Is there extreme classism in the furry fandom?
A Hot Take
A contingent of Furry Twitter seems to think so!
Via Cayman
"Furries run the internet" yeah and some of us bag your groceries too, please be aware enough to acknowledge the extreme classism that exists in this supposedly egalitarian fandom.
Those who don't have the means to commission a lot of art (or the skill to draw it), purchase a fursuit, or fly all over to attend conventions, are often made to feel invisible in a space that's all about visibility
This warrants further examination than a knee-jerk reaction.
A Brief History Lesson
When you divorce someone's communications from their context, if your goal is to understand the truth, then you're setting yourself up for failure.
In the beginning, there were Something Awful and 4chan. Their existence made a lot of people angry and was widely considered a bad move.
Both websites were famous for their hatred of furries in order to promote queerphobia by proxy, and both were extremely popular hubs for early Internet memes.
Their furry hate and popularity promulgated the belief that furries are "degenerates" (itself a reference to "degenerate art"), which culminated in a stereotype of furries that (in my opinion) Is best exhibited by the satirical Twitter account, Bad Furry.
However, a problem arises in this narrative: One cannot be a "degenerate" and also be successful. As individual furries accomplished impressive feats or good deeds, it became possible for furries en masse to push back against the stereotype.
Telecommunications as a whole, which also encompasses The Internet, is in a constant state of failure and just in time fixes and functionally all modern communication would collapse if about 50 people, most of which are furries, decided to turn their pager off for a day.
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So a few folks have asked for more information.
On the first part: The Internet and telephone systems of today are codependent and the Internet is an incredibly fragile thing that constantly breaks in hundreds of different ways on the daily because of the scale of it.
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And furries? Furries have always run the internet since bulletin board days. Furries had a dedicated ISP before the White House got internet service. They are also heavily present in the amateur radio scene.
Towards the Present Day
In the past month, furries helped a library raise $110,000 to offset the amount illegally withheld by a bigoted mayor because he objected to "homosexual materials". I wrote about it here. It received a fair bit of media coverage.
In a parallel thread, a lot of people are discovering that a furry named Chise helped created the Moderna vaccine.
The news media has also been abuzz with articles about furries running the Internet.
Overall, no.
There are certainly some classist cliques within furry, unfortunately.
What I think is happening here has multiple factors:
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Furries are pushing back against the Bad Furry stereotype without regard for how it makes their friends feel. (Most of us aren't experts in anything, nor are we rich by any measure.) This results in some truly hamfisted word choice and a blatant disregard for the blindness of privilege. This isn't uniquely a furry problem.
Communication is hard, and Twitter doesn't make it any easier.
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The minority of classist/elitist circles within the fandom certainly doesn't help the first factor at all.
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There's a lot of unspoken and assumed pressure for furries to be patrons of the arts. This mostly manifests on who wins the lottery for the attention economy on social media.
This is a problem that affects everyone. For example: I write technical deep dive blog posts. Most furries don't give a single fuck about this. If it isn't a suggesting fursuit photo or cute art, they aren't going to waste their time. This can make it feel like you have to spend money on art/fursuits/etc. to be accepted in the fandom.
But this simply isn't true. You only benefit from those things if you're trying to win a popularity contest in your own mind and become an influencer on social media. Your Twitter follower count isn't your worth to your friends, and if you think that it is, you have the wrong friends.
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The privileged few of us that have a steady income above what we need to survive feel obligated to be generous with artists and friends. When communicated poorly, this can sound like furry is pay-to-win.
If you feel like you're being made invisible because you aren't a tech worker or genius scientist or millionaire, I'm sincerely sorry that other people are making you feel this way. But that's not the intent from most of us.
I'm going to circle back to my blog for a minute. In 2020 I spent an entire month writing a 9-part series on how to get into tech with no experience for as close to $0 as possible. This advice has been tested in the real world by convicted federal felons, so it's a bit more insightful than your run-of-the-mill career advice. Why did I do this? Becasue fuck gatekepers! Fuck elitists. Fuck classists. I want more people in my communities to make more money and tech careers are a good way to do that.
What Should the Message Be?
Being a furry doesn't make you inferior, but it doesn't make you superior either.
At the end of the day, the Furry Fandom is a bunch of humans expressing their humanity in their own quirky way. Some of us have advantages, most of us don't.
There is no master race, and it certainly isn't us.