💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 4-08.gmi captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:55:29. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-05-26)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
njms: Why I Don't Write Callouts
Nat's gemlog on callouts is a good post on a complicated subject. It's something I hadn't given much thought to til recently because, prior to social media, my own spaces and communities were small enough, tight enough, that we knew who the jerks and trolls and such were. On a particular development forum I frequented in the mid 2010s, there was a poster who was a notorious jerk. People were "idiots", ideas were "stupid"; you know the sort, the kind of person who exists online in a particularly poisonous kind of way, expecting, if not to get their way, to at least be left to do their thing.
In my particular case, the poster was eventually banned from the forums, though this came a good fifteen years since he'd started pulling his schtick on Usenet (some people are, if nothing else, persistent). And to be honest, it really only came after shifting attitudes about the amount of rope people should be given online. In the past, it was a bit laissez-faire. You were expected to have a tough skin, and people finally started to realize that these kinds of attitudes were driving people away from online communities, even keeping them from ever starting to participate. In this sense, that user's ban (and likewise for thousands of similar types across the net) was long overdue.
But that's a moderation action taken after behind-the-scenes discussion on what's admittedly a pretty small-fry forum. On social media, these things have much more impact - not just on reputation, but on people themselves.
A few years ago, a developer I knew in the same city had his name put on blast on Twitter. Problematic. Whispers became yelling. It left containment (as we used to say on Twitter), hit Reddit, news sites, you name it. In that sense, it was over. Who can recover from something like that? The draggings intensified. And within a week, he was dead by his own hand.
I didn't know him well, just through social media and a local Slack instance, even though we lived in the same area. He was not a good man; but he was not evil, either. He was complicated, hurt some people badly, loved others fiercely. He existed with a kind of nuance that social media, particularly in the arts, tries to banish. You're righteous, or you're a monster; _I'm not going to buy books by problematic writers_ ; and so on.
Since then, I've thought a lot about the death laser that is social media, the way you can exist in a little bubble for years, even decades, without anyone really caring about you, until they do. And when they do, it's overwhelming. People stop following you. People you thought were friends block you. Your phone will never stop buzzing. Google + your name is nothing but shame.
I've felt, in the past, though decades ago now, such intense shame that it brought on a psychotic break. A decade before social media I felt so trapped by it, so suffocated, that it felt like there was only one option left to me, if you catch my drift. Thankfully, I was snapped back to reality. I'm still here. But for what felt like daily for much of a year, and then sporadically afterward, I was shamed again and again and again. Kids are awful. Teenagers doubly so. And yet thinking back on it, I was fortunate, really blessed, that I got to go through all that before the internet became an effective bullying mechanism. I can't imagine what it'd be like if I couldn't escape. Before the 2000s there was this sharp delineation between online and irl. That distinction seems to be long gone.
I try not to call people out, but I'm not perfect. I try not to call people out because people are complicated, and it's rare that someone is the simple monster that exists in our mind. None of us are saintly, not really. Many of us are flawed, sometimes to a startling degree. And nobody knows how, really knows how, to deal with unrelenting shame delivered with crushing and unending pressure.
Some people can take it. People are, in many ways, pretty resilient. But not everyone can. And, years ago now, one of my acquaintances killed himself rather than live in excruciating shame.
I wish I'd known him better. He'd invited me to a local launch for his big project. I made excuses, as I'm wont to do. I wish I hadn't. In the aftermath, all the things we could have said or done, and didn't, are magnified. I could have been better to him. I should have done more.