Watching this made me very glad I'm not involved in consuming or promoting this kind of internet culture anymore. The closest I ever got to cancel culture was reading way too many Ellen Pao posts...
Watching this made me very glad I'm not involved in consuming or promoting this kind of internet culture anymore. The closest I ever got to cancel culture was reading way too many Ellen Pao posts on reddit years ago. Lindsay made the right call leaving Twitter and IMO more creators should be as un-involved in Twitter and similar networks as possible. When you have a massive audience that no longer comes from just one niche you reach a point where you need to have politician level lowest-common-denominator speech. In a world as unjust as our own you can't say much without making your privilege known to some group. Then you sound either tone-deaf or malicious (mostly depending on interpretation).
I used to work with a woman who was filthy rich. Like a net worth of around $100MM rich. From what I could guess she was working mostly to have something to do. When she joined she told the CEO she wouldn't work Fridays under any condition. She likely didn't even have a salary. Given that I work in Silicon Valley there are quite a lot of wealthy people - I'm sure the two founders of that company already had enough money to retire when they started it. But this woman was on another level.
She'd talk off-hand about taking a helicopter up to her husband's cabin that he built with his own hands. She'd post in Slack a picture of salmon she cooked after fishing it out of an Alaskan river and flying it back to California in said helicopter. To be honest I don't think she was trying to flex. People just talk about the things they're doing, and a $100MM person will do stupid rich things that no one else can relate to. There was just a failure to read the room.
On Twitter, with a large following, the room is too big to read. Any white person making any comment on race or any comment on something produced by a person of color can be seen as inappropriate. A Twitter user that sees Twitter as a space for people of color to communicate and for social justice movements to grow (through the platform's natural drive to put people into bubbles) might see a lone comment from Lindsay Ellis and interpret it in their context.
We need social media to filter less. From the perspective of the outraged in this situation Lindsay Ellis may be on the very fringe of their bubble. Twitter won't show them Trump or trumpers' tweets. But a mis-interpretable white woman's tweet could show up in their feeds.
This has been a theme across several Tildes posts recently (such as this one, but esp. this one). I feel like it's not appropriate to put the onus on Ellis (or anyone else who wants to use a...
But a mis-interpretable white woman's tweet could show up in their feeds.
This has been a theme across several Tildes posts recently (such as this one, but esp. this one). I feel like it's not appropriate to put the onus on Ellis (or anyone else who wants to use a platform such as Twitter) to self-censor just because there are bad-faith vultures circling around, waiting for something to descend on.
Personally, I think Twitter, as a platform, is nearly incompatible with good-faith, productive communication. But, I think if people do want to try to use it, they should speak their mind freely. If tweeting requires you to assume the worst of your potential audience, and the audience is going to assume the worst of you, it's not worth bothering. If Twitter doesn't want to take measures to change that then deleting your account is perfectly reasonable.
Imho, I don't know if that is any sort of solution. There's just a limited amount of people any person can personally know, and social media has not pushed that limit higher, it has simply...
We need social media to filter less.
Imho, I don't know if that is any sort of solution. There's just a limited amount of people any person can personally know, and social media has not pushed that limit higher, it has simply expanded the people possible to enter your personal bubble to essentially the entire globe. As Ellis said in the video, takes that people do because like 10 of their friends follow them get taken out of context, and then all it takes is one idiotic individual like that twitter user in the video who just has honestly way too much time because Twitter has consumed all their other hobbies to compile a list and whoops YOU'RE CANCELLED.
I've talked about this a few times now when the topic of "PC language" (I don't know what else to call it) came up, the lovely @kfwyremade a good observation about the audience of your speech, and here it's a similar problem I feel. The audience of Lindsay's words is global. And amongus those people there's going to be evil people who will use the guilt of other people on a platform to launch a mob attack.
Because that's what they are. Bullies. They just hide behind the shield of social justice to bully.
I think social media platforms that are more siloed will become more known for being less prone to this kind of thing. It's hard to get several thousand people to focus on a single comment when,...
I think social media platforms that are more siloed will become more known for being less prone to this kind of thing. It's hard to get several thousand people to focus on a single comment when, for example, it was made on a niche discord server with 300 total followers.
This was a... bit of a tough watch. Lindsay shared a few different kinds of trauma and I really think you're in a bad situation if you feel you have to do that to get internet vultures off your...
This was a... bit of a tough watch. Lindsay shared a few different kinds of trauma and I really think you're in a bad situation if you feel you have to do that to get internet vultures off your back. Makes me want to get off the internet entirely, honestly.
The rap segment was surely… haunting. Especially considering that until this moment Lindsay didn't really talk a lot about her personal life, if at all. The video was probably one of the most...
The rap segment was surely… haunting. Especially considering that until this moment Lindsay didn't really talk a lot about her personal life, if at all. The video was probably one of the most unsettling videos I've watched on YouTube, to be honest, but I think it's a good thing, because the things she talks about are hella fucked up, and the impact on the viewer is, imo, appropriate.
Yeah, I kind of wonder what the intent was. She even said it herself, she knows it's not going to change anybody's minds. So then why put even more of yourself out there?
Yeah, I kind of wonder what the intent was. She even said it herself, she knows it's not going to change anybody's minds. So then why put even more of yourself out there?
Ultimately a professional, high quality, and honest video will remembered in five years, not a bunch of disingenuous takes from random people on Twitter.
Ultimately a professional, high quality, and honest video will remembered in five years, not a bunch of disingenuous takes from random people on Twitter.
I didn't know where to post this tbh, because honestly it relates very closely to internet culture and social media, but touches on more things I feel. It's a damng good video though, probably...
I didn't know where to post this tbh, because honestly it relates very closely to internet culture and social media, but touches on more things I feel.
It's a damng good video though, probably Lindsay's best in my opinion (but is that only cause I agree with it? I don't know...)
Haven't seen it yet, but I like that one of the chapter headings is "White nonsense." That was basically my impression of the entire blowback against her tweet.
Haven't seen it yet, but I like that one of the chapter headings is "White nonsense." That was basically my impression of the entire blowback against her tweet.
As someone who has spent his teenagers revelling in one of those parts of the internet (let's just say I used the term Social Justice Warrior unironically) I have exited it and gotten a life and...
As someone who has spent his teenagers revelling in one of those parts of the internet (let's just say I used the term Social Justice Warrior unironically) I have exited it and gotten a life and it's made it so much better. It's more than just about race.
I've been using Twitter a lot lately, and it's mostly been great, but man people are just really willing to retweet outrage-bait without any skepticism. (Not to say that there isn't outrageous...
I've been using Twitter a lot lately, and it's mostly been great, but man people are just really willing to retweet outrage-bait without any skepticism. (Not to say that there isn't outrageous stuff that legitimately could use the attention! I just mean that there's definitely a good portion of stuff that also portrays itself as such that shouldn't be treated that way.) I've been proactive about unfollowing the worst regular offenders, but the problem exists in varying levels everywhere there. I wonder if something about the basic structure of Twitter exacerbates the problem: maybe it's a natural consequence of having retweets / quote-retweets as a standard action, combined with the lack of upvote-sorting which might have been able to prioritize outrage-skeptical responses.
As Lindsay mentions in the OP (as have many others) Twitter is a platform optimized for engagment, like a lot of social media platforms. It doesn't really matter why the engagement is happening,...
As Lindsay mentions in the OP (as have many others) Twitter is a platform optimized for engagment, like a lot of social media platforms. It doesn't really matter why the engagement is happening, what the topic is, or the quality of the content. The things that generates the most engagement "wins", and nothing is better at it than outrage, dogpiling, and reactionary hot takes.
Watching this made me very glad I'm not involved in consuming or promoting this kind of internet culture anymore. The closest I ever got to cancel culture was reading way too many Ellen Pao posts on reddit years ago. Lindsay made the right call leaving Twitter and IMO more creators should be as un-involved in Twitter and similar networks as possible. When you have a massive audience that no longer comes from just one niche you reach a point where you need to have politician level lowest-common-denominator speech. In a world as unjust as our own you can't say much without making your privilege known to some group. Then you sound either tone-deaf or malicious (mostly depending on interpretation).
I used to work with a woman who was filthy rich. Like a net worth of around $100MM rich. From what I could guess she was working mostly to have something to do. When she joined she told the CEO she wouldn't work Fridays under any condition. She likely didn't even have a salary. Given that I work in Silicon Valley there are quite a lot of wealthy people - I'm sure the two founders of that company already had enough money to retire when they started it. But this woman was on another level.
She'd talk off-hand about taking a helicopter up to her husband's cabin that he built with his own hands. She'd post in Slack a picture of salmon she cooked after fishing it out of an Alaskan river and flying it back to California in said helicopter. To be honest I don't think she was trying to flex. People just talk about the things they're doing, and a $100MM person will do stupid rich things that no one else can relate to. There was just a failure to read the room.
On Twitter, with a large following, the room is too big to read. Any white person making any comment on race or any comment on something produced by a person of color can be seen as inappropriate. A Twitter user that sees Twitter as a space for people of color to communicate and for social justice movements to grow (through the platform's natural drive to put people into bubbles) might see a lone comment from Lindsay Ellis and interpret it in their context.
We need social media to filter less. From the perspective of the outraged in this situation Lindsay Ellis may be on the very fringe of their bubble. Twitter won't show them Trump or trumpers' tweets. But a mis-interpretable white woman's tweet could show up in their feeds.
This has been a theme across several Tildes posts recently (such as this one, but esp. this one). I feel like it's not appropriate to put the onus on Ellis (or anyone else who wants to use a platform such as Twitter) to self-censor just because there are bad-faith vultures circling around, waiting for something to descend on.
Personally, I think Twitter, as a platform, is nearly incompatible with good-faith, productive communication. But, I think if people do want to try to use it, they should speak their mind freely. If tweeting requires you to assume the worst of your potential audience, and the audience is going to assume the worst of you, it's not worth bothering. If Twitter doesn't want to take measures to change that then deleting your account is perfectly reasonable.
Imho, I don't know if that is any sort of solution. There's just a limited amount of people any person can personally know, and social media has not pushed that limit higher, it has simply expanded the people possible to enter your personal bubble to essentially the entire globe. As Ellis said in the video, takes that people do because like 10 of their friends follow them get taken out of context, and then all it takes is one idiotic individual like that twitter user in the video who just has honestly way too much time because Twitter has consumed all their other hobbies to compile a list and whoops YOU'RE CANCELLED.
I've talked about this a few times now when the topic of "PC language" (I don't know what else to call it) came up, the lovely @kfwyre made a good observation about the audience of your speech, and here it's a similar problem I feel. The audience of Lindsay's words is global. And amongus those people there's going to be evil people who will use the guilt of other people on a platform to launch a mob attack.
Because that's what they are. Bullies. They just hide behind the shield of social justice to bully.
I think social media platforms that are more siloed will become more known for being less prone to this kind of thing. It's hard to get several thousand people to focus on a single comment when, for example, it was made on a niche discord server with 300 total followers.
This was a... bit of a tough watch. Lindsay shared a few different kinds of trauma and I really think you're in a bad situation if you feel you have to do that to get internet vultures off your back. Makes me want to get off the internet entirely, honestly.
The rap segment was surely… haunting. Especially considering that until this moment Lindsay didn't really talk a lot about her personal life, if at all. The video was probably one of the most unsettling videos I've watched on YouTube, to be honest, but I think it's a good thing, because the things she talks about are hella fucked up, and the impact on the viewer is, imo, appropriate.
Yeah, I kind of wonder what the intent was. She even said it herself, she knows it's not going to change anybody's minds. So then why put even more of yourself out there?
Ultimately a professional, high quality, and honest video will remembered in five years, not a bunch of disingenuous takes from random people on Twitter.
I didn't know where to post this tbh, because honestly it relates very closely to internet culture and social media, but touches on more things I feel.
It's a damng good video though, probably Lindsay's best in my opinion (but is that only cause I agree with it? I don't know...)
Haven't seen it yet, but I like that one of the chapter headings is "White nonsense." That was basically my impression of the entire blowback against her tweet.
As someone who has spent his teenagers revelling in one of those parts of the internet (let's just say I used the term Social Justice Warrior unironically) I have exited it and gotten a life and it's made it so much better. It's more than just about race.
The internet is a wonderful, terrible thing.
I've been using Twitter a lot lately, and it's mostly been great, but man people are just really willing to retweet outrage-bait without any skepticism. (Not to say that there isn't outrageous stuff that legitimately could use the attention! I just mean that there's definitely a good portion of stuff that also portrays itself as such that shouldn't be treated that way.) I've been proactive about unfollowing the worst regular offenders, but the problem exists in varying levels everywhere there. I wonder if something about the basic structure of Twitter exacerbates the problem: maybe it's a natural consequence of having retweets / quote-retweets as a standard action, combined with the lack of upvote-sorting which might have been able to prioritize outrage-skeptical responses.
As Lindsay mentions in the OP (as have many others) Twitter is a platform optimized for engagment, like a lot of social media platforms. It doesn't really matter why the engagement is happening, what the topic is, or the quality of the content. The things that generates the most engagement "wins", and nothing is better at it than outrage, dogpiling, and reactionary hot takes.