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Millicentsomer's profile
Lili Loofbourow
Lili Loofbourow
Lili Loofbourow
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@Millicentsomer

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Lili LoofbourowVerified account

@Millicentsomer

writer. @Slate.

Oakland
lililoofbourow.com
Joined January 2010

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    Lili Loofbourow‏Verified account @Millicentsomer 9 Jul 2020

    I get the longing--I even share it--but the naivete is annoying. Online pundits should know (and factor in) that social media as a "public square" where "good faith debate" happens is a thing of the past. Disagreement here happens through trolling, sea-lioning, ratios, dunks.

    7:25 PM - 9 Jul 2020
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    • Luke Otwell Caity Sergey Mohov resident qinghe nie auntie Осторожно, Жюль Верн! Dan Paddy Andy Max Power Chris Moreland かず太郎
    153 replies 3,307 retweets 12,412 likes
      1. New conversation
      2. Lili Loofbourow‏Verified account @Millicentsomer 9 Jul 2020

        Bad faith is the condition of the modern internet, and shitposting is the lingua franca of the online world. And not just online: A troll is president. Trolling won. Perhaps we can agree that these platforms aren't suited to the earnest exchange of big ideas.

        25 replies 855 retweets 4,557 likes
        Show this thread
      3. Lili Loofbourow‏Verified account @Millicentsomer 9 Jul 2020

        Of course that's frustrating, especially to those who wish to debate things like abortion. But there's a history here: platforms got flooded by devil's advocates who wasted the time of people with real investments--cruelly, for sport. That tends to weed out good faith engagement.

        8 replies 210 retweets 2,382 likes
        Show this thread
      4. Lili Loofbourow‏Verified account @Millicentsomer 9 Jul 2020

        Add to this that most arguments worth having have been had and witnessed 1000x already on these platforms, in several permutations. We know their tired choreographies, the moves and countermoves. At this point we mostly enjoy the style of whichever dunk we happen to agree with.

        4 replies 199 retweets 2,365 likes
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      5. Lili Loofbourow‏Verified account @Millicentsomer 9 Jul 2020

        Does that lead to paranoid readings and meta-debates that seem totally batshit to onlookers who aren't internet-poisoned? Yup! "All Lives Matter" sounds perfectly reasonable--as a text--unless you know the history of that discourse. (And you'll sound pretty weird explaining it.)

        8 replies 152 retweets 2,037 likes
        Show this thread
      6. Lili Loofbourow‏Verified account @Millicentsomer 9 Jul 2020

        "Why would you refuse to debate someone who's simply saying that All Lives Matter?" is the kind of question an Enlightenment subject longing for a robust exchange of ideas might ask. Well, the reason is that most of us know, through bitter experience, that it's a waste of time.

        7 replies 356 retweets 2,760 likes
        Show this thread
      7. Lili Loofbourow‏Verified account @Millicentsomer 9 Jul 2020

        It wouldn't be a true exchange. We know by now what "All Lives Matter" signals and that what it signals is orthogonal to what it says. Your fluency in this garbage means you take shortcuts: you don't have to refute the text to leap to the subtext, which is the real issue.

        6 replies 266 retweets 2,628 likes
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      8. Lili Loofbourow‏Verified account @Millicentsomer 9 Jul 2020

        To outsiders, that leap will look nuts. That's obviously what all the coded Nazi shit is for and about--the 14 words, the numbers, the OK hand sign that both is and isn't a white power sign, the Boogaloo junk. They're all ways to divorce surface meaning from intentional subtext.

        10 replies 297 retweets 2,550 likes
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      9. Lili Loofbourow‏Verified account @Millicentsomer 9 Jul 2020

        Yes, this is bad for discourse! Yes, it inhibits intellectual exchange! Yes, it makes productive dissensus almost impossible. But that's not because of "cancel culture" or "illiberalism." It's because in this discourse environment, good faith engagement is actually maladaptive.

        11 replies 379 retweets 3,077 likes
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      10. Lili Loofbourow‏Verified account @Millicentsomer 9 Jul 2020

        It's possible and likely that knowledge gaps between people who are online too much and folks who aren't are making things worse. If Atwood (or whoever) isn't online much, she might be shocked to see people accuse a nice-looking boy in a Hawaiian shirt of wanting a 2nd civil war.

        6 replies 156 retweets 1,841 likes
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      11. Lili Loofbourow‏Verified account @Millicentsomer 9 Jul 2020

        It might indeed look like cancel culture gone mad. He's just standing there! Civilly! Offering support to Black Lives Matter protesters, of all things! Can't we all, whatever our disagreements, come together in support of a good cause?

        3 replies 72 retweets 1,241 likes
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      12. Lili Loofbourow‏Verified account @Millicentsomer 9 Jul 2020

        It's *also* possible that people who've learned to read *through* stuff (to whatever bummer of a subtext we're used to finding there) sometimes overdo it. Some of us might reflexively ignore the actual text--fast-forwarding to the shitty point we "know" is coming even if it isn't

        7 replies 109 retweets 1,795 likes
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      13. Lili Loofbourow‏Verified account @Millicentsomer 9 Jul 2020

        "Free speech defender," for ex, will mean something different to an idealist than it will to someone who watched reddit hordes viciously defend revenge porn and sites like r/beatingwomen, r/creepshots, and r/Jewmerica while people whose pictures got posted there begged for help.

        2 replies 209 retweets 1,949 likes
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      14. Lili Loofbourow‏Verified account @Millicentsomer 9 Jul 2020

        Free speech! they were told. Anyway. Sure, good-faith debate would be nice. Instead, the internet pressure-cooked rhetoric. Again: people can watch the same argument be conducted a million times in slightly different ways, and that's interesting, and a blessing, and a curse

        2 replies 105 retweets 1,565 likes
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      15. Lili Loofbourow‏Verified account @Millicentsomer 9 Jul 2020

        It produced a kind of argumentative hyperliteracy. If you can predict every step of a controversy (including the backlash), it makes perfect sense to meta-argue instead--over what X *really* means, or implies, or what, down a road we know well, it confirms.

        8 replies 165 retweets 1,872 likes
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      16. Lili Loofbourow‏Verified account @Millicentsomer 9 Jul 2020

        This isn't great. People talk past each other, assume bad faith. But it's not the fault of "illiberalism" that good faith is in short supply. And if that's where your analysis begins, I can't actually tell whether you're naive or trolling. And I'm no longer sure which is worse.

        77 replies 359 retweets 3,301 likes
        Show this thread
      17. End of conversation

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