Your Favorite X is Problematic
December 7, 2022 11:38 AM Subscribe

Every "Chronically Online" Conversation Is The Same
posted by backseatpilot (130 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite

...Yeah, this is why I don't post much on social media and don't have comments in some places.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:49 AM on December 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

Turn the whole thing off
posted by bxvr at 11:51 AM on December 7, 2022 [7 favorites]

I was still on Twitter when the garden lady thing hit the fan, and that's where I would have reached for the "SELF-DESTRUCT" button for the entire internet if I had such a thing.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:52 AM on December 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

Quite a lot of people, across socio-economic strata, ethnicity, religion, cultural background, physical location and even points in history are utterly , ravenously desperate for two things:

1) a scapegoat
2) to be "better" than anyone appearing in the previous line
posted by aramaic at 11:59 AM on December 7, 2022 [37 favorites]

At what point does discourse become punishment?

Once it can be identified as “discourse”, you’re definitely getting close.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:02 PM on December 7, 2022 [21 favorites]

Because none of these encounters matter. It literally doesn’t matter that someone made chili for their neighbors because you were never meant to know about it in the first place. It’s not your business.

Right, like, this is it, for me. It's nobody's business. Nobody needs to hear about it.

I guess I'm a chronic under-sharer at heart, so I just don't understand what would drive someone to send the garden-coffee tweet. Absolutely alien behavior to me. Who are you speaking to with that tweet? What's the desired response? You're putting essentially-inconsequential personal details out into the ether, largely devoid of context; you're gonna get dragged.

But I guess that's every main-character tweet. You could've just left that in drafts.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:03 PM on December 7, 2022 [25 favorites]

(someone has surely already called this article out as problematic)
posted by Going To Maine at 12:04 PM on December 7, 2022 [13 favorites]

(The 'Your Fave is Problematic' tumblr is almost ten years old now. The podcast is younger, but they just did a hundredth episode.)
posted by box at 12:09 PM on December 7, 2022 [7 favorites]

I don't know where this should fall on the spectrum of like, late-stage capitalism and the commodification of everything but I think the people who post these things don't necessarily have AN audience per se, they are just performing their lives for everyone to see. like we don't even live inside of our own lives anymore but in a performed narrative that is meant for external consumption.

to really really badly paraphrase Peter Watts "if we're not performing for social media, we're not alive"
posted by supermedusa at 12:09 PM on December 7, 2022 [21 favorites]

It's adaptive for life with 8 billion other people living on the same planet, like yeah of course what you can do winds up massively limited in such a crowded world.

At present we're wasting all our complaining time on stupid pointless things, which do not help live in a crowded world, like the examples here, but once a few billion of us have died from directly climate attributable causes, and our priorities radically shift towards survival, then you just watch how this great internet cultural police force turns out to be useful at stopping all manor of subtly anti-social behavior, like cars.

Or maybe not.. maybe our inherent stupidity and pettiness prevent our cultural complaining being used for good at scale. We shall see.. ;)
posted by jeffburdges at 12:13 PM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I’ve more than once lamented MetaFilter’s gradual drift from best of the web to a place to be mad at the world and also each other but there’s a reason why I’m still on MetaFilter while Twitter is now half a decade in my rear view mirror. Twitter was always bad, it’s only gotten worse and there is no one there interested in reversing course.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 12:16 PM on December 7, 2022 [83 favorites]

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
...
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
posted by nikoniko at 12:17 PM on December 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

But yeah, people need to chiiiiiilllll, and also, everything seems to be falling apart, so what are we to do?
posted by nikoniko at 12:20 PM on December 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

This is really what got me to give up on twitter, before Elon made it unsalvageable. I read so much great stuff, learned so much from smart people talking for free, and as twitter evolved, eventually to get to that good stuff I had to get past EVERYBODY's take on the person who did something stupid, or EVERYBODY's take on the stupid responses to a person who did something innocuous. More often than not I did not see the original offense. I saw a bunch of nearly identical takes that I agreed with generally but didn't care about at all. I would log on, read 25 tweets that all said the same thing about someone I didn't care about, and then give up.
posted by Emmy Rae at 12:20 PM on December 7, 2022 [11 favorites]

As awful as twitter gets, if you're not important yourself, and thus have no annoying followers, then you can follow interesting scientists on twitter, and you encounter much better content than really anywhere else.

You need to unfollow anyone who gets sucked into the offense of the day stupidity of course. Ain't exactly healthy long-term of course, even once you've instituted the no stupid rule, but science twitter educates in a way community blogs never do.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:31 PM on December 7, 2022 [12 favorites]

I just don't understand what would drive someone to send the garden-coffee tweet. Absolutely alien behavior to me. Who are you speaking to with that tweet? What's the desired response? You're putting essentially-inconsequential personal details out into the ether, largely devoid of context; you're gonna get dragged.

Exactly my feeling. There's not really much "humble" in their humblebrag when you're proclaiming (truly or falsely) that you live a life of idle leisure and joy. Of course, they attracted more ire than the situation deserved, but who'd be surprised by the outcome? Envy and jealousy were the only foreseeable outcomes by anyone with a lick of sense.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 12:44 PM on December 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

All the world’s indeed a stage
And we are merely players
Performers and portrayers
Each another’s audience
Outside the gilded cage
posted by slogger at 12:50 PM on December 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

I come a long line of oversharers in a region of the world inclined toward oversharing (and I'm probably guilty myself). And I'm not particularly bothered by people chattering about their day to day on social media because what is social media for especially during, say, pandemic time?

But then again, I have long had the face/put out the vibe/whatever where perfect strangers just start talking to me, with zero prompting and sometimes in surprisingly personal detail, about their lives all the time in real life. It doesn't bother me (I like listening to stories. I like being with people). Sometimes I feel like I was glad I was there (a supermarket cashier I'd never seen in my life once broke down telling me about her son's cancer diagnosis and I also ended up crying and it's possible we hugged). Sometimes I think I'm getting taken for a ride, but it's a fairly anodyne ride (most people don't ask for anything except a listen and a "Wow" or whatever). It has always just seemed to me that people just need to be heard every now and then. It reminds us that we are alive.

Mostly I read overshare posts etc as a sign that we could all use someone to talk to--someone who will listen and maybe even respond-- and an awful lot of us believe we have no place to go or way to ask for it. So we yell at the void and hope for a sign that someone is listening.
posted by thivaia at 12:55 PM on December 7, 2022 [45 favorites]

I’ve more than once lamented MetaFilter’s gradual drift from best of the web to a place to be mad at the world and also each other

QFFT
posted by jklaiho at 1:00 PM on December 7, 2022 [36 favorites]

The other side of this are the people who see the internet as such a void that it assumes no one, at all, is listening (most of the time, they aren't) and treat social media as a kind of stream of consciousness captain's log kind of experience. I remember that being a real deal during the early days of blogging and Facebook when people I knew would periodically get weirded out by a semi stranger asking about how their doctor's visit or home renovation had gone because it's like they'd forgotten their posts were not just a diary.
posted by thivaia at 1:03 PM on December 7, 2022 [14 favorites]

There's not really much "humble" in their humblebrag when you're proclaiming (truly or falsely) that you live a life of idle leisure and joy.

Is it so unusual for people to have two hours of down time in a day?
posted by No One Ever Does at 1:28 PM on December 7, 2022 [37 favorites]

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players;

This reminds me of something Abigail Thorn of PhilosophyTube said on a live stream once. She was reading fan mail and came to a message about a video where she had quoted that line from Shakespeare to add some dramatic flair to whatever it was that she was discussing. The message was a sincere sounding critique asking something along the lines of "Only men and women? Shouldn't you use language that's inclusive of nonbinary people?" to which Abigail politely parried "Fair enough, but you'll have to take that up with the Bard".
posted by metaphorever at 1:43 PM on December 7, 2022 [15 favorites]

I get expecting a negative response, but it's like expecting shit to float by because you're in the sewer. At some point, you have to think "as a human being, perhaps I should not be standing in the sewer."
posted by kingdead at 1:44 PM on December 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

Never previously heard of the 'garden lady', but if a friend of mine had made that tweet I would be worried about them, because whoever wrote it seems to me to be trying to convince themself that everything is wonderful rather than expressing unalloyed joy about their life.

I generally get vicarious pleasure out of other people's happy experiences unless I actively despise them or think what they’re doing is intrinsically wrong, and even then I occasionally have to remind myself not to.
posted by jamjam at 1:48 PM on December 7, 2022

I remember the lead incident spiking. It was funny watching so many people beclown themselves. The spreadsheet of problematic authors was great too. There's something Jane Austen like about these incidents, as people very loudly intend to point out their virtues to the world when they by judging others as inferior, and all they succeed in doing is highlighting their own worst flaws.

FWIW, 100% of my Twitter feed on these topics was people saying it was fine to sit in a garden (or read a book or whatever.) Often in an entertaining way. It's why, for all its many issues, I was sorry to leave it. It was a nice place. Not that I'd ever do anything there so reckless as describe a pleasantly banal morning I once had! Hah-hah, no, that's asking for trouble.
posted by mark k at 1:48 PM on December 7, 2022 [9 favorites]

Is it so unusual for people to have two hours of down time in a day?

Some people do, some people don't, and some people really don't.

And of the people that do, not all of them have a lovely backyard garden to relax, or a loving partner with which to share it. So what's the purpose of rubbing your good fortune in the face of the strangers of the world?
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 2:06 PM on December 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Receiving the diary entries of a hundred or a thousand people, live, turned out to be mostly bad.
posted by shenkerism at 2:07 PM on December 7, 2022 [19 favorites]

I don't have a partner nor a backyard, but why would I care that some random person on twitter broadcasted to the X people that chose to follow her that she was enjoying life?
posted by No One Ever Does at 2:08 PM on December 7, 2022 [52 favorites]

Exactly my feeling. There's not really much “humble” in their humblebrag when you're proclaiming (truly or falsely) that you live a life of idle leisure and joy. Of course, they attracted more ire than the situation deserved, but who'd be surprised by the outcome? Envy and jealousy were the only foreseeable outcomes by anyone with a lick of sense

How we read things is so telling! “I have two hours of time in the morning” = “I live a life of idle leisure and joy”. And “who’d be surprised by the outcome?” No one, but that’s kind of the sad point. Part of the reason I stopped reading facebook aages ago is that seeing everyone else’s good times bummed me out and made me feel like my life was ho hum or bad. I didn’t want to harsh on the mellows of people I knew, so I ended up quitting the site. If you don’t really know yr. followers personally, people are happy to obliterate you because they are (rightly or wrongly) peeved about their own issues. We all know those consequences are out there, and I think we’re all kind of afraid of them. But many of us’d also kind of like to share our little happy thought bubbles or feelings of gratitude, and so…
posted by Going To Maine at 2:08 PM on December 7, 2022 [16 favorites]

FWIW, 100% of my Twitter feed on these topics was people saying it was fine to sit in a garden (or read a book or whatever.)

Right, Garden Lady is an awkward example case if you're looking to boogeyman twitter as some exceptional cesspit cos it was like... One tweet yelling at Garden Lady and then everyone else getting mad about how out of line that response was. Chilli lady seemed to be about the same i think, idk
posted by ominous_paws at 2:16 PM on December 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Exactly my feeling. There's not really much "humble" in their humblebrag when you're proclaiming (truly or falsely) that you live a life of idle leisure and joy.

Okay, but why would you make this assumption rather than any number of equally likely ones: 1) they work from home, which is its own privilege but not exactly idle leisure and joy, and can thus just mosey on in from their garden to their home office; 2) they work hours that leave their mornings free; 3) they're freakish early birds who can spend 2-3 hours over coffee and chatting before going on with their work day at 9 or 10 am; 4) they're self-employed and set their own schedule, and have prioritized morning chats, etc etc.

Whatever conclusion you jump to says a hell of a lot more about you than it does the tweet writer, whose sin was a very mild bit of oversharing and humblebragging about being in love with her husband. That's very often the case in general when someone becomes Twitter's main character over something relatively innocuous.

I'm so glad the linked article points out "It’s not your business." Because it's not! "But it made it to my timeline!" you may say, to which I say, "okay, but do you know her? Is she a notable public figure? Do you have literally any social circles in common with her? Does the way she lives her life have literally a single thing to do with you? No? NOT YOUR BUSINESS." Generally speaking, before I even consider having a hot take on any of this kind of online discourse, I ask myself: is it my business? Is it at least marginally entertaining or funny or enriching and therefore worthy of sharing? It almost never is. So I keep scrolling.
posted by yasaman at 2:17 PM on December 7, 2022 [41 favorites]

So what's the purpose of rubbing your good fortune in the face of the strangers of the world?

The strangers of the world aren't just walking down the street and minding their own business when suddenly ATTACK FROM PLANET BOUGIE gets in their face.

Either A) they follow the person, so one may choose to avail themselves of the unfriend/unfollow button, or B) they got shown because someone they follow shared or retweeted the person, so one may choose to avail themselves of the unfriend/unfollow/disable retweets/block options, or C) The Algorithm put it on their feed, in which case the blame is still not on the person enjoying their garden but on the system which is sending people's posts to strangers, so one may choose to avail themselves of the various methods for restricting lists, chronological timelines, or, in extremis, closing one's account at a social media site that doesn't respect one's wishes.
posted by tclark at 2:19 PM on December 7, 2022 [29 favorites]

Man, even here at metafilter I count more than one remark implying that the I-love-relaxing-in-my-garden woman should have known better to express than to express that feeling in public, or that by doing so she was committing an affront to less fortunate people. Are we only allowed to discuss things that we hate, or are struggling with? If not, which things that one might be happy about are we allowed to name in public?

I think the idea that expressing happiness, in print, in public, is somehow foolish, or worse, shameful, is pretty fucked up.
posted by Ipsifendus at 2:20 PM on December 7, 2022 [149 favorites]

Good grief. Perhaps the purpose, is in fact, to acknowledge and be thankful for that particular good fortune?

So yea, maybe she was misguided, for the same reasons you don't advertise any sort of windfall, financial or otherwise, except to those you trust. Because it tends to attract negative attention from unhappy people who want tear you down or extract something from you -- happy people will be happy for you briefly and move on with their lives.
posted by smidgen at 2:26 PM on December 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

This thread is interesting because Facebook/Twitter et al push negative things to drive engagement, but what if it's just about anything drives engagement and their dataset was bad. Maybe instead, the people they pushed it to was wrong, and they could drive engagement just as well with all those cheesy happy slogans at HobbyLobby/Michaels/BigLots etc that people must really like because they have an entire aisle of them?
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:29 PM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Who are you speaking to with that tweet? What's the desired response?

When I had a twitter, I posted stuff like this, or about my cats, or whatever's going on in my D&D game. I do the same on my mastodon. But I'm not a Public Person or an Influencer (I remember being really weirded out when I originally joined Metafilter and found PEOPLE I DID NOT KNOW discussing things I'd said on my now long shuttered blog!) and I don't have a giant social media reach. I had maybe 150 followers on Twitter including RL friends, gaming buddies, Mefites, friends from other online media circles, and probably some spammers because Twitter's full of them. That was who I was talking to: my friends!

One of the things about Twitter/Tumblr/etc. callouts of these perfectly normal people's posts is that not everything that is open to the public is inherently meant for everybody in the world. There's a lot of borderline public/private stuff that we're privileged to look into because it's posted "publicly" even if it's not really something of interest to the world at large. Also different internet social groups have different mores around what it's OK to post/say/etc. so something that is perfectly normal in one circle is a gross etiquette violation in another.

A lot of people think there is "the" internet when in truth there are a lot of little internets that we only see parts of. Actual internet stuff is like an iceberg: 90% of it is hidden in non-public spaces like private/friends-only accounts, locked forums, discords, etc. Sometimes we see glimpses of other people's subsets of the internet and it's just quotidian stuff. The need to react to people being different to me and doing their own thing and daring to post on the internet about it boggles me.

One of the things I really like as a feature of Mastodon is that you have the option to make posts local to your own server and/or not discoverable. With features like that, maybe Garden Lady and Chili Lady would have had their posts go to friends who care and maybe not be found by the part of the internet that thrives on rage.

It's been a few weeks since a bunch of my (women) friends from my college alumni circle quit twitter. Twitter came up today for reasons and the universal response was we all thought it had been better for our mental health to be off it. The regular Two Minute Hates for today's Designated Asshole, deserving or otherwise, are not something I miss.

Apparently I have a lot of opinions about this.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 2:31 PM on December 7, 2022 [25 favorites]

When indie rocker Mitski tweeted that she’d prefer it if her fans didn’t film her the entire time she’s onstage, some fans claimed that her request was insensitive to people with memory-related disabilities.

HUH?! What kind of complaint is that? Is the idea that people with memory-related disabilities are going to watch the footage over and over again? Do they videotape everything constantly and then rewatch it? Or that people without memory-related disabilities perfectly remember every second of every concert they've been to? Because I've seen many, many concerts in my life, and I remember only a few details, mostly just the impressions and feelings of enjoyment (or not).
posted by Saxon Kane at 2:45 PM on December 7, 2022 [9 favorites]

How we read things is so telling! “I have two hours of time in the morning” = “I live a life of idle leisure and joy”.

Indeed. There was a point when I was in my thirties when I had two hours of time in the morning pretty much every day, because I worked every afternoon and evening. I was never home from work before midnight, but I did not have to be awake at dawn or anything.

Luckily it was before social media, so I was not judged by strangers for being at leisure at eleven AM every day. I did get grief occasionally for a decade before that for always seeming to be at liberty during the workweek and why don't I have a job anyway? I did of course have a fulltime job but my weekend fell mid-week by my request. Lineups for things I needed to do always seemed to be shorter on a Wednesday morning than on a Saturday afternoon.

I wonder if one could think of it as a Dunning-Kruger spin on parochialism, where you assume everyone else must have a life basically set up like yours is and you are unaware that you lack the imagination to envision that not everyone's is.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:59 PM on December 7, 2022 [12 favorites]

Okay, but why would you make this assumption rather than any number of equally likely ones

All the the possibilities you listed are beyond the reach of most of the world.

I feel weirdly attacked on this issue, so I’ll lay it out clearly: I DONT THINK GARDEN LADY DESERVED THE VITRIOL SHE WAS SENT. I think she could have anticipated it, and it’s strange to me that me saying that is the source of such controversy on MetaFilter. So unexpected to see the experience recreated after only a few posts here. Perhaps I should have anticipated it too, but since there’s no algorithm forcing it on me I can remove this thread from my Recent Activity and be untroubled. Ta ta!
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 3:01 PM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

From TFA:

A frequently quoted tweet acts as a shorthand for this phenomenon: “Hi, most annoying person you’ve ever encountered here! I noticed this post you wrote in 3 seconds doesn’t line up with every experience I’ve ever had. This is extremely harmful to me, the main character of the universe.”

This struck a chord.

A pop-punk chord, to be specific.

I’m remembering about 15 years ago, when suddenly so much of the Top 40 was songs dripping with egocentric self-pity. Not only was the message “My life is hard and no one understands,” but “everyone else clearly has it easy, and shame on them for not centering ME, the only one who suffers”. (One troupe parodied it beautifully here.)

Now we have social media, which allows us to curate Oscar-clips of our lives for everyone else to compare to their blooper reels. Small wonder it has created an atmosphere of bitter resentment. Hell, it seems like half the time we log on looking for something that will outrage us so we can taste that addictive righteous indignation.

It’s hardly new, of course, this sense that other people are being aggressively happy AT us. Miss Manners called it “But What About Me?”

In my experience, the What About Mes will be no more satisfied to see you suffering. Post about getting laid off, or putting your dog down, and they’ll ignore you entirely or else turn the conversation around to how their problems are worse.

I really do think self-pity tends to crowd out compassion and empathy. And social media has all of us playing dual roles: both washed-up Elvis with a gun, and also whoever he’s shooting at on TV.
posted by armeowda at 3:12 PM on December 7, 2022 [23 favorites]

So is this thread some kind of performance piece to demonstrate the FPP's point?
posted by star gentle uterus at 3:23 PM on December 7, 2022 [43 favorites]

You know, I almost think that we have more of an Eternal September problem than an Extremely Online problem.

Think about this: there's just so many of us. Someone posts "I am having a lovely day with my partner tra la la" and it reaches thousands of people - well, maybe 5900 of them are like "aw, how sweet" or "gee, I wish I had that kind of time these days" and move on, but of the remaining 100, 10 are really into trolling, 10 are new to social media, 10 just got dumped and the remainder are going out of their minds from immediate life stress, and they all post unpleasant comments. Anyone would think that the world was full of mean-spirited people who can't stand it when they aren't the center of attention, but really it's just that a very small percentage can be a very large absolute number.

Have you ever made a mean comment on the internet, or at least a comment that was poorly phrased/timed so that it seemed pretty mean? I bet a lot of us have. If everyone makes one unjustified, judgemental, ill-informed comment per year, there are enough people on social media that it's still a heck of a lot of comments.
posted by Frowner at 3:24 PM on December 7, 2022 [35 favorites]

I think she could have anticipated it, and it’s strange to me that me saying that is the source of such controversy on MetaFilter.

Quite frankly, because it's fucked up to think about a happy, good thing about your life, want to share it, and then before doing so, go through the following process: 1) is my simple expression of happiness going to make random internet strangers feel bad and mad; 2) in what ways is my simple expression of happiness with my life circumstances going to be taken as implicit attack on the less privileged or as flouting my own privilege; 3) how am I going to feel if my simple expression of happiness, shared with my limited social media following, goes viral for frankly incomprehensible reasons; 5) what is every single possible bad faith reading of my simple expression of happiness and how many tweets/addendums do I need to include with my simple expression of happiness to head them off.

The fact that the possibilities I listed in my earlier comment "are beyond the reach of most of the world" is not the point. That is, in fact, the exact kind of being terminally online the original article is pointing out, because it's jumping off from a single person's single statement about their personal experiences, making any number of assumptions about that person, and then making it about some systemic or structural injustice or privilege. But, like, why is it on the original tweeter to anticipate that? She's talking about her life, to people she has reason to think want to hear about it, because they are following her. I don't know about everyone else, but I don't expect every person's every social media post to account for everything and every injustice and inequity in the world. This goes back to that one tweet that summarized some of this kind of social media nonsense as "I like pancakes" and someone else replying "so you hate waffles?" "no! that is a whole new subject!"
posted by yasaman at 3:32 PM on December 7, 2022 [50 favorites]

“Elon Musk’s Twitter Isn’t Ready for the Next Natural Disaster,” Vittoria Elliott and Aarian Marshall, Wired, 05 December 2022

Again, as vital public safety messages go out over Twitter every day, the service should be nationalized.
posted by ob1quixote at 3:48 PM on December 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

I’ve more than once lamented MetaFilter’s gradual drift from best of the web to a place to be mad at the world and also each other but there’s a reason why I’m still on MetaFilter while Twitter is now half a decade in my rear view mirror. Twitter was always bad, it’s only gotten worse and there is no one there interested in reversing course.

Amen to all of this.

I took about a decade-long(?) break from MeFi for a bunch of reasons. One of them was what I perceived to be overzealous moderation, including deletion of threads and comments in what seemed like an effort to appease the most oversensitive users.

I'm not sure the level of moderation has changed, and maybe there is still stuff that's being shut down too hastily. But what has changed is that I've spent years in the hellscapes of places like Twitter.

MeFi ain't perfect -- far from it -- but it's way, way better than the birdsite, which continues to devolve into even more of a cesspit. And the importance of quality moderation, by imperfect humans rather than even more imperfect robots, is clearer than ever to me now.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:13 PM on December 7, 2022 [15 favorites]

It takes one glance at TFA to see that Garden Coffee Lady sells themself a "wholistic yoga meditator", how can people not read the tweet without that context? So with that context it is not unreasonable to see people challenging the tweet, its implicit privileges, etc.

Literally the grey font under their name is "Alternative Holistic Health Service". It's not a your grandma having her morning coffee kind of context.
posted by polymodus at 4:35 PM on December 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Even holistic yoga meditators are allowed to enjoy a cup of coffee, though.
posted by Crane Shot at 4:51 PM on December 7, 2022 [54 favorites]

Literally the grey font under their name is "Alternative Holistic Health Service". It's not a your grandma having her morning coffee kind of context.

Okay, but that's still the exact thing TFA is talking about: It’s just one example of how high the stakes seem to be for interpersonal encounters that are objectively nobody’s business, and how so often our thirst for drama is really a thirst for punishment.

Because none of these encounters matter. It literally doesn’t matter that someone made chili for their neighbors because you were never meant to know about it in the first place. It’s not your business. To demand retribution against someone who says they enjoy coffee with their husband or makes surprise chili for strangers — or even someone who complains about these things! — reflects something far more disturbing than humblebrags or being a presumptuous neighbor. It’s that these reactions are so normalized online that they’re almost boring.

I have no investment in this particular lady, but like, surely it's readily apparent that comments like this are enacting the exact same pattern the article is talking about by acting like "okay, but this tweet or this person did deserve this response," or "this person should have expected this response." Like, nah. Holistic alternative medicine lady who loves her morning coffee with her husband, and who has 20kish followers who are presumably there specifically because she is a holistic alternative medicine yoga practitioner or wtfever, could not have and should not have anticipated that her random tweet would go viral and unleash an avalanche of Discourse. Lady who made chili for her neighbors could not and should not have anticipated people who have no connection to her or her community becoming truly unhinged about her simple neighborly gesture. It's a sign of how deeply unwell online social interaction has become that these things even happen, and your average internet rando should not be conducting themselves as if the Panopticon of the Terminally Online can fall upon them at any moment thanks to unpredictable virality.

All of us internet randos do not need to become such enthusiastic participants in context collapse. This is really not a thing we should normalize, even as we acknowledge that it happens, because it makes the internet worse, it's not making any of us happier, and conducting our online lives in fear of it happening to us isn't tenable for a lot of us. We don't have to enable and encourage the "platforms where controversy and drama are prioritized for driving engagement where we’re rewarded for despising each other."
posted by yasaman at 5:05 PM on December 7, 2022 [48 favorites]

So what's the purpose of rubbing your good fortune in the face of the strangers of the world?

I always just sort of assumed the garden lady approached Twitter like some people use Facebook or Instagram. We all approach things in different ways (look to the old "I use favorites for bookmarks" vs "favorites are signs the universe likes me" division* here), and yeah, she was just saying "Shit this is awesome, and I wanted to share it"which would've been well liked and positively responded to on, say, Facebook, if the privacy was set to friends only.

Unfortunately, she posted it on Twitter (like a lot of people do) and got jumped up and down on for it. Hell, I've posted a picture of a particularly nice beer in an airport on Twitter, and I could have easily been jumped on for any number of reasons (as seen in another thread, that I was flying meant I was killing the planet, that posting a picture of a beer could be construed as not caring how triggering it might be to alcoholics, family members of alcoholics, etc). Instead, because the only people who follow me seem to be people I've met in real life, it got like one or two likes, and disappeared into the ether.

Not everyone approaches social media like it's a battlefield, I guess. Not that I haven't engaged in battle, but not every post is about manning the barricades.

*This is not an invitation to re-litigating favorites, it's just an example, I promise!
posted by Ghidorah at 5:11 PM on December 7, 2022 [14 favorites]

By posting here we're flaunting that we have time to read the Internet and that we have access to tech.
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:19 PM on December 7, 2022 [26 favorites]

By posting here we're flaunting that we have time to read the Internet and that we have access to tech.

Or, and hear me out, we might be posting here as a way of avoiding the immense amount of work we have to do, and tabs might just have been the most destructive thing ever invented. And that we have access to tech.
posted by Ghidorah at 5:21 PM on December 7, 2022 [11 favorites]

People post because it's there, not because they have anything brilliant to say. It's dogs barking because they hear another dog.
posted by blnkfrnk at 5:37 PM on December 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

(someone has surely already called this article out as problematic)

I mean, I'm still processing the slap in the face that backseatpilot gave to our brave boys in uniform by failing to Remember Pearl Harbor in the OP.
posted by non canadian guy at 6:01 PM on December 7, 2022 [11 favorites]

So what's the purpose of rubbing your good fortune in the face of the strangers of the world?

Jesus Christ let people be happy in public. Do you tell people on the street to stop smiling too?
posted by Jilder at 6:13 PM on December 7, 2022 [26 favorites]

The most incisive thing I've ever read about this is Jia Tolentino's essay in her book Trick Mirror called the I in the Internet (non-book version here), which focuses on five things: “First, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale." Her discussion with Ezra Klein is excellent.
posted by lookoutbelow at 6:31 PM on December 7, 2022 [27 favorites]

So what's the purpose of rubbing your good fortune in the face of the strangers of the world?

Straight-up if social media is not for saying "I'm happy and I love my husband" I have no idea what its purpose is, and I do and will judge anyone who chooses to engage with social media who believe the opposite. Because it sure sounds like those are the people in TFA, who are just looking for a fight. Those are some miserable fucking people and I have zero interest in listening to them be Debbie Downers about whatever harmless few things in life make people happy.
posted by nushustu at 6:32 PM on December 7, 2022 [33 favorites]

Definitely bragging: "Every morning, my husband and I love to take our Ferrari down to the private airport where our twin-engine Cessna awaits to take us on our latest adventure."

Bragging... maybe, I guess?: "Every morning, my husband and I like to hang out in the garden with a cup of coffee".

I mean, sure, it bugs me when people post photos of amazing-looking restaurant meals I wish I could afford to try, but my general reaction is to say to myself, "well, look who's having dinner at 6 pm", and leave it at that. Seems kind of a pointless waste of time to make a federal case out of it.
posted by Crane Shot at 6:32 PM on December 7, 2022 [7 favorites]

I'd think Tolentino could make a better fpp than this, lookoutbelow. All those observations sound broadly very relevant..
posted by jeffburdges at 6:38 PM on December 7, 2022

sad as it is, the punishment for having a perfect garden and a perfect spouse who you have perfect chats with is that you don't get to be 100% perfectly upfront about your life in public without people potentially having negative reactions.

humanity...might have been a mistake.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 6:38 PM on December 7, 2022 [17 favorites]

these people are hilarious and taking them too seriously and calling them miserable etc is in and of itself also kinda a downer

"ha ha look at all these assholes" stops being funny pretty damn quick.
posted by nushustu at 7:15 PM on December 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

But even if I'm bothered... It's not my business to be bothered about it in their presence? Like, this is subtweeting material or screencap it to your friends, unless one doesn't have friends, i guess. Because the other thing that ought to be brought up more in this thread is how much even the botheration is an act in the sense that as much as the original tweets are for their actual followers there are indeed accounts whose a significant identity involves being bothered (and they get rewarded in the attention economy). Often that overlaps with justified callouts but also as likely not, which is how Book/YA Twitter gets its reputation.
posted by cendawanita at 7:15 PM on December 7, 2022 [11 favorites]

I mean honestly. SNL's Debbie Downer sketches were funny, primarily because we had sad trombone and Rachel Dratch pulling faces. But getting a firehose of that, minus the humor, day after day after day? Does anyone who has been on the internet for any length of time, in this, the year of our lord 2022, really find that kind of complain-y virtue signalling funny? I say this as someone who loves to laugh, who loves being happy, who I would self-describe as genial. I cannot understand how people look at all of that fucking hullabaloo over a lady who says "I like talking with my husband. I love my husband" and thinks "yes, this is funny" outside of a "if we can't laugh at the saddest things, we might as well hang ourselves" kind of way.
posted by nushustu at 7:19 PM on December 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

The thing that has always puzzled me about social media is how many people use it when it makes them unhappy. And like, I GET it, I read the stories, I understand the psychology at work, I know why people engage in social media in ways that make them miserable. But in a fundamental, personal way, I find it puzzling. And I have no idea if that's my age or my psychological makeup or what, but what I value is making dumb jokes that my (mostly real-life) friends/acquaintances find funny, and seeing my high school friends' pictures of their kids. I like having random conversations with smart people on MetaFilter that I don't know in real life! But I don't want to be on places other than MetaFilter, because the conversations are a lot worse, a lot faster. I've had things go viral a couple of times in the past 15ish years, and while it was once very satisfying because I'd created something that felt neat (/publicly interesting) that people liked, in ALL cases it was also deeply unsettling that so many people I didn't know wanted to talk to/about me. And it was just like, "I did a thing, I am not a thing to have discourse about!"

I have no larger point; I just both totally understand why people engage in activities that make them very unhappy, and struggle to understand why people engage in activities that make them very unhappy. I would like to give them hugs.

"I have long had the face/put out the vibe/whatever where perfect strangers just start talking to me, with zero prompting and sometimes in surprisingly personal detail, about their lives all the time in real life."

Where I am this is called "farm face," and I definitely have a farm face, people approach me all the time on public transit to tell me ALL KINDS OF SHIT.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:22 PM on December 7, 2022 [7 favorites]

Because I am a monster, my universal response to criticism by randos is, and has been since Junior High:

"I do not care whether you exist or not, so why would I care what you think about anything? Yesterday I had no idea you existed and tomorrow I will have forgotten, so why would I waste time listening to you now?"

...this will not work in situations involving the threat of physical violence, so obviously YMMV, but I have found it to be huuuugely deflating to people. I mean, genuinely hilariously deflating; as in their friends start laughing at them kind of deflating.
posted by aramaic at 7:23 PM on December 7, 2022 [7 favorites]

Think about this: there's just so many of us. Someone posts "I am having a lovely day with my partner tra la la" and it reaches thousands of people

yeah but if they post it here it reaches 60 people and the same thing often seems to happen

IMO much closer to the "we take our ferarri to the cessna" side of things and yeah, a bit rude. people posting photos of expensive restaurant meals are also being a bit rude IMO.

uh bragging about fancy restaurant meals and bragging about fancy cars are in exactly the same category. “Bragging” about how much you love spending time with your spouse and/or family is not, unless you are, I dunno doing it in response to a friend talking about their divorce, because it’s generally parsed as an expression of affection for your spouse and family which most people put in a fundamentally different category from talking about how rich you are
posted by atoxyl at 7:26 PM on December 7, 2022 [28 favorites]

I know that Twitter is a bad neighborhood and was even before the current ownership took over, but the "she deserved it for being a wholistic yoga instructor and posting something smug about her happiness in public" gives me some contextual vibes that I don't think the people who think the pile-on was funny or justified probably intended.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 7:37 PM on December 7, 2022 [25 favorites]

It's hard to not read sections of this thread as being the same as "I'm not saying women should be catcalled but they should know they're going to be catcalled going out like that!"
posted by Ferreous at 7:51 PM on December 7, 2022 [38 favorites]

MeFi ain't perfect -- far from it -- but it's way, way better than the birdsite

Like democracy for political systems, it's the worst, except for all the others.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:53 PM on December 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

Showering is classist.
posted by andorphin at 8:18 PM on December 7, 2022 [11 favorites]

My wife dreads and shuns social media, because she gets far too many junior high vibes from it.
The cliques, the abuse, the scrutiny, the dogpiling.
posted by doctornemo at 8:20 PM on December 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

Coffee lady and the blow back happens because Twitter has the feeling of talking amongst friends while actually being a public megaphone. What she said was appropriate for a friendly audience, and the criticism likewise for some harmless snark between onlookers... when both those quasi private conversations intersect and spread each side thinks the other is being ghastly.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 8:32 PM on December 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

Part of the reason those conversations escape containment in either direction (the "bragging" and the snark) is because Twitter encourages it by showing you what your followers and people you follow like. Also quote tweeting, which can be used for plenty of interesting and useful conversation forks, but is notorious for this kind of dunking on bad tweets.

Supposedly avoiding people using QTs in bad faith is the justification for not having them at all on Mastodon, which is definitely an "we can engineer people out of behavior we don't like" technical choice. I don't have a strong opinion on whether the inability to quote tweet is worse for conversation than the dunks are. Just pointing out that technical choices on Twitter facilitate context collapse and other forms of social media choose differently (also cf Facebook's privacy choices around shared posts with commentary).
posted by gentlyepigrams at 9:04 PM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

But in a fundamental, personal way, I find it puzzling.

I guess one upside of having had a substance abuse problem at some point is not finding these things puzzling at all.
posted by atoxyl at 9:04 PM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Christ, there's nothing that gets my goat more than people behaving like people. Out there, being social, having opinions and feelings, not always behaving in the ways I think are respectable. It's fucking unacceptable.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:09 PM on December 7, 2022 [13 favorites]

one thing twitter has going for it is that this kind of low-effort dunking-for-the-cheap-seats stuff tends to be at least a little bit funny

See there might have been a time when I would have said that as a dunk but now I'm just actually so incredibly depressed that I more or less mean it.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:12 PM on December 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Or, and hear me out, we might be posting here as a way of avoiding the immense amount of work we have to do, and tabs might just have been the most destructive thing ever invented. And that we have access to tech.

We have ~~cameras~~ tabs
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:41 PM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Talking about the "chili lady incident" is incomplete without noting that the chili lady in question has been consistently stalked and harassed by Kiwi Farms and ilk. They initially started targeting her because they thought she was a trans woman.

They aren't the whole of the chili lady incident. But they started it, and were savvy enough, basically, to know which Twitter subcultures were deranged enough to keep the madness going once they'd been tagged in and given a troll-written abusive narrative to adhere to.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 11:13 PM on December 7, 2022 [22 favorites]

Anyway, I think it can simultaneously be true that

Social media not-so-subtly tries to incentivize us into "performing how good our lives are" in ways that suck ass and immiserate other people
Resentfulness online is a pretty fucked-up phenomenon that—surprise!—disproportionately targets women

[CW: discussions of online abuse, EDs, threats of animal cruelty]

I have dated a couple of people who existed somewhere on the "influencer" spectrum, and I'm friends with a few more sorts of that variety. I think there are a lot of influencers who either don't think too carefully about the impact their content might have on their audience or who have an actively unhealthy, at times even malicious, relationship with the sites they post on or with their audience or with rival would-be influencers. (About a decade ago, when I was much younger, I even dated someone who introduced me to the horrors of the Tumblr eating-disorder community, which among other things takes all of the implicit social messaging online and makes it way more explicit—including the part where people actively post about their "successes" in the hopes that it will ruin their nemeses' days.)

Influencer culture sucks! It's like less-well-regulated celebrity culture, and I think that we can all agree that celebrity culture is bad and that regulations are sometimes good, et cetera et cetera.

But at the same time, I don't know a single person with an audience of more than 10,000 people or so who doesn't experience semi-regular harassment—and I don't know a single woman with an audience of 10,000+ people who hasn't flat-out said to me, at some point, that she's learned not to post publicly about her own happiness, because that's literally the thing that serves as catnip for a certain kind of person to make a game out of trying to ruin her good day. It's an extremely fucked-up cultural norm that overlaps with but exists separately from "influencers are problematic," it often targets people with audiences of only a couple dozen people or so, and it disproportionately affects women, because both right-wing and left-wing subcultures have come up with ways of rationalizing the deep-seated misogynist belief that it's disgusting for a woman to publicly be happy.

I have an audience of 35,000 or so on one social network—one that I use, in part, as a bona fide social network where I keep in touch with friends and find things to do—and at this point it's strict policy that I do not talk about my personal life on it. I don't talk about people I'm dating, I don't talk about my job, I don't share things that I do with my friends. I have had to explain to people who I've dated, fairly early on into our dating, that I am not going to post about our relationship online, and that a part of the reason why is that they will be stalked and harassed if I so much as include their name on my profile.

The 2-3 influencer-esque sorts who I've dated innately understand this. Because what I deal with is bad enough that I've set up that firewall, the shit that they deal with is orders of magnitude worse. If they share opinions, emotions, details about their personal life, stories about their families, or anything more innocuous than cute pics of nature and/or animals, they're going to get rape threats—full stop. Hell, sometimes "cute pics of animals" won't protect you. The "chili neighbor" woman also has a cute pet pig, and disabled her account at one point because her dedicated hate mob started collectively tweeting about killing and eating her pig.

This behavior is so common that even slightly more-online generations seem to take it for granted as a fact of life. Women I know in their 40s are sometimes shocked at the reactions they receive (not all of them, but some of them, you know?). Women closer to my age are sometimes shocked at the level of vehemence, but rarely at the fact that it happens. And the people in my life who are even a bit younger than I am will actively go out of their way to ask me not to draw attention to them: they've dealt with enough online harassment that they're extremely careful about when and how they establish inlets for other people to notice that they exist.

I think it's telling of the median age on MetaFilter that so many responses here take the crank angle of "well why are those people posting those things in the first place?" Folks here are uncommonly Internet-savvy, but the Internet circa 2022 is not the Internet circa 2002 or even 2012. Attitudes towards content online that would have seemed sensible a decade ago now come off as extremely callous, in part because folks here really don't understand just how bad this has become. (Which is why the article in the FPP got written in the first place, but the day a MeFi comments thread internalizes rather than reflects the link in the post, I'll eat my nonexistent hat.)
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 11:50 PM on December 7, 2022 [40 favorites]

It seems to me that the problem combines the algorithmic pushing of outrage and drama that are getting critiqued here with the fact that there are so. many. people. broken right now.

I had this experience yesterday: I shared an article about illustration AIs (over on ye olde Facebooke, since I'm not posing on Twooter). I've been playing with, and enjoying, illustration AIs. I mentioned in my introductory comment to the article why it was good for people to have technological access to artistic expression beyond their personal hand-drawing capacities, and that while I know that new technologies are also disruptive, and that that fact is poorly dealt with under our late-stage-capitalist, weak-safety-net world, to remember that new tools themselves are not evil and have liberatory capacity, and to go enjoy them.

And someone I'm tenuously socially connected to totally flipped out. They replied and basically accused me of gloating over the destruction of their livelihood, and went on a long rant about how people in academia (where I work) had built their careers by exploiting people in the arts (where they work), living privileged lives of wealth and comfort while the artists starve and die uninsured even if they are lucky enough to be paid to create. And they cursed me in a very long comment, and told me they hoped my job was taken over by AI very soon because I deserved to lose my job and supposed overprivileged comfort, and suffer like them.

It was pretty extreme. And pretty displaced--I too suffer low pay, job insecurity, etc. But you know what? That individual is suicidally depressed right now. As are a whole lot of people today in the supposed "post pandemic" era. Seeing someone happy about the latest fixation of their sense of doom made them express extreme outrage at a mild enjoyment post, not because they are "extremely online," but because they are in a state of great despair.

That's something that weighs on me, posting on social media today. It's not just knowing there are trolls out there. It's knowing there are so many people currently overwhelmed with anxiety and depression, and that unlike during the lockdowns of 2020, when sharing that was supported and urged, today the social pressure is to pretend that's all behind us.

And that's a separate issue from whining about oversensitive people on the internet who seem to be looking for any barely-plausible target at which to hurl outrage. A full 42% of my college students this semester describe their mental health as poor. For my LGBTQ+ students, it's 66%. There are a lot of very unhappy people out there, barely hanging on, and suffering too strongly to make good decisions about where to aim their despair and rage. It's a powder keg, basically, and not all the people who may explode at us are ones we should snort at or revile.

That's hard to navigate. But it's also an argument for trying to continue to connect on social media--because that's where many people continue to express things they aren't expressing in "real life." And it's not because their online personas are fake, or algorithm-incited creatures of oversensitivity. It's because their online personas are real. They are expressing things online they feel they have to hide in their offline lives. And they need support.
posted by DrMew at 12:29 AM on December 8, 2022 [23 favorites]

our media (society) has an inexhaustible supply of
1) women, you're doing it wrong
2) being cynical makes me smart
3) i am proud i have it worse
4) please give me attention
5) at work, with family and irl manditory positvity is required, and i cant push back on how i am abused, online is the safe space to be mean sad imperfect abusive
6) we agree the media portrays unrealistic standards for women, but disagree wether to shoot the messenger when that self-employed messenger of the patriachy is a girlboss yoga gooper.
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 12:37 AM on December 8, 2022 [23 favorites]

It's 11am on a Thursday and I'm lazying in bed, sipping coffee and browsing metafilter. I'm only saying this because today I learned it's my one chance of bringing untold misery upon the world at large!
posted by Pyrogenesis at 1:03 AM on December 8, 2022 [18 favorites]

It was pretty extreme. And pretty displaced--I too suffer low pay, job insecurity, etc. But you know what? That individual is suicidally depressed right now. As are a whole lot of people today in the supposed "post pandemic" era. Seeing someone happy about the latest fixation of their sense of doom made them express extreme outrage at a mild enjoyment post, not because they are "extremely online," but because they are in a state of great despair.

Due to site demographics I don't think most people here understand how covid and inflation have shit on the social, emotional, and financial quality of life of people on the bottom half of the socio-economic ladder over the last few years.

If you want to brag about having a garden and a husband and two hours every morning in which to enjoy both you really need to pick the venue carefully because a lot of people out there are really going through it right now.
posted by zymil at 1:10 AM on December 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

I guess I just don't understand why sharing an expression of happiness and love for one's spouse and the small joys in life is automatically considered 'bragging' now?
posted by rosiroo at 2:55 AM on December 8, 2022 [18 favorites]

the service should be nationalized.

A global social media environment should be the owned by the United States Government? In principle probably not that different from being the plaything of a hyper-rich flake having a mid-life crisis but not really that much better either - one might hope that private Twitter could ultimately be convinced to be answerable to its users, but U.S. State-owned Twitter never could be because it would be expected to represent the interests of the United States.
posted by Grangousier at 5:49 AM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

like, I could make a case for this kind of intense hand-wringing being a form of white fragility at its finest (we must protect the honor of white women posting!!!!! or humanity itself is lost!!!!!) if you really want to go down that route

Again, noted transphobe Nazi harbor Kiwi Farms actively targeted one of the two women in the article and threatened to skin and eat her pet. They're also known for throwing "white" in front of "woman" or "queer individual" because they know it's an easy way to justify misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia while confusing progressives, so it's a little weird to me to see you using their playbook on MetaFilter.

I'm no stranger to being snarky and mean online, but surely it's not ageist of me to point out that harassment on the Internet has evolved, and that targeted hate campaigns against women—white women, even—are a real actual thing that literally documentedly occurred in one of the two instances that this Vox piece is about. Sure, chiligate sucked in some sad lonely people who argued in good faith, the way Johnny Depp's propaganda machine successfully turned a lot of very-sincere people against Amber Heard. That's... how organized propaganda works. Like that's literally what propaganda is.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 6:35 AM on December 8, 2022 [29 favorites]

rosiroo: I guess I just don't understand why sharing an expression of happiness and love for one's spouse and the small joys in life is automatically considered 'bragging' now?

When you know people IRL apart from their online persona, where the laying thick of constant “I wuv my partner “ social media posts are papering over the misery of their actual relationship, it’s not hard to generalize that to pretty much any online PDA. People who are secure don’t feel the need to project an image to the world.

In the vein of the old saw “it takes more muscles to smile than to frown”, I guess it takes fewer muscles to scroll on by to something that interests you instead of being a dingus to others online.
posted by dr_dank at 6:43 AM on December 8, 2022

The most chronically online interaction I've witnessed was in the replies to Vox's own "what is the most chronically online interaction you've witnessed" Twitter thread -- multiple people responded to the tweet to say that the term "chronically online" is itself ableist.

(My initial thought was that they were suggesting that the term "chronically" only applies to chronically ill people, but I think they were saying something about some people being unable to leave their homes and therefore being chronically online was their only outlet for human interactions or something.)
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 7:00 AM on December 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

Whether scientifically accurate or not, the traditional saying is “it takes more muscles to frown than to smile.”
posted by oulipian at 7:12 AM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also, framing people mildly disagreeing with you as rape culture and akin to gendered violence and harassment ...

Surely someone with your bona fides is aware that women actually receive ACTUAL rape and death threats, and actual harassment? Fuck, someone once sent me a death threat because I said I wasn't terribly mad about a soda tax. They said they'd send my head to my mother in a box. Over soda.

When you accidentally trip up the internet hate machine you never know whether this is the time it ends with a SWAT team throwing tear gas canisters through your windows, or whether it's just the same shithead 14 year olds again who won't really do anything. That is why even the non-violent, non-rapey pileon is terrifying--it can take a turn at any time.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:15 AM on December 8, 2022 [31 favorites]

I am disappointed to see the pile-on hate for what to was to me an innocuous tweet be present here. I don't follow this lady, and only ever saw the tweet in question in friends RTing with a "if this is upsetting to you, something so minor in the scheme of things, go touch grass I beg you."

But again, this is why I keep all social media I have private. My life is too short to have randos who are perpetually having a bad day popping up in any feeds to admonish me over, I dunno, having a ginger cat instead of the cat breed of their preferred choice. Or being able to be privileged to have a cat at all or something.

I agree with the poster upthread that MeFi has become meaner and less best of the web.
posted by Kitteh at 7:29 AM on December 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

framing people mildly disagreeing with you as rape culture and akin to gendered violence and harassment is exactly the kind of thing the article decries

Yeah, no, I'm saying that when people jump down women's throats (garden LADY, chili [trans?] LADY) on the internet it IS gendered harassment. I'm old enough to remember when Kathy Sierra was forced offline by doxxing because a bunch of assholes got mad at her for being a woman on the internet (and of course weev was heavily involved in running Sierra off the internet, which puts the incident in the historic chain of Gamergate etc. internetwide harassment of women and other marginalized groups.).

There's a whole history of piling on women on the internet and I'm a woman on the internet and I see it and I'm naming it. And I'm also naming the reaction to it of "don't do the thing that provokes threats and harassment" as being closely related to "don't wear those clothes that provoke threats harassment" because threats and harassment aren't the fault of the person being threatened and harassed. They're the fault of the threateners and the harassers.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 7:41 AM on December 8, 2022 [27 favorites]

They're also known for throwing "white" in front of "woman" or "queer individual" because they know it's an easy way to justify misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia while confusing progressives

Yeah, we can talk thoughtfully about issues with white feminism all day and into next week (see: the GA election polls, Jesus Christ), but it's really depressing to see how many young progressives are too dim not to fall for this.

People's inability to sort out the different social implications of someone choosing to come into your space and tell you, personally, something and someone simply speaking in public about something, and how that plays out on the Internet, all the way here in 2022 is also depressing. Like, I may have rolled my eyes slightly at garden lady--it's that goopy "positive thinking" which is just another handmaiden of late capitalism--but I didn't react to her as I might if she'd insisted on telling me about the garden on the phone, or in small group at church, or in group chat. I've been online since 1992 but it shouldn't take 30 years!
posted by praemunire at 8:12 AM on December 8, 2022 [11 favorites]

I was recently listening to a podcast that touched on the alliance of the Republicans and evangelical Christianity and they talked about the creation of "The Rage Machine" -- I'm probably butchering it a bit here but it's that you form alliances against things, not for things. So you're against gay marriage, you're against abortion, and therefore you can ally together to make sure That Thing Is Put Down.

I do feel like the Garden Lady* is a version of that.

I mean figuring out who to yell at to make sure that two hours of leisure and a garden (I haven't absorbed whether this was like, a large garden in Manhattan or a what) are not unattainable goals, that employment standards are high, that minimum wage is a living wage, and that housing is affordable is hard.

Yelling at the toxic positivity lady living her life is easy. Sharing one's distain for her is creating alliances by the same mechanism that has worked so well for the right wing community. Is it the same result? No, because no one's translated that into a political movement yet to shut down all the holistic healing centres or make her marriage illegal.

But the mechanism of distain feels the same to me, because she's just - sharing a moment in her life. Annoying? Maybe. I don't love it when teenagers make out behind my workplace either but I'm not about to shame them. But blaming her for society's problems seems off. Propaganda, as stated above.

* Over the pandemic I did enjoy coffee in the backyard -- I can't really call it a garden unless you mean things are out of control back there -- with my husband. Tuesday I cleaned 4 toilets at work including one where a kid threw up as a part of my job, and yesterday I spend some time printing flyers and the other trying to figure out what's causing so many duplicate records in our customer database, so, you know, the glamour continues here in the fitness/wellness industry that helps pay my electric bill.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:11 AM on December 8, 2022 [19 favorites]

I think, sadly, the reason this conversation plays out here with similar trends as on Twitter is because the algorithmic engagement-driven form of interaction created by monolithic social media platforms has changed our brains. It’s a giant systemic and structural issue we can’t individually control. I excerpted some parts of the excellent Jia Tolentino essay (sadly only the first bit about distended identity is online) which I think speak to this really well.

Most importantly and why I think content about someone else’s life somehow becomes fodder for online outrage: “Through social media, many people have quickly come to view all new information as a sort of direct commentary on who they are.” There’s no way to exist on the Internet other than speaking, and the thing we're driven to speak about, via the deliberate structure and dynamics of the platform, is rage about nonsense.

On the need to speak to exist:

As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet – for anyone to see you, you have to act. You have to communicate in order to maintain an internet presence. And, because the internet’s central platforms are built around personal profiles, it can seem – first at a mechanical level, and later on as an encoded instinct – like the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good.

On virtue signalling (perhaps an amplifying component, via controversy then engagement algorithms, “extremely online” discourse:

A legendary case occurred In June 2016, after a two- year- old was killed at a Disney resort – dragged off by an alligator while playing in a no- swimming- allowed lagoon. A woman, who had accumulated ten thousand Twitter followers with her posts about social justice, saw an opportunity and tweeted, magnificently, “I’m so finished with white men’s entitlement lately that I’m really not sad about a 2yo being eaten by a gator because his daddy ignored signs.” (She was then pilloried by people who chose to demonstrate their own moral superiority through mockery – as I am doing here, too.)

On the societal conditions that drive this:

These deranged takes, and their unnerving proximity to online monetization, are case studies in the way that our world – digitally mediated, utterly consumed by capitalism – makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard. You don’t end up using a news story about a dead toddler as a peg for white entitlement without a society in which the discourse of righteousness occupies far more public attention than the conditions that necessitate righteousness in the first place.

On whether there’s any point talking about this given it is what it is:

And, more important, the internet already is what it is. It has already become the central organ of contemporary life. It has already rewired the brains of its users, returning us to a state of primitive hyperawareness and distraction while overloading us with much more sensory input than was ever possible in primitive times. It has already built an ecosystem that runs on exploiting attention and monetizing the self. Even if you avoid the internet completely – my partner does: he thought #tbt meant “truth be told” for ages – you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near-impossible to regulate or control.

On identity as playacting:

In 1959, the sociologist Erving Goffman laid out a theory of identity that revolved around playacting. In every human interaction, he wrote in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, a person must put on a sort of performance, create an impression for an audience.

And how this plays out online by placing personal identity at the centre of the universe:

We can, and probably do, limit our online activity to websites that further reinforce our own sense of identity, each of us reading things written for people just like us. On social media platforms, everything we see corresponds to our conscious choices and algorithmically guided preferences, and all news and culture and interpersonal interaction are filtered through the home base of the profile. The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the center of the universe. It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection. Through social media, many people have quickly come to view all new information as a sort of direct commentary on who they are.

Offline, you can stop performing:

Offline, there are forms of relief built into this process. Audiences change over – the performance you stage at a job interview is different from the one you stage at a restaurant later for a friend’s birthday, which is different from the one you stage for a partner at home. At home, you might feel as if you could stop performing altogether; within Goffman’s dramaturgical framework, you might feel as if you had made it backstage. Goffman observed that we need both an audience to witness our performances as well as a backstage area where we can relax, often in the company of “teammates” who had been performing alongside us.

Online, this form of identity formation is a disaster:

Online – assuming you buy this framework – the system metastasizes into a wreck. The presentation of self in everyday internet still corresponds to Goffman’s playacting metaphor: there are stages, there is an audience. But the internet adds a host of other, nightmarish metaphorical structures: the mirror, the echo, the panopticon. As we move about the internet, our personal data is tracked, recorded, and resold by a series of corporations – a regime of involuntary technological surveillance, which subconsciously decreases our resistance to the practice of voluntary self-surveillance on social media.
…
We can, and probably do, limit our online activity to websites that further reinforce our own sense of identity, each of us reading things written for people just like us. On social media platforms, everything we see corresponds to our conscious choices and algorithmically guided preferences, and all news and culture and interpersonal interaction are filtered through the home base of the profile. The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the center of the universe. It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection. Through social media, many people have quickly come to view all new information as a sort of direct commentary on who they are.

Why is it like this? Capitalism:

This system persists because it is profitable. As Tim Wu writes in The Attention Merchants, commerce has been slowly permeating human existence – entering our city streets in the nineteenth century through billboards and posters, then our homes in the twentieth century through radio and TV. Now, in the twenty- first century, in what appears to be something of a final stage, commerce has filtered into our identities and relationships. We have generated billions of dollars for social media platforms through our desire – and then through a subsequent, escalating economic and cultural requirement – to replicate for the internet who we know, who we think we are, who we want to be.
…
Selfhood buckles under the weight of this commercial importance. In physical spaces, there’s a limited audience and time span for every performance. Online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end. (You can essentially be on a job interview in perpetuity.) In real life, the success or failure of each individual performance often plays out in the form of concrete, physical action – you get invited over for dinner, or you lose the friendship, or you get the job. On-line, performance is mostly arrested in the nebulous realm of sentiment, through an unbroken stream of hearts and likes and eyeballs, aggregated in numbers attached to your name. Worst of all, there’s essentially no backstage on the internet; where the off-line audience necessarily empties out and changes over, the online audience never has to leave. …Identity, according to Goffman, is a series of claims and promises. On the internet, a highly functional person is one who can promise everything to an indefinitely increasing audience at all times.

On how this relates to misogynistic trolling and harassment:

Incidents like Gamergate are partly a response to these conditions of hyper-visibility. The rise of trolling, and its ethos of disrespect and anonymity, has been so forceful in part because the internet’s insistence on consistent, approval-worthy identity is so strong. In particular, the misogyny embedded in trolling reflects the way women – who, as John Berger wrote, have always been required to maintain an external awareness of their own identity – often navigate these online conditions so profitably. It’s the self-calibration that I learned as a girl, as a woman, that has helped me capitalize on “having” to be online. My only experience of the world has been one in which personal appeal is paramount and self-exposure is encouraged; this legitimately unfortunate paradigm, inhabited first by women and now generalized to the entire internet, is what trolls loathe and actively repudiate. They destabilize an internet built on transparency and likability. They pull us back toward the chaotic and the unknown.

posted by lookoutbelow at 9:14 AM on December 8, 2022 [25 favorites]

I get really really uncomfortable with takes that have any hint of "how dare people express joy in having a partner online" because that is uncomfortably close to the logic underpinning incel communities.
posted by Ferreous at 9:16 AM on December 8, 2022 [19 favorites]

interesting point, but--why is this, though, in a scenario where the social and economic forces affecting people are keeping them very very lonely in addition to very broke?

because it’s something people perform for or do “on behalf of” their partner (or child, or friend, or whoever) - it’s not all about the person they are talking to

This does of course interact weirdly with social media, where one is talking to everybody. And it’s not too hard to imagine a person who *does* go on about their partner to the point of being obnoxious. I don’t have a real example of that offhand but I’ll give you the *related* personal example of being seated at a family event next to a woman who wouldn’t stop going on about how smart and successful her kid (who is about my age) is. But that’s a pattern, not an incident - the Twitter example here seems well within the bounds on its own (not getting into any other vibes people got from her persona).

you could compare to the “rules” about displays of physical affection but then that’s bound up with stuff about the implication of sexuality
posted by atoxyl at 9:33 AM on December 8, 2022

Also it’s usually considered inappropriate (and socially undesirable) for people who are lonely to be openly resentful of people who have strong relationships (rather than of systemic factors that account for their loneliness) because, well, it’s socially desirable for people to have strong relationships? It’s not like material wealth, one can’t accuse people of hoarding their human relationships - that’s approaching incel shit.

“People keep getting lonelier and also it becomes increasingly gauche to talk about being happily connected to someone if you are” seems like one of the more dismal routes that could be taken from where we stand right now.
posted by atoxyl at 9:48 AM on December 8, 2022 [17 favorites]

I want to hear more expressions of people's joy, not fewer.
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:49 AM on December 8, 2022 [19 favorites]

Maybe it's the ADHD talking, but I just can't imagine enjoying talking to one person for several hours every day.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:50 AM on December 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

lol remember the time that 2 ppl who met and fell in love because of metafilter decided, in an incredible act of hubris, to happily share here in MeTa that they had just got married, and how this was later referred to, without a shred of irony, as an example of "friend-having privilege" by people who acted like their happiness was a personal targeted attack.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:54 AM on December 8, 2022 [31 favorites]

In Chinese there's a really good term for those people who can pick fault with anything -- '喷子', meaning a person who spews spittle along with their unasked-for negative opinions. There's also a slang borrowed from Japanese sub-culture to describe this kind of behavior -- 'ky', as in 'I might be ky here but I can't stand the lead singer's new haircut' in an online discussion about a band's latest album. I think of 'spewers' as the more passive-aggressive cousins of trolls.
posted by of strange foe at 10:01 AM on December 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

The reaction & counter-reaction & synthesis/discourse of the two has sprawled well past the original tweet, but I also wonder about the aspect of lifestyle marketing in the "holistic lifestyle coffee-drinking" tweet. We've seen multiple waves of different approaches to "turn your life into your business & your business into your life, and play it up for the camera so the referral bonuses/ad dollars/sponsorships roll in" throughout the history of the commercial Internet. (and of course, it's been far-from-neutral as far as who this has been promoted to appeal to)

And that makes people's reactions especially messy, since it's in response to an intentional blurring of lines. I'm not saying I'd say anything *to* someone, but I'll privately roll my eyes at a particularly in-your-face advertisement, or an MLM pitch; where the threshold for me reacting the same way to a personal message is higher.
And that's some aspect of why it's a successful strategy. I can junk a spam email without doubting myself, but what if it's a *Tupperware/Cutco/Essential Oil/VanLife* party, and won't you just show up so I can get reimbursed? And since you're here, I know you said you wouldn't buy this big-ticket item, but how about this smaller thing? And be sure to use my referral link, I know it's a marketing thing, but we both get a discount out of it...

There's a person on the other side, but we've seen companies realize they can use this to their advantage by putting people in the line of fire (but discarding them once they're costly or no longer effective). There shouldn't be metaphorical fire for people to be in the line of, but also that can be extended to cover any sort of reaction. I'm reminded of Netflix vs. Dave Chappelle, where they simultaneously ignored employees raising concerns; but also had one of their social media accounts go "stop saying Dave Chappelle is transphobic, there's a person running this Netflix account", but then if I remember right fired that team after.

I don't have a good answer. It'd be nice to say "don't do anything that resembles any of this", but then that means anything can be categorized under that and then you have Lockheed Martin saying if you don't support apartheid you're punching down.
And similarly it'd be nice to say "ok, only say anything negative when it's justified", but as we've also seen, people are *really great* at coming up with reasons why it's justified this time, whether by target or cause or anything in between.
"Don't go too far" is a stronger line to be able to draw, but again people are really good at coming up with ways to make anything seem like a proportional response.

Basically, people are complicated & internal consistency is a fool's errand; and accelerating all this through the technically-mediated-telepathy that is social media is speeding up things good and terrible.
posted by CrystalDave at 11:07 AM on December 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

One of the things about Twitter/Tumblr/etc. callouts of these perfectly normal people's posts is that not everything that is open to the public is inherently meant for everybody in the world.

Danny O'Brien absolutely nailed this issue in a blog post nearly twenty years ago, and I've been linking people to it ever since:

The problem here is one (ironically) of register. In the real world, we have conversations in public, in private, and in secret. All three are quite separate. The public is what we say to a crowd; the private is what we chatter amongst ourselves, when free from the demands of the crowd; and the secret is what we keep from everyone but our confidant. Secrecy implies intrigue, implies you have something to hide. Being private doesn’t. You can have a private gathering, but it isn’t necessarily a secret. All these conversations have different implications, different tones.

Most people have, in the back of their mind, the belief that what they say to their friends, they would be happy to say in public, in the same words. It isn’t true, and if you don’t believe me, tape-record yourself talking to your friends one day, and then upload it to your website for the world to hear.

[...]

There are only two registers on the Net; public and secret. In the public sphere, everything you say is for everyone. Talk in the secret register, and you have something to hide.

And this is what the end of privacy means. It means the end of the private register. Not everything that is private is meant to be secret, meant to be hidden. It’s just not intended to be public. That grey area is fading, and soon it will be gone.

The entire history of social media is people running hard into this problem. Gradually, people learn to recreate or rediscover private spaces online, and once they do, they mostly disappear from the public ones.

But the big social media sites are fundamentally opposed to that process, because putting everything in one big public space where people can dunk on each other is great for their engagement metrics.
posted by automatronic at 12:30 PM on December 8, 2022 [22 favorites]

"Don't go too far" is a stronger line to be able to draw, but again people are really good at coming up with ways to make anything seem like a proportional response.

I think normalizing *silence* as a middle response would help. Certainly it would annoy the big corporatized social media sites, since it doesn't do them any good. But surely if, if someone in my feed does something creepily influencer-ish, my first instinct is to mute them for a month, that will break several of the bad feedback loops and not harm anyone who actually just had a good day and wanted to be grateful in public?
posted by clew at 2:11 PM on December 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

The entire history of social media is people running hard into this problem. Gradually, people learn to recreate or rediscover private spaces online, and once they do, they mostly disappear from the public ones.

I've been reading a bunch of Wendell Berry recently, and—while he's a bit of a crank who occasionally dips into social conservatism in a way that makes me squick—this post reminds me of his "public vs. community" theory. Berry was convinced that the universal "public" was inherently dangerous, because it divorces everything from context and can essentially only be traversed through sheer banality. The cultural narrative that the only two modes of culture are "private" and "public" fails to account for "community," his proposed intermediary space, which is where people can express themselves openly and expect to be understood. Which is similar to O'Brien's "register" in this blog post, I think.

We talk a lot about younger generations lacking a sense of privacy, but I think what they often lack is a sense of community. They leap right from private to public, without that space in between where they can genuinely expect to be understood. (At least, that's one of my tentative hypotheses, which is furthered by the fact that a lot of Gen Z-ers I know are staggeringly good at public-facing rhetoric, and shockingly bad at shifting away from that register even when they're talking with their peers.)
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 3:40 PM on December 8, 2022 [9 favorites]

Sorry, I've read this twice and can't help but hear, "cancel culture has gone too far" vibes. I haven't heard of any of these social media blow ups aside from the Amber Heard case and West Elm Caleb. Did West Elm Caleb get fired from his job or something? I thought the internet dunked on him for a week and then moved on. If that was all, that's pretty tame for a guy who ghosted so many women they managed to find each other on the internet.

The internet has been a great help for people to organize against people with more financial or social power, which is why there's been so much backlash and moral panic from elites. Jennings has one paragraph about not dismissing all accusations. But I'm surprised that Jennings didn't point out the obvious: most of this is dog-piling on women.

It's not a "problem with the discourse", it's just plain ol' misogyny.

Talking about the "chili lady incident" is incomplete without noting that the chili lady in question has been consistently stalked and harassed by Kiwi Farms and ilk. They initially started targeting her because they thought she was a trans woman.

Yup. Standard misogyny from conservatives.

But at the same time, I don't know a single person with an audience of more than 10,000 people or so who doesn't experience semi-regular harassment.

I have over 20k followers on Twitter and I get a rude tweet maybe once or twice a year. I post under my real name. But I'm a cisgender man.

So this article rubs me the wrong way because it seems to be deflecting from the obvious cause (misogyny) to something unrelated (using the internet to point out sexism, homophobia, racism, ableism, and elitism.)

And for the record, even when I brush against Mefi's moderation, I'm still glad this site has the moderation it does. Asking the mods to ease up would be throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you aren't getting wet.
posted by AlSweigart at 4:04 PM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

"in defense of people who are attacked for saying the wrong shit on the internet is just the icing on the cake."

Again you are excusing dogpiling and abuse for extremely anodyne things. Getting swarmed by Twitter mobs isn't just a few people saying "check your privilege" People are getting death threats. You seem okay with this.
posted by Ferreous at 5:42 PM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Am beginning to wonder if this kind of reaction is why so many cat pictures are posted when people feel the need to update online, instead of anything with statements about the rest of their lives.
posted by Peach at 6:15 PM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

the internet runs on cats though
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:19 PM on December 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

My perspective on this is deeply influenced by the fact that a common thread in a suspiciously large portion of these cases is that the people who are arguing, as the TFA does, that the "chronically online" (and their tweets of menace which signal the end of civilization) all seem to focus on supposedly disingenuous and overwrought complaints about ableism — something that a tweet I read yesterday said isn't a real thing and is merely the attention-seeking fantasy of women who aren't actually disabled.

In the jorts/grocery thing, I watched as mild, thoughtful tweets by disabled folk were mocked and dismissed as unhinged.

Ableism keeps coming up in this discussion as a punchline — even in this thread — and this is suspicious as fuck to me, as well as more than a little distressing.

And the larger issue is that this whole line of discourse is so noxiously familiar. After more than thirty years of watching this, there is a recognizable sulfurous stench associated with thinkpieces about the rise of censorious illiberism. They're almost always written by a certain type and they almost always are harshly critical of the same groups of people.

A reliable rule of thumb for me for many years has been that someone using the term "pseudo-intellectual" is someone safely ignored. It looks like I'm going to add "virtue signaling" to that list.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:51 PM on December 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

In the jorts/grocery thing, I watched as mild, thoughtful tweets by disabled folk were mocked and dismissed as unhinged.

Thankfully my TL is more filled with subtweeting personalities so by the time I heard about the chilli lady it was well second or third hand. Except for the Jorts account. Suddenly the human running it had to share how sus a thread was by a particular account commenting on the episode, an account that called out Jorts before in that grocery thread - the implication as you say, this account in particular is being overwrought in crying ableism.

Anyway, that's why I unfollowed the union cat.
posted by cendawanita at 7:28 PM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

No one says the pileon was justified here or has said that.

If you want to brag about having a garden and a husband and two hours every morning in which to enjoy both you really need to pick the venue carefully because a lot of people out there are really going through it right now.

or, even

not two, several! that was the part where I, personally, in the privacy of my own home and not on twitter, rolled my eyes a bit and said something like "what in the trust fund". but I kept it to myself

Kept it to yourself... until now, that is. If you think something is too shitty to say on twitter, reconsider bringing it to metafilter
posted by Wood at 7:42 PM on December 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

It's almost like there's no way to have an online discussion about whether people online get their backs up too easily, without everyone getting their backs up.
posted by Crane Shot at 7:52 PM on December 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

Ableism keeps coming up in this discussion as a punchline — even in this thread — and this is suspicious as fuck to me, as well as more than a little distressing.

I think people just got tired of seeing it used as an excuse to do nothing. Like with the kellog's strike from a few years ago, there were posts about how a kellog's boycott was ableism because some people could only eat one cereal (never mind all the store brands/ect). Or the anti Uber stuff being ableism because some people can't drive(never mind all the wheelchair users that uber will not help).
Lots of stuff like that really poisons the well in peoples' minds.
posted by Iax at 9:20 PM on December 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

It’s darkly hilarious to me how perfectly this thread illustrates the exact dynamic talked about in the article.
posted by dorothy hawk at 9:42 PM on December 8, 2022 [23 favorites]

Well, I'm a big enough person to admit I was wrong, people were actually really mad at garden lady, some of them are clearly even here! Being completely proportionate

I stand by my unwavering belief / desperate hope that "uhh excuse me but some of us can only eat one name-brand cereal" was an op to sow division, though
posted by ominous_paws at 10:50 PM on December 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

In conclusion, I'm happy for the Garden Lady and wish her the best in her loving relationship, and may the Chili Lady continue to do good in peace.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:09 PM on December 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

This was highly entertaining. Thank you all.
posted by some loser at 5:34 AM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Nooooo it's not over yet noooooooo!
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:15 AM on December 9, 2022

By which I mean, this was a fascinating discussion and so so so relevant to all online communities. I hope MeFi management internally will discuss this dynamic.
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:59 AM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Emotional reactions come first (about garden lady's post or the blow-backnshe received) and then ad hoc philosophies of how-to-live-in-the-internetcene follow. This is what the engagement driven internet wants, and we will fall into more often.

Is garden lady an excemplar of.how misogyny polices and silences everything a woman does online. Yes

Is garden lady an excemplar of how karen-privledge is humble bragging and being used to make others inferior and envious? Yes

Is garden lady an example of "wokeness has gone too far - the revolution eats its own children"

is garden lady an example of all criticism of white women is terrorism

is garden lady the risk influencer/advertsers take when they seek the reward of viral advertising?

In space, no one can hear you scream, on the internet, thats all we hear.
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 11:56 AM on December 10, 2022 [4 favorites]

Metafilter: In space, no one can hear you scream, on the internet, thats all we hear.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 4:16 PM on December 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

On the web, and in life, people take pleasure in criticizing and denouncing others. As far as I can tell, it makes them feel superior.

If you don't have a garden, a little balcony, a nice view, fresh air, or a green space in your neighborhood, join me in whipping capitalism back into shape. Meanwhile, being pissy about an old woman enjoying coffee outside is ugly.
posted by theora55 at 10:31 AM on December 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

Perhaps germane to this thread is this thread of tweets referring to things as “ableist and problematic” (some of which I kinda agree with!) that is generally a reminder of how Twitter can be bad for ye discourse.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:29 AM on December 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

“ableist and problematic”

it's all relative.

In fact, I have a relative who, due to an old injury, can't really sit anymore without being in pain. The longer they're compelled to sit, the worse the pain gets. So, as they pointed out recently, all talk of going to a movie or a play or a sports event, or out to a nice restaurant, or just visiting friends for dinner, let alone going to the doctor (always gotta sit in the waiting room) or travelling pretty much anywhere that isn't on foot or a bus or subway (are there any other transport options that don't require sitting?) -- that's ableist as f***!
posted by philip-random at 2:37 PM on December 15, 2022

Why double-down on conflating the issue of social media discourse with complaints about ableism? This thread is really pissing me off.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:12 PM on December 15, 2022

philip-random, I feel terrible for your relative.

At the same time, I think this may be an example of how the concept of ableism is potentially infinitely expandable. Literally everything that anyone could ever enjoy may be impossible for someone else with a specific disability to enjoy. So is every uncritical expression of praise for any kind of pleasure, large or small, ableist? If so, it seems to me that the concept is so broad as to be meaningless... and useless.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:14 AM on December 19, 2022

I'm with you and so is my relative (though I probably didn't word their "complaint" very well). I'm pretty sure it was intended as more of a humorous dig than anything else -- to make the point that ableism just doesn't scale very well. Because everybody's got something going on ... if you want to dig for it, if you want to fix focus on it.

In my relative's case (call her Joanne), fixing focus (demanding attention) is the last thing she wants. She hates having to make mention of it, would rather just live the life she can live without her particular malady becoming how she gets defined (there are upsides to an invisible disability, I guess). But sure enough, there's always somebody who's not aware, who makes some completely reasonable comment or request ... and Joanne has to either tell a white lie (my back's kind of sore right now), or get cranky, or commit to a long and complex story about an old injury that wasn't even that bad at the time, but for whatever reason, it never properly healed ... and so on.

And for the record, I absolutely believe that there is something to ableism and have learned to be way more conscious of various assumptions and word choices, because why not?
posted by philip-random at 6:06 PM on December 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Thanks for the further background. I agree: I absolutely think ableism is real, and didn't intend to communicate otherwise. But it's also tricky and subjective. And there's a certain kind of discourse around it online that can seem to be more about asserting moral superiority over others than about actually advocating for people with disabilities.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 1:50 PM on December 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

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