there's a big conversation to be had, beyond the scope of this thread, about how to redesign social media so that it does not encourage demon summoning quite so hard, but in the meantime what we all personally can do is strive to be kinder online (12/n)
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using twitter in a way that is focused on kindness means actively fighting twitter's tendency to pull you towards hatred; this is part of what i read into 's description of being Very Online as an "extreme sport" (13/n)
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the trick to being Extremely Online in a way that doesn't involve turning into a shell script is... you have to learn to surf the chaos of other people
it is said that hell is other people; there is a truth to that
what I do is a form of hell-surfing
it's an extreme sport
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a big part of how i try to be on twitter is
1) i try not to start conversations i think will produce triggering dynamics, and
2) if i somehow end up in one and get triggered, i try to name that i'm triggered and pause or leave the conversation to work through it (14/n)
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the point of naming that i'm triggered is to remove my own plausible deniability. most people just "tweet through it" and there's a name for that for a reason. your reasoning becomes extremely untrustworthy, everything becomes about proving you were right at all costs (15/n)
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a funny meta-note i kinda have to add to this is that the word "trigger" has itself become charged and politicized
i think the way this happened is that people weaponized "X triggered me, therefore X is bad"
this is the opposite of what i'm saying (16/n)
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my experience has consistently been that "X triggered me" is much more about me than it is about X, and that focusing on the me part of that interaction is much better for my sanity than blaming X for making me feel bad, which just never ever ever ever works (17/n)
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How do you feel about intentionally triggering "for the lolz"? How do we talk about that kind of malice and disrespect? I should not need a suit of armor to tolerate hate, I think you'd agree.
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I do take your point that it's a valuable skill to recognize "feelings happen" and we can regard them and decide what they mean, other than the intuitive reactionary response.
But it's asking a lot of the recipient, and not everyone can get there.
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I have a friend who is like this with me, and it felt like I was a parched plant finally being watered.
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