More ways in which the internet has broken our brains
Twitter poisoning, and other fun phenomena.
1. “This group of people whose politics / interests / identity I am frequently rude about don’t like me, for some reason. Ergo, they must be the baddies.”
Conversely:
2. “This group of people whose politics / interests / identity I would have found utterly and rightfully hateful until we ended up on the same side about this niche culture war issue have turned out to be the goodies. Wow, who saw that coming.”
Not mentioning any radicalised former TV writers in particular here.
Conversely again, but in a different way:
3. “This mild criticism of a book / TV show / sports franchise / cute animal meme is an attack on the core of my identity, approximately equivalent to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. I shall now respond accordingly.”
4. Exactly the same, but with someone else enjoying a book / TV show / sports franchise / cute animal meme you don’t like.
5. “My head is now completely and joyously empty except for one thing: cats.”
6. “This week’s events actually just highlight the importance of doing exactly what I’ve been calling for for years now anyway.”
7. “Imagine if this small and basically irrelevant thing was actually a much bigger and actually quite different thing. Now try telling me it isn’t bad.”
8. “So, this extremely complex and multifaceted phenomenon we’re all talking about? Well by a staggering coincidence, it’s actually about this thing I’ve been posting obsessively about since some time in the second Gladstone administration.”
9. “Wow, 6,000 people all providing an extensive range of well-documented evidence complete with citations to demonstrate I’m factually wrong. Guess I must have touched a nerve.”
10. “Someone I encountered on a dating app was not completely perfect. Let us now come together to shame them out of ever seeking sexual or romantic connection ever, ever again.”
11. “Oh, so you like breathing oxygen, do you? Your hatred of anaerobic organisms makes me sick.”
12. “Here are 371 essentially identical photographs of me. No reason.”
(Yes I am jealous because there are only about six photographs of me in existence which I don’t actively hate.)
13. “Your entirely justified criticism only makes me more determined to be a dick about this.”
14. “This thing which will break the economy and ruin lives, absolutely not excluding my own, is actually good, because approximately eight people I dislike will hate it slightly more than I do.”
(I propose we call this phenomenon “Twitter poisoning”.)
15. “I am not a lawyer, but I am pretty certain that this copy pasta I just saw fourteen other people sharing has greater legal force than the terms of use I agreed to when I set-up my account.”
In a similar vein:
16. “I think this person and their politics are silly, from which I can safely conclude that defamation law no longer applies. Now to take a big ol’ sip of coffee and check my post.”
(This one was incredibly common among critics of Jeremy Corbyn and the left more broadly – it’s a shame that there already is a Bradley Effect, as it’d be a great name – but it’s not entirely a phenomenon restricted to either the internet or defamation law. See, for example, the occasional stories that pop up involving estate agents smacking someone in the face on camera, simply because they find them a bit annoying.)
17. “This may seem like a complicated geopolitical issue, affecting millions of people and with hundreds of years of history behind it… but if you boil it down to its fundamentals you’ll find it’s actually about my own beef with a rival faction in the Labour party, yeah?”
18. “There’s actually a very useful historic parallel which explains all this, probably involving some aspect of the Roman Empire.”
(Look it would have been shitty if I did all of these and didn’t go for myself even once, now, wouldn’t it?)
19. “Did I mention that I have a dog? A dog? Dog dog dog dog dog dog dog.”
(Stop it Jonn this is becoming self indulgently masochistic now.)
20. “This slight change in font/character limit/algorithm is the literal end of the literal world.”
21. “F*ck you with your f*cking coffee and your f*cking garden you piece of f*cking sh*t. Oh, so you’ve got a partner, and a garden, and some coffee, do you? Millions of people don’t even have any f*cking legs you prick! Die! Why don’t you just die! Die die die die die!”
22. “I am leaving. I am definitely leaving. For real this time, this was the last straw. Don’t try to stop me!
“See you tomorrow.”
Now, read the prequel!
The article above is an expanded extract from the Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything archive. It’s a sort of sequel to this piece about how my adventures in early 2000s Doctor Who fandom perfectly prefigured the way the internet would eventually break all of our brains. An extract:
So much of this is recognisable in online discourse today. The bitter, endlessly splintering factionalism. The way matters of slight inclination or personal taste harden into identities. The way communities develop in-jokes and codes that newcomers may find off putting, or may swiftly and ostentatiously adopt as a way of showing they’re part of the in-group. The ease with which online radicalisation seems to happen made a lot more sense to me after I’d re-examined the period of my life in which I viciously hated a company whose only crime was to make Doctor Who audios that I didn’t think were very good.
You can read the rest here.
Self-promotion corner
The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything goes out every Wednesday at 4pm. In this week’s edition I explained my problem with “centrism”; went in search of the most densely populated square of Great Britain; and made some notes on clouds, and the bloke who named them.
If you’re enjoying these weekly extracts, then why not become a paying supporter? For a mere £4 a month or £40 a year, and every Wednesday afternoon you’ll get a bit on politics, some diverting links, an article on something from history/geography/language/whatever I’ve been obsessing about this week, and the map of the week. And for less than a pound a week, too! Click here to get started.
BUT: we’re all broke right now. If you can’t currently justify paying for some nerd’s substack (unemployed, underemployed, impoverished student, and so forth), just hit reply and I’ll give you a complimentary subscription, no questions asked. I am literally giving it away.
Or here are some things you can read now, for free:
This piece about how the right-wing press is killing the Tories with kindness.
This one about how “15-minute cities”, a worthy but dull bit of urbanist theory, became yet another front in this endless bloody culture war.
Righto. A lot of nonsense I’ve written about Doctor Who, which you can find here.
