Sometimes I think the internet was a mistake.
On its surface, the internet is a very silly concept. The idea that I, a curmudgeonly high school teacher, can have an audience the size of a newspaper or TV station in a mid-sized city is insane. I don’t think anyone deserves an unmediated channel to the entirety of humanity. The negative incentives and temptations are too enticing. Human brains and our ethical development as a species are too primitive for that much power. I have thought this for a while but ignored my inner-monologue for years.
I once had a full-blown panic attack and had to be talked down by a friend, when I saw that some ungodly number of people were viewing my tweets on a monthly basis. I didn’t take Twitter seriously—I still don’t. To me, it’s a glorified group chat, (with an audience). I often had to restrain myself (sometimes unsuccessfully) from making fart jokes. I always thought the idea that my tweets were generating interview requests from NPR and speaking invitations to be preposterous. A sizable percentage of my tweets had typos. It became a running joke in my house, with my friend group, and the name of the new newsletter. I decided to walk away from Twitter (for the second time) on Halloween: Takes & Typos was born in November. I think I am better for it and I am glad you’re along for the ride.
In the 90s when the internet hit the mainstream, there were a lot of breathless opinion pieces celebrating the “rise of the citizen journalists,” “the democratization of media,” and “the death of gatekeepers.” Each of those has yielded mixed, at best, results. Many of the “citizen journalists" are cranks, conspiracy theorists, or worse. The “democratization of media” has given scammers, propagandists, and fabulists massive platforms to grift or “monetize” their followers. “The death of gatekeepers” is similarly going poorly. The intervening thirty years have shown us that we need better gatekeepers—not their abolition. Gatekeepers kept schmucks and fascists on the fringes. What we needed in the 90s was someone to send Thomas Friedman or Ruth Marcus out to pasture, but what we got was Alex Jones’s InfoWars and anti-vaxx crunchy mommy blogs.
Another way the internet is a mistake is its ability to elevate bad faith arguments into the political mainstream. There is currently an ongoing, disingenuous public spat over the “free speech crisis.” Possibly the most tedious salvo in this discourse was this unfortunate letter in Harper’s crying about the current “stifling atmosphere” regarding speech. Ask yourself, in the year of our Lord, two thousand and twenty-three, do you think people being unable to share their (terrible) opinions and beliefs is really a major societal issue? Do you feel censored or silenced in your life? That doesn't pass the smell test for me.
The people crying about speech are what I term opinion elites: people previously able to opine on newspaper opinion pages and in university lecture halls, without any real rejoinder. But an upshot of the aforementioned “democratization of media” is that now when they publish nonsense takes (pick your poison: race science, transphobic TERF-ery, anti-immigration sentiments, or other reactionary apologetics), they get an earful from people they perceive as below them. They are unaccustomed to being told “sir/ma’am, your takes are abhorrent and here’s why…” en masse. This is the core of the speech crisis. We have a cadre of elites conflating people telling them "I don't like you or what you're saying" with "you don't have the right to say it." Speech is a two way street. Yelling “shut up you noxious bigot, you’re not welcome in this space” is impolite. But the right to do so is as sacred as the right to pen cornball columns in the paper of record.
