kevin_standlee (
kevin_standlee) wrote2011-03-27 08:10 pm
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Nova Albion and the Future of Fandom
I didn't hang around after the main convention ended around 5 PM. Too tired, too hungry again. Going to try to get to sleep early.
I had someone ask me yesterday, "How can we inject the energy and spirit at this steampunk convention back into Worldcons?" He's right about the issue. I remember Worldcons, when I started attending in them in 1984, as high-energy, high-excitement events. Now they're much less so.
I gave the person as long-winded answer to his question, but I think it boils down to a single, cold-hearted answer: "Some significant Worldcon SMOFS are going to have to die." Or at least retire from the field of active convention running and participation in Worldcon organization.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not wishing death on anyone, neither literally nor figuratively. But to a great extent our collective conrunning brains at the Worldcon level are suffering from calcification of the neurons as we continue to keep things frozen into the form that we consider ideal, and in some individual cases, effectively working toward mummification, with a stated opinion that amounts to, "I want Worldcon and fandom to die when I do, and it must not change in the slightest until then, either."
It's not that we don't need experience. We do. What we need to do is not be straightjacketed by it. We need people who have the energy and drive to make events like Nova Albion and the other steampunk events and like the anime conventions want to work on general-SF/F events rather than getting discouraged by the entrenched interests who are more concerned with making sure that the Wrong Sort of Fan doesn't actually get involved. We certainly don't need the people making the decisions passing rules that effectively preclude those who actually are willing and able to get things done from even participating. (And that's not an academic, theoretical statement, as the WSFS Mark Protection Committee did exactly that this past year, even in the face of evidence that the members of the WSFS Business Meeting wanted something different.
I had someone ask me yesterday, "How can we inject the energy and spirit at this steampunk convention back into Worldcons?" He's right about the issue. I remember Worldcons, when I started attending in them in 1984, as high-energy, high-excitement events. Now they're much less so.
I gave the person as long-winded answer to his question, but I think it boils down to a single, cold-hearted answer: "Some significant Worldcon SMOFS are going to have to die." Or at least retire from the field of active convention running and participation in Worldcon organization.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not wishing death on anyone, neither literally nor figuratively. But to a great extent our collective conrunning brains at the Worldcon level are suffering from calcification of the neurons as we continue to keep things frozen into the form that we consider ideal, and in some individual cases, effectively working toward mummification, with a stated opinion that amounts to, "I want Worldcon and fandom to die when I do, and it must not change in the slightest until then, either."
It's not that we don't need experience. We do. What we need to do is not be straightjacketed by it. We need people who have the energy and drive to make events like Nova Albion and the other steampunk events and like the anime conventions want to work on general-SF/F events rather than getting discouraged by the entrenched interests who are more concerned with making sure that the Wrong Sort of Fan doesn't actually get involved. We certainly don't need the people making the decisions passing rules that effectively preclude those who actually are willing and able to get things done from even participating. (And that's not an academic, theoretical statement, as the WSFS Mark Protection Committee did exactly that this past year, even in the face of evidence that the members of the WSFS Business Meeting wanted something different.
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A big question to me includes a factor of convincing people that Worldcon remains relevant. To the newest generation of potential new fans, I get the impression that it doesn't matter, since they can always go to the Big Show (=DragonCon or ComicCon, or whatever).
Worldcons didn't always used to be the province of a bunch of rich semi-geriatric fans the way it's perceived to be by some of those with whom I talk at conventions. The irony is that most of those relatively wealthy older fans are the same people who were young and energetic troublemakers once upon a time.
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Maybe it needs to be presented that way? Because if the 20-somethings and the publishers don't think Worldcon is important, the pros have to go elsewhere and it all crashes in on itself.
If that's really the truth of it, we need to find a way to communicate that truth...
Preachin' to the Choir . . .
But there are right and wrong ways to go about it. You can't just throw the younger kids a guest and a panel and then say "now be quiet, stay out of our hair while us adults socialize and conduct business". There's got to be an adaptation of stuff for them to do that includes panels and parties and even kon suite slightly changing how they do things. I think this is a huge sticking point because to a lot of the older generations these changes would seem like *regression* because things would change to be more like they were 20-30 years ago. However, 20-30 years ago was when WorldCon had the demographic they want to have again . . .
I think the other real problem is that WorldCon fandom *seems to me* to be much less forgiving of ConRunners on the learning curve. They want the same old people because they don't screw up. New people screw up. Even with a great mentor new people will make mistakes. If a mentor is good they'll avoid the sinkholes but they'll let their protege find a puddle or two so that they not only learn not to do it again but also how to deal with bad situations when they arise. However, I don't think that the WorldCon fandom would be tolerant of this at all. It seems the WorldCon attitude is know everything or don't try, which is a great way to get stupidly-oblivious con workers but not a good way to get the kind that could actually make a WorldCon happen in 10 or 20 years when the people who don't make mistakes physically and mentally can't handle it anymore.
Re: Preachin' to the Choir . . .
Re: Preachin' to the Choir . . .
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So, no, I don't think Worldcons have decayed much in the last couple decades. Now Westercons, on the other hand ...
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...we are talking about other cons that aren't Worldcon or gen SF cons, cons that stir that neo-like feeling of excitement in us still, cons that the 20-somethings are attending and having a blast at.
Furcon, Nova Albion (and other steampunk cons), cons where your creativity and craft (and ideally, but not always, competence) are what gets you recognition and respect (not just longevity).
Gallifrey One, the con that would have only been the children of the 60's and 70's but with the new series transformed into a vital and growing concern (and, at this point, my favorite con of the year bar none).
I'll put anime conventions at the opposite end of the failing continuum, too many being so youth-oriented that they end up driving away older fans of the medium, but that doesn't mean that they're not exciting and energetic, in ways that too many gen SF conventions have stopped being.
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I friend (who in her 30s) attended the LA Worldcon (her first and only worldcon)and her over all assessment...
It was full of OLD people and they were NOT welcoming of younger folks. {emphasis mine}
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However -- if Worldcon were mostly about TV and movie SF and comics, then I'd completely lose any interest I had; it would be dead to me. *Including* the good work being done in those areas is necessary and appropriate; but they're peripheral, they're not where the field advances (there's little theoretical reason they couldn't be, it's just my observation that so far they aren't; well, the cost of visual media does mean they have to serve a bigger market, and the collaborative nature of the production tends to interfere with consistency and clear visions). They're visually rich, but mostly do not have the real core of SF -- ideas, and thinking.
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I still think a contributing factor in Worldcon falling off was bad scheduling of such in the 2000s (yes, I know it's "scheduled" by who bids and wins). 2000-2006 all Worldcons were in large metro areas with significant fannish communities (I count "Britain" as a metro area/community for this purpose, based on 2005 and previous British Worldcons). But 2007-2011 have had 2 Worldcons in very isolated from NA/Europe locations, an isolated and relatively small US location (Denver; no really significant other metro areas in driving distance), the smallest US metro area in decades, if not ever (Reno; we'll see how it draws from Portland and the Bay Area), and a Canadian site (which has problems with respect to non-Canadian artists and dealers).
That all means you still get Worldcon regulars, but aren't likely to get many repeating newbies. It also gets former semi-regulars out of the habit of attending when it's in the same time zone or so. Note that, given the current bids, Worldcon will only be in the Eastern Time Zone once in the ten years of 2005-2014 and not at all in the BosWash corridor.
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The new guard always has to wait for the old guard to die, often literally, because the old guard hates change.
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What I'm more likely to be is to try and point out the rather serious challenges facing anyone who wants to change things. You can, for instance, run Worldcons cheaply, but you have to throw away huge amounts of things that we've come to take for granted, and you have to be willing to accept a level of discomfort that the core audience has shown a propensity to bitterly complain about.
I don't mind people making changes. What troubles me is people changing things without understanding why things are the way they have been in the past. Deliberately changing things with your eyes open is completely different from charging into something and stepping on the same organizational landmines that others have previously triggered. See the difference?
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In my case, what I'm trying to do is encourage more people to nominate and vote on the Hugos, which will, I hope, create a more diverse voting body. I've also tried to propose different panel topics and other kinds of programming -- though I get a lot of resistance about that. I think that Reno appears to be creating a great model for new programming, by making the interests of panelists visible to each other, so that we can add interests we hadn't thought of previously.
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This weekend I was at Anime Conji in San Diego having similar thoughts.
(While there was the brief thought that I'd be ecstatic if half the people at Conji showed up for ConJecture, until I heard that they'd past 1,500 members, and remembered that ConJecture ended up at a different hotel and has a much tighter space)
I do agree that there does seem to be a lot of the same people running Worldcon as there were around 1999-2000 when I started going, and have observed that the "young guard" there are already in our forties, or late thirties - except for a few in the n+1-th generation, and that includes a lot of the current Chicago crew.
From other discussions, I suspect that one thing that might help is to lower the costs of membership. I know of efforts to remove the tie between the supporting membership rate and the attending rate, but even that was fought fiercely. So I fear that (Worldcon) fandom may be beginning like the school district in Arizona I heard about years ago where residents of a seniors only development packed the school board with their only agenda being to keep their taxes as low as they could.
why bother?
I see what the overseas conrunners get: access to attendees, participants, and organizers who would otherwise be unavailable. Maybe Denver and Reno and Texas get this too. And I see how even though there are far more interesting sercon conventions within an easy drive of Chicago, someone there might want to do it anyway, because they have a hotel that's big enough without a convention center so the cost is small. But the real loci of younger convention runners, places like Minneapolis and Boston and St Louis, lack such hotels, and stand to gain nothing by hanging a Worldcon tag on their efforts. As anyone who went to Tuckercon will be quite aware.
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And the second question should be "How in the hell do we make attending a Worldcon affordable?" Because I'm 51 and I sure as hell don't have that kind of coinage.
However, based on the comments here I would be inclined to guess that neither of these questions are ones the SMOFs in question are terribly interested in asking...or getting answers for.
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The answer to this has two parts. One: put it in a hotel (not a convention center), within easy driving distance of as many fen as possible. Chicago is doing this, and you could also do it in New York or Las Vegas. Then, and this is the scary part unless you have a lot of cash you're willing to lose, lower the price to the point where all those fen will actually come. A $0 conversion to attending from a $50 or possibly even $40 voting fee, an at door rate in the $80-$100 range, and $20 supporting memberships that come with the right to convert to attending at the price difference in effect at time of purchase, would all be good starts.
One thing that's in the way of a $0 conversion is the way bids operate. But in an age of mostly uncontested bids, they could probably operate some other way, that didn't saddle the winning convention with the bidding costs.
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If people know about Worldcon, it will always find that new audience. If they don't, any further discussion of what's attracting or repelling them is pointless.
And I find, going to conventions with a younger crowd, that is the biggest thing I run into there. "Worldcon, what's that?" Heck, most of them don't know about their local sf convention. Or even cons that specifically cater to their interests.
The first year I went to Kumoricon, the local anime convention here in Portland, one of the committee members told me about going to Sakura-Con in Seattle and running into other people from Portland who wished they had an anime con to go to closer to home... when Kumoricon had already existed for several years.
This is not to point the finger at Worldcon organizers and say they are doing nothing. SDCC has had the extraordinary good fortune of being selected as a publicity venue by Hollywood, which in turn has generated tons of free media coverage. Dragon*Con has had the extraordinary good fortune of being in the backyard of what was the one and only general-news channel most of the US knew about for years and years. Worldcon's never been thrown a break like that.
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No, it's still there. I've got to say it.
WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!?!
How do I join a movement to change this? It's crap, pure and simple.
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I've come to the conclusion that there are some people in WSFS for whom openness and transparency are something that other people have to do. I've done my best to actually live up to the same rules I expect others to abide by, but that perhaps just means I'm stupid.
A rather small number of people (five out of fifteen) were able to get their way in a classic example of a backroom deal. What they did was legal and within the rules. But two of those five people have terms coming up for re-election at Reno. Perhaps people looking for a change should take note. I'll write more on this subject as we get closer to the convention, because, frankly, if I make too much of an issue about it now, it will will have died out in a few weeks, as all of these things do. For now, I just think that people who are going to be at the Reno Worldcon and care about this need to be prepared to set aside the 1000-1300 period on the second, third, and maybe fourth days of the convention in order to actually make change happen. You have to be present to vote, and those people who show up are the ones who make a difference.
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And the considerable resources that Worldcons have poured into minimizing registration queues has had the unexpected side effect of people saying, "It must not have been popular because I didn't have to wait long to get my badge" or "There was no line to get in to the Masquerade, so it can't have been good," when what happened is that we opened the doors very early to improve traffic flow. Talk about your unexpected consequences!
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When my wife and I went to WDW last November I was stunned by the number of people riding those scooters around the parks. I never noticed them on prior trips. And I've been seeing more and more of them at Archon.
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A bit more buzz is a good thing, but sufficient aisle room so that people can stop and look at dealers' merchandise and not have to keep dodging traffic is good, too.
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I was peripherally involved in the layout for the art show and dealer's room at Intersection in 2005 (Big Dave did all the AutoCAD juggling required). The fire lanes in the chosen hall were absolute and documented as such on the official convention centre plans, no encroachment by tables, fixed exhibits etc. permitted. They were wide enough for a fire truck to drive down if needed.
That resulted in big open spaces which we couldn't cram down to make the place more intimate if we had wanted to but that's the breaks.
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Quite the opposite, in fact. The more spread out your facility is, the more people need scooters. 3500 people at Anticipation needed 20 or so scooters between them. 1/3 of those same people at Boskone (and that's probably the con with the most overlap) needs two or three.
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If they usually go to Dragon*Con, from a far distance, the question becomes, how do I get them to change their habits? Conversely, has Dragon*Con (or SDCC, not to just pick on D*C), asked "how do I attract people away from Worldcon? Just curious here.
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There are things that always have to be the same. Registration, finance, ops, facilities, other admin functions should run in tried-and-true ways. Those are structural.
It's content where there's flexibility, and where things need a bit of shake-up. I'm a lit fan, but the dealers' room needs to be more than books, and that means recruiting and encouraging dealers of other sorts of fannish stuff. There are strong initiatives to raise the profile of F&SF art and artists and musicians (who didn't really get much major event focus at Worldcons in the past), to feature current popular genre trends, to make Worldcon more of the "big tent fandom" event it purports to be.
We're doing a lot in events to foster cross-pollination between different sorts of fanac. For the masquerade we've got Hugo-winning Phil & Kaja Foglio as MCs (old hat for the Comic-Con crowd, but that's not us, and they're good). Half-time is Hugo-nominated author, screenwriter and comic book writer Paul Cornell doing his version of "Just a Minute." Sharon is working to make the Hugo Award Ceremony entertaining. The film, anime and dance crews are bringing their own hometown innovations to Worldcon.
Actual people are doing actual work to ensure that the convention isn't just the same old same-old.
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Actually, this is one that the Old Guard do wrong. There are better ways, and they scale up. Anticipation's treasury staff was 1/3 the size of Reno's -- and that was with having two primary currencies in addition to the usual Worldcon oddballs.
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Do you know anything about there internal systems? O r just guessing looking at staff numbers.
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Not included in my point but possibly relevant: to run a treasury operation that big you need a big room. Lean treasury fit into a tiny little office at Anticipation. Just one more thing that takes up more space, making the con more spread out and diffuse.
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Paul has carte blanche for his panel (well, he can't have masquerade judges, they're doing something else then), but he's being encouraged to pick famous fans and pros who happen to have the right sort of personality to be on the panel.
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No, you really don't, that's my point. I don't have figures for FOGcon but I do know that the crowd there is the crowd from Wiscon -- and Wiscon is a more worldwide event than Worldcon is. 15% of the attendees at Wiscon are from the state of Wisconsin -- and that includes concom members. They get Aussies by the dozen, and enough foreigners overall that the Pocket Program has to explain US style tipping. Heavyweights like Samuel Delaney attend every year. They do things with their publications that I did not think were possible. They take awards seriously and the entire convention attends. If FOGcon accomplished a quarter of this, and there's reason to think they did considering how many people not from the state of California I know who attended, then the organizers got as much egoboo out of it as they would have from bidding for a Worldcon.
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One of the key things about Worldcon is that it comes to people who can't come to it. Look at all of the Australian fans who are highly unlikely to ever attend a Worldcon outside of Australia. Repeat this for every region that's ever hosted a Worldcon.
You can grow Worldcon and lose many of the things that make it difficult to run, but in doing so you probably make it just another permanent-site convention like DC or ComicCon. It would be just as much the "World" con as the self-named World Steampunk Convention is the "world" gathering of steampunk culture.
But that's probably just dandy for people who can afford to travel a long distance every year or who happen to live within commuting distance of the Permanent Worldcon Site.
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But let's see what happens if you deliberately aim your Worldcon at a hotel and not a convention center. Okay, your costs go down by at least a quarter of a million dollars. (That's how much the San Jose Convention Center cost to rent and to decorate in 2002.) That means you can significantly reduce your membership cost. That probably means demand will shoot up because it's more affordable. Except that because you're no longer in a building big enough to hold your convention, you either will suffer enormous overcrowding (making people very unhappy with you) or else you'll have to impose a membership cap, and that just means the actual cost of the memberships will go up anyway as people will re-sell their memberships on the secondary market.
I don't really see a good way out of this. Hotels are not infinitely expandable. Sure, we could hold conventions of up to maybe 2,000 people in hotels we have around here in the Bay Area (the Fairmont and the Doubletree immediately spring to mind, and there are others). But 5,000? The number of hotels in the USA that can host such an event without a convention center can be counted on not more than two hands. And such facilities likely would impose high fixed costs equivalent to a convention center; that was our experience negotiating with the San Francisco Marriott, which could probably hold 5K with some noticeable crowding, but wanted about a half-million in revenue guarantees — worse than renting Moscone Center!
So what should we do? Impose a 2,000-person membership cap on Worldcon the way World Fantasy has a more or less 800-person cap (with holes in it)? That would certainly push Worldcon down the road of being a "business literary conference," which someone at Aussiecon 4 told me she assumed Worldcon was, much to my surprise.
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I don't see it. You're probably right that the number of 100ksf+ hotels in the US is not that much more than a dozen; I came up with the Hyatt Regency Chicago, a couple of hotels in in Las Vegas, the Peabody Orlando (which is now much larger than it was in '92), three in New York, multiple sites in Atlanta, the Hershey Lodge in PA, the Moody Gardens in Galveston, the (under construction, but totally bookable) Washington Marriott Marquis in DC, the San Francisco Marriott. And you're also right that some of those facilities won't want to deal with us. But we should be talking to the big hotels in New York, and to the Washington Marriott Marquis. And to the smaller convention centers, like Buffalo and Ocean City. I'd rather see 8,000 people in a 100,000 square foot facility than 4,000 rattling around in a facility that's too big. And while it depends a lot on how efficient the space is, 12 square feet per attendee for a large 4-5 day con is a totally doable number in my experience.
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New York would be worse, by all accounts. There's a reason we haven't been back to New York since 1969. The costs are out of the stratosphere.
Even Chicon 7's memberships aren't going to be perceived as cheap, and they're not in a convention center.
I'd rather have 10,000 people in the space we've currently been taking than limiting attendance to 2,000 so we can cram them into smaller, cheaper space.
But maybe I'm all wet. Someone who is convinced that the members won't complain about crowding should try it. I expect, based on the queue-tolerance of anime cons, that maybe younger fans don't think overcrowding is a bad thing.
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As I mentioned above, I thought this too until I got a very interesting phone call from a salesman for one of the big New York hotels.
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Nine years is a long time. It was only six years from when the Sheraton told MCFI they weren't welcome to bid for the '98 Worldcon there to when MCFI won their bid (and negotiated quite favorable rates, forkage policies, and so on) for 2004.
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The $250K it cost to rent/decorate the San Jose Convention Center is actually a bargain, it appears. Not as much as the relative pittance that Winnipeg was charged in 1994, but still a very good deal.
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Winnipeg was among the five best Worldcons I've attended, and I'm not saying that just because I was Deputy Chairman. It's pretty much the only Worldcon where I got to Day 5 thinking, "I could stand a couple more days just like this."
Alas, all Canadian sites share a common problem: vast numbers of Americans who are allergic to border crossings. Montreal and Toronto, both major metropolitan areas within an easy one-day's driving distances of a large portion of the US population, had lower attendance than would an equivalent US city in the same general area. That's probably not something that can be fixed; it's American isolationism in action, and the actions of the US government in demonizing everyone isn't helping.
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I'm not saying it can't be done; I'm saying it's not as easy as you are suggesting it is. I'd admire anyone capable of talking these hotels into deals that don't end up costing as much as any given convention center and wouldn't change the nature of the convention entirely (say by prohibiting costumes and parties).
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Nothing (other than the INS and the US State Department) would stop SF fans from other countries joining up and attending a regular "Americon" or even working on staff or committee; it's one of the joys of SF conventions anywhere and everywhere that some of the fans you meet aren't from around these parts.
Twenty or thirty years ago this would have been unthinkable -- the Worldcon was automatically the American national SF convention with a poor drab substitute NaSFiC on the very few occasions it left the CONUS. Back in the 70s Colin Fine wrote a filksong about this (in the days of the old three-zone system):
"Around and around and around goes the Worldcon,
East coast and West coast and central and all,
Sometimes the rest of the world gets a look-in,
The kind-hearted Yanks let us play with their ball."
Those days are dead and gone with the wider spread of fandom and cheap(ish) airfares and enough connectivity for inexperienced non-US committees to be able to tap a widespread network of Brains in Jars to get over the bumps.
An annual ASFC would probably mean is that fewer American fans would attend the Worldcon, whether held in the US or outside its shores as their mad money and free time would be used up attending the regular Big One wherever it might be held. At that point it might well be possible to fit even a US Worldcon into one of the big hotel spaces available as the numbers fall.
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Worldcon in Melbourne last year attracted around 2000 people, including Aussies and Kiwis by the hundred. That's what we want out of Worldcon, not a few dozen who can afford the flight to the USA every year.
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Even Fourth Street Fantasy, which barely hit 200 people one year, routinely had people from both coasts, sometimes from overseas (not counting guests), and did have rather a lot of the top people in fantasy through over the years.
You can start a new "thing" which is very much not a small local relaxacon. I'm sure you can also fail to; that is, not all attempts succeed by any definition. (The Fourth Street running now is a second edition, with very different concom and a many-year gap; and it's fun too.)