Social media and changing directions

Last week a friend of mine asked “are you ever coming back to Twitter?” The answer is no. I spent the past six months trying to figure out why Twitter had become such a miserable experience for me – reading everything I could about shame, deference politics, and harm -- and what that had meant for me and my work. Those reflections are below.

At the same time, a lot people have told me there are things they appreciated about what I write about. And it can be a lot of fun to do the detective work behind bad theological takes, and what we might be able to do better.

So I decided to try something out. This is Bad Theology in the Good Place. Bring me your vapid liberal memes and your thinly veiled TGC propaganda. I’ll give some thoughts and you can offer yours. We’ll see if it sticks. And if it does, I might ask you to throw in a dollar. Because paying people for their labor is important.

But first, some learnings (with links):

1.     A couple months ago I met a person at a worship retreat. I didn’t recognize him, but he recognized me. He approached me and the first thing he did was apologize. I said, “for what?” At some point he had made a comment on Twitter and it came off as questioning women’s expertise, or something to that effect. I had hit back.

He thought about it, worried about the interaction. I have no memory of this happening. I felt bad about it.

But I recognize I’ve also been on the receiving end of interactions that I’m quite sure other people have forgotten. They’ve been caustic, accusatory, even mean and then rode off into the sunset without thinking about me again. Me: I perseverated. I felt ashamed and angry at myself.

I don’t want to put myself into a place of casual interactions of harm – causing them or receiving them. There’s enough trauma out there without me adding to it.

2.     I learned amazing things from amazing people on Twitter. I miss it often. And I miss the resources and some of the relationships. But Really Engaging in Twitter meant consuming a lot of theological garbage and it was starting to impact my thinking and writing. There’s a lot of manufactured outrage on the internet. Some of you have amazing self-control about looking away from this wreckage, and I am impressed by you!

3.     I guess a lot of pastors enjoy the experience of having a platform and get a kick out of their book-writing status. My experience was a tirade of trolling and hate speech. Over the past three years I was called a bitch, a whore, told to fuck myself, that it would be better if I was dead, that I am an idiot, the anti-Christ, a terrorist, a false priest, and an abomination. Trad Catholics made threads to make fun of how I looked and others made memes about my face. The more followers I got, the more aggressive this trolling became.

In my Twitter-algorithm-assigned-bubble I also watched what Sarah Schulman might call a consistent collapse of conflict and abuse. I saw this in the slippage of language like appropriation, racism, ableism. I often saw these accusations used to establish authority and dominance. I’ve become more aware and concerned about personalized and therapeutic forms of anti-racism and how often I’m seeing these models aid elite and corporate capture. This isn’t a place I want to invest my time.

4.     The day I left twitter a woman popped in to tell me I was leaving the platform to “avoid accountability.” I chuckled and hit the deactivate button. The person who said this is a stranger to me. She didn’t want my wholeness or to move me deeper into the work of material solidarity. She wanted me to feel ashamed.

In my corner of Twitter people often used the tools of social movements as an end in themselves. Polarization is a tool -- one we use when we need to make clear the stakes that are significant for movement work. But polarization as a permanent state makes coalition impossible. Rage energizes and fuels people and movements for a time, and its corrosive if we live absent rest and joy. Shame can be a tool for recognition and change (and at times has been generative in my life!), and shame as an end in itself is destructive and invites moral policing.

5.     I do not want to write free content for Elon Musk. I do not want to produce free content for the stockholders at Twitter.

6.     I was on Twitter because this is how you sell books. Over the past few years, I’ve become aware that the publishing industry’s insistence on platforming has been a disaster for authors, and for books. Not only do authors have to come up with the ideas, create the proposals, and then write the whole damn book, we also have to sell. The work that goes into this often feels like an ethical quagmire.

Before the publishing industry became dependent upon social media as the primary source of book sales, people developed a following because they produced good ideas and people wanted to further engage them. Now, if you want to write, you have to begin with a platform. You have to be good at Twitter and Instagram or pastor a megachurch. This does not always translate into being a good writer. Sometimes it mitigates against good writing.

I want to be more discerning about what I’m willing to do, how much of myself I’m willing to put on the line, what investments I’m willing to make for publishers.

7.     I don’t want to invest in people who lie about their identity, or cosplay someone from a marginalized group in order to exercise dominance through deference politics, or make up, twist, or skew facts about themselves in order to control narrative space. I’m more and more aware that these are often coordinated efforts that are designed to break apart solidarities and possible coalitions. I want to know who people are through their politics and their commitments. I respect people’s ideas whose work I’ve witnesses as courageous and consistent, and it’s often difficult for me to assess this on the basis of tweets.  

8.     I don’t want my solidarities to be based on whether I respond to this tweet or uplift this post or “like” something that turns out to be by someone who did something offensive that one time. I want to stand on the line with people, to get into the dirty materialism of our political lives, to pull up the structures of oppression from the root.

9.     I need to care for my mental health and my moral health. I’m not convinced that Twitter helped me become a better person or helped me more deeply invest in the grounded struggles of my community. For you it might be. For me it was a detriment and a distraction.