Thriving on Hate
Long-ago colleague Adam Platt recently posted this to his X feed:
Folks should be on whatever social media they want, including Adam, but his post was prompted by other people doing what they want — moving to the rival service Bluesky — and enjoying it.
Our coming period of hyper-dehumanization will be horrifying, but the psychic costs of wet blankethood pushed Adam the same direction, reducing “interesting people” to “lemmings” in the next sentence. Eventually, the lemmings are as culpable as fascists.
Adam’s thinking follows a hundred other soggy opinion writers who spend less time fighting fascists than encouraging people to lash themselves to them.
I quit X in January and it wasn’t easy. I had 26,000 followers there, good for steady dopamine hits, especially since writing 280 characters was less psychologically taxing than the columns and features I wrote for 35 years.
Fun … until it wasn’t. Twitter’s dopey Jack Dorsey gave way to a vengeful Elon Musk, who in the name of free speech banned the word “cisgender” because his trans daughter disowned him. Musk transferred the “blue check,” haphazardly given to journalists and other figures who needed identity verification (I photocopied my drivers license), to folks who paid for them. As advertisers fled, Musk put his check-bellied Sneetches at the top of replies, meaning that you had to wade through a sea of MAGA chirpers before getting to the folks you actually cared about.
Someone paid for Adam’s X, so perhaps he didn’t see the metastasizing ads for erectile dysfunction, blatant scams, or Trump-friendly disinformation. After millions blocked Musk on his own service, he let blocked users see posts of those who blocked them, savagely undercutting anyone who had been cyber-stalked, or just wanted a bit of relief from networked abuse.
When you see yourself in the “reasonable middle,” you may not realize your triangulation pulls you toward equating abusers and their victims. And that your desire for “genuine dialogue” masks an adrenaline addiction to a fight-or-flight environment. Whether you can admit it or not — it took me many months to realize this about myself — you’re thriving on hate.
Pat Reusse, god bless him, was honest about this, when someone asked him about joining Bluesky:
While I can still be an asshole online — it was baked into my personality long before the internet came along — I’ve found Bluesky a balm. Early users fought for superior blocking tools, and in these salad days, there are no ads. It’s not quite true that there’s “no algorithm,” but the loudest Trump fan on earth isn’t pushing alien content into your feed; it’s all people you chose to follow. You can mute various keywords and hashtags, with tons of homegrown filters to curate what you see.
Is this the “echo chamber” or “safe space” that drives op-ed columnists and X rage farmers nuts? You can make it that. But if you look deeper than Adam — who has apparently not looked at all — people are goddamn delighted to re-encounter their online friends.
In the Trump era, mutual support will be vital — a community of friends and allies who protect each other. I made real-life friends on Twitter, and nurturing and expanding that community on Bluesky has been a blessing in bleak times.
One of the op-ed crowd’s most fatuous notions is Bluesky users will miss “disagreeable views” and “dissenting opinions” — as if those views aren’t thick in the air, elevated by the clickbait-addicted web and mainstream outlets eager to sanewash fascism in the name of “balance.” When living in Mordor, you shouldn’t blame people for seeking a bit of The Shire.
Thanks to X abandoners, I’m starting to build another solid following. As new folks flood in, there are more who don’t swallow my bilge — and I’m finding the disagreements thoughtful. Part of it is me: I learned from Twitter not to always hit “reply,” especially if I’m mad at who I’m replying to. Part of it is folks detoxifying from a place optimized for poison.
One encouraging Bluesky folkway is disdaining the “dunk” — highlighting an outrageous post to make fun of it. All this did on Twitter, and especially X, was give the biggest jerks what they want: attention. Not every Bluesky user resists — I’m trying! — but the tools and culture buttress painful lessons learned.
I even see people disdaining users on “their team” who milk outrage, like many of the “resistance” accounts, or Twitter lefty mega-influencers offering condemnation, not solutions.
There’s certainly nothing stopping right-wingers from joining, and many are. But they’re not getting elevated in “What’s Happening,” and Bluesky’s so-called “nuclear block” makes blanks of their “shots fired.”
I’m not kidding myself that Bluesky will remain a great place — money always finds a way in. Although organized as a Public Benefit Corporation, with revenue plans that sound reasonable, Bluesky is still a corporation, as good as leaders and the money let it be.
Maybe we’ll only get away with it for a little while longer, but in these scary days, isn’t it fun to get away with anything at all? At the very least, don’t be the sort of person who sees an exodus and thinks, “It is not I, it is the interesting people who are wrong.”