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Website : TSR History
Slave Register website history
This essay by Tanos, the creator and owner of The Slave
Register, explains the origins and development of the Register since
its foundation in 2000.
The Slave Register ("TSR") was created after several ideas came
together towards the end of 1999.
Writing in November 2006, more than 100,000 profiles have now been created,
including over 88,000 Slave Registration Numbers. After passing the 100K
milestone, I want to take some time to record how TSR came about, and what
were those ideas that sparked it.
The Draka
The most immediate cause was reading S.M. Stirling's book, "The
Domination", which collected his Draka trilogy into a single volume.
Most of Stirling's work involves alternate histories, and his Draka timeline
is set in a world where slavery survived in a British colony in
southern Africa, which eventually broke away and became an industrialised
imperial power in it's own right. This timeline has slavery still continuing
in the Draka Empire in the 21st century, including domestic slavery in Draka
homes throughout Africa, Asia and parts of Europe.
It's made clear that each slave is assigned a registration number by the
government, which also required detailed record-keeping about each slave's
life:
In front were a driver in the grubby coverall which seemed to be the
uniform of the urban working class and an armed guard with a shaven head;
both had serf-tattoos on their necks. The American felt a small queasy
sensation each time he glanced through the glass panels and saw the orange
seven-digit code, a column below the right ear: letter - number - number -
letter - number - number - number.
("Marching through Georgia", Chapter 4.)
The electroprod clicked against the crucifix and rosary that hung
through the cloth tie of her sack dress. Made from scraps of wood, silently
at night beneath her blanket. "Nun?"
"I am a Sister of the order of St. Cyril, Master."
The Draka flicked the steel rod against her hip, hard enough to sting.
"You were. Now you're 73ES422."
("Under the Yoke", Chapter 1.)
Giving a person a name is a very symbolic event: names are involved in
the recording of births, in baptisms and when brides change their
surnames
after marriage. So giving a person a number provides a way of identifying
them - and potentially controlling them - without having to permit them a
name, and the individuality that goes with one.
This combination of domestic slavery and the objectifying effects of
registration is very appealing to someone with my set of interests, and I
started thinking how it could be made real within the consensual Master/slave
subculture.
Barcode tattoos
The second idea that led to TSR was the image of a barcode tattoo which
became very common in the media in the 1990s. The first time I saw one was
Jana Sterbak's "Generic Man" in an
exhibition at London's Serpentine Art Gallery in 1996: it was
reproduced in "Time Out" magazine, and I went to the exhibition
as a result. I don't know whether the photograph is of a real tattoo,
and at the time I assumed it wasn't, but it shows the back of a man's
shaved head, with a barcode at the top of his neck. There was a lot of
debate about CCTV cameras in public spaces and the "Surveillance
Society", so these kinds of themes were appearing in exhibitions.
Towards the end of the 1990s, I found some more barcode tattoo images on
the huge Body Modification e-Zine (BME) website, where visitors to the site
could contribute pictures of their tattoos and experiences. All of the
barcoded people had chosen a random barcode, and some mentioned that there
was no obvious way to make a barcode mean something or represent your
identity.
So when I started thinking about slave registration numbers, it was natural
to offer optional barcodes as part of the system: they provide a
universally recognised way of encoding numbers, they are objectifying, and
they provide an alternative to the "Property of ..." markings
which break the taboo against relationship-specific tattoos.
MasterSlave.org.uk
The third idea in the mix was the MasterSlave.org.uk website, which I had
started in late 1999. Originally it was just a place for writing about
Master/slave relationships (which eventually grew into Internal
Enslavement) but when the Slave Register idea came along I was in the
process of adding a version of the profiles system developed for Informed
Consent. It was straightforward to add the option to receive a random Slave
Registration Number instead of choosing a profile name, and after finding out
how to make barcode graphics, the combined Register and M/s website was ready.
Going live ...
The Slave Register was launched on the 19th of January 2000, as a section of
the MasterSlave.org.uk website. The basic features have changed very little
since then, with each registrant having a profile page, certificate and
being able to display a personal ad. A hundred registrations were made in
the first ten days, and 3000 more were made in the first year.
I continued with MasterSlave.org.uk in this form until the start of 2001,
when I created the separate Internal Enslavement website to host my growing
number of essays about M/s. Then on 3rd June 2001, I moved the Register off
MasterSlave.org.uk and onto its own site at www.SlaveRegister.com.
I eventually closed MasterSlave.org.uk, with its remaining features moving
to my other sites, but The Slave Register carried on as an independent
single purpose website, just hosting the Register. This change to a simpler
website was accompanied by a higher rate of registrations: 10,000 were made
in the 12 months to June 2002.
External validation
One natural question the existence of the Register raises is: what purpose is
it really serving for all those tens of thousands of people that register?
My Internal Enslavement writing was devoted to methods of internal
validation of consensual slavery, and to bringing slaves to the point where
rejection of their owner's legitimate authority was unthinkable. The
Register, on the other hand, was about external validation, and
was one of several different ideas for this which were floating around at
the time.
Some people advocated exchanging money when acquiring a submissive or a
slave. There had been a notable case in 1996 when an "Amanda"
apparently sold herself on the internet this way, and it was still talked
about in BDSM circles.
There were even personal ad sites dressed up as slave auctions (Slave Farm
and Slave Store - both auctions are now closed), and people had suggested
that I add an auction feature to The Slave Register.
However, I've never seen any way to implement a practical (and ethical) slave
auction system in the real world, outside of something like Laura
Antoniou's Marketplace.
The Marketplace is the backdrop for four of her books of BDSM fiction:
a worldwide, underground slave training and slave dealing network, in which
slaves enter consensual but binding contracts.
Auctioning slaves only works in the Marketplace because it is a closed
system and virtually a monopoly: if you break the rules, or violate your
contract then you risk being excluded from the only game in town:
To be shunned by the Marketplace is to be sure that the rest of your life
is spent doing the very things you four are all escaping from. Little
organisations of dilettantes, shallow displays of crude imitations of the
real thing, purveyors of pornography for idiots, and casual players who have
no concept that people actually live this life. To be shunned is to be
forever barred from our meetings, our conferences, and our social events,
from the sales and the trades, the parties and the resorts ...
Without those checks
and balances, any system of selling slaves is widen open to abuse by
psychopaths and the much more immediate threats from the clueless, the
unimaginative and the downright boring.
My thinking with The Slave Register and its form of validation is related
to why money works, rather than involving money itself. Part of
the reason money is taken seriously (and isn't just funny little pieces of
paper) is that everyone agrees to exchange it for goods and services. It's
this general recognition that gives money its validity, and it's the collapse
of confidence in how other people will treat your money than leads to
monetary crashes.
In similar ways, there are social mechanisms for making a relationship feel
more solid and tangible: things like getting married by some authority
figure (priest, Mayor, witchdoctor, ship's captain); announcing the marriage
in some widely read publication (the church newsletter, the local newspaper,
the London Gazette, "Hello" magazine); changing your name to reflect
the relationship ("I'm now Mrs Jones", "We're now the
Foxington-Smythes"); dressing differently (putting your sash over the
other shoulder or wearing wedding rings.)
This kind of external validation is circular: other people take it seriously
because other people take it seriously, and the Register aimed to jump start
this kind of process. After glancing through the
photographs of number tattoos and tags submitted
by slaves, it has wildly exceeded my expectations. I never imagined just
how many people would incorporate the Register into their identity and use it
to help mark the transitions in their relationship.
Expanding the website
During 2004, I began work on a complete rewrite of the software used by the
Informed Consent website, which was also the basis for The Slave Register.
The new IC went live in January 2005, with the addition of web discussion
boards and networks, which allowed people to put information about their
circle of real-life friends and acquaintances into their profile.
By June 2005 I was ready to go live with the new TSR website, and it added
the option to join with a profile name rather than a Slave Registration Number,
to create a profile page, upload pictures,
display a personal ad, maintain a network and, in July, to use web
boards dedicated to M/s and ownership topics. This made TSR a
much more rounded site, with the Register itself now complemented by
discussion.
This expanded role allows the site to give people in the ownership
subcultures another kind of validation: not only the validation of
relationships that the Register has helped to provide, but also validation of
the customs and attitudes that are common in our subculture, and not so
accepted in the BDSM play scene or vanilla life.
Further reading
S.M. Stirling's
Draka books provided one of the inspirations for assinging numbers to
slaves.
Jana Sterbak's
photograph "Generic
Man" planted the idea of barcode tattoos in 1996, and
Body Modification e-Zine's pictures
of barcode
tattoos showed examples of the real thing later on.
(TSR now has its own collection of
SLRN tattoo and
tag pictures.)
For the selling of Amanda,
see
her
original post and an
update
several months later. One
account
of it also includes some other ideas for using
money to make consensual slavery more tangible.
My old MasterSlave.org.uk
website now just redirects you to TSR: the essays went to
the Enslavement site, and
some of the pictures to my homesite.
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