Curiosities, Vol. 5: How We Treat Our Enemies
On public shaming and social responsibility
This is a free edition of my weekly curated column Curiosities. If you like what you read, please consider becoming a paid subscriber so you can get delectable morsels every Sunday.
Back in 2015, journalist Jon Ronson wrote a book called So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. It was ahead of its time and raised the alarm about the profound psychological harm online public shaming does to its victims. He investigated a wide array of public shaming campaigns and the devastation they wrought on their subjects. It is required reading for anyone interested in online culture.
Ronson writes, “I suppose that when shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.”
It’s impossible to understand the harrowing fire of online hatred until one experiences it. It’s a unique and alien type of hurt, and what makes it hurt all the more is how absurd it is. Why do I care what strangers on the internet think of me? you berate yourself, I shouldn’t care. It shouldn’t matter. And yet, in that moment, nothing matters more. The only comparison I can think of for the absurdism of the pain is extreme depression. When I was in the throes of clinical depression, the prospect of doing the dishes made me want to kill myself. I knew that was absurd. Recognizing the absurdity doesn’t make it any less horrific — in fact, it makes it more so.
There’s also something dangerously radicalizing about online hate. Most fringe crusaders I can think of have some sort of origin story in online shaming. It’s like a religious experience — a Damascus road encounter — that pushes you into fanaticism. I’ve tried hard to resist that impulse in myself, but I’m not sure how well I’ve succeeded.
For this week, I’ve collected articles exploring online hatred, pile-ons, and harassment campaigns. Enjoy.
This week’s content
Aella on internet hate
Sex worker, writer, and rationalist Aella wrote a brilliant piece here on Substack detailing her struggle with sexist, violent, and degrading hate she gets online. She writes, “Some innocent part of me really doesn’t understand. It stands there kind of shocked, hands open and palms up, saying quietly “but… I’m a person. I’m a person. I’m a person!””
She recounts how she met people she thought were cool and wanted to spend time with, only to discover them being snarky and mean about her in an online forum. She goes on,
Something inside me just gave up. I went to my hotel room bed, cried gently, and let myself go through the Giving Up. Of course this would happen. Of course the intimacy I’d had was a raw tunnel leading under my skin, and it had let in pain. Of course this would happen again, as it had already happened so many times.
And I think this was the key, for me - the of course. It wasn’t a hand-spreading, pleading why - it was surrender to this like the laws of physics. It wasn’t that this shouldn’t be happening - no, it should. I’m a microcelebrity, and this means that some people will use me in ways that hurt. Throw a ball, it falls. What the fuck else did I expect to happen? This is the dynamic like the earth beneath my feet is the ground.
My method of gentle, compassionate self observation had, I think, relaxed enough of the landscape around my tangle to allow this mini tragedy to finally rumble the tectonic plate over a few inches. If I’d been anxious about the fact that I had hangups here, I’m not sure I would have had the space for my mind to catch this realization. The shift happened subtly, beneath me, inevitably. I shifted nothing; it shifted me.
I relate. Mockery and hate are just the costs of being a public face. That is the deal I made when I went online to write over a decade ago. It’s a shitty deal, but it’s the one I’ve made.
Read the full article here.
Helen Lewis on the nightmare that is Goodreads
“Oh, Stephen, you should really get on Goodreads!” No, I shouldn’t. I’ve decided that Goodreads is an internet contradiction: a haven for people who profess to love books but exhibit illiterate behavior. Helen Lewis wrote an article in the Atlantic this week about reviewers brigading books without reading them and exerting extraordinary power over the publishing industry in the process:
When the complaints are more numerous and more serious, it’s known as “review-bombing” or “brigading.” A Goodreads blitzkrieg can derail an entire publication schedule, freak out commercial book clubs that planned to discuss the release, or even prompt nervous publishers to cut the marketing budget for controversial titles. Last month, the Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert withdrew her upcoming novel The Snow Forest from publication because of the backlash she received after revealing it was set in Soviet Russia. The Goodreads page for The Snow Forest, which has since been taken down, accused her of romanticizing the Russian soul. “I’ll cut the job for you—they don’t have any,” wrote one reviewer. Another wrote: “Just like her characters in this nover [sic] are unaware of the events of WWII, Elizabeth Gilbert herself seems to be unaware of the genocidal war russia is conducting against Ukraine RIGHT NOW, because I’m sure if she knew, she’d realise how tone deaf this book is.”
The book had been scheduled for release next February, but in a video announcing that it was “not the time for this book to be published,” Gilbert essentially endorsed the Goodreads criticisms: “I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are all continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.”
Lewis makes two arguments that should be blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever picked up a book: 1. none of us know what’s in a book until we read it, and 2. we should create a culture where it’s a social faux pas to review a book without reading it.
Read the full article here.
Jesse Singal on suicide bating
Jesse Singal is a science journalist and podcaster and is an incredibly controversial figure for his writing on gender-affirming care. I want to put the substance of the controversy to the side in this post to focus on an article he wrote this week on Substack. I think it’s important to highlight this piece and the moral message it contains, not in spite of his controversial image, but because of it. (An aside, I’m a fan of his book The Quick Fix, which investigates fad science. It’s a good book and you should read it.)*
Singal made the mistake of tweeting recently about youth transition, expressing alarm at a documentary podcast in which a young person seemed to receive a short and shoddy assessment before receiving gender-affirming care. Tweeting anything is a mistake, especially about controversial, tender subjects that affect a minority population. I believe that using Twitter to mediate any socially significant dialogue is dangerous, and I do think that Singal has been reckless in his use of social media.
That fact, however, does not mitigate the immorality of the response to his tweet: a certain subset of people responded by telling Singal to kill himself. It wasn’t an anime-avatar nobody who kicked off the suicide bating, but a prominent and successful journalist. Singal recounts,
He wrote: “Do you ever feel the slightest twinge of self-recognition as a complete failure. Is there ever a moment that your brain sparks to life with the knowledge of your total uselessness, finally aware that there is only One Thing Left For You To Do :) ” Anyone who speaks internet knows exactly what this means. (The origin of the phrasing is a letter J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. sent to Martin Luther King Jr., trying to get him to kill himself.)
I’m pretty inured to internet madness at this point, but I’ll admit that this disturbed me. Kulwin isn’t some random internet nobody — he’s an established voice in lefty media who works for fairly well-known outlets. I thought that this was inappropriate and said so: “It’s sort of crazy to have another known figure in lefty media publicly call for me to kill myself, and there’s absolutely no pushback, no ‘This is too far,’ nothing from his ‘side.’ It’s really bad to say stuff like this because you have no idea what someone is going through.”
Of course quote-retweeting it made things worse. A large number of people started tweeting at me that yes, I should kill myself. Others expressed searing outrage that I was mad about Kulwin’s tweet given all the blood I have on my hands as a result of my having written that youth gender medicine can help some kids, but that there are holes in the research and comprehensive assessments are important.
In light of the magnitude of my crimes, the absolute least anyone could do was wish for me to end my own life, and I was being such a whiny baby by complaining about an act as self-evidently righteous as Kulwin’s.As the wave of suicide-bating crested, other journalists in Kulwin’s immediate circle began feverishly doing everything they could to prove me right: there’d be absolutely no pushback to what he had tweeted.
Regardless of what you believe about Jesse Singal, give the devil his due: it is morally reprehensible to call for his suicide. And if you say, as some online activists unironically do, that there are no bad tactics, only bad targets, then you are, simply, an immoral person. Being good to our friends is easy. Nobody gets cookies for not being abusive to someone they like. Our morality is tested on people we don't like. It is how we treat our enemies that counts.**
If you object that these are merely a minority of voices calling for suicide, you would be correct, but also missing the point. I see too few of my fellow leftists decrying unethical behavior from the minority. If they are merely a minority, then why are we so scared of them? Why are we so complacent in the face of unethical, abusive behavior from our own “side”? What we don't decry becomes normalized.
Let me put a sharper point on this: if you refuse to object to bullying behavior because it is in the service of black, trans, or gay rights, then you are engaging in racist, transphobic, and homophobic behavior. To not hold people to a universal standard of ethics is to implicitly assume their inferior status. It is to dehumanize. Any minority individual is just as prone to human corruption as the rest of us and has the same moral imperatives as the rest of us. To pretend otherwise is to act as if that person is something other than human.
Read the full piece here.
Music of the week
I’ve been binging Sleep Token’s new album Take Me Back To Eden. It’s a strange combination of pop, metal, and jazzy vocals. This is my favorite song from the album:
Obligatory cat picture
Dot being a contemplative floof.
What I’m reading this week: Deadhouse Gates by Steven Erickson
Book two of the Malazan: Book of the Fallen series. This series is an unrelenting fever dream, absurd and magnificent in its imaginative force. It’s also incredibly dense, convoluted, and long. Worth the effort if you are into that kind of thing.
That’s all for this week. Stay curious
*Because this is the internet, let me make some things very clear: I believe that trans women are women, that trans men are men, and that trans people need access to gender-affirming care. I will never deliberately misgender anyone, and I consider trans people my fellow humans. Trans people must be protected and accepted as equals in society. I’m horrified by the anti-trans rhetoric on the right and what I perceive as a rising anti-LGBT+ movement. I also believe that Jesse Singal has been unfairly maligned and that his journalism is decent. I am also open to the possibility that Jesse Singal is doing real harm to the trans community, and I’m willing to hear you out if you disagree with my assessment of Singal.
**This doesn’t mean being “nice” to them, or best friends with them, or not decrying their abuses. I spent the first half of my 20s being an activist against ex-gay therapy and succeeding in my goal of stigmatizing the practice. But it does mean treating them as humans, not bullying them, and not being cruel.
I really like this. I agree a lot, I think a lot of bullying from lefty circles goes unchallenged and is brushed aside as "punching up" or being for a good cause.
However, respectfully, I have a nitpick. The article says that if a person claims there are no bad tactics just bad targets, they are simply an immoral person.
I don’t agree that there are not bad tactics only bad targets but I think that there should be a component of action before a person is called immoral. If they are just *saying* that then I would say they are simply holding an immoral belief. But *acting* upon the belief is what makes a person immoral I think. Given how many people operate through an ends-justify-the-means mentality I’m a bit skittish calling people immoral.