Last month I sent off this tweet and got some mild disagreement.
That the disagreement was mild is a credit to my followers who are a good bunch of obsessive Twitter addicts. The replies that challenged me were along the lines of “well, sure, but XXXX and XXXX really are pretty awful” and “my dislike is not knee-jerk, they’ve earned it!”
Maybe. And so?
Where does the tit for tat end? They did bad things so we do bad things and they do worse things and then we do even worse things and then they burn down our vacation home in Mackinac?
All because of some keystrokes on a stupid app.
We all know that social media weaponizes our anger to increase engagement and raise stock prices. Go on Twitter for five minutes and see 15 tweets that raise your blood pressure 30 points.1 Dunk on those same tweets to pick up a few hundred dopamine hits in the form of likes and retweets. Was your dunk totally fair? Well, no, maybe not, but c’mon, they started it. Ride the rush baby!
Of course, now you’ve made them mad and they're going to hit back, only maybe just a little bit harder. This leaves you no choice but to say some harsh words about their beloved Nana. Six hours later Mackinac is in flames.
Take a breath. You don’t know how good or bad these people are. Twitter gives us only a small window into their lives. We’re icebergs with 90% of us hidden out of sight. And even that’s not right. Pretend that Twitter represents ten percent of who Nikole Hannah-Jones really is (a ridiculous exaggeration). At best you’ve only seen ten percent of her tweets but the Twitter algorithm has made sure that they’re the ten percent most likely to twist your ideological knickers. So you go to war and boom, there goes the Titanic.2
Or take Jesse Singal, probably a better example for me. I like Jesse. I pay good American cash to subscribe to his podcast Blocked and Reported (he has a junior partner but her name escapes me at the moment)3 AND his newsletter. Even so, I can see how he might annoy people. He is combative. Like Nikole Hannah-Jones, he’s been attacked a lot, which tends to make one prickly. He can be snarky, especially on Twitter, and that alienates folks. I have two real-life friends who are decidedly not fans, despite all my attempts to defend him. The Jesse they see is not the guy I see.
I was reminded of all this a week ago when a tweet popped up in my timeline from a big account that I dislike. This dude expressed some sad feelings about growing up without anyone caring about him. Reading his words I just stared at the screen. They made him seem a lot more human. They also made me feel like a bit of a jerk.
Now add in ramped-up partisanship. In America, we’re getting more politically divided every day. According to Pew, 63% of Democrats and 72% of Republicans say that members of the other party are more immoral than most Americans. This is an unhealthy way to view our neighbors. Of course, often they’re not our neighbors.
If you live in a political monoculture, and increasing numbers of us do, all you’re going to hear is how bad they are. How many Trump voters am I friends with? Looking at this precinct-level map of New York, is it surprising that the answer is zero? (Although I do play poker with a couple guys from that red zone.)
Partisanship and geographic sorting are making it much harder for us to see each other as human.
Maybe Brittany is right. I know gentle decent people who become smack-talking aggression machines when they behind the wheel of a car. Having all that metal between us and other humans makes them seem less human. Now trasnlate that to social media.
Twitter is constant digital road rage. Behavior we’d be appalled at when applied to those we care about becomes entirely acceptable when we do it to those we loathe.
And I know that after all my mealy-mouthed bloviating some people will still say, “Yeah, but I know they are awful.” They may be awful but you are delusional. We all are.
Take this recent Twitter exchange.
Kat Rosenfield is pointing to a thread that argues PPP loans and student loans are very different things and resentment of the latter may be quite reasonable for a small businessperson, given all that they suffered. Her tweet gets this reply:
No, just no. The thread Kat quoted, is not saying they are equivalent. Ann Bauer’s thread is describing the frustration and anger of small business owners forced to jump through hoops to try and keep their businesses alive. Kat’s tweet makes it clear that the thread is expressing the views of small business owners, not Kat’s own—although she’s probably sympathetic to some of the ire they are feeling. At no point does she suggest anyone has been “immoral.” This is a total misreading of what she’s written.
And yet, I’m pretty sure that Joel isn’t being deliberately dishonest. I don’t know his reasons, but I suspect they are ideological. Joel is left-wing (I scanned his timeline) and he’s probably thinking (wrongly) that Ann and Kat are right-wing, or not left-wing enough, so he has read into their words what he wanted and expected to see. And so it goes.
The point isn’t that Joel is wrong (although he is), the point is that none of us are good at seeing each other clearly as our Twitter vehicles speed down the Interwebs. Joel is probably a decent guy most days. His profile says he likes “Reading. Gear-geeking. Nature. Caring for animals.” Animals are nice! Maybe Joel had a fight with a friend, or some bills came due, and this might not be him at his best. That’s the case for every aggressive tweet you see cutting you off on the highway.
A recent line in Ethan Straus’s House of Strauss Substack caught my eye. Straus referred to media Twitter’s
“omnipresent, reflexive demonization and collective will to hurt outgroup individuals.”
This rings true. I’ve seen a bunch of these cliquishly nasty tweet storms recently. Some big Twitter name will do a quote tweet of a perceived enemy and then all their followers will gleefully create a pile-on. Anything goes when you’re targeting one of the outgroup. It’s middle school all over again. “C’mon, everyone hates Cindy!”
Sometimes I will call somebody on their rudeness and try to get them to be more courteous. (This is when I have time free from my day job of tilting at windmills.) “Attack their bad ideas,” I argue, “not them personally.” “Be polite.” To which the replies range from “lol” to “they say bad things, they deserve it.”
Why be polite? Because you’re trying to make our hellish discourse a little bit less monstrous. You might even get lucky and receive a “sorry.” (It happens!)
And sometimes, far more rarely than we probably think, our targets do deserve it. There are bad people out there and bad behavior and there are times when we need to draw a line, take a stand, and call them out.
This was the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire (not the libertarians of New Hampshire, who are decent folks) celebrating Meghan McCain crying at her father’s funeral. This is disgusting behavior and calling it out seems reasonable to me. Kmele Foster did just that.
And yet not everyone agreed.
I see the argument—John McCain pushed policies that led to war and the death of innocents so his daughter deserves no respect—but I’m not buying it. John McCain is dead and his daughter didn’t bomb anyone. Nobody should be taking pleasure in her sorrow.
I’m sure Wallace thinks he’s justified. “They deserved it!” he mutters to himself as he tucks himself in at night. I agree with him that war is bad and we should not be bombing families but this is not the way. Spitting on people’s memories is not good for us, it’s not good for Wallace.
Looked at from the right angle, we all deserve it. I’ve been piled on and I’m sure those doing the piling were smugly sure that I deserved it. If you search Twitter you can probably find me behaving badly, and it will be because I thought someone totally deserved it.
“Free your mind of the idea of deserving…and you will begin to be able to think.”4
Much of this is backed by hypocrisy. When I or my Twitter friends (my ingroup) dunk on those people (the outgroup), I’m more sympathetic. And yet we’re making Twitter one smidgen more toxic than it was five seconds ago. Maybe we should rethink our dunks, even the really funny ones, even those on the Twitter account of the New Hampshire Libertarian Party.5
At a minimum we could aim for cool civility. Focus on the bad ideas, cut the people uttering them some slack. And if they become too awful? Make free with the block or mute buttons. I’d rather block someone than have them constantly raising my blood pressure and tempting me into jerkish tit for tat behavior.
Back off pedants. I know blood pressure is measured in millimeters of mercury (mmHg), not points, but mmHg just looks weird.
In this metaphor, you’re the Titanic. Don’t mess with icebergs.
Fine, Katie Herzog is the real owner of that podcast. Unless it’s Moose, the star of Moose Nuggets.
Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed.
Although they really did deserve it!
It's just too easy to hit the send button. Maybe Twitter should build in a 10 second delay?
It's a good reminder for all of us, and I should be more like that.
I mean, there are a few big name people on Twitter where I reserve the right to think that they are horrible individuals, no matter what their life story (some that I remember from long before Twitter and know from decades of exposure are not good individuals to be around, some who ganged up to get a friend of mine fired from her activist job, some who are well known to be straight up sex offenders who keep getting away with it), though even then, I'll only really dunk on one of mildly on Twitter, and sadly, the person I dunk on is the least harmful of the ones I think are horrible (though that person is the one that annoys me the most).
(In person with other people with decades of experience with this particular Vox writer is different story, one where I'm not at all mild in my dunking. I try to be a much better person on Twitter than I am in real life, in a shocking reverse of the norms.)