Hey, it’s me, Sarah. And this is Note to Self, a newsletter where I unpack whatever’s been in my notes app, tweet drafts, or group chat lately.
Every time I open Twitter (which is often), I’m filled with anxiety. My feed is an endless procession of delirious hot takes, condescending virtue signals, bad news, garden-variety vitriol about the day's discourse, and jusssst enough jokes to keep me coming back.
I want to say, “it wasn’t always like this” and blame it on a recent failure of (ahem) leadership. But that’s not true. While it’s gotten worse, anger came home to roost on Twitter a long time ago; famously, it’s found home on every social media platform. Each day, people log on to their app of choice seemingly for the express purpose of getting angry.
Several months ago, a woman tweeted about how she starts every morning by having coffee and catching up with her husband in their garden. There isn’t even an opinion in the tweet, it reads more like an entry into a gratitude journal.
Nonetheless, it went viral as people clamored to put this woman in her place. Strangers speculated that she must have rich parents, that she must not have to work, and that she must not have any other responsibilities in her life in order to enjoy the luxury of daily time with her spouse. I call this the, “Must be nice” genre of internet anger. Hallmarks of the genre are bad-faith interpretations of clearly malice-free comments, willful misunderstanding, and trauma dumping in the replies as an attempt to shame the original poster for not being “considerate.”
Then, there’s the “Actually…” genre of internet outrage. This genre is, at its core, one-upmanship, wherein people claim progressive ideologies to make increasingly obscure arguments that fall apart with basic logic or even an ounce of nuance. These are the so-called “terminally online” takes — for example, a tweet that said liking “himbos” is predatory because of the power dynamic. Last week on Twitter, someone said that sex scenes in movies are nonconsensual … for the audience! There was a spreadsheet of problematic authors circulating which included William Shakespeare for “misogynistic principles enforced in books” (more on that here). Each of these angry, nonsensical takes inspires an even bigger backlash of anger, and sometimes a backlash to the backlash, and on and on forever.
A cousin of the “Acutally…” genre, alike in indignity, is the Social Citizen’s Arrest. This one is all about pile-on vigilantism in drastic disproportion to the original event. That’s a subjective line, but for the purpose of this conversation, I’m talking about people who’ve committed social blunders, not hate or bigotry. Remember West Elm Caleb? Who could forget? He went viral on TikTok and then everywhere after a few women publicized details of his identity in retaliation for casually dating and ghosting more than one woman in New York City. Inconsiderate, perhaps womanizing behavior from a 25-year-old man did not shock me, personally, but it touched a nerve on the internet. The comments spun into a harassment campaign, with people calling for his job and spamming his employer’s (West Elm) Instagram account. Feels a bit much, no?
Like the “Actually…” genre of tweets, the people who contribute to these pile-ons claim to be doing it for some higher good. The women who helped “break” the West Elm Caleb “story” said they did it to protect other women. Whether they achieved that is another question, but it’s clear from the tone of their original videos that it also felt good to vent their dating indignities and start a viral conversation (over-the-top ending aside).
With each of these events, opportunities for anger multiply as the discourse ripples to the edges of the internet and then back. Each wave brings a new POV on the issue until everyone finds their place in the conversation, even if it’s one of annoyed disinterest.
And then what? What becomes of all this outrage? From petty unkindness and passive aggression to genuinely hateful behavior, we live in an attention economy. Viewership, engagement, following — all of it makes people money. Some of the West Elm Caleb women are influencers with brand deals. The news outlets that pick up these viral events collect their clicks and ad views. We’re all familiar with how clickbait works at this point. On these apps, as well as on the news, outrage is what gets and holds people’s attention. Outrage is rewarded.
But not all outrage is created equal. The world is full of righteous anger — it’s the fire that fuels the most critical justice movements of our time. Anger can start important conversations and kick off movements. It can be a transformative power for good, and it’s vital that people have microphones like social media to share it.
But all other examples I gave here today? While they touch on important issues — privilege, sex, relationship politics — the locus of the outrage is beside the point proper. There’s so much in the world to be angry about, and yet we’re invoking these worthy topics just to argue over the silliest shit. As if that helps. As if anger equates to activism.
I think that getting angry about stupid stuff online helps us understand our place in the moral and intellectual order of the world. If you can look down on someone, if you can be angry or disgusted with their opinions (as I have been for several paragraphs of this newsletter), then you know where you stand, even for non-issues like a woman who has coffee with her husband. You can lend your anger to the discourse of the day, carve out your own unique little high ground, and collect approving marks for your cleverness. Everybody wants to be validated by the echo-chamber chorus of their own algorithm. Is this a meaningful metric for our net good in society? Of course not. But it is a very human one, I think.
It would be easy to suggest that social media has corrupted our humanity; that it has led us astray. But I think our reaction to social media and everything it has become is, well, so us. We act out for attention. We are critical and unkind because it makes us feel in control. We condense nuanced issues into draconian binaries because we cannot fathom that we are complicated; that we each have the capacity for good and bad. Our desire for connection is as intense as our fear of rejection. I think that’s the most human thing of all. Kind of sad, actually.
“Touch grass,” is the common internet pejorative for people who’ve lost the plot online. It’s an insult and a distantly genuine plea to step away from the keyboard. Perhaps we should reclaim “touch grass” as a kind sentiment instead of a derogatory one. Something to acknowledge that we all get a little lost; a way to gently remind one another that we have the autonomy to behave differently. It could be a well-wish, even.
Touch grass,
Sarah