How Twitter can ruin a life: The story of Isabel Fall

This is a heartbreaking read. There are several gut punches throughout, in particular when Fall talks about her own experiences. She's clearly a writer, as she is very good with words:

“The powerful want to say that we are entering a dangerous new era where ‘people disliking things en masse’ has coalesced into some kind of crowdsourced [weapon], firing on arbitrary targets from orbit and vaporizing their reputations,” she wrote to me in an email. “The use of mass social sanction gives the less powerful a weapon against the more powerful, so long as they can mobilize loudly and persistently. This is not new. Shame and laughter are vital tools for freedom.”

She cautions, however, that “like all weapons, it will do the most damage when aimed at the least defended, the isolated, those with no one to stand up for them, publicly or privately. And we must be careful with the temptation to use it inside our own houses to destroy shapes we think are intruders.”

This article also introduced me to the idea of paranoid versus reparative readings, which puts a name to something that has bothered me for a long time but that I didn't have the vocabulary to express. The linked article here hits on some of the problems I have with a lot of modern internet media criticism:

Art does not exist to be evaluated on a scale of “harm” to “uplift,” and if we want to talk dog-whistles, that right there is a huge one: it’s deeply anti-intellectual, and it centers a form of toxic individualism that evacuates solidarity/difference in favor of moral purity.

I ended up vaguely hearing about this a while ago, and ended up reading the short story yesterday (it's archived here https://archive.is/oXDEt , the link can be found on wikipedia so it's not too hidden).

It's pretty good, it was a good read, sad to see it end this way and all that. The other thing that becomes apparent is that I think very few people speaking out about the story had actually read it.

Like, aside from it being written by a (unknown at the time) transgender person expressing their experiences, it's a decently long prosaic intimate story about a dystopian climate-change-apocalyptic future where the state has appropriated gender to improve helicopter pilot's ability to destroy and murder, in an effort to wage a war against an AI called the "Pear Mesa Budget Committee". It's not a fly by night hastily-written Breitbart piece about bathrooms, or a lame copypasta -- it's a well written and edited, complex and nuanced expressive short story. Is the concern that the ~ ~ vulnerable youth ~ ~ are going to sit down and read an 8,000 word short story published in an obscure online magazine, on what gender feels like and how it can be felt differently, and they'd get turned corrupted in to evil transphobes? I would at least be content seeing people read something that takes some focus and investment, that wasn't pumped out by a clickbait media company in an effort to get the headlines retweeted and discussed endlessly with no one actually reading the article body.

But again, it's not really about that is it,

On January 17, commenting on Fall’s decision to withdraw in a now-deleted Twitter thread, the bestselling science fiction and fantasy author N. K. Jemisin said she was “glad” the story was taken down, stating “Not all art is good art. Sometimes art causes harm. And granted that marginalized creators end up held to a higher standard than others, which is shit, but… that’s bc we know what that harm feels like, up close and personal. Artists should strive to do no (more of this) harm.” She also noted the author’s extreme stress and its health effects as part of the harm “Attack Helicopter” had caused.

it's like I said before:

In subsequent tweets, however, Jemisin admitted that she hadn’t read the story.