In Praise of Facebook's New 'Like' Button

At the Daily Dot, I wrote about Facebook Reactions.

When rumors spread online last month that Facebook was going to add a “Dislike” button, the Internet reacted with a great deal of, well, dislike. Although CEO Mark Zuckerberg clarified that he didn’t intend to suggest that the platform was instituting its own form of Reddit downvoting, nobody understood what he was really planning until Reactions was revealed last week. The site’s new version of the ”Like” button includes six additional emotions: “Love,” “Haha,” “Yay,” “Wow,” “Sad,” and “Angry.” When users click to “Like” a post, they will be able to choose one of these options, including the iconic thumbs up to which we’re all accustomed.

In a Facebook post from last week, Zuckerberg explained the rationale behind the change:

Not every moment is a good moment, and sometimes you just want a way to express empathy. These are important moments where you need the power to share more than ever, and a Like might not be the best way to express yourself. … Reactions gives you new ways to express love, awe, humor, and sadness. It’s not a dislike button, but it does give you the power to easily express sorrow and empathy—in addition to delight and warmth.

It’s great to see Zuckerberg finally acknowledging the many ways in which people use Facebook. When he used the platform back in August to speak publicly about the three miscarriages he and his wife experienced, it appears he understood the power of Facebook to share news and stories that aren’t exactly likable.

Reactions makes sense as a next step—both for Mark Zuckerberg and his company. While some might dismiss Reactions as silly or weird, I predict that it will help people communicate with each other in ways that feel more intuitive and that end in less awkwardness. Think about it: When someone says something funny, we don’t say “LOL” or “that’s funny.” We laugh. When you share a devastating loss with a friend in person, you might be comforted by the obvious concern and sympathy on their face.

Facebook can’t perfectly mimic the experience of laughing with a roomful of friends or having someone there with you when you hear terrible news (at least, not yet), but it can help people express the emotions they actually mean to express, which can be difficult online. A thoughtless “Like” on a sad post can be read as insensitive or flippant, but there’s not always anything to say in a comment about it, either—nor would a whole thread of “wow that sucks” make you feel any better.

Friends often tell me that they struggle with figuring out how to respond to posts that share serious problems or frustrations. Often they end up saying nothing at all, and clicking a thumbs up icon doesn’t feel like an appropriate substitute. Instead of leaving an empty space when users are grieving or feeling blue, Reactions might help people support friends and let them know that they are heard and that their pain is acknowledged. Sharing a sad post would feel less like screaming into an online void and more like talking to a group of friends.

Read the rest here.

In Praise of Facebook's New 'Like' Button
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Why Peeple Won't Save Us From Jerks

I wrote about Peeple again for the Daily Dot, but from a slightly different angle than my other piece.

Peeple, a new app for rating people like as if they were restaurants on Yelp, hasprovoked so much criticism and anger online that its creators, Julia Cordray and Nicole McCullough, have shut down their Twitter and Facebook pages. The app, which is flawed in more ways than it isn’t, is still supposed to be released in November—even despite the death threats that the creators have reportedly received.

I wish I could say that I’m stating the obvious, but sending McCullough and Cordray death threats is not OK. It’s never OK. And although some are gloating over the fact that getting harassed might teach them what the Internet is really like, I still wish that were a lesson they could’ve avoided.

One potential upside is that the app may be getting some changes. Although the creators are making bold statements like “We will not be shamed into submission,” it seems they may have listened to their critics at least a little and made the app opt-in. However, this was not framed as a change. The creators never said that they were responding to criticism and updating the app. In a LinkedIn post, they simply stated that it’s an opt-in app, even though a week ago they explicitly said that it wasn’t. Are they hoping we don’t notice?

Even if Peeple undergoes some much-needed changes, I still haven’t seen anything from the creators about how specifically they intend to address abuse, harassment, and bullying on their app—because it will happen, opt-in or not. What creators of Peeple should learn is that you can’t engineer an asshole-free world. And if you try, the assholes will make sure that it hurts innocent folks much more.

Developers who believe that their apps will be free from abuse are laughably naive. Even apps that in theory have codes of conduct, moderators, and procedures for reporting abusive users struggle mightily with this problem. On Facebook, public pages intended to harass and bully others proliferate. On Twitter, harassers and stalkers use multiple sock puppet accounts to gang up on people they don’t like(especially women and people of color) and drive them off of the platform and sometimes out of public life.

Storify has been used to stalk users (including those who don’t use Storify themselves) by pinging them with notifications that someone they know to be unsafe and threatening is collecting and saving their tweets. On Ask.fm, a site for people to anonymously ask each other questions, teens flood their targets’ inboxes with bullying messages, in some cases leading to suicide. On Reddit, even subreddits dedicated to creating a supportive space get inundated with abusive trolls. YouTubecomments… well, the less said about that, the better.

It might be, thus, tempting to throw one’s hands up and proclaim that there’s nothing wrong with Peeple because the Internet’s already full of abuse and stalking and harassment—so who cares, right?

But the difference between Peeple and all those other apps is that they all have a purpose besides judging and evaluating people. Those apps have facilitated social change and activism, helped people learn new things and stay informed, provided art and entertainment, and created friendships and relationships.

Peeple does, in theory, have a constructive purpose—complimenting people and making sure that you’re surrounding yourself with good ones—but there are already better ways to do that that don’t involve nearly so much potential harm (especially to children or marginalized people like abuse survivors). When creating new technology, it’s important to ask yourself if the benefits actually outweigh the costs. While Peeple probably has some pros, the cons are just too overwhelming.

Read the rest here.

Why Peeple Won't Save Us From Jerks

The Danger of Believing That People Are "Genuinely Good"

Here’s what I was thinking as I watched Twitter thoroughly critique Peeple, a new app that promises to let people “rate” other people like restaurants on Yelp without any option to opt-out: If only all of us were still able to be so naive.

Personally, I’m far from the only person who thinks that Peeple sounds like Regina George’s Burn Book in digital form:

But Peeple’s founders have such rosy ideas about how their app is likely to be used that it’s making me wish I could hide under whatever rock they’ve been hiding under. You don’t even have to have faced online abuse to figure out that people are going to use an app like Peeple to make each other’s lives a living hell (and no, not deservedly). If you aren’t already familiar with how terrible this app is, Ana Mardoll did an excellent summary on Twitter starting here.

In the typical condescending and difficult-to-parse style of their social media posts, the founders claimed that “People are genuinely good even though Yelp has over 47 million reviews and all the users are anonymous and in that 47 million reviews there are 79% positive reviews.” Since it’s apparently not obvious, here’s the difference: most people have little incentive to trash a business on Yelp unless they really did have a pretty bad experience there. Even if they do trash a business on Yelp with no justification, though, it’s probably not going to be that big a deal. The business may lose some potential customers, which does suck, but chances are the unfair review will be overshadowed by more reasonable ones anyway.

When you’re rating people and not businesses, things change. First of all, it gets personal. People want to get back at their exes, abusers want to abuse, stalkers want to stalk. Second, one “bad review” on someone’s Peeple page can be enough to cost them their job, their family (if they get outed, for instance), their friends (if they get falsely accused of abuse by their actual abuser, which is a thing that abusers do). Women, people of color, and marginalized groups will inevitably get targeted by MRAs, Stormfront, or whatever the creepy stalker-y death threat-y regressive group du jour is. Bad reviews of businesses have typically gone viral because those businesses have acted in discriminatory or otherwise unfair ways, but people have gone viral for things as innocuous (and irrelevant to normal people who have shit to do besides stalking people they don’t like) as speaking at a feminist rally, being a bad date, or simply existing. I’m not going to link to examples, because that would perpetuate that abuse. Do some Googling if you don’t believe me.

The Peeple founders don’t seem to see it that way. Based on their posts, they seem to envision the app’s users as good citizen types who primarily want to use the app to bolster the reputations of people they like. Sometimes, of course, there may be bad reviews, but those are surely deserved, and if you think you don’t deserve your bad review, well, you can always just defend yourself in the court of public opinion, and certainly whoever is Objectively Right will prevail in the end. In another one of their bizarre Facebook posts, they write:

We have come so far as a society but in a digital world we are becoming so disconnected and lonely. You deserve better and to have more abundance, joy, and real authentic connections. You deserve to make better decisions with more information to protect your children and your biggest assets. You have worked so hard to get the reputation you have among the people that know you. As innovators we want to make your life better and have the opportunity to prove how great it feels to be loved by so many in a public space. We are a positivity app launching in November 2015. Whether you love us or our concept or not; we still welcome everyone to explore this online village of love and abundance for all.

A “positivity app”? In what universe? Not the one I’m living in.

I do, actually, believe that most people are generally trying to do the right thing. I get asked all the time how I could possibly believe that given what I see and what I write about, but I do and that’s a whole other article. But I also know that it only takes a few people with bad intentions to cause serious damage to others and to the world in general, and I also know how cognitive bias works. Maybe the disconnect between people like me and people like the ones who founded this app is that they think it would take some Hitler type to go on there and intentionally ruin someone’s life, but it really wouldn’t. All it takes is a man raised to believe that women owe him sexual access, or a jilted ex who doesn’t want anyone else to go through what they had to go through, or someone who’s under the mistaken impression that a coworker who messed up and caused the team’s project to fail deserves to never work in the field again. Someone who gets angry and says some things they later regret, only now it’s been screencapped and posted on 4chan along with the target’s credit card number and home address. Someone who believes that they’re saving countless unborn lives when they slander an abortion provider. Someone who thinks that feminists are so dangerous to the very fabric of society that they’d be justified to use any means, no matter how dishonest, to stop them.

It’s not like these things aren’t already happening. This would just make it even easier. And none of the safeguards that the Peeple founders are claiming to be implementing actually seem like they’d make much of a difference. For instance, they say that negative reviews won’t appear unless you claim your profile and thus allow them to show up, but someone could always just give you 10/10 stars and then write a bunch of shit about you. (And they don’t seem to understand that even positive reviews from total strangers, that you did not consent to have sent to your phone, can be ridiculously boundary-crossing and unwelcome. Haven’t either of them ever experienced street harassment?) They say that you have verify that you’re over 21, but nowhere do they say that you have to verify that your target is over 21. You can use this website to bully a child. They say that you have to use your Facebook profile to review people, as if that’s some sort of reassurance. I’ve seen rape threats from people whose full names were attached. They’re not afraid; they have institutional power behind them.

And that’s why I say it must be nice to be as naive as the Peeple founders apparently are. To not know this shit is going on? To not have to try every day to reconcile that with your belief that everyone has some good in them. To not live in fear of the day you piss off the wrong white man with an internet connection and plenty of spare time.

If Peeple is really going to be so “positive,” then why shouldn’t it be an opt-in service? Why wouldn’t everyone want to create a profile so that they can receive these wonderful compliments from their friends and lovers and that one random neighbor they talked to on the sidewalk once? I think on some level, the founders realize that they wouldn’t. They can’t make the app opt-in because then it’d never work. Most of us who’ve been around the online block have reacted to the whole thing with horror and revulsion. The only way the app’s creators can get it to work is by violating people’s consent and essentially forcing them to participate. I fail to see the “positivity” in that.

I get the urge to develop technological solutions to the problem of people being assholes. I really do. It would be great if we could never again date someone who sucks in bed, or hire a babysitter who plops the kids in front of the TV and then spends the rest of the night on Facebook, or befriend someone who will spill our secrets or take us for granted, or live with a roommate who never does their dishes. These things are at best annoyances and at worst serious life-fucking sorts of things.

But more surveillance of each other is not the solution. Heed the warnings of people who know what it is to be surveilled. Read 1984 if that’s what floats your boat. These tools will inevitably be used for abuse, and that’s not worth making sure that your next partner is good in bed.

~~~

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The Danger of Believing That People Are "Genuinely Good"

Asking, Guessing, and Crowdfunding

Periodically the debates about crowdfunding start up in my online space again; right now is one such time. I noticed a disconnect between the two “sides” of the debate that I wanted to address.

To clarify, I’m talking about crowdfunding in terms of individuals who do it for personal reasons–to pay medical bills, to care for a sick pet, to provide for their needs while they search for work, to complete a project they need or want to complete, and so on. I’m not talking about this sort of crowdfunding.

These conversations inevitably get bogged down in arguments over who “deserves” money and who doesn’t, who “really needs” the money and who doesn’t, which things are “legitimate” to ask for money for and which aren’t, etc. I don’t really find that interesting or relevant. I think that people should be honest when stating their reasons for asking for donations. For some people that’s “My baby and I are going to become homeless unless we get money for rent” and for some people it’s “I want to try this cool new thing but don’t want to risk thousands of dollars of my own money on it.” From there, it is each individual’s own responsibility to decide if they think it’s worth donating to this person’s fundraiser or not.

What I do find very interesting is that many people’s objections to this type of fundraiser are couched in language like “imposing” and “being rude.” That suggests that a conflict between ask culture and guess culture may be at play.

A summary:

In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.

In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

All kinds of problems spring up around the edges. If you’re a Guess Culture person […] then unwelcome requests from Ask Culture people seem presumptuous and out of line, and you’re likely to feel angry, uncomfortable, and manipulated.

If you’re an Ask Culture person, Guess Culture behavior can seem incomprehensible, inconsistent, and rife with passive aggression.

[Obligatory disclaimer that these two “Cultures” are simplifications and opposite ends of a spectrum; most people have some Askiness and some Guessiness to them, depending on context.]

Guessy people see [some] crowdfunding requests as inappropriate and invasive, especially given that many of that person’s friends probably have trouble with their finances as well. It is difficult for them to see a request for donations and not feel obligated to comply with it, and they assume that others are being similarly manipulated.

Asky people don’t understand what the issue is. Anyone is free to ignore the crowdfunding post and keep scrolling, or even unfriend the asker for good measure. Asky people try not to be overly concerned about other people’s finances; that’s their job to manage for themselves. To them, there’s no harm in asking as long as you aren’t manipulative about it and can take no for an answer.

I sympathize with Guessy people here because I know how that feels. When I did not trust myself to be able to set my own boundaries, I constantly saw others’ requests as impositions and wished they would stop making them. Even when I said no and had that no respected, I felt guilty for saying no and wished that others hadn’t put me in this awkward position. It seemed to me that the kind thing to do would be to not make your friends feel bad, and the way to do that would be to not ask them for things unless you’re pretty sure that they’re able and willing to say yes.

But while I sympathize, I don’t want Guess to be the norm, because I’ve also been on the other side. For instance, I went years without asking anyone out on a date because I was terrified that no matter how clear I was that no is an acceptable answer, I would make them feel bad and they would say yes out of guilt. I avoided asking people for help as much as possible. I didn’t pitch my writing to publications or offer myself as a conference speaker or ask anyone if they could listen to me vent for a while. (I still don’t really do the latter, but, I’m working on it.)

And, honestly, that sucked. You don’t get any awards for never making anyone feel even the slightest bit guilty. You also don’t go on a lot of dates, at least not with the people you really wish you were dating.

As important as it is to learn not to feel entitled to other people’s time, attention, help, money, etc., it’s equally important to learn how to see and acknowledge others’ needs without feeling obligated to fulfill them. It is really, really hard to be a person when you can’t do that; I know that from experience. And as this periodic shaming of people who request donations shows, it also sometimes makes it hard to be a person who treats others well. If we tell the people around us that they can’t ask for things because we find that too inconvenient, we perpetuate social norms in which people have to suffer alone.

What about people who ask for money they don’t really need? That’s where it comes back to honesty. People should be honest about why they’re asking for money; otherwise, it’s not a fair request and possibly even a scam. Lying and scamming is bad. But beyond that, I don’t really mind if someone decides that they’d really like a trip to Europe that they can’t afford but don’t exactly need; I will probably decide not to contribute to that fundraiser, then. Others may make a different choice. It’s their money.

In my experience, though, most requests for crowdfunding come from a place of need. Most people I’ve known who have had to ask for money online have thought about it very carefully, and often felt quite a bit of shame. It wasn’t a decision made lightly.

When I work with trauma survivors and people with mental illnesses, I’m struck by the fact that all of them, to a person, say that they feel ashamed of their feelings because others “have it worse.” Sometimes they name specific experiences others have had that are “worse,” and then, unbeknownst to them, a client with that exact “worse” problem tells me that they don’t have the right to be upset because–you guessed it–others have it worse.

I find that the same is true with many people who request money online. No matter how bad their situation is, they worry that others have it worse and maybe those are the people the money should be going to.

That’s why, if someone asked me for advice, I would say not to worry so much about who has it worse and ask for what you need. Someone who believes that solving poverty in Africa is the most/only important issue right now will probably not donate to your fundraiser, and that’s okay. We all have the right to ask, as long as we’re doing so in a way that allows people to say no.

And on the other side, those of us raised with Guessy norms should think critically when we feel that others are imposing. It’s a difficult balance, because boundaries are important, and those of us who have had boundaries crossed by askers in the past might find it especially difficult to find that balance. But the solution cannot be to expect people to never ask us for anything. I don’t think anyone actually wants to live with those social norms.

As someone who seems to straddle the boundary between Ask and Guess a lot, I have a complicated relationship with the idea of myself asking people for money. I do it with my Patreon, of course, but that feels more like giving people the option of paying me for work that I do that they benefit from, not “requesting donations.” But I’ve toyed with the idea of doing a GoFundMe to raise money to apply for American citizenship, which is extremely expensive and otherwise unaffordable for me. But it’s not food. It’s not shelter. I have permanent residency and will be fine without citizenship. Many people will not want to donate to that fundraiser. Others have specifically told me that the would, because they think that the country needs more citizens like me. That’s their choice, and they get to decide that that’s worth their money just like others get to decide that it’s not.

It seems overbearing and infantilizing to act like it’s my responsibility to make sure that others don’t spend money they don’t have. It’s true that not everyone is great at managing their money, but that doesn’t make it my responsibility (or my right) to try to manage it for them by assuming that they cannot handle seeing a request for donations in their Facebook feed.

~~~

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Asking, Guessing, and Crowdfunding

Not the Ethics We Need, But the Ethics We Deserve

Yesterday, Charles Clymer wrote on Facebook regarding the Ashley Madison hack:

The thing about the Ashley Madison leak that truly fascinates me is the hypocrisy of internet privacy activists, whom are predominantly male.

No, I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to judge every person who has “cheated” on their spouse or with someone who is married. People engage in infidelity for a lot of reasons. There are trapped relationships, repressed sexualities and gender identities, abusive marriages, etc. I get that “cheating” isn’t always black-and-white and that people have a right to privacy.

But what blows me away every time some internet privacy incident comes up is that so many of the same people who rant and rave about government surveillance or compromised private information or unauthorized data collection… are the same folks who will gladly share a nude picture of a woman whose computer or device has been hacked.

These are the same people who view celebrity women as commercial products and thus, not entitled to any privacy.

These are the same people who, because of whatever bullshit “friendzone” grudge they hold against women, seem to gleefully–even obsessively–post stories, anecdotes, videos or whatever about women who have been caught cheating.

And not because of some moral crusade against infidelity but because they feel the need to control, in however small a way, women’s sexuality. If they’re not getting any, neither should women.

If they feel they have been denied sex by the women of the world (apparently a collective), they’ll go out of their way to publicly humiliate women in compromising situations.

Can women be cheating assholes or abusive or simply awful human beings? Of course. Every rational adult knows this.

But these angry, insecure men who spend their waking hours glued to Reddit and 4chan aren’t rational. They don’t view women as having the potential to be assholes because they’re human beings; they view a woman as an asshole because to them, she’s a product who is expected to perform to their liking. A robot devoid of character and personality, dreams and nightmares, needs and wants.

This is about a vicious sense of entitlement to women’s minds and bodies by a large population who wield enormous influence over the primary means of communication among human beings.

It’s not just about hacking a nude photo or revenge porn or the unceasing stream of harassment women receive online.

It’s also about enabling a culture that communicates to men that it’s perfectly fine to assault, rape, and kill women for not giving you what you want.

This whole Ashley Madison fiasco is simply another illustration of male entitlement and rage over the loss of that entitlement.

So, yes… while it’s a bummer to see privacy violated, I’m not exactly inspired to “join the cause”.

Shoot me an e-mail when your ethics are consistent and don’t blatantly and violently discriminate against women.

Fine, I’ll bite, since it’s a little weird to have Charles Clymer tell me that my anger over the Ashley Madison hack is “simply another illustration of male entitlement and rage over the loss of that entitlement” (which, you know, I never had), and that I’m one of the people who looked at the leaked nude photos last summer. I didn’t–and in fact, have been speaking out against this sort of thing for years–but the conflation Charles makes in this post sure is a convenient way of avoiding the issue of privacy and online shaming.

Are there people who oppose the Ashley Madison hack but supported the celebrity nude photo leak? Certainly. Are there entitled, sexist men speaking out right now against the Ashley Madison hack? Certainly. Unfortunately, you’re going to find horrible people in just about any political camp, including the most feminist camps out there. (TERFs, anyone?) That other people are ethically inconsistent doesn’t mean I have to be.

When it comes to ethical consistency, which Charles is trying to lecture us about in this post, you have to support what’s right and oppose what’s wrong based on what’s right and what’s wrong, not based on what your friends and your enemies happen to be doing.

I’ve already stated my opposition to the Ashley Madison hack in a variety of ways, so here I want to get a little more meta and point out a disturbing trend that Charles Clymer is far from the only progressive writer to play into. That’s the idea that finally this whole sexual shaming thing is impacting straight white men, not just women, queer people, and people of color! Rejoice!

I think I won’t. Yes, I belong to some groups that have suffered for millennia because of the idea that our private sexual lives should be anyone else’s business and that we should be judged and punished for living those lives. And you know what? It gives me no joy to see this virus spread. Revenge may be a valid impulse, but it doesn’t tend to lead to a better world for anyone. I don’t want straight white men to have to deal with public sexual shaming. I don’t want anyone to have to deal with it. The fact that it’s starting to hurt them too is not a good sign! It means we’ve really started to accept this as just the way things are.

Further, everyone keeps conveniently ignoring the fact that straight white male lives were not the only ones potentially ruined by this hack. It is impacting LGBTQ people. It is impacting women. It is impacting people who did not join the site to cheat, but because they needed things to be “discreet” for some other reason, and if you really can’t imagine any other reason someone might need things to be discreet, well…what you lack in imagination, you make up for in privilege.

I do recognize that for some people, this hack turned out to be a good thing. The people who found out that their own ostensibly monogamous partners were cheating on them, for instance. Maybe the hack gave these people a way to get back control over their lives. It’s almost inevitable that unethical actions will genuinely benefit some people who themselves did nothing wrong; that’s one of the reasons ethics is hard. That’s why I didn’t really see anything wrong with people using the hack to find out if they were being cheated on.

As for all the people I know–many of whom I greatly respect–who were gleefully feeding their entire email address books into that app so that they could spy on the lives of their friends and acquaintances and that one random person they emailed once about a potential sublet, that only fills me with horror and fear. Horror that I have friends who care so little for others’ privacy; fear that one day I’ll get doxxed, and people I thought were my friends will cackle at their laptop screens as they violate my consent.

I keep coming back to this patronizing undertone in all this–that I should somehow be glad for this. That this is keeping people safe. That if we all watch each other, if our world becomes like a panopticon, then we can be safe from being cheated on, from being discriminated against, from being hurt. I don’t agree. I don’t want this. I didn’t ask for this. This does not feel safe to me. I would feel much more safe if we all just finally agreed that it is unacceptable to dox and shame people unless they present a real, direct threat to someone else. I do not feel safe when my friends say, “Well, we’d never dox you, you haven’t done anything bad.” But someone else thinks I have! Everyone has done something bad according to someone.

Sexual shaming is an old, old problem. For a while it seemed to be getting better, but now I’m not so sure. We’ve started to accept its premises rather than challenging them. Some of us celebrate the fact that people who were always safe from sexual shaming are no longer. That shows them, right? They deserve it after what they’ve done to us, right?

We’re in the middle of the ocean and the water’s streaming in through the cracks in the hull, but rather than patch them until we can get to safety and build a better ship, we’ve apparently decided to just sink the motherfucker along with everyone on it. Nobody gets any privacy! Everyone gets their sex lives posted online and scrutinized! Anyone can lose their livelihood–even their life–for doing a disapproved-of thing!

Is this what justice looks like to you? It’s at least a twisted sort of equality, I’ll give it that.

But some of us have boats and life jackets and others don’t. Some at least have a wooden plank to grab onto, and others don’t even have that. Who do you think will be the first to drown? Who will be able to float away to land? Most importantly, wouldn’t it have been better not to sink the ship to begin with?

This is what Charles Clymer refers to as “a bummer.”

Revenge may taste sweet, but it’s not nutritious. It won’t keep us alive. Only justice can do that.

~~~

Further reading: “Our Shared Affair: The Sexual Shaming Behind the Ashley Madison Hack” by Katherine Cross, who has seriously been a consistent breath of fresh air to me in all these discussions about online doxxing and shaming.

~~~

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Not the Ethics We Need, But the Ethics We Deserve

What We Can Learn From a Reformed Troll

[Content note: online harassment & threats]

Many of us who have dealt with trolls online have spent a lot of time–to much, probably–wondering what motivated them, how they would justify their actions (or not), whether they would ever regret it or apologize.

Writer Lindy West actually got to find this out. After she publicly called out a troll who’d made a Twitter account impersonating her late father and used it to harass her (yes, that happened), he emailed her and apologized. He even donated money in her name to the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, which had treated her father before he died. On an episode of This American Life, West called him and talked to him more about why he did what he did.

The conversation was both amazingly honest and also painfully unsurprising, at least to those of us who have dealt with this sort of behavior. The ex-troll admitted that he’d been in a really bad mental place when he’d made multiple accounts just to harass West. In the email he’d originally sent to apologize, he wrote, “I don’t know why or even when I started trolling you. I think my anger from you stems from your happiness with your own being. It served to highlight my unhappiness with myself.” In the TAL episode, he explained that he was overweight and unhappy with his body, and West’s public satisfaction with (and celebration of) her own weight made him resentful. Gender played a role, too:

Women are being more forthright in their writing. There isn’t a sense of timidity to when they speak or when they write. They’re saying it loud. And I think that– and I think, for me, as well, it’s threatening at first. …I work with women all day, and I don’t have an issue with anyone. I could’ve told you back then if someone had said to me, oh, you’re a misogynist. You hate women. And I could say, nuh-uh, I love my mom. I love my sisters. I’ve loved my– the girlfriends that I’ve had in my life. But you can’t claim to be OK with women and then go online and insult them– seek them out to harm them emotionally.

West added:

In my experience, if you call a troll a misogynist, he’ll almost invariably say, oh, I don’t hate women. I just hate what you’re saying and what that other woman is saying and that woman and that one for totally unrelated reasons. So it was satisfying at least to hear him admit that, yeah, he hated women.

Indeed, that level of self-awareness is pretty rare in anyone, let alone in men who harass and threaten women.

Although none of my really-awful trolls have ever apologized, one who used to mildly troll my comments section did, and confessed that it had to do with his own mental health issues that he was taking out on me and my blog. I became his outlet, the lightning rod for all his grievances with himself and the world. From talking to other women with a presence on the internet, I know my experience (and West’s) is not unique.

There is a lot to learn from the TAL episode. Although trolls/online harassers probably have a variety of motivations, there clearly is a subset of them that troll because they can’t or won’t deal with their own personal issues. I want to be very careful here and not do the whole blaming mental illness thing, but I also want to trust people who have mental illnesses when they say that their mental illness is what prompted them to do something shitty. That’s part of humanizing mental illness, too–acknowledging that sometimes, especially when untreated/unmanaged, it can cause people to act in ways that aren’t really in accordance with who they actually want to be.

But also, you need not have a diagnosable mental illness to be in a bad place in your head at some point in time. You need not have a diagnosable mental illness to believe on some level that it’s okay to outsource emotional caretaking to someone else. The common thread here isn’t “mental illness” but “people avoiding dealing with their own issues and taking their pain out on others,” which, as I’ve been discussing a lot around here, is a gendered phenomenon.

In the episode, West concludes:

If what he said is true, that he just needed to find some meaning in his life, then what a heartbreaking diagnosis for all of the people who are still at it. I can’t give purpose and fulfillment to millions of anonymous strangers, but I can remember not to lose sight of their humanity the way that they lost sight of mine.

That is what horrified me most about this whole thing, aside from imagining what it must’ve been like for West pre-apology. How on earth could a random writer on the internet give these people what they need–partners, friends, self-love, satisfying jobs? It’s a frustration that I’ve felt before.

When the episode first aired, I saw a lot of people hailing it as some sort of sign that, see, trolls really are people too, and they’re redeemable, and maybe if we just remember not to lose sight of their humanity, then they’ll see the light and stop trolling! (Note that although I’m borrowing some of West’s wording here, I absolutely don’t think she’s this naive. Not after everything the internet has put her through.)

It’s a nice thought. It means that the solution to the revolting bullshit people (mostly women) deal with online is neither to “just ignore it” nor to lash back out or ridicule or petition social media platforms for better moderation. It’s just to talk to them and figure out what’s making them hurt so bad.

You can probably see why this is unacceptable as far as general advice goes. As West said, women can’t take responsibility for healing all these strangers’ hurts. People in my field get paid good money to do that, and I’m not about to do it for free for someone I’ve never met who just called me a fucking cunt.

Moreover, though, I’m not sure that most trolls are “redeemable.” Buzzfeed writer Tabatha Leggett, who got rape and death threats after writing about watching The Simpsons (yes, really), recently described her experience contacting her trolls, and seems to have had a rather different one than West did:

The first guy was a stand-up comedian from Chicago. He’d left a meme that said “kill yourself” in the comments section. He insisted that leaving a meme was different to typing out the words “kill yourself”. “Anyone who knows the meme wouldn’t take it seriously,” he told me. “I just wanted to tell you to shut the fuck up.”

I told him that his comment, underneath the hundreds of other abusive ones I’d received, came across as threatening. He told me I was an idiot for feeling that way. I asked him why he felt the need to comment at all. Why not just avoid reading my stuff in the future?

“You might have other really good stuff that you write about,” he replied. “I just didn’t want you to write about The Simpsons again. I was like, shut up.”

Another man that she spoke to did apologize, but it’s unclear which of these reactions is more typical. Point is, sometimes no amount of emotional labor will extract an apology (let alone genuine regret). And even if it did, what difference does it make? The damage has been done, and there always seem to be more trolls willing to take the place of those who realize the error of their ways.

If there’s anything to take away from Lindy West’s interview with her troll, it’s that trolling is more about the troll than the target. However, note that many people are miserable and full of self-hatred and do not make accounts impersonating a writer’s dead father that they use to harass her. The ex-troll’s misogyny and our society’s tolerance of it probably played as big a role in his behavior as did his personal problems.

Unfortunately, we can’t magically heal everyone’s misery. We can stop blaming victims of harassment for that harassment, and we can institute some better social norms and institutional policies that help prevent harassment. People like Lindy West are part of the reason we’re finally having that conversation on any sort of scale, but it’s embarrassing how much we had to put up with before that conversation finally got started.

~~~

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What We Can Learn From a Reformed Troll

Can We Not Record Strangers' Conversations And Put Them On Twitter?

Have you ever had that experience where everyone’s laughing at something and you’re just sitting there in silence, internally screaming WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK???

That happened to me when I read about this “hilarious” livetweet by a Canadian blogger of a “douchebag” on his first date at a cafe. I’ve been seeing this shared all over the internet, including by lots of my friends, always with comments about how “hilarious” it is and how much of a “douchebag” the guy is. At first I kept asking myself what I was missing about this, but then I realized that maybe it’s other people, and not me, who are missing things.

“But you can’t help but overhear people sometimes!”

Let’s start with the obvious fact that, while overhearing people in public places is inevitable, intentionally paying attention to them when they clearly don’t mean to include you is not inevitable, and documenting their conversation for the purpose of spreading it around on the internet is even less inevitable. Haven’t we been saying this all along about online stalking? If you know that someone would not be comfortable being listened to and recorded–and you should always assume that a stranger would not be comfortable with you listening to them and recording them–the correct thing to do is to not listen to and record them, unless there is a compelling reason to. Sorry, but making fun of an egotistical dude is not that compelling a reason. I’m talking about stuff like, protecting others from violence or abuse.

“But he’s an asshole!”

Some people also apparently believe that it’s okay to violate someone’s assumed boundaries/privacy because “they’re an asshole.” Here’s an uncomfortable fact many of us don’t like to think about: someone out there thinks you’re an asshole. Yes, you. Many people probably think that I’m an asshole. There are probably many people who think that the things I say to my friends in public spaces are so completely ridiculous and laughable that they should livetweet them to all their Twitter followers and see what happens. There are people who think that you and your partner sound totally ridiculous when you’re out on your dates, too. And since people tend to have friends and Twitter followers who agree with them, their “hilarious” livetweet of your personal conversation might get quite a bit of traction online.

“But no, the people who think I’m the asshole are wrong! They’re the assholes!”

Good luck with that.

The thing is, you never really know someone’s story. Often when people shame someone online, they end up with a completely wrong impression of what was really going on. This is a particularly painful example of that–a person who was shamed online for sitting on a folding chair on a treadmill and watching TV. This viral photo, I suppose, was meant to be some representation of Everything That Is Wrong With Fat People These Days. Of course, they got it wrong:

It’s not just the fat-bashing that hurts. Or the humiliation, the shaming, this last safe societal prejudice. All that is bad, of course. What really hurts, though, is how much the boys who took that photo of me “doing it wrong”—and the thousands of people who see it—will never know.

They’ll never know how experiences just like this began dividing me—early—from my body. That the taunts of “fatty” and “blubber” and “lardass” when I was 6 made me stand at my bedroom window and wonder if it was a long enough way down to the ground; that when the kids at lunch poked my stomach with pencils to see if I’d deflate, I honestly wished I would, with a long, satisfying “sssssss”; that by the time Ms. Gleby was leading my entire sixth grade Phys Ed class in laughing at me, I no longer had a body at all. I was a floating head, and I was determined to think of my physical form as a brick that I had to suffer the inconvenience of dragging around. My body wasn’t me. It was despicable. It was nothing.

The people who laugh at this picture won’t know that every jeer, every “mooooo,” and every “sorry, no fatties” made me more and more successful at being bodiless.

And they won’t know how scary it’s been to decide to maybe make a different choice.

They’ll never know what came before that treadmill-sitting moment: 80 minutes of aerobic exercise. They’ll never know how long it took me to feel worthy of motion, worthy of joining a gym, how long it took me to decide that moving actually felt good, and then the discovery that this was the way to reunite my floating head with the rest of me, to feel my body at its most basic, a biochemical machine that supports me. That’s what I am on a treadmill. That’s what bodies are. They are not appearance. They are purpose. It’s so hard—irrationally hard—to remember that. The world makes it hard to remember.

I’m not saying that the guy on the date had some deep back story that was causing him to appear to be a douchebag when he really wasn’t. Maybe he really is a douchebag. Maybe he really is terribly sexist. But it’s important to remember that we’re seeing this guy through one person’s lens, and that person was clearly motivated to make him seem as ridiculous as possible in order to create a bunch of viral tweets.

I’m not going to throw out some platitudes about never judging people or thinking that they’re silly. Judge, but like, consider that you’re maybe not the ultimate arbiter of whether or not a total stranger that you’ve never even interacted with is A Douchebag?

“But it was anonymous, so what’s the problem?”

Yes, shaming people online anonymously is worlds better than shaming them online and actually naming them (or posting photos of them). However, keep in mind that when something goes viral online, you lose control of it. There have been plenty of instances in which internet mobs have deliberately identified and named previously-anonymous people in viral stories. Sometimes this has disastrous effects, especially when these internet mobs are incompetent (as they are wont to be) and name the wrong person.

Even without a mob, though, some random Twitter follower could be like “Oh hey, I’m in that cafe too! That guy is [insert physical description here].” And someone else could be like, “Oh, I totally worked with that guy once and he was such an asshole.” And before long, the fragile veil of anonymity is gone, and someone is getting named and shamed online for something really quite insignificant.

Besides, they still know it was them. They still have to deal with the humiliation of thousands of people mocking them for it. It’s easy to claim that being an asshole means you deserve this, but do you really? And, as I said earlier, I’m pretty skeptical of any attempt to label a total stranger an asshole on the basis of one person’s tweets. (Not that that’s not at all the same as not believing someone who claims that someone harassed or assaulted them. It’s different when you 1) name a specific thing that the person did and 2) they did it to you.) I’m more okay with shaming people for doing specific harmful things to other people, because–although this is a controversial point–there is some evidence that this can (in certain types of situations) be an effective way of preventing people from hurting each other and/or helping to repair the harm already done. Being egotistical and annoying is not that sort of offense, though.

“So what, sharing stories about other people online is always wrong?”

Nope. It’s a spectrum and there are lots of different ways to talk online about one’s experiences offline. Posting about it on a private friends-only account is different from posting it publicly. Sharing the location is different from not sharing the location. Sharing a line (or a few lines) of dialogue is different from obsessively documenting an entire conversation. Sharing something positively (i.e. “Here’s an awesome compliment a stranger gave me!”) is different from sharing something negatively. Sharing something in order to warn people of a problem is different from sharing something purely for the purpose of ridicule. Sharing something that was said to you is different from sharing something that you overheard that was not meant for you to hear. (To that end, this would’ve felt somewhat less creepy if it’d been livetweeted by the woman who was on the date with the guy.) Sharing something to your audience of 50 Twitter followers is different from sharing something to your audience of 20,400 Twitter followers, which is how much the blogger in question has.

I could go on. Point is, there’s a lot of nuance. A decision to share something after a careful consideration of some of these questions would leave me feeling a lot more comfortable than a broad claim that “well it’s anonymous” or “but he’s an asshole.”

I feel like a lot of the response to this is stemming from the deep frustration many people have with 1) dating, 2) egotistical people, and 3) sexism. (Keeping in mind about #3 that, as far as I could tell, there wasn’t really any clear sexism in the livetweet. Just a guy being incompetent at engaging a woman in conversation. Which could be sexism, could not be.)

I get it. These things are really quite frustrating and I actually have no patience for any of them, including dating. But 1) unless it happened to you personally, this is not your story to tell and 2) there are plenty of ways to share these stories with friends and get support and laugh about it that don’t involve viral tweets. I’m a huge fan of posting on Facebook (not publicly) and of having a group Facebook message going with close friends, where everyone can share their various frustrations and triumphs.

I’m just not here for this creepy eye-f0r-an-eye “if someone is an asshole then it’s now acceptable to do just about anything to them” thing.

And lest it seem like I’m doing the irritating “can’t we all just get along and not be mean to each other” thing, let me be perfectly clear: a world in which the response to this blogger’s livetweet is “whoa wtf that’s creepy and obsessive what are you doing” rather than “LOL SO HILARIOUS LOOK AT THAT DOUCHE” is a world in which we are all safer. Because the world we have now is one in which, apparently, people actively eavesdrop on each other, record each other’s conversations, and make them go viral online for the purpose of ridiculing them.

Do you want to live in that world? Because in that world, anything you say can be used against you for no particular reason. Even if you did nothing ethically wrong or actually harmful. You can wake up one morning and have your entire Twitter feed ridiculing something you said to a friend on the subway yesterday, and even though it’s anonymous, you will know, and your friend will know. Your boss could call you into their office and ask why you were talking about sex positions with your girlfriends at a bar over the weekend. The top search result for your name could be a “hilarious” livetweet from one random hour of your life you wish you could forget.

So, we could live in that world if y’all really want to. Or–or–we could decide, and persuade others, that obsessively recording a stranger’s entire conversation and putting it online is a weird and creepy thing to do. We could recalibrate our response from “LOL WHAT AN ASSHOLE” to “um why are you so preoccupied with what random strangers are saying on their dates?”

I’m not scared of dudes who talk about themselves too much and say silly things about what it’s like to be a writer. I am, however, terrified of all these vigilantes who think it’s their role to police the relatively innocuous faux pas of total strangers.

~~~

Further reading, since I didn’t want to get too repetitive:

~~~

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Can We Not Record Strangers' Conversations And Put Them On Twitter?

How to Motivate Yourself To Read Books

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I read a lot.

A lot of my friends have recently been asking for advice about reading. Specifically, they say that they really value reading (books, generally) and have always seen themselves as people who read, but lately they can’t seem to motivate themselves to do it. This causes a lot of cognitive dissonance.

Usually people have one or both of these problems: 1) motivating themselves to actually pick up a book and read it, and 2) maintaining their focus on that book rather than getting distracted by other things, such as social media or articles online. Although these are slightly different issues, I’m addressing both of them here because some of the same suggestions might help for both.

Some people cite various factors that they think have contributed to the problem with reading, such as: 1) the prevalence of distracting technology, 2) being out of school and no longer being required to read all the time, and 3) being more used to reading short articles online rather than books. While I think that working out what causes difficulty with reading can be useful for you, I also think that the problem can be resolved without that. (See also: solution-focused brief therapy.)

Since I’ve had some of these issues myself and have developed a few practices that help, I decided to put together a blog post for reference for folks who have these issues. I also asked friends what’s worked for them, since this is such a common problem in my social circles, and incorporated their recommendations.

This isn’t “advice” per se; some of these might work for you and some of these might not. If you already know that the problem isn’t [thing] and a given suggestion addresses [thing], there’s no reason for you to try it (except curiosity, maybe). Some of these cost nothing to try, and others cost money. Some address the activation energy problem, and some address the focus problem. Some may feel bad to you, like you’re “giving up” on something important. If it feels awful, you don’t have to do it, but also consider that it might be worth readjusting (at least temporarily) your expectations for yourself.

1. Try reading something easier/simpler/more fun, at least at first.

A lot of people say they have trouble motivating themselves to read books, but what they really mean is Big Serious Books. If you really wish you could just pick up a book already, forget about Tolstoy or David Foster Wallace for now, and pick up a YA novel, a comic book, or something else that’s easy for you to get into. Online fanfiction works too. Saga is an amazing comic book series with big political themes, lots of diversity, beautiful art, and an engaging, suspenseful story. Peeps is a YA vampire novel, but it’s nothing like Twilight. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is, well, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

This seems to work for a lot of people. My friend Nicole says: “When I can’t motivate myself to read, I approach it like I approach exercise–start off with some easier reads to get the momentum going. Definitely doesn’t work for everyone, but when I pick up some Harry Potter or even a Sweet Valley High book (only Judy can judge me), I’m at an easier entryway for reading than if I went 0 to Dostoyevsky.”

This is in some ways one of the hardest suggestions to implement because, I’ve noticed, a lot of people have a lot of shame and stuff around what they read. It’s difficult to feel like you’re Really Reading if you’re reading a comic book or a teen vampire story. But are you comprehending words on a page? Are you making predictions and feeling empathy for a character and wondering what made an author write it the way they wrote it? Then you’re reading.

If you really can’t get past the potential embarrassment of being seen with one of these books, you could buy a protective cover for it, or use an e-reader (more on that later).

You might find that as you (re)develop a reading habit, it becomes easier and easier to read harder and harder things. Tolstoy will always be there for you when you want him.

For me, this suggestion translates as reading fiction rather than nonfiction. Like quite a few like-minded people, I often feel that reading fiction is “silly” and “useless” compared to reading nonfiction, but I often find nonfiction difficult to get into and focus on. When I can’t get myself into nonfiction, I try to overcome that feeling and read some fiction instead. First of all, reading something is better than reading nothing. Second, it’s not even true that fiction is silly or useless; I absolutely learn about the world from it and get writing ideas from it and such.

Although most of my friends say that they have no trouble reading things online and feel that they have replaced books with blog posts and articles, if that’s not the case for you, then blog posts and articles might be a stepping stone to more “serious” reading.

2. Get comfortable.

When I’m having trouble focusing on a book I want to be reading and I can’t figure out why, I do some body scanning. Often I realize that the problem is that I’m physically uncomfortable and it didn’t even make it into my conscious awareness.

Note that this might be true even if you think the problem is that you’re getting distracted by your phone or whatever. I often automatically check my phone when I’m physically (or mentally) uncomfortable as a way to cope with those feelings in the moment. While this can be extremely useful when I have to be there and need to distract myself from my discomfort, it’s not as useful when you need to focus on reading, and when it’s actually possible to resolve the discomfort.

Figure out which reading positions are most comfortable for you. I like to have back support and a surface that is neither too hard nor tries to swallow me. My favorite places to read are hammocks, couches, armchairs, and those lounge chair things they have at the pool, as long as it’s not the hard plastic ones. Unfortunately, reading in bed is not usually something I can make comfortable for long periods of time, and neither is reading at a computer while sitting in some sort of chair. Regardless of what your favorite reading positions are, if you’re doing it for a while, make sure to get up regularly and stretch. Otherwise you’ll find yourself getting stiff and cramped and therefore distracted.

Other factors play into comfort, too. One friend says she reads on her computer using Kindle for Mac, because reading on her computer means that she doesn’t have to turn the lights on–and lights trigger her migraines. In college, I had a Snuggie so that I could stay warm while still being able to flip the pages.

3. Remove distractions.

Assuming that you do have a problem with getting distracted by things, see if you can remove them. If it’s noise, find a quiet place or use earplugs (they’re pretty cheap at any drugstore). If it’s technology, put it in another room or turn it off. I like to go outside with my books and leave other stuff inside.

Sometimes people don’t do this because they assume that if they “really” wanted to read, they’d be able to do it even with the iPhone right there. But that’s not really how motivation/focus works. Most humans like to move in the direction of least effort, at least when we let our automatic impulses take over. You love reading, but you also love Facebook, and Facebook is just easier. That doesn’t make you wrong (or Facebook evil). It’s just a thing that you might need to acknowledge and plan around.

4. Try an e-reader.

Money permitting, e-readers (or e-reading apps on phones) can really help. That’s the thing that worked best for me, and the suggestion I got most often from my friends who say it worked for them. For some people, e-readers are physically more convenient and easy. For some, it’s that there aren’t other distractions on it (like there are on a phone). For other people, on the other hand, reading on a phone is great because it allows you to read in situations where you otherwise might not have been able to. I used to read e-books on my phone while waiting for clients to show up at work.

Those of you who commute on public transit may also find that e-readers/phones resolve a lot of logistical challenges. When I first moved to New York, I had a hell of a time trying to hold onto a pole on a crowded train and a bag or two and a book with pages I needed to flip. Within a few months, I got my Nook, which can be held in one hand and has conveniently-located buttons that flip the pages without a need for another hand. I happily read for hours each week while standing on trains and holding onto poles.

The cheapest current Kindle is $80, and you can even pay for it in installments. It’s probably even cheaper if you get it used. If that’s still not affordable for you but you do have a smartphone, Kindle and Nook both make free apps (and there are probably others). Your local public library might have e-books available for borrowing. Even the one here in my little Ohio suburb has that now. A friend also recommends BookBub as a way to find cheap and free ebooks.

5. If you have to drive a lot, try audiobooks.

Personally, I dislike receiving information in audio format, but some people say this works for them, especially when they have to commute by car a lot. This is also great if you feel like you can’t justify the additional time spent on reading because you have so many other things to do. This way, you’re not expending any extra time on it, just making better use of the time you already have.

6. Make it social.

Reading is generally a very solitary activity, and it’s difficult to spend hours isolated from other people doing something that’s not easily shared with them. So see if you can make it shareable.

Traditionally, people made reading social through book clubs. If that’s an option for you, try it. Note that book clubs need not be in-person/geographically proximate–online book clubs can work a lot better if it’s difficult to find people nearby who share your interests, or if going to in-person events is stressful.

However, there are plenty of ways to make reading social besides book clubs. For instance, you can post book reviews on sites like Goodreads or on Facebook. You can share what you’re reading on social media, and often friends will get excited along with you or discuss the book with you if they’ve read it too. I love to post quotes on Facebook and Tumblr, especially from nonfiction books (but often from fiction too). It helps me feel like I’m doing something good for people by spreading the knowledge I’m getting, and it also gets me some positive reinforcement from people for reading. Everybody wins.

I’ve written before (to a small amount of pushback) that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with using this sort of reinforcement to motivate yourself to do things you know are good for you to do. You are not weak or silly or shallow if the encouragement and positive feedback of people you care about helps you do things. Yes, there are downsides to this, but it’s also the way humans work. Be self-aware and use it to your advantage.

7. Take books everywhere.

Take books everywhere you go, even if it’s a situation where people might make fun of you for having a book. (When I used to hang out with friends who were slightly less cool than my current friends, they’d make fun of me for having a book. They’d be like, “What, did you think I’d be that boring?” I’d be like, no, but I thought, what if you were late and I had to wait for you? What if you went to the restroom for a while? What if you needed to leave earlier and I wanted to stay at the coffee shop by myself? That’s to say nothing of public transit.)

If you always have a book, you might find yourself turning to it in those everyday boring situations. In line at the post office. In the doctor’s waiting room. In the train. On your lunch break. At the bar, waiting for your friends to show up. Boredom can be a great motivator.

E-readers help with this, but I’ve been doing it with paper books for as long as I’ve been able to read.

8. Make a habit of browsing bookstores and libraries.

When you’re in a bookstore or a library, there’s really only two things to do: find books, and read books. As a kid I used to walk out of the library with huge towers of books because I couldn’t bear to leave such interesting things in place. I wouldn’t always read all of them, but the excitement of finding something cool in the stacks is its own motivator.

When you find an interesting book, try reading the first chapter (or part of it), not just the jacket copy. If you don’t like it, you haven’t spent that much time. If you do like it, check it out or buy it, and then you’re already hooked and motivated to keep going.

This is also very fun to combine with #6. Make it social. When I was in high school and there wasn’t much else to do, my friends and I made bookstore trips constantly. Nowadays, I like to take people I’m dating (or thinking about dating) to bookstores. You learn a lot about someone that way, and plus it’s fun, and plus it encourages you to read.

Although there’s definitely something special to me about bookstores and libraries, browsing books on Amazon can have some similar effects, especially since it’ll show you similar books to what you’re looking at. I’ve definitely gotten lost in that particular rabbit hole for a while.

9. Graph it, chart it, log it.

This goes along with #6 (making it social) given how social media is these days, but for me, graphing and charting and logging things is also its own reward. I’d imagine the same is true for other nerdy types.

I like recording what I read with Goodreads, and I also use an iOS app called Hours to track how much time I spend reading each book (along with other productive things I do).

But my favorite book-tracking thing by far is this chart created by my friend Malcolm. Malcolm’s aim in creating and using this chart was to encourage himself to read more, but unlike other book-tracking mechanisms, this one tracks the time you spend reading, not the number of books you finish. Sometimes people start books they don’t end up liking but then they don’t want to put them down because sunk cost fallacy + it feels like you get no “points” for a book you don’t finish. This chart acknowledges all the time you spend on books (including audiobooks), whether or not you finish them.

You can see my own version of Malcolm’s chart here.

Some people also find success with HabitRPG, a cute webapp that treats to-do’s and habits as a game and also has an optional social component.

10. Do a little at a time.

For many people, motivation is all about that first push, and then the rest comes easily. Don’t think of it as “I need to read War and Peace.” Think of it as, “I need to read a chapter of War and Peace.” Or even a page. You might find that once you start reading you keep going naturally, or you might not. In that case, you can gradually raise your page goal rather than diving head-first into reading 100 pages a day or whatever.

DailyLit is a website that can help with this by emailing you installments of books each day. HabitRPG, which I mentioned above, can also help, because you can set a daily goal like “read five pages” and see what happens.

Mark Reads, which a few of my friends recommended, is another way to read in installments. In this series, Mark reads books out loud a chapter at a time and reviews them. My friend Suzanne says, “It’s like an online book club led by the kindest, most hilarious person who is never ever prepared for the next twist in the book he’s reading.

11. Shift your assumptions.

Reading is an act that’s all tangled up in things like class, race, gender, and neurotypicality. Sometimes we expect impossible things of ourselves, like reading dozens of dense books each year and being able to regurgitate all their plots or facts on demand, and that leads to a lot of shame that makes reading even more difficult. Sometimes we devalue certain ways of reading (audiobooks, ebooks, social reinforcement, with frequent breaks to check a phone) or certain types of texts (YA, “women’s” literature, fanfiction). Many of us remember our parents or teachers telling us to put that crap down and have held onto those ideas into adulthood.

Yes, I do think that there are ways to evaluate and judge literature, but I also think that what you think is “good” depends entirely on what you need. Recently I read a short self-published novel called Robins in the Night. It was not particularly well-written; it needed a lot of editing and a lot of the stylistic choices seemed stilted or incomprehensible to me. But it was a retelling of the Robin Hood story in which Robin Hood is actually a queer trans woman who stands up against the unjust treatment of a Black man, and at the moment, that’s exactly what I needed to read, “quality” notwithstanding. I recommend it.

As you pursue your reading goals, I recommend keeping some (re)frames in mind:

  • The perfect is the enemy of the good./Reading something is better than reading nothing.
  • Only you get to decide which books are “good” or “impressive” or “valuable” for you.
  • Work with your brain, not against it. If positive reinforcement from your friends helps, use it. If you can’t read for ten minutes without checking your phone, consider figuring out what’s going on with that, but in the meantime, read for ten minutes at a time and take breaks to check your phone.
  • Try to get rid of “should”‘s. Should you read long serious novels? Should you read without an e-reader? Should you be able to read for long stretches of time without taking a break? Should you read quickly? Should you remember everything you read? Should you find nonfiction interesting enough to hold your attention? Maybe, but who cares? Do what you can and what feels right.

What has worked for you? What engaging books do you recommend to someone who’s having trouble picking up a book and staying with it?

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How to Motivate Yourself To Read Books

How We Justify Shaming, Harassment, and Abuse

[Content note: online harassment]

Usually when we tell people not to do bad things, such as threatening feminist writers with rape or telling them to kill themselves, we emphasize that these things are bad to do because they’re bad to do, not because of who we’re doing them to. You shouldn’t threaten me with rape for writing this blog post because threatening people with rape is a monstrous thing to do, not because I am right and my blog post is correct. Even if my blog post were completely wrong and even if I was kind of a crappy person, threatening me with rape would still be wrong.

But of course, because human beings are human beings, these principles often fly right out the window when we’re angry, frustrated, disempowered, or simply annoyed. Yeah, sure, verbally abusing people online and violating their privacy is generally wrong, but this person is really bad. This person’s ideas are wrong and they need to stop saying them. This person hurt someone I care about, so they deserve this. This isn’t even a real privacy violation, because that information was out there anyway. It’s not abusive to say something that’s just true. It’s not like there’s anything else I can do in this situation. I was really angry so you can’t really blame me for doing this.

Spend enough time among humans in groups–so, maybe a few hours or days–and pay attention, and you’ll notice enough of these rhetorical devices to make your head spin. One recent one that has my brain hurting concerns Amy Pascal, a former Sony chairperson whose emails and other private info were leaked last fall when hackers stole thousands of documents from Sony, which subsequently ended up on Wikileaks.

Considering that this happened so soon after that ridiculous celebrity nude photo leak last summer, you would think that most people would treat something like this pretty seriously. They didn’t. It turns out that Amy Pascal made racist comments about President Obama in her emails, which I think we can all agree she shouldn’t have done regardless of whether or not she had any idea it could ever be public.

However, that someone has done a bad thing doesn’t then make it okay to do bad things to them in retribution. Certain consequences are, I think, appropriate, depending on what the bad thing was. Sometimes people lose their jobs for saying racist things, which (unlike many people) I think is okay. In a multicultural society and workforce, saying racist things makes you a worse employee than someone who is otherwise just like you but does not say racist things. A company that allows employees who say racist things to continue working there is going to eventually alienate a substantial portion of its customers or clients, and so it is in that company’s best interest to fire employees who say racist things.

Likewise, sometimes people lose friends when they say racist things. I think that’s also appropriate. Everyone deserves to decide for themselves who they do and do not want to be friends with. If I don’t want to be friends with people who say racist things, and you say racist things, then I will stop being your friend. Not only am I personally angered and irritated by racism, but I can’t be friends with someone that I can’t trust not to mistreat my friends of color. (And yes, making “racially charged comments,” as they’re known, is mistreatment.)

But is it okay to publish someone’s personal information because they’ve said a racist thing? Is it okay to shame them in a sexist way? Is it okay to specifically go out of your way to publicly embarrass them about something that has literally nothing to do with the racist things they said?

I don’t think so.

But that’s exactly what Jezebel did to Amy Pascal when they published her leaked Amazon purchases along with “snarky” commentary, shaming her for the personal care/hygiene products she chose to use.

AmyPascal
Screenshot from Jezebel

I think we can all agree that this doesn’t add to the conversation. It doesn’t undo any harm done by Pascal’s racist comments or teach anyone why they were wrong. It doesn’t hold her accountable for them in any way. It doesn’t accomplish anything. It reminds me of a bunch of middle school girls publicly shaming and bullying another girl because they found tampons in her locker or because they found out that she bleaches the hair on her upper lip. It’s completely pointlessly cruel and Pascal did nothing to deserve it.

Jessica Roy writes at NYMag:

The problem with this genre of commentary is that it celebrates a gut-level delight in the same sort of invasion of privacy that drove Redditors to distribute those nude celebrity photos: Exposing people’s secrets — especially powerful people’s secrets — doesn’t just make us feel good, it makes us feel powerful. And though the Sony leaks show Pascal made hundreds of Amazon orders, the highlighted products seemed picked exclusively to humiliate a woman for attempting to stay young in an industry that demands it. Surely writing about Scott Rudin ordering a bottle of Rogaine wouldn’t have packed the same punch. This doesn’t mean women can’t and shouldn’t critique other women. But humiliating a woman based on her body — whether it’s the private photos she took or the products she ordered — seems like overkill.

In a piece about doxxing “for good,” Ijeoma Oluo has a similar take on this analogous issue:

Freedom of speech also comes with accountability for that speech — but doxxing isn’t about accountability, it’s about silencing. Techniques designed to intimidate people out of the public sphere are wrong, no matter who is doing it. Deciding that we will not stoop to their level and that we will not risk innocent people does not fix racism, sexism, homophobia and the like, but it helps us protect the ideals that we are fighting for.

[…] Harassment and threats must be recognized as the crimes they are, whether they come from MRAs or from overzealous anti-racists. You’ve got to be vigilant in condemning harassment, just as you should if you witness it in the street. We need to stop making excuses for people who get joy from instilling fear in others.

The connection between these two things might not be readily apparent. Should we really compare leaking someone’s beauty regimen with threatening them with violence or doxxing their address? I would argue that we should. Both of these things get justified with claims that the target is such a bad person that they deserve this treatment. But of course, as Oluo points out, innocent people get hit with the splash damage all the time.

I think the problem goes beyond that. If we make a rule that says, “Doxxing/abuse/harassment/threats/shaming is okay when the target did something really bad,” then everyone gets to interpret “really bad” for themselves, and you may not like that interpretation. For instance, there are people online who earnestly believe that I am a threat to their livelihood and to the continued functioning of our society. Many MRAs also believe that feminists pose a serious and imminent threat to their physical safety. Surely by their standards I have done plenty of “really bad” things, such as writing widely read articles about feminism.

I cannot overstate the importance of pointing out that they really believe this. They’re not just saying it to get some sort of Points online. They’re not lying. (At least, not all of them.) They believe this as truly and completely as I believe that inequality exists and must be fixed, that there is no god, that I love my friends and family.

Think about your strongest convictions and how real, how powerful your belief in them is. Now, imagine that someone believes with an equal conviction that I am (or you are) a terrible person who poses a threat to them and to everything they love and care about. Imagine that we have all spent years cheerfully promoting the idea that “Doxxing/abuse/harassment/threats/shaming is okay when the target did something really bad.”

Now try to reason this person out of threatening me or you with death or worse. Try to convince them that if they obtain access to our silly Amazon purchases or private emails, they shouldn’t post them online. Try to convince them that if they have information that could destroy our lives if made public, they should keep it to themselves.

This is why I don’t feel safe in online spaces that promote doxxing, abuse, harassment, threats, or shaming against anyone, no matter how much I fucking despise the person they’re doing it to.

If doxxing/etc is ever okay, then it is always okay. Because if it is ever okay, then we will find ways to justify it in any situation we want. We will always be able to point to someone’s racist emails or tweets. We will always be able to show that they really really hurt someone we care about. We will always be able to claim that the internet would be better off if this person just disappeared from it.

I don’t know what to do about doxxing, quite honestly. I don’t. Sometimes doxxing is the last resort of people who are themselves extremely unsafe and have no idea what else to do. Sometimes doxxing happens because the authorities and the websites where abuse takes place continually refuse to take these issues seriously and address them and help keep people from having their lives wrecked. Why the fuck did it have to take doxxing to stop someone from posting “creepshots” of underage women on Reddit? This sort of thing makes me want to curl up in bed and just scream “what the fuck” and “I don’t know” over and over. I have no answers about this.

But nobody was in danger because Amy Pascal’s Amazon purchases had not been made public. Whatever brief rush of glee that article’s author and readers experienced as a result does not justify the violation of someone’s privacy. The fact that doxxing and shaming and all of that may, in some fringe cases (I said may) be a necessary evil doesn’t mean we now have license to use it recklessly and constantly.

It is so easy and tempting–and seductive, really–to lash out at someone who’s made you angry or upset. It’s easy, too, to justify it to people who already agree with you by telling them how angry or upset you were. But ethical behavior isn’t just for situations when you’re feeling calm and happy. It’s also for the situations when you’re angry and upset. It’s especially for those situations, because when we are calm and happy, we usually need little encouragement to do the right thing.

It is true that taking the high road doesn’t necessarily mean that we “win,” whatever winning even means. It won’t necessarily keep us safe. People will still threaten to rape and kill me because I’m a feminist.

But the more we encourage people to think of this behavior as inherently wrong rather than wrong only in cases where we don’t personally dislike the target or think they did something bad that makes them deserve it, then the more other people will call out this behavior when it happens. The more people call it out, the less socially acceptable it will be. The less socially acceptable it is, the greater the social costs of doing it, which means that the more likely it will be that people who do it will face real consequences, such as getting banned from Twitter or losing their job or losing friends.

And the more people face real consequences for doing these things, the less these things will happen. Not only to the people you hate, but also to the people you love.

How We Justify Shaming, Harassment, and Abuse

Trigger Warnings, Microaggressions, and the War Against "Over-Sensitivity"

My newest piece at the Daily Dot examines the backlash against “over-sensitivity” online.

A group of Columbia University students have ignited the latest battle in the online war over trigger warnings by asking professors to include them before teaching classics that feature detailed rape scenes, such as certain Greek myths. Predictably, their own classmates have responded with insults and thinly veiled rape threats in the comments sections of the Columbia Spectator story.

Lest it seem that these students are asking for some extreme and unreasonable accommodation, consider this: Have you ever had a friend invite you to see a movie and asked them to warn you if the movie has graphic violence in it? If so, congratulations, you’ve asked for a trigger warning. It’s unlikely, as Michael E. Miller writes in Post, that trigger warnings are a “treatment [Greek myth] never had before.” Surely someone has at some point handed their friend a book of Greek mythology and said, “Watch out though, there’s kinda a lot of rape in there.”

The outrage over trigger warnings (in college syllabi and elsewhere) is just one example of the online backlash against supposed “over-sensitivity.”

Microaggressions, which have long been discussed in academic circles but recently made more well-known by college students’ awareness campaigns, are another frequent target. National Review referred to the effort to reduce microaggressions as “thought police.” Reason advised voters to be “less sensitive” to microaggressions. The Atlantic offered some helpful advice: “Instead, let’s focus on acts of aggression that are far from micro.” The message seems to be that what you don’t think about can’t hurt you.

When I read any one of these many panicked screeds, what I see on the surface is fear that things that have always functioned a certain way (i.e., college classrooms, corporate offices, online comments sections, and casual conversations) will no longer be able to function that way. Now we have to be “sensitive.” Now we can’t make lewd comments about a female colleague’s body. Now we can’t ask an Asian classmate which “type of Asian” he is.

But it goes deeper. People are worried that they’ll have to care about all these problems they never even knew existed, that they’ll be seen as bad people if they do not care, and that they won’t know all the right words to say and will say the wrong words instead. And that’s a real fear.

But it’s a fear few want to acknowledge, because it’s so deeply uncool to admit that you care what people think of you. So instead, it becomes about how college students are So Whiny And Coddled These Days and how will we ever be able to have a conversation if we have to be So Sensitive all the time?

Read the rest here.

Trigger Warnings, Microaggressions, and the War Against "Over-Sensitivity"