Mad Online
Following up a short Twitter thread of mine this morning, I thought I’d expand on my refusal to be “mad online”.
Here are the tweets:
In recent times, I’ve gained thousands of new Twitter followers for, variously:
1. Calling the mainly Pakistani Muslim Grooming Gangs in various British towns and cities “a pack of nonces following a religion founded by a nonce” on national telly;
2. Writing a column where I set out, in a fair bit of detail, why I think feminism is utter cobblers and how its predilection for pseudoscientific claims backgrounds modern forms of transactivism;
3. Various bits of commentary on the war in Ukraine where I’ve booted people across the political spectrum right up the arse for historical inaccuracy and foreign policy naïveté.
In more recent times I’ve lost at least hundreds of those new followers precisely because I don’t keep saying this stuff on Twitter. My Twitter is only occasionally spicy, usually in an amusing way:
In response to my refusal to be Mad Online, this follower made a pertinent observation:
This is self-evidently true. James Lindsay is merely the most recent, most high profile example. Because Twitter is biased against conservatives, he was banned from the site, but Jason Stanley (a lefty philosophy academic at a distinguished university) is, if anything, even madder. His account is present for all to see.
I’m not sure which is worse.
There are a number of theories as to why this happens (it also happens in places other than Twitter, as this piece documents with respect to a culinary YouTuber who appears to have gone quite mad). That author discusses the concept of “audience capture”, where people go right out on a limb to appease their (growing) band of followers and finish up sawing off the branch on which they sit in the process.
For what it’s worth, I suspect I’d be disinclined to go down the same path, but for a prosaic reason: I’m old. Or, rather, I’m old in internet terms.
I first started writing and being moderately widely published (ie, in my state-based newspaper) in high school. My first piece in the national press ran in 1993. My first novel was published in 1994. “Being GenX” is not much of a defence against social media madness, but for me, it’s worked. It also boils down to sheer luck. I’m glad my first brush with fame was before the internet really got going, and especially glad it was before social media even existed.
I’ve come increasingly to the view that social media is a place, and we use the wrong prepositions for it. One isn’t “on Twitter” or “on TikTok” or whatever; one is in Twitter or in TikTok, much like being in France (or wherever) for a holiday. This place-ness is, I suspect, why novelists struggle to depict social media in fiction and accounts for the popularity of everything from superhero film franchises to televisual nostalgia (think Stranger Things). Scriptwriters don’t have to portray that pesky internet, or characters face down in their phones.
Authors — if they become popular enough — often have an odd relationship with their readers (but only when those readers engage in direct correspondence, either as fans or critics or some mixture of the two). This is, of course, something social media puts on steroids.
I’ve been through the traditional situation twice, on a vast scale with my first novel (Australia Post spent more than a year delivering my mail in sacks) and more moderately with my second and third novels (because they were published in 2017 and 2018, most of the letters were in digital formats, but not all).
I wrote about the latter experience for Law & Liberty:
And thanks to the letters I received from readers, it became clear that many people wanted to live in the world I’d created. […]
The idea that I’d created some sort of ideal vision would not go away. It even turned up in serious reviews from reputable outlets. People liked everything from the way I’d organised society to the role of the military to the system of governance to the stable, orderly rituals of Roman religion to the way the health service was run.
There were times when I wanted to shout did you not notice the authoritarianism? Did you not notice the eugenics? Did you not notice the medical experiments on POWs? Did you not notice the torture? (A few people — mainly professional reviewers — noticed the torture.)
Not an entirely pleasant experience; I did wonder if I’d overestimated my readers. This is something novelists often do — we fall into one of two great traps, viz, “readers are geniuses” (my flaw) or “readers are idiots” (every book you’ve ever read that tediously spells out every point so you don’t miss it, eg Atlas Shrugged).
I think treating social media as a place may be the key to staying sane and not going Mad Online. If you’re in another country for work or holidays, you know you have to modify your behaviour. Sometimes this includes aptitude in a foreign language; it often takes in an awareness of different manners and morals.
To paraphrase and modify L. P. Hartley, Twitter is a foreign country, and they do things differently there.
