of thing you can variable-abstract like this. Someone could say this meaning copaganda shows and conservative country music, and another person will read it and think 'ah, yes, they despise the same children's cartoons that i do'. Bad design!
- Fourthly, the last sentence just rubs me the wrong way. 'Other illegal or immoral tropes'? And you call yourself progressive. Gay marriage is about to become illegal again in America. Are you going to stop supporting the queer community? Like, listen to the way you sound. 'You ship illegal ships' at least elaborates into some reasonability. It lists incest and pedophilia as two specific examples, which are normal and common things for someone to want to set a boundary around. But, again! In some parts of the world, 'illegal' means gay people! Women driving cars! Black people walking at night! Conflating the words 'illegal' and 'immoral' is not a good look, and it contradicts the progressive worldview that the list tries to establish in earlier sections.
- And finally, by presenting all these topics through the lens of fiction (it's not 'dni if you are a pedophile', it's specifically relating to media consumption), it flattens a list of complex topics into tawdry internet drama and then equates them to fucking Real World Zionism. Maybe those are not of entirely equal consequence. In the worst case scenario, again, this is a person who treats enjoying Steven Universe as the same crime as a racism-motivated physical assault.
When we got into discussing all these things in the discord server, the person who had been using the link was SHOCKED. They'd been using it for a while by that point, and all this time, there were things in there they didn't agree with. But then, I said something along the lines of 'this is why we read things before we use them as representations of our identity and morality', and they were... equally confused.
It hadn't occurred to them to read it. To examine what it contained and whether they agreed with it before they taped it to the door for patrons to read before they entered the establishment. I nearly put my head through the wall.
And I think that's the biggest danger of this fucking thing. Not any of the contents, but the framing as a whole. "Basic DNI Criteria". It presents itself as a reasonable baseline. No need to read it, it's normal! Trust me! It says so on the tin! And everyone else is using it! It's presented the way it is, from the name to the description to the long first section, in order to convince people to use it without reading it. Or, if they do read it, to convince them to use it despite potential discomfort with any one element, because it's packaged alongside things they do agree with. I can't point to definite malice, but it's suspicious as hell. Like, isn't that a propaganda tactic? Why are we seeing it here?
anyway, at the very minimum if you want a dni please make your own. make a carrd (ew) or a neocities (yay) and do it yourself. don't trust a random stranger to not sneak something you disagree with in there. this website's going to goatse a bunch of teenagers when the domain expires, i swear to god
but also maybe consider thinking a little more critically about the entire practice, and about the difference between what it purports to do and what the actual effect is
Anyways, DNI if you wear the flag hat in Headbangers
*Post-post footnote 1: or maybe not. Relevant comment. Guess who did the thing from the america-centrism post and assumed things were america-centric just 'cuz they were in english and covered queer topics? This idiot. Turns out this might just straight-up be a Filipino website, or at least made by someone who had input from one or more Filipino users. It's interesting that we can tell, given how aggressively sterile the rest of the post is...
