OK, so the short version, and the long one is probably going to end up being a Medium post or something, is that so much of fandom is animated by certain self-mythologies, including fannish intelligence and a lot of Socratic philosopher-king stuff.
There are also, and simultaneously, any number of sociopolitical streaks--call them anarchist, minarchist, libertarian--that boil down to "you can't tell me what to do!"
This leads to a massive distrust of any sort of formal organizational structure.
Mix all that up and you get a lot of people who believe that everything would be great if the Right People were in Charge because the Right People wouldn't have to tell anybody what to do, everybody would just Know, because they're the Right People.
There are also petty-power-corrupts issues. And this isn't McCarthy-era Red Scare, as you suggested...it predates that. At the first Worldcon, in 1939, there was something called the Exclusion Act that mandated that certain people couldn't be present unless they promised not to give out flyers.
And, also also, there are memories.
To this say, there are arguments and hurt feelings about whether the Exclusion Act constituted "banning" those people, because they weren't banned, they just had to promise not to hand out flyers!
Also also also.
MOST OF THE PEOPLE WHO WERE THERE ARE DEAD.
The people arguing are people who got the story from one side or another, and the grudges were passed down, like the Sith Teachings of the Petty.
(Oh, and the flyers?
Pro-Communism/Socialism flyers.
Again, _1939_.)
The Hugos are an outgrowth of this absurd, toxic stew of aggressive anti-hierarchical, anti-control, anti-structural personalities and petty power.
The World Science Fiction Convention is never sponsored, never professional. People SPEND thousands of dollars of their own money to make it happen.
"Never sponsored" !?!?!
You should watch the Smofcon "What can we learn from Chengdu?" video, where a bunch of the US people who were on the Chengdu concom eulogize about how great it was that Chengdu got loads of corporate sponsors, and how future Worldcons should try to follow their lead...
I think WorldCon has gradually gotten more commercial in recent years, then significantly so with Chengdu. I don't know whether the endgame is ComicCon but I hope not because we already have several of those.
Here's a very crude word frequency analysis of some of the topics discussed at the Smofcon "What can we learn from Chengdu panel?", using the (machine generated?) subtitles.
I think we can see what things they were most interested in talking about, and there was little to no pushback on this.
I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm saying that if you go back to, 1995, I suspect there would have been significant disdain for this sort of thing but those days are gone.
Well, now that I'm putting it out there, lets see what vox populi says.
It pisses me off to see comments about "The Chinese fans running the con/Hugos", which is complete bollocks. Businesspeople were in charge from day 1, and none of the Fannish Inquisition nonsense seemed to care.
Yes, it was clear to me who was in charge, even at the bidding phase. I don't know whether everyone else didn't know or didn't care (or perhaps weren't looking).
I also think you're looking at a bunch of SMOFs who are seeing the sheer amount of money the Chengdu WorldCon had to play with and being very tempted.
(I mean, they offered me a trip to China, which I declined.)
Well, I too was looking, and am really glad I had the foresight to archive the (Chinese language only) bid team page.
Apologies for crappy machine translations on the EN versions.
web.archive.org/web/20220313...
Haijun Yao is on there as a member of the bid team and is still honorary co-chair on the Chengdu Worldcon site. He's also the deputy editor in chief of Science Fiction World, whose recommendations were used as an excuse by Dave McCarty to throw out Chinese nominations.
