I learned something today. Writing about lessons is how I best integrate them. Typically I do this privately, but this one is about the prevalence of both cowardice and inauthenticity, with broad implications.
Today was another notifications-blowing-up-on-Twitter day, this one on the niche account I run about mathematics. I used to do tons of original research about the stories of women mathematicians, but it’s been about a year since I wrote a new one. Now that I’m busy with a grown-up job, I recycle the content on birthdays, death anniversaries, and around news-related hooks, and most of the account is about a daily mathematical challenge, with problems taken from the Mathematics 2021 calendar.
The Background
It’s almost impossible to relate social media drama in an interesting way, so I’ll summarize it briefly: an adult (a woman with a PhD) got trolled. Her response was a classic from the Woke playbook on twitter: go through the person’s followers and start pulling the “guilt by association” tactic, demanding to know why various people follow the person; here, my mathematics account. People usually reserve this tactic for when they have lost an argument, which is ridiculous enough. I was ignoring it out of secondhand embarrassment for the woman, since using this tactic as a response to being trolled on Twitter is so cringe. It lands the person on a spectrum between “just plain pathetic” and “narcissistic injury” and is both boring and gross. Watching it is a little like watching someone over the age of two defecate. The unwanted intimacy is awkward and I always end up feeling sad that the person doesn’t know enough to be embarrassed. It’s transparently about their ego in losing an argument or getting trolled — you can tell, because the public call-out is always the first tactic. Not an email or a DM, which is the appropriate approach for someone who genuinely wants an answer. The real purpose is not to get information about the reason for a follow—it’s performing for an audience.
I’m sick, so I took five naps today. After each one, I had more and more notifications as the drama blew up. The person-who-did-the-trolling’s followers and some of my own twitter friends stepped in to play defense, and it went like these things tend to go: the person playing the “guilt by association” card looked as pathetic as, in this circumstance, they were.
As it happens, the person she got trolled by is one of my good friends. In contrast to the accusation that he is a sexist/misogynist, he spent much of lockdown helping me learn to code. As a direct consequence of his actions, there is one more woman employed in STEM, at an income north of the American household median, with excellent health insurance. I say that not to be crass or to boast, but to explain the magnitude of the consequences of his kindness. I was poor enough to regularly miss meals all through school. Additionally, I am both deaf (though blessed with excellent hearing technology, still deaf) and someone working to overcome C-PTSD. That makes me a first generation college graduate, disabled, and, with my friend’s help, no longer poor — several overlapping intersections that the Woke claim to care about there.
I didn’t bother to defend him, mostly because it wouldn’t have mattered at all. Actions (even actions that demonstrably forward their professed values and goals) do not matter to the Woke, any more than my religious parents cared that some Muslim neighbors we had once lived up to the Scriptural mandate of caring for widows and orphans far more consistently and effectively than they did. Failure to worship Jesus = Failure to profess allegiance to Wokeness = proof of being a sinner.
The Lesson
I saw the tweet in this pic midway through the day’s drama, and it blew me away. I’ve covered the identity of both the unfortunate individual who started this silliness and the person she was responding to.
Think about this, and what it implies.
First, it implicitly accepts entirely the rightness of the Woke standard of policing Twitter follows — which, by the way, is always applied selectively, to one’s “problematic” follows only. I follow AOC and Ted Cruz; CNN and Breitbart; leftists and conservatives and everyone in between. Following people from all over the political map is part of how I keep my own biases, confirmation and otherwise, in check, and it’s a practice I recommend. If Twitter is going to be a window onto the world, making it as wide of one as possible is a good practice.
Second, it is a tacit admission that the Woke see social media as a place to perform virtue, to carefully cultivate and control a public face. It is little wonder that so many of them pull the “guilt by association” tactic; they work so hard at being inauthentic and are so focused on other people’s perceptions that those of us who refuse to play by their rules are surely irritating AF.
Third, it potentially implies that the Overton window on Twitter being set so insanely far to the left is a facade. Ask yourself — what if, as some of us have long suspected, the left use Twitter as a stage on which to perform for each other? What if all the while they are exploring the thoughts and ideas in which they have actual interest from alt accounts, too cowardly to speak up?
When I was in college, part of my required courseload was three “diversity” courses. There they taught us to react to the world in ways entirely consistent with the “guilt by association” tactic, to go looking for microaggressions and react emotionally, even histrionically. One of my favorite podcasts frequently discusses the prevalence of Cluster B personality disorders, and the more I learn about them, the more I see how those courses, accurately titled, would have been called something like “How to see the world like a Narcissist and react to it like a Borderline.”
We have a long way to go to return our cultural discourse to something resembling sanity, tolerance of differences, and stopping the march towards rigidly enforced groupthink. I don’t know what the answers are, or even if the march can be stopped.
But I am encouraged by what I saw in the tweet above. People can much more easily leave behind performances than authentic beliefs.
If many of the Woke are performing for each other to this ridiculous extent, maybe there’s more hope than I realized.