Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
1/ Over the past few weeks I've been thinking more about "public persona" - how careful should I be with it? How filtered? When the bestiality tweet went viral, literally thousands of people assumed I'm a dog fucker instead of realizing I'm a researcher who asks weird questions.
33
325
Aella
@Aella_Girl
2/this is a bit scary, cause the thing I have to be afraid of isn't truth, it's weaponized narratives carried by people who don't like me and don't care about my actual opinions. The question then becomes, how much should I filter my speech to avoid handing weapons to the enemy?
10
182
Aella
@Aella_Girl
3/And of course I'm not discounting the practical use of self censorship to avoid stuff like having five thousand people call you a dog fucker, but it does go against a lot of what I value. I want to be uncensored, I want to be as vulnerable as possible as publicly as possible.
3
112
Aella
@Aella_Girl
4/I want to be a shameless human who freely offers up the weapons other people can use to throw at me, because that's their choice and not mine. My choice is just to demonstrate the lack of self judgement that I generally feel, and by implication lack of judgement for all
3
116
Aella
@Aella_Girl
5/those people and beliefs around me too (I'm still working on astrology pls give that one time). I feel generally capable of being eviscerated, so I want to allow myself to be eviscerated. It's just the internet doing what the internet does.
2
75
Peter Wang
@pwang
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
The whole mechanic of “being open & vulnerable to test reciprocal openness and vulnerability” is the best (really, only) way to build genuine human trust. It can work in the right small groups. It DEFINITELY does not scale to the mass noise amplification system of Twitter.
1
1
Peter Wang
@pwang
Replying to
@pwang
and
@Aella_Girl
You are just putting your vulnerability out there, and it’s fuel for others to shape or weaponize or exploit for their own personal social currency. Think of it as creating a tiny horcrux of yourself, but not dark magic: a hopeful shard of future-self, a posi-crux.
1
Show replies
Dr. Poop Muscles, PhD
@Space_Boy_Ben
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
I barely share anything meaningful anymore because this kind of space can be so exhausting; I can't even imagine it with your kind of reach. Also it's equally full of people who are apathetic or aren't present in a particularly honest/ meaningful way. So I shut down sometime ago
iorena
@limitoftruth
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
I think this is the essence of the culture war: we can bully each other into conformity or we can keep being painfully real and weird and eventually learn to live with our differences. I know what side I'm fighting on.
Sam Spycher
@sam_spycher
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Most censorship is self-censorship. We can't eliminate censorship, because we can't eliminate fear. As a society, we do get to influence what is censored. Tolerating viciousness on the web damages free speech more than it promotes it, because it generates so much fear.
1
🇨🇦 Jeremy 🇨🇦
@GreetsUwithFire
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
I 💯 believe you’d be one of the most interesting ppl to have a long, deep, open- free of judgement - full of curiosity and fascination - type of conversations with. Keep on keeping on, Aella.
1
SeparateSight
@separatesight
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Even individuals who are careful not to express certain thoughts/questions have trouble keeping their minds free, because of the danger of revealing themselves in unguarded moments. That leads to a deeper form of self-censorship, in which some ideas won't even occur to them.