wonderful! i love how much your voice comes through in your work eliza! also, the point about searching for the person who can finally end the debate is so well articulated. i’ve noticed myself fall into so many of these patterns. here’s hoping 2024 is the year we can try to kill the reactionary in our heads!
Getting off twitter has made a profound difference in the way I have conversations with people and interact with media in general. Finally being apart from the endless rabbit holes I always managed to find myself scrolling through made me realize how much emotional labor I was putting in FOR FREE! Like, no one is paying me to digest all of these takes and choose the best one! And it really wasn’t as productive as I thought. Anyways, love you diva you have such a way with words 💋 xoxo
fr bring back the fucking salon!! by far the most frustrating thing about any type of conversation online these days is that no one actually listens to each other. and tbh the reason i find it so frustrating is that it's not purely the result of human impulse to be assholes to each other sometimes; its totally manufactured by twitter itself. the programmers' goal is to keep you on the app as long as possible, and discourse does that. so the app is designed to reward this kind of behavior and basically feed our worst impulses. and i *do* think there's something poetic about that journal post. she would do numbers on tumblr they fuckin love poetry over there
I think part of it is that what is incentivized online is a combination of "righteous jutting outrage" relative to good faith discourse. I can imagine how even the long term discussions of academics do operate similarly to the internet, specifically when a person has such a batshit insane claim, all relevant figures or scholars hound around it in moralistic grandeur, falling over each other to use it as a shining example to raise their own sense of security in their own "superior/truth" ideas. In any field requiring a competition or resulting rightness of ideas, people are gonna trample on someone who tries, even sincerely and earnestly trying. While I think the internet is primed for attention screaming crying rending people limb from limb-empowered posting, clout chasing is everywhere, irrelevant of how attentive we are to it. Like birds trying to hone their beaks against rocks, I think the value to explore ideas, as stated, is useful and requires even bad takes. However, as noted, the internet, even in its longer and slower forms, is not constructed for a back and forth communication between people, but an onslaught of the audience, an endless heckling towards proposed ideas. Platforms based on metrics of response or attention will select what is most likely to GET a response to be the most visible, and with our limited time and viewing capacity, that will color our view of these online user's ideas. In all honesty, it is possible to both participate in a phenomenon (i.e. the meta-ness of journaling in a meta-aware world of content generation) and be critical of it (send tweet). To be aware of something is often to be hypocrite, to have existing on more than one side of a topic, resulting in a person better understanding it holistically. To parse out ideas, be productive, and return to a salon-esque era is to identify that fundamentally, you need the room and comfort to address both a person's hypocrisies and your own biases, both of which don't lend themselves to moral righteousness and slaying today's main character. I don't entirely think the productive slow version of discourse begins, continues, and ends comfortably, and that its value isn't in the way it makes us feel, hence why it contradicts almost all attention or reaction-based online platforms. This got way too long! Apologies!
Substack is amazing for the reasons you already outlined. I find myself bored with online discourses and love longer, intentional pieces like this. You really can't be thoughtful somewhere like Twitter.
I often find myself stumbling down these rabbit holes too. I’ll be 40 minutes into an argument and suddenly gain post-discourse-clarity where I ask myself “wait why do I care?”. I get so absorbed in the drama of people’s lives and put so much emotion into the discourse that I end up exhausted. I have to step back and wonder why I actually care about 10 year olds buying drunk elephant products from Sephora. In the end I found it so brain rotting that I deleted TikTok. We should really just return to the Greek/Roman activity of holding symposiums in order to get our daily fill of discourse.
this was wonderful read! as someone who has been using internet especially tumblr twitter discourses has always been silly to me. we need to accept that the way we use internet has drastically changed.
It's no longer just sharing textpost memes people now more than ever have started using it to express themselves and who cares if people build internet persona, it had always been common in subcultures except it's heavily online and bullying these people simply enjoying is more accessible and deemed "intelligent" among certain twitter circles.
this is a really fun, great piece - my partner calls this sort of discourse 'hot take culture' where everyone is competing to demonstrate that they have the best take, all the time, regardless of context or consequence. it turns the internet into a headache.
Seeing the “coffee lovers” account brought me to the surface again because im a fam of them HAH All these tweets seem genuine to me! I can see those tweets existing as a text from a friend(or.. well meaning but hardass aunt for the first one).
It is sad to believe someone’s words are bait, but they may be bait, so you need to be vigilant, right??
I think THAT belief keeps us from engaging honestly with people we don’t agree with. Because we don’t agree and it’s written so absolutely it must be bait.
I haven’t been able to stop assuming that all tweets are genuine for the past year or so(concussion side effect?? Idk). I’ll see a tweet like the first one and think “how sad it must be to think like that. How limited their world must be to really believe that” instead of “this is bait, this is not genuine” I’m getting at something, I have something to say about this topic, but I’m still figuring that out haha thank you for writing this essay!!! It was very thought provoking
this was such a lovely read! your point about constantly searching for winners and losers hits so hard, especially when we see how people deliberately choose their wordings on twitter; snappy comebacks, gifs, etc, its all a performance!
wonderful! i love how much your voice comes through in your work eliza! also, the point about searching for the person who can finally end the debate is so well articulated. i’ve noticed myself fall into so many of these patterns. here’s hoping 2024 is the year we can try to kill the reactionary in our heads!
when actually writing the essay to be written results in a satisfying fleshing out of ur thoughts and improved understanding
yipee :-)
Getting off twitter has made a profound difference in the way I have conversations with people and interact with media in general. Finally being apart from the endless rabbit holes I always managed to find myself scrolling through made me realize how much emotional labor I was putting in FOR FREE! Like, no one is paying me to digest all of these takes and choose the best one! And it really wasn’t as productive as I thought. Anyways, love you diva you have such a way with words 💋 xoxo
fr bring back the fucking salon!! by far the most frustrating thing about any type of conversation online these days is that no one actually listens to each other. and tbh the reason i find it so frustrating is that it's not purely the result of human impulse to be assholes to each other sometimes; its totally manufactured by twitter itself. the programmers' goal is to keep you on the app as long as possible, and discourse does that. so the app is designed to reward this kind of behavior and basically feed our worst impulses. and i *do* think there's something poetic about that journal post. she would do numbers on tumblr they fuckin love poetry over there
i consume words by eliza like a meal to the starving every time you post 🩷🩷
I think part of it is that what is incentivized online is a combination of "righteous jutting outrage" relative to good faith discourse. I can imagine how even the long term discussions of academics do operate similarly to the internet, specifically when a person has such a batshit insane claim, all relevant figures or scholars hound around it in moralistic grandeur, falling over each other to use it as a shining example to raise their own sense of security in their own "superior/truth" ideas. In any field requiring a competition or resulting rightness of ideas, people are gonna trample on someone who tries, even sincerely and earnestly trying. While I think the internet is primed for attention screaming crying rending people limb from limb-empowered posting, clout chasing is everywhere, irrelevant of how attentive we are to it. Like birds trying to hone their beaks against rocks, I think the value to explore ideas, as stated, is useful and requires even bad takes. However, as noted, the internet, even in its longer and slower forms, is not constructed for a back and forth communication between people, but an onslaught of the audience, an endless heckling towards proposed ideas. Platforms based on metrics of response or attention will select what is most likely to GET a response to be the most visible, and with our limited time and viewing capacity, that will color our view of these online user's ideas. In all honesty, it is possible to both participate in a phenomenon (i.e. the meta-ness of journaling in a meta-aware world of content generation) and be critical of it (send tweet). To be aware of something is often to be hypocrite, to have existing on more than one side of a topic, resulting in a person better understanding it holistically. To parse out ideas, be productive, and return to a salon-esque era is to identify that fundamentally, you need the room and comfort to address both a person's hypocrisies and your own biases, both of which don't lend themselves to moral righteousness and slaying today's main character. I don't entirely think the productive slow version of discourse begins, continues, and ends comfortably, and that its value isn't in the way it makes us feel, hence why it contradicts almost all attention or reaction-based online platforms. This got way too long! Apologies!
Diva incredible work once again, may have to quote you in my thesis
Substack is amazing for the reasons you already outlined. I find myself bored with online discourses and love longer, intentional pieces like this. You really can't be thoughtful somewhere like Twitter.
I often find myself stumbling down these rabbit holes too. I’ll be 40 minutes into an argument and suddenly gain post-discourse-clarity where I ask myself “wait why do I care?”. I get so absorbed in the drama of people’s lives and put so much emotion into the discourse that I end up exhausted. I have to step back and wonder why I actually care about 10 year olds buying drunk elephant products from Sephora. In the end I found it so brain rotting that I deleted TikTok. We should really just return to the Greek/Roman activity of holding symposiums in order to get our daily fill of discourse.
this was wonderful read! as someone who has been using internet especially tumblr twitter discourses has always been silly to me. we need to accept that the way we use internet has drastically changed.
It's no longer just sharing textpost memes people now more than ever have started using it to express themselves and who cares if people build internet persona, it had always been common in subcultures except it's heavily online and bullying these people simply enjoying is more accessible and deemed "intelligent" among certain twitter circles.
i know they were doing some gay shit in the salons too--bring them back!!!!
this is a really fun, great piece - my partner calls this sort of discourse 'hot take culture' where everyone is competing to demonstrate that they have the best take, all the time, regardless of context or consequence. it turns the internet into a headache.
this was DELICIOUS.
this is so funny and depressing and perfectly sums up the twitter take lifecycle. So glad to be free of that place.
Seeing the “coffee lovers” account brought me to the surface again because im a fam of them HAH All these tweets seem genuine to me! I can see those tweets existing as a text from a friend(or.. well meaning but hardass aunt for the first one).
It is sad to believe someone’s words are bait, but they may be bait, so you need to be vigilant, right??
I think THAT belief keeps us from engaging honestly with people we don’t agree with. Because we don’t agree and it’s written so absolutely it must be bait.
I haven’t been able to stop assuming that all tweets are genuine for the past year or so(concussion side effect?? Idk). I’ll see a tweet like the first one and think “how sad it must be to think like that. How limited their world must be to really believe that” instead of “this is bait, this is not genuine” I’m getting at something, I have something to say about this topic, but I’m still figuring that out haha thank you for writing this essay!!! It was very thought provoking
this was such a lovely read! your point about constantly searching for winners and losers hits so hard, especially when we see how people deliberately choose their wordings on twitter; snappy comebacks, gifs, etc, its all a performance!