I have participated in all kinds of ridiculous arguments and conversations. And then, of course, there are the straight-up trolls, gleefully wreaking havoc.Īs someone who has been online for a long time, I have seen all kinds of ridiculous arguments and conversations. There is another category entirely of racists, homophobes, transphobes, xenophobes and other bigots who target the subjects of their ire relentlessly and are largely unchecked by the platforms enabling them. Bad-faith arguments abound, presented with righteous bluster.Īnd these are the more reasonable online arguments. Vulnerability and difference are weaponized. Or, if the person is held mildly accountable for a mistake, a chorus rends her or his garments in distress, decrying the inhumanity of “cancel culture.”Įvery harm is treated as trauma. If a mistake is made, it becomes immediate proof of being beyond redemption. “Likes” are analyzed obsessively, as if clicking a button on social media is representative of an entire ideology. Or someone popular gets too close to the sun and suddenly can do nothing right. Or they bring up something ridiculous that someone said more than a decade ago as confirmation of … who knows? Or they take a singular instance of something and conflate it with a massive cultural trend. Or they misrepresent the original statement and extrapolate it to a broader issue in which they are deeply invested. Or they make note of every circumstance the original statement did not account for. Others take issue with some aspect of that statement. We have all become hammers in search of nails. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way. An experience that was once charming and fun becomes stressful and largely unpleasant. It becomes harder to disinvest from pointless arguments that have nothing at all to do with you. It becomes harder and harder to distinguish good-faith criticism from pettiness or cruelty.
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Your skin thins until you have no defenses left.
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After being on the receiving end of enough aggression, everything starts to feel like an attack. Then there are those who harass me for all kinds of reasons - some aspect of my identity or my work or my presence in the world troubles their emotional waters.Īfter a while, the lines blur, and it’s not at all clear what friend or foe look like, or how we as humans should interact in this place. Some just hate me, as is their right, and they follow me to scavenge for evidence to support or intensify their enmity.
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Most of them appreciate my work, though they may disagree with my opinions. Then I wrote a couple of books, and blinked, and suddenly hundreds of thousands of people were seeing my tweets. Those numbers slowly inched up to a couple thousand. For years, I had a couple hundred followers.
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My online following came slowly, and then all at once. It makes me uncomfortable to admit that I have some influence and power online, because it feels so foreign or, maybe, unlikely. Suddenly, we are all Goliaths in the Valley of Elah. At least online, we can tell ourselves that the power imbalances between us flatten.
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In real life, we are fearful Davids staring down seemingly omnipotent Goliaths: a Supreme Court poised to undermine abortion and civil rights a patch of sea on fire from a gas leak an incoherent but surprisingly effective attack on teaching children America’s real history the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act a man whom dozens of women have accused of sexual assault walking free on a technicality. It’s hard to calibrate how we engage or argue.
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We hold in equal contempt a war criminal and a fiction writer who too transparently borrows details from someone else’s life. In our quest for this simulacrum of justice, however, we have lost all sense of proportion and scale. On Twitter, we can wield a small measure of power, avenge wrongs, punish villains, exalt the pure of heart. Online spaces offer the hopeful fiction of a tangible cause and effect - an injustice answered by an immediate consequence. Increasingly, I’ve felt that online engagement is fueled by the hopelessness many people feel when we consider the state of the world and the challenges we deal with in our day-to-day lives. I’ve felt this way for a while, but I’m loath to admit it. Something fundamental has changed since then. I got to share opinions, join in on memes, celebrate people’s personal joys, process the news with others and partake in the collective effervescence of watching awards shows with thousands of strangers. I followed and met other emerging writers, many of whom remain my truest friends. Online is where I found a community beyond my graduate school peers. I lived in a town of around 4,000 people, with few Black people or other people of color, not many queer people and not many writers. When I joined Twitter 14 years ago, I was living in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, attending graduate school.