The Stick Theory of Internet Debate

[writerkit]

So I found an essay called "Losing Friends to Twitter Brain?" and you should all go read it. I think it's a valuable way of defining your internet discussions. Because there's a certain brand of leftism that's very "OH YOU MUST FLOG YOURSELF" and it's very common in internet discussions. It's also not at all useful for any sort of practical anything. Essentially, the premise here is that you should not discuss on the internet anything that's not in concrete reality-- "anything you cannot poke with a stick." It notes that this doesn't prohibit political discourse. You can poke a letter writing campaign with a stick, after all. But it does force you to stop playing Oppression Olympics and the "You must perform marginalization to be allowed to have an opinion" game.

Incidentally, there's also something I found on Tumblr that I really appreciate which seems relevant here: "If your solution to some problem relies on 'If everyone would just…' then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At no time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now."

It's one of the largest sources of "things you cannot poke with a stick." And I know this, because I used to try to get the anarchists and communists in my social circle to bring it down to stickness-- ie, elucidate for me how you were going to get from here to there, and what steps are you going to take to make sure it doesn't turn into the USSR. When I didn't get accused of being a bourgeois or lectured about how the USSR was just fine until America ruined it, the explanation always had some sort of "everyone just" in there, and any suggestion that everyone will not just was taken as a sign I was a tool of the capitalists.

(Or as I put it more succinctly a while ago: "If your revolution does not have a date, time, and budget attached to it, it's not a revolution," though this was a lot more entertaining when nobody had done that and I was just rolling my eyes at the "NO gradual change; ONLY socialist revolution" Tumblr children.)

Comments

[squirrelitude]

Oooh, thank you for that link. I like it, I will steal it.

Thankfully, I am mostly insulated from people who are on Twitter Brain; almost none of my Dreamwidth acquaintances engage that way, and I mostly just see it on Mastodon. (Mastodon copied the design of Twitter, so it has... the same problems! Surprise!) I've pretty much just muted all the people I see doing that, though, and that makes it tolerable.

EDIT: Meaning, I'm fine with continuing to do political discussion; I basically just avoid people and places that do this stuff, and I guess I don't really interact with very many people I know on the places that are the worst for Twitter Brain.

[elusiveat]

I'm having a hard time knowing how to respond to this because I can't tell whether you're trying to challenge Oppression Olympics culture, or if you're trying to challenge eutopianism. Because I think eutopianism is extremely important and furthermore, in my own experience, it is almost always the Oppression Olympics people who try to shove a sock into any kind of open flowing conversation in which ideas as tossed back and forth about what could be under the right political circumstances.