One of the challenges I find on Twitter is that the platform collapses speech and action, conversation and pronouncement, to a single indistinguishable form. It favors certainty, because uncertainty (or unwillingness to jump to certainty) is generally silent.
This compounds when individuals or groups in different places on those spectrums cross paths; the problems are further multiplied when bad-faith actors exploit the posture of uncertainty as a means of DDOSing those they certainly disagree with.
I’ve been on every side of that particular dynamic at different times on different issues. Hopefully this rumination is taken not as “eaton is subtweet-scolding people,” but "as “eaton is contemplating how difficult this place can be.”
Often, I see people criticize “twitter discourse” as poisonous or toxic because it’s short, or because of favorites and virality, but I’ve seen similar dynamics emerge in otherwise chill face-to-face communities when stakes were high.
That “stakes are high” quality is one of the reasons I have a profound distaste for the ~rationalist pose~ of being dispassionate and clinical about everything. It’s rarely true — often it simply means “this topic is an intellectual puzzle with no consequences for me.”
It’s relatively easy to be dispassionate about something that does not affect me, that I believe in my heart will never effect me. That doesn’t mean my thoughts on the matter are more likely to be correct than the folks with skin in the game.
Often, my dispassionate distance from an issue brings with it profound ignorance of the issue’s real complexity, unfamiliarity with the hard-won lessons others have already learned, the blithe conviction that my tidy mental models solve long-intractable problems.
Over the years I’ve found that this particular dynamic can be a hard one for those of us who spent significant time in authoritarian subcultures and systems. Learning to hold one’s conviction — sometimes for no good reason beyond refusal to be cowed — became a survival trait.
A cussed refusal to relinquish any earnest conviction, any earnest doubt, even any ~entertained possibility~, without a bloody and protracted battle, became in that context a way of maintaining a coherent self.
Removed from that context, though, the survival trait quickly becomes pathology. It’s a slow process of learning that ~I~ am not erased if I loosen my grasp on an idea, of mapping new contours for “humility” and “conviction” and “determination” and “compassion.”
Learning — or trying to learn — how to fight the things I believe are genuinely evil and dangerous, and also live alongside people who draw those lines in different places.
To remember that others are hearing similar echoes and as they navigate this space, too.