slacktivism – I'm Not Doctor Who

I poked my head on to Twitter earlier — not to participate or engage, because I think I’ve well and truly broken my former addiction to it, but instead simply to share the article on Ys that I spent all day writing.

Literally immediately — and yes, I do mean literally — I saw someone indulging in one of the reasons I stopped wanting to use Twitter in the first place: pointless, unnecessary handwringing and guilt over things that were nothing to do with them.

The person in question, whom I had previously thought to be a fairly level-headed, rational sort of individual, went on an 8-tweet tirade about how awful the 4th of July was and how Americans enjoying and celebrating what has become nothing more than a holiday — regardless of its history — was somehow racist.

I closed the tab straight after I shared the link to my work, because frankly I don’t have time for that shit.

One might argue that it’s a good thing the Internet has supposedly made us all more socially responsible and aware of all the terrible things in the world — and perhaps it is. However, one thing the Internet very rarely does is actually do anything about these terrible things in the world. Whether it’s people changing their Facebook avatars to “raise awareness” for a charity (I think they’d rather have your bank details, thanks), someone painting their nails in protest against the amorphous concept of “toxic masculinity” or flaccid “protests” against whatever the issue du jour is, Internet activism achieves absolutely nothing whatsoever.

Actually, no, that’s not true — it does achieve something. But it’s not anything good.

The only thing Internet activism achieves is to drive wedges between people — alienating people from one another, and drawing very, very clear battle lines that you can only ever be on one side or the other of. Us and them. The “right side of history” and its respective “wrong side”. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. That sort of thing.

The inherently divisive nature of self-proclaimed activists’ behaviour online has had an overall enormously negative impact on online discourse as a whole. As I noted in my post where I decided to set Twitter aside, people who believe strongly in things (or at least consider themselves to believe strongly in things) have a tendency to take an “I’m right, you’re wrong” approach with no middle ground. And this is true for everyone who holds strong opinions on one thing or another, whether it’s “censorship” in games, the supposed epidemic of “misogyny” that the Internet is suffering, or who they think should win the Presidential election.

The general unwillingness to take other people’s perspectives into account has ruined all sense of rational discourse on social media. Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration, but it’s certainly soured the experience for me; social media of all types (with the exception of this blog, if that counts, which I don’t really feel it does) had just stopped being fun, and seeing that string of tweets today the moment I opened the Twitter page drove it home for me. There was a stark contrast between this and the private conversation I was having with my friend Chris at the time, whereby we disagreed on our opinions regarding the video game Limbo — he liked it, I hated it — and somehow, magically, managed to do so without feeling the need to convince the other person that they were wrong. We simply enjoy different things, and talking about those things you don’t have in common as much as the things you do makes for some of the most interesting conversations.

You can enjoy your life, or you can spend your time getting pointlessly angry about things and people on the Internet. I’ve got games to play and things to write, so I know which one I choose.

Today has been one of those days where I’ve been considering jacking Twitter in altogether. What was once a friendly, fun, enjoyable place to hang out — and a place where I’ve been able to make a lot of friends I otherwise would never have come into contact with — is rapidly becoming an echo chamber filled with people that I don’t particularly want to associate with. It’s becoming somewhere where I don’t feel particularly welcome.

I shan’t get into details as the latest spate of Twitter outrage is plastered all over the Internet and really doesn’t need any more publicity, but I will say that, as usual, both sides of the argument in question are acting like complete tools. There’s the aggressive, unpleasant, filthy undercurrent of the Internet supposedly harassing people for their beliefs and supposed transgressions, and on the other side, the people defending themselves and their friends often stoop to personal insults, hypocrisy and outright ranting. Anyone left in the middle, wanting to take a rational viewpoint on the whole thing, is left branded as an awful person regardless of how much sense they’re actually speaking — if you don’t stand on the side of the group that has painted themselves as the “good guys” then you’re worthless human garbage, no better than those that are supposedly sending “death threats”. (And don’t even get me started on the semantics of how that term is liberally misapplied.)

At the core of this never-ending parade of outrage, argument and public shaming is a group of people who claim to believe in “social justice”. Who wouldn’t want to stand up for social justice, right? The trouble is that the term “social justice warrior” has picked up severely negative connotations owing to the behaviour of some of these people supposedly fighting on the side of equality, freedom, all that good stuff. Which is daft, when you think about it — as previously noted, who would say they were against social justice?

And yet the criticisms of many of these “social justice warriors” and the way they go about their business are often valid. They use aggression, harassment, sweeping generalisations, public shaming — many (though, it must be said, not all) of the tactics they are quick to condemn the seedy underbelly of the Internet for — to get what they want. Disagree with the way they do things and you’re “tone policing”. Disagree with some of things they are saying and you are a misogynist, sexist, transphobic, terrible person who should be hounded until the end of time until you apologise, and then hounded further when you are forced into an apology because it somehow wasn’t good enough. The people involved make this group huge, influential — and quite often in possession of a really quite unpleasant mob mentality.

I’m utterly sick of it. I don’t care. It sets me on edge. It makes me anxious. I’m nervous about even posting this in case one of these armchair activists gets hold of it and decides to twist my words into something that doesn’t even resemble what I originally said — as happened to YouTube personality “TotalBiscuit” earlier today.

This surely isn’t what these people want. This surely isn’t a good way to go about raising awareness of social issues. Certain quarters of Twitter now scare me and make me feel like I can’t talk about certain things for fear of reprisals — from the side that paints themselves as the forces of Good. I’ve done my best to ignore, unfollow and even block the people who are most unpleasant about all this, but it’s still not the friendly, welcoming place to hang out that it once was. And that really, really sucks.

I’ve culled my Following list by a hundred people this evening. If that doesn’t filter out this never-ending, anxiety-inducing noise, I’m setting my account to private. If that doesn’t work, then it’s time to say goodbye to Twitter — for good this time. I wouldn’t be the first from among my group of friends to do so — for these exact reasons — and I probably won’t be the last.