A woman tweeted about enjoying coffee in her garden and Twitter hated it. Is everyone miserable right now or what?

having me. Bridget. I'm excited to talk about being miserable. It's like your favorite topic, you know, not really, but yeah, kind of. I mean, I I it's funny that we're talking about this. Like I think of myself as a fairly like a person with a fairly sunny disposition. I'm pretty smiley. I'm kind of a look on the bright side type. But I definitely feel lately like something is up. I don't know. I think that we're more miserable, more tense, more stress, and we're bringing in that more and more

to our online spaces. And so I'm looking forward to really talking through what I think is going on and what it means for all of us. Yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it, because I totally agree it's it's hard out there. There's just so much heavy stuff going on and a lot of it feels totally intractable, and uh yes, So I'm glad you got I'm glad you gotta figured out what's what's the story? Bridget So first I should say that this is not

totally new ground. I think I've mentioned this on the show before, but a study out of Harvard Business School found that negativity travels much further and faster on social media, particularly Twitter, much faster than positive stories, because you know, we all just love to hate. But my question is not just about social media. I am more wondering is

it us. Are we, both as individual roles and as a collective citizenry of the United States, are we in such a state of fear and anxiety and overwhelm and exhaustion right now that when we show up to online spaces that we're just bringing more anger and negativity with us. On top of all the ways that we know social media platforms and algorithms are made to amplify things that we hate and negativity, of course, but I'm asking something else I'm asking, is it us? And I want to

be clear. I usually show up to these kinds of conversations with lots of research and studies to back up what I'm saying. I want to be clear, this is pretty much one anecdotal you know. I have a few recent examples I think demonstrate a little bit of what I'm talking about and what I'm seeing online. And if you are very online, like I am, for better or for worse, you might have actually seen some of these

examples play out in real time. And I think the way that people acted to them and the discourse that popped up around them on social media tells us something about where we're at right now. Ask people. I know, Michael, you are not someone who really identifies as being very online, am I right? Yeah, that's right. I historically have not

been very online. I in the early parts of like the Internet and the nineties and the early aughts, I was a lot more and then I just really took a pretty big step back from social media h much to the betterment of my mental health, I think. But over the past year or two I have really increased my use of Twitter a lot. And yeah, you know,

the question of like is it us? You know, how much of it is is the platforms, but then how much of it is us being affected by the platforms and then bringing that back and just continuing, uh, continuing that feed back loop. You might actually be the most offline person who is kind of in my peer group, like if I don't include my parents and people who are who are not in my peer group, not contemporaries

of mine. Sometimes we'll have our podcast planning meetings and I'll be like, oh my god, did you see this thing on the internet, Like this cat is being accused of being able list on Twitter? And You'll be like, I don't know what any of these words mean. I don't know what you're saying, like what's happening here? And so I you do happy? It seems to come with a level of bliss that I envy. Yeah, I mean I stress about other things. Yeah, you're always stressing about something.

I want to be clear, You're not like Mr then just not, You're just not stressing about something that strangers are doing on the internet necessarily. Yeah, like whether or not the cat is ablest, you know, like it shouldn't be right. We should all be inclusive and work for universal design, but like, you know, you know how cats are. Okay, So I want to get into these I've got I've I've got them. Lay it out as sort of three vignettes, if you will. Uh. The first I'm calling woman enjoys

coffee in garden, comma with husband. So this was the tweet that the first tweet that really stopped me, and I had to contend with what I think. I think I would describe as an outsized reaction to what I thought was a fairly normal tweet. A woman tweeted something pretty innocuous. She said, quote, my husband and I wake up every morning and bring our coffee out to our garden and sit and talk for hours every morning. It never gets old. We never run out of things to

talk about. Love him so much. And you know, I think most people might see a tweet like this and I might think, how nice for her, what a nice morning. Others might see a tweet like this and think nothing. Uh. I think it's I don't think it's out of the remal possibility that somebody might see this tweet and think, you know, oh, she's bragging. Don't like it feels braggy, But then keep scrolling, keep moving on, No big deal. But the thing is a lot of people had a

very visceral reaction to this tweet. They did not keep just keep scrolling. They expressed themselves. So pretty much all hell broke loose on Twitter because of this tweet. And I have a couple of samples of responses that I witnessed with my own eyes, right, So I only want to talk about things that I actually saw intervial time, because, as I said, I'm very online, so I watched all of these things unfold intervial time. Uh. I don't know what that says about how I spend my time, but whatever,

here we go. The sad ways that I spend my time is your gain, because I'm here to tell you about them if you miss them. Well, you know when you were saying, like a lot of people said nothing, and I was thinking, just sitting here, thinking like what does it mean that so many people reacted to that tweet that you read about this woman sitting in the garden with her husband, you know, and like, Okay, maybe

it's a little tweet, but like it's pretty innocuous. She's not really like she's certainly not harming anyone, she's not making any controversial claims like and so the fact that so many people would have that reaction and actively write a response to it, I was like, Wow, how sad for them. Uh, But then here you are paying attention and thinking about what those other people are writing, and so like you, you're pretty far in it. Oh, I'm

in it. No one is saying that I listen, I just before we even get into the vignettes, I am very much contextualized within this very online culture. I am the call is coming from inside the house. I am critiquing it from within. I am not. I don't want anyone to think that I see myself as you know, kind of above it moral high ground. I'm in it. I'm I'm I'm in them. I'm down in the muck. I'm with all of you. Okay. So here are some

of the reactions that I saw to that tweet. The first bucket was people basically being like, oh my god, you must be rich, you know, people saying that she must be independently wealthy or very rich and very privileged. If she's able to enjoy coffee, have a garden, and spend her her and her partner are both able to spend their mornings not working. I saw a tweet where someone was like, don't y'all work, don't y'all have jobs? And she said, oh, I have a small business, and

so I'm able to make my own schedule. Then I saw another reply to that where they said, okay, so you're able to have your peaceful mornings because you're exploiting the labor of your employees and that gives you the ability to enjoy your mornings. Terrible, And she replied, I'm a sole employee of my business. So just a lot of assumptions about her economic status and her privilege, all via her having a garden, her drinking coffee, her spending

the morning's talking to her husband. Yeah, all assumptions coming from the worst possible place of like giving her no benefit of any doubt, just like people actively wanting the most like, meanest and worst possible way. It could be true to be the case, Yes, that she's definitely exploiting her employees in order to have like she must be doing something bad if she's able to be enjoying this

like these like nice mornings consistently. So another kind of bucket of responses that I saw were contrasting how she described her own mornings and what they look like with their mornings, and so people whose mornings didn't sound great, you know, plagued by things like insomnia, anxiety, loneliness, chronic

pain or fatigue. Um, and yeah, when you compare waking up in the morning feeling lonely and in pain and really exhausted in drained, that does not sound as nice as waking up in the morning and having coffee in a garden. Sure, but again, interesting how when someone puts there, you know, pretty innocuous happy thing out into the world, people's responses can sometimes be like, well, good for you. I'm not having a happy morning. My mornings aren't that happy.

I don't have a garden, I don't have a partner. Um. So yeah, like a like a very personalized response to her kind of innocuous happy tweet, which I guess it's like fair right, Like she tweeted it publicly. People can tweet back if they if they want. But yes, it's like you're like, oh, you're happy, how I'm not. You shouldn't be either. The thing that you feel good about

you should feel bad. Yeah. I saw one response that was so specific that they replied to her tweet about the garden and the coffee and having coffee in the garden in the morning. Where I live, the winter snow is already starting and my patio is uncovered. As I was like, oh wow, like tough break. I can't afford a covered patio, like one of those capitalists fat cats out here the common people with the uncovered patio. Right.

So another bucket of response that I saw were people saying that it's completely unrealistic to enjoy talking to one spouse for hours because most people hate their spouses. I don't want to spend any time talking to them, and other people saying that like that sounded really braggy and insensitive because so many people are lonely and single. And

then just to claim that like people. I guess people went back to her, you know, wedding pictures and stuff and glean that she had only been married for a couple of months, and it's like, well, yeah, to to three months. In sure, you still think your husband is brilliant and you enjoy talking to him. Try ten years and maybe you'll think he's an idiot and you can't even stand the sound of its fucking breathing. You'll want to hate him with that coffee cup, you know, like, yeah,

that's probably gonna heapen but litterally enjoy the moment. Yeah. I mean. Also it's like she's a newlywed, like she's allowed to still be in the phase where she enjoys the company of her husband and then and like talking

to him as a fun time. Um. One thing that I should note is that in my depths of all of this, I did see accusations that the original Garden Lady poster, who definitely gives off like spiritual Earth Mama vibes, that she posts anti vax content and tread wife content, which if you don't know what that is, we did an episode with Joe Piazza all about it, so definitely check it out. Um. I have to say, I cannot confirm or deny any of that from just the cursory

look that I took at her social media. But I almost wonder if it was a pylon first and then people find the tweets that quote justify why they did the pylon, if that makes sense. Like I almost wonder if it's like, well, are you saying that it's okay to pile to pile on someone for like tweeting something innocuous because six months ago they also had some bad

takes on vaccines or whatever. Or is it like or like like like, are you are you using this to justify some behavior that maybe now you're like, oh, I'm looking at that. I kind of wish I hadn't tweet at that. Yeah, I mean I looked at it after you sent it to me ahead of this episode, and I saw a lot of people criticizing the garden tweet.

I didn't see anything about, you know, correcting misinformation or putting out like accurate vaccine information, because like, how is that even relevant to this lady tweeting about drinking coffee in her garden. It's not, it's not. This is not going to make me sound great, and I'm fully aware of that, but I just know the vibe of really going all in on criticizing something or someone and then needing to justify that to be like, well, I'm not

the asshole here. She actually said this back in and that's why it's okay that here in two I've done this to her, you know what I mean? So I just I really viscerally get that experience because I I've I've been there Yeah, we've all been there. We can identify with the idea of finding finding some post talk justification. Uh,

we humans do that all the time. So probably my favorite response to all of this, the tweet and the discourse came from Asia Barber, who if you don't know who that is, they are a brilliant writer on fashion and sustainability and influencing an online culture. Definitely give them a follow because they're brilliant, and also buy their book Consumed,

because it's also really good. But they make this really interesting point that people's reaction to Coffee Garden Lady is actually an understandable reaction to an online culture built on comparison. Asia rites quote, I genuinely think social media has gotten us to this miserable place where folks are tired of being happy for other people. It's the impact of comparison culture,

while everyone pretends it doesn't exist. Basically, they go on to argue that we're all trained to be happy for people when good things happen to them, but especially if things in your life are not where you are them to be, it can be really draining to have to have that expectation of performing happiness for others. And since the opposite of happy is, you know, bitter or jealous

or rageful or spiteful. That's kind of becomes the default other response, And so they argue that we should all be more comfortable with just having a neutral reaction in those situations, that we shouldn't feel forced or have the expectation of cheering people on all the time if frankly, we just don't have it in us. But that doesn't mean that we have to then project all of our hang ups and our challenges and perceived failings and anxieties

onto strangers via the internet. As as I writes, quote, instead of being a society where we've normalized feeling neutral about other people being happy, this app instead tells you that you have to have an emotion and if it isn't good, it must be bad, so quick make shut up because you genuinely just don't want to feel happy for this person. And I think that Asia is really

onto something that we are. I think there's something about social media that trains us that if we see something, we have to have a like a real reaction to it. We have to either like it and smash like or hate it and like leave a mean reply or whatever. Download it whatever. Like we have kind of lost that you can just see something and feel neutral about it.

And I can understand why that is making us kind of emotionally drained and exhausted, where you know, we just don't have a lot of other emotions to give other than anger and uh, spite and bitterness because of that, because of that constant expectation that we always be reacting. But it's okay to not have a take, to be like, Okay, this woman's having our coffee. I'm gonna keep scrolling next thing,

you know. And I have to say, even though I live in the middle of the city in d C, I do actually have a garden in my apartment and I have been known to spend a morning out there with a cup of coffee from time to time. And seeing this visceral reaction that everybody had to this coffee garden lady, I'm almost afraid to ever tweet a picture of my garden because I don't want the Internet coming after me. Yeah, and she did eventually tweet a picture

of her garden, and it's it's very nice. She's gonna, you know, her and her husband is a great job of transforming their suburban lawn of their modest home into a little garden. But it certainly doesn't read like, you know, she's some super rich, out of touch person. She's just just looks like a normal house where normal people live. Yeah, it's not like she said, oh, every morning I fly to Paris so I can have authentic Parisian espresso or whatever.

And I think that we're so drained and so exhausted and so tense and tired as Americans that the littlest stuff some many expressing the smallest bit. I don't, not not even try. I would call this luxury, the smallest bit of something that's not toiling, the smallest bit of something that's not the misery that I think so many of us are rightfully feeling. It's like hits a nerve, it's a little trigger point for us. I get it. I don't. I'm not happy that I get it and

identify with it, but I do understand it. Yeah, And like you're saying, it's it's two things. It's the having that emotional reaction of like anger or jealousy or resentment or whatever it is, um and then also saying something about it, you know, like not just like feeling annoyed and scrolling past you know, like I said before, I look at Twitter, you know, probably a couple hours a day if you add it all together. And I see ship that I find annoying all the time, but I

don't need to weigh in on it. Oh my god, and it's I spend I mean even just like literally but for you. And I got on the mic before we were recording, I was like, have you heard about this tech bro who took an uber from Manhattan to Philly? And he says that the three different state governments charged him all these fees, and I was so I was so meticulously He included a screenshot of the different tolls and fees that he was charged, and I was so

meticulously going through this. I was like, this is an adding up. Something's not right here. I lived in New York. This is what is its route? And I do think there's something about the Internet that invites too much scrutiny and too much emotional investment into the ongoings of strangers

and people and purchased. It's partially due to to the way that algorithms work, Like the reason why I saw Hollin Tunnel tweet most because Twitter it was a trend, right, and so you know someone can eat It's it's so easy to gamify that game of five people's willingness to be become emotionally invested in the business of strangers. It's

so easy to gamify that against us. Yeah, there's the algorithm that really incentivizes negative content, right, because it's just it's just an empirical fact that algorithms reward negative content with more likes, more visibility. But maybe just blaming it all on the algorithm is kind of letting us as a population off a little easy, right, Like why are we showing up that way? Exactly? And that's I mean, that's exactly what I'm hoping to get out in this episode. Yes,

it's the algorithms. Yes, it's the way that tech leaders have designed these platforms to continue to keep us on edge, angry, and divided for their material benefit. But what's going on with us? Are we are we good? Are we are we all good? So let's take a quick break and then I want to get into our second then yet and we are back. So we were just talking about the viral garden Lady tweet. And after I saw the

garden Lady tweet. I realized that this kind of highly personal, aggrieved response to the innocuous happiness of others was everywhere on social media, like this Garden Lady tweet. Once I saw that I was seeing this kind of response everywhere, which brings me to our next vignette, which I'm calling professor gifts students with books. So in this situation, a college professor who has this very inspiring backstory. He's the son of too incarcerated parents, first in his family to

go to college, and now he's a professor. He tweeted a picture of his campus office, which I have to say is just gorgeous. It's like one of those offices from a movie, you know, with the built in bookshelves, where all the walls are shelves, and it's just gorgeous. It's like very meticulously decorated, and it's one of those offices that anybody would die for. It's gorgeous. And he tweeted, quote my rule, any student who comes to my office hours can keep any book on my shelf that they like.

All they need to do is ask. I had a professor who used to do this back in college, and I've always remembered how special. It made the teacher student relationship. Let's continue this tradition. Uh that's nice, right, that's very nice. Yeah, I went to grad school. It's been way more time there than I should have. And uh, what he's describing sounds like the ideal professor scenario. Like it sounds nice, it sounds friendly, it sounds supportive, it sounds generous, it

sounds like a nice thing. I also went to grad school. Uh. I don't think I ever once went to office hours ever, which is probably not surprising that I ended up dropping out. Had my professors acted like this and and ben like this and you know, cultivated the kind of environment where they were giving out these books as a token of our really our our academic relationship, I might have stuck

around grad school. But alas um, I remember seeing this tweet and thinking how nice it was, and you know, I got I got warm fuzzies, and for a while, all of the responses were other academics basically being like, this is really nice. This is really the book the ideal situation that you want between you know, students and teachers where they feel this kind of connection and that connection is crystallized and symbolized in this way. Everyone one

was loving it. But then another professor responded, let's call him Professor Petty. Professor Petty responded, accusing book professor of telling everyone what a great guy he was via what he called quote lifestyle porn. Professor Petty wrote, a whole bunch of tweets. It was a whole back and forth which I with this, the entire thing go down, h

Professor Petty, he's a he's a couple of his. Professor Petty's responses says, you've got a lovely office, dude, and you're rich enough to be able to give away the problem that you decorate your office with. That's not political, that's ghosh. I'm assist white man who's working in an academic environment without a giant office bigger than my living room, nor with enough money or budget to give away the things that I need to do my job. To any

student who asks check yourself. He goes on to say, just seems to me like highly curated, performative, humble brags made superciliously from positions of extreme, unexamined privilege don't form the basis of inherently radical politics. You may disagree, I guess how can I do more than one thing at once. If I've given the books I need for my job away, you seem to treat books as props and window dressing

rather than tools of the trade. Super weird. I donate things that I don't need or have dupes of, but giving away books on request odd. So Professor Petty really yeah, he Professor Petty did not like this, and he really wanted like this was I read them as one pair rack, but this was like a bunch of tweets. He was like back in forth, really digging in. Super sillious. Even I know, I also love like what I like academic e sounding drag. This is, I guess I'll say, yeah,

it's it's so petty. I don't know, so I don't know how many people you follow in like academic Twitter, but definitely professors like tweeting about what it means to be a good professor and providing good mentorship and like different ways to be a good mentor. That's like a common thing that people post about, right, So book professor is I think totally within those normal boundaries of talking

about it. And you know, it sounds like things are working out pretty well for book professor, and that's great. You know, lots of people have nice things happen to them. It doesn't mean that they're bad. Yes, And I should also reveal one of the reasons why the optics of this just weren't great was that book professor is black

and Professor Petty is white. And so the optics of a white professor scolding a black professor and calling him privileged and saying, you know, you're you've got all this unexamined privilege and I don't have a big office and you do, and that's bad. It's just not a great look, it's really not And also being a professor who like can't do his job without his books, it sounds pretty

grim for Professor Petty. Yes, and you know, I also think that the way that Professor Petty reframed those tweets and his responses really strip away a lot of the context of professor books, you know, his background as an academic who faced all of these challenges to get where he is, kind of returning the favor of this kind gesture that a professor did to him when he was coming up. Professor Petty really just flattens that situation. It takes all the new nuance out of it and turns

it into someone humble bracking on the internet. But that's not really the spirit of what Professor Books said in the first place. Yeah, it really isn't. And you know, I don't know where Professor Petty works, but it's probably not like a fourteenth century monastery where there's like three books that a team of monks has been working on over generations. You know, like there's a lot of books.

Most professors I know who have offices and universities have more books than they know what to do with, right, and so giving away books to students it's pretty common. I think, Yeah, it's it's it is completely common, and

so as they do. Black academia. Twitter really came together to gather Professor Petty and support Professor Books, and eventually Professor Petty deleted his tweets and apologized, saying that he was taking his frustrations with academia out on the wrong person, which yeah, obviously I think I could tell I mean

this person, and yeah, you didn't do anything wrong. You're taking all your anger out on him, And partially I get it, right, if you're an academic sitting in your tiny office watching everybody give props and accolades to another academic in their big, gleaming, beautiful office. Of course, I think it's a little bit understandable for that to feel sort of personal, you know, And I am super again I don't love that. I sort of partially get it because I am super familiar with that feeling of why

not me? Why do I have to cheer on others who have the things that I want but don't have access to. Part of me gets that because yeah, I'm a petty bitch. I've I've I've definitely felt that thought that before. Who hasn't. But I also think that it seems like it's very easy to get riled up by something that a stranger post as a proxy for your feelings about assist amic or institutional frustration, right, because sometimes

the villain is some something like big and lofty. You know, the college that you teach at is underfunding your department or not investing in infrastructure, so your office is horrible and tiny. But those things do not have, you know, visible Twitter accounts that you can yell at and like yell your grievances toward other academics tweeting pictures of their big, cool offices. They do they're much more visible and easier to take your frustrations out on. Yeah, I cannot understand.

There's plenty of things in academia to be frustrated and angry about, but like you said, don't take them out on a professor who is just trying to do something nice for students. You know, maybe it is a little eye rollie, you know, if that's how you feel, fine, But uh, I guess after all this, I kind of feel sorry for Professor Petty that he's in such a bad, dire emotional play that like just like bubbled over and he felt that he had to express his frustration on

on professor books. Well, this is exactly what I'm saying. I think that we're all I think that we're in a state of constant emotionality and and and kind of like I think that for a lot of us feeling bleak right now, and so we're on this hair we're showing up to online spaces on this hair trigger that I don't know that I've really felt the same way before.

And I guess that's exactly what my what my claim is, Yeah, Professor Petty probably would have had a much nicer night if he just like went out and talked with his friends, you know. Yeah, or when scrolling Twitter saw that picture had the whatever reaction he had clocked it, asked himself a couple of leading questions, like, oh, this is really you're really annoyed about this? Why that would lead him to the the result of like, oh, I'm frustrated with

my own situation in academia. I have frustrations about what's happening on my own campus, and that's I think that would be so much more productive. And maybe he it's it's almost like he got there eventually, but I think he could have had a much nicer time if he got there without being dragged by all of black academic Twitter with like with withering, fucking takedowns. You know, black Twitter users are like a like a sharp tengued bunch too, so I'm sure some of those had to hurt. Yeah,

that probably sucked. If he felt bad before, he probably feels worse now exactly. And so this actually reminded me of you know, I said earlier that it's been a while since I feel like I've seen people showing up on this like hair trigger with misery and anxiety, And it actually reminded me of the way that I felt in the early days of the pandemic, you know, I and like that was a hard time for all of us and easy for me to be my you know,

apertment garden feeling whatever I was feeling. But you know, I remember, I would get super upset and super angry about all of these pictures of maskless patrons at crowded bars and restaurants. And this was during the part of the pandemic where I was like pretty deeply distancing, and so I was really feeling the emotional and physical and

the mental strain of all that distancing. It was not a great time, and I would get almost like deeply irrationally rageful at these images, and I would have to do the work of reminding myself, Like, Okay, Bridget, are you really mad that this like nineteen year old college student in wherever I went to this crowded bar? Or are you mad that like institutions and people and people with power and political leaders should have made better options

to support people? Right, maybe our political leaders should have taken bolder action to keep those bars closed and like meaningfully paid and supported people to stay home, and you know, made better decisions to keep people safe, Like, there's there was no picture of that on social media. What I did have was pictures of like nineteen year old college students partying. Let's be real, when I was nineteen, I probably would have been partying during a pandemic too, because

I wasn't very smart. But I had to really work to remind myself that just because the people I am seeing partying every single time I opened my social media apps are so visible, the actual thing that I am angry about is not them partying, is that our leaders have failed us so bad that it turned it into like a personal choice, and that those places were available

to be overcrowded and all of that. Like, but it is work, and I think that so often we are using people who are visible as a proxy for our anger, which is often times rightful about something that is institutional and not so visible, which brings me to my last man yette, which we'll get into after a real quick break.

Let's get right back into it. So we were talking about how sometimes are anger on social media, we're using visible people as proxies for our anger, that maybe it would be better directed toward institutions, which brings me to my last one. Yet which I'm calling woman complains about male shoppers for grocery delivery. App Let me set the stage for you. So, are you familiar with the joke women be shopping? Women be shopping? Is there more to

the No, that's the whole thing. Okay, I'm familiar with it. Then, Okay, Well this is basically that in reverse, which is men don't be shopping. Uh So, it's just like pretty well worn online discourse that pops up online fairly regularly, and it's the idea that men are bad grocery shoppers. They pick bad fruit. You know, you can't trust them to pick a good avocado, Well, will get the worst one.

They don't know where stuff is if you don't give them a meticulous list, will come back with the wrong thing. Women need to essentially FaceTime men and like walk them virtually through a grocery store for them to get to be able to do anything right, to the point where it's almost better to just do it. If you're sending a man to shop for you, it's almost better just do it yourself because he's gonna do a terrible job.

And so this discourse definitely plays into a lot of like hot button topics around gender and things like that, right, it it deals with domestic labor like grocery shopping being

kind of assigned as female labor. You know, the idea of men uh beenizing their incompetence, which basically means like being so bad at grocery shopping that they won't even do it, and so like the woman will just do it herself even if they are a sensibly being paid to the person who tweeted the tweet I'm about to read didn't say what grocery delivery app that she was using, you know, whether it was a go puff or insta cart.

But it really dips into our expectations around how we treat gig workers who are mostly being like paid sub optimal wages and likely being misclassified as an independent contractor to do the labor of someone else, and just the general ethics around gig work in general, which I know is a hot button issue. All of this is to say that you already know this is gonna be a topic where everyone has an opinion, just a flashpoint of

a bunch of different things. So last week a woman tweeted, quote my last time using grocery delivery, and I got a man he started refunding stuff that I knew, dang well the store had. I was so pissed. I got in the car and went to the store. He was at bro was literally standing in one aisle on the phone. The tweet got over seventy likes, almost four thousand retweets, and too many responses to count. So you're just standing

there on his phone. Yeah, I think he was just I think that she's trying to say he was just standing there on his phone saying things that she knew that they had in stock were out of stock, and like being like, oh, refund, oh refund if you if you have not used instat cart, if they go to the store and they don't have a thing that you want, they just refunded. And so she's saying that he was just refunded, refunded, refunded, and not actually shopping, just like

refunding everything. Well, of the three fignettes, I'm pretty sympathetic to to what are wecalling her. Unhappy grocery lady. Unhappy grocery lady. I mean that does so kind of annoying. I am with you there, and Okay, so these are the buckets of responses that I saw so some people thought, you know everyone, or some people kind of are like you right that, Like everyone has a right to expect that if they're paying for a service, that sort of

should be done correctly. Like if you paid to get a haircut and the barber messed up your hair, most people will be like, oh, well, it's reasonable to complain about that, because you should get what you pay for. Um. Other people thought that the woman who initially made the tweet was coming off as like lazy and entitled, right, Like, if you're gonna complain about the person shopping for you, you should get the groceries yourself. And one of those

responses came from George's the Cat. You may remember George the Cat. Are you familiar with George the Cat? Yeah, I'm familiar with George, so you may remember George the Cat. He rose to Twitter fame after a viral asque Creddit post about two cats, one name Jeans and the other name George's, who lived in an office together. Um, and George has turned into something of a I guess a

leftist celebrity cat on Twitter. George's or whoever is running this Twitter page on George's behalf replied to his over two d thousand followers idea go get your own groceries,

and this response did not go over well. Um, some disability advocates pointed out that, especially during a pandemic, that not everyone actually can go get their own groceries, and so George was accused of perpetuating able ism for this response, and so the entire discourse kind of got a little complicated after that, and some of the accusations that I saw were, like, it sounds like this discourse has reached a weird conclusion where some folks are, you know, defending

an able bodied woman in confronting a gig worker at a grocery store, you know, by using the fact that people with disabilities need to sometimes have to rely on services like insta cart to do so. So the converse the discourse just got very complicated and very big and

very involved. And I think it's a good example of exactly what I was talking about before, how anything except the visible individuals are kind of just removed from the conversation, right, And so most people are either blaming the quote entitled grocery lady or the quote lazy, bad male shopper, because that's so much easier and more visible than grappling with any kind of a bigger picture. So looking at the politics of apps like insta Cart or go puff for instance,

or the people who designed the app. And I also think when gig apps like insta carts oftentimes have exploitation built into them as a feature. Of course, nobody has having a good time. The person who is being underpaid to shop is probably not having a great time. The person who feels that they were getting sub optimal service because that person is underpaid for that labor, it's also

not having a great time. And so I think it's one of those situations where the real villain is the app or the more more specifically the tech leaders who build the app and get rich off of it. Yeah, slutely. And people have complained about poor working conditions at insta Cart for a long time, and they there's a unionization effort.

I think, like, what was that like a year ago now that they you know, fought and and suppressed and yeah, maybe if they paid their workers decently, called them workers, treated them as workers, and uh, you know, worked with them, they would be able to provide the level of service that grocery lady is looking for. But they choose not to do that. You know, it's like it's hard to

really fault. You know, there's some some gig worker for not taking the gig work seriously because it's gig work, and you know, it's probably not how I would have done it, But I don't know what's going on with

this guy. And I also think this idea, you know, when people talked about people with disabilities and the fact that they often do have to rely on services like insta Cart to get their groceries, I think again that's a situation where the failing is institutional, because people with disabilities should have accessible, reliable, affordable services to help them live their lives and to get them the things that they need in their lives with, you know, and instead

they're given this a private app like insta Cart that really functions more like a pricey luxury service and so it's not super accessible that has all this exploitation built into it. Um never mind the fact that I'm sure there's lots of disabled folks who work who are forced to do gig work and are being underpaid, and so again I think these are are issues are really institutional, but so often it's easier to blame the visible parties.

You know, it's not the tech leaders who get rich off of apps like insta cart or the institutional failings. These people and things are not so easy to find and yell at on Twitter. But the person who tweeted about having a bad experience on instacart, well, she sure is.

She's very easy to find. He tweeted about it. Yeah, absolutely, And it's there's more of that same post talk justification, like with garden Lady, where after the fact, after people were already piling on, they were searching for reasons to dislike her, you know, like, oh, she's anti vax which

maybe she's, maybe she's not. I have no idea. But obviously the whole reason that everybody was tweeting about her wasn't because of her positions about vaccination, right, It was just some justification people found after the fact to justify what they all already wanted to do. And you know, suggesting that this seemingly able bodied person just go and get her own groceries. It's you know, it's like a level of snark that one would exist on the Internet.

But ah, but it does feel like people were piling on and like looking for reasons to support one side or the other because of problems caused by those larger systemic forces and instant cart itself or I guess we don't know if it was instant cart, but whatever the app was, Like you said, they're not visible. Uh, grocery lady is visible, George is visible. Unfortunately the gig worker wasn't visible. I know, I what if he tweeted his side of the story, like, lady, I'm getting paid nothing

to do this. Okay, He's probably out there, has no idea any of this is happening. He's probably knowing how men grocery shop probably out there are stuck in the aisle trying to pick a good avocado. He was just trying to call somebody to come help him fight his way out. Meanwhile, there are celebrity cats tweeting about him. We we live in such a weird, weird timeline, like like the such a weird timeline, And that cat probably

makes way more than he does. Oh for sure, no question in my mind, how was that George is an office cat? Like George's making money, He's given books to little kittens. I know. I want the controversies to fold back in on themselves, where someone is angry that it has a nice office and is gifting books to kittens and doing it in a garden. M that's the worst part,

that he's doing it in a garden. So all of this is to say that, you know, I saw lots of people in response to all of these vignettes being like, Wow, people are so miserable. You know, I would never share my happy moment with with the internet because people are so miserable they're just going to crap all over it. And I kind of agree, not in the you know, kind of snarky like, oh you're so miserable, log off, touch grass kind of way. I meet it in the real way. I think that we as Americans are just

really miserable right now. We're living through a pandemic economic instability, climate instability, worsening division, political anxiety, and our institutions, who are offensibly here to provide us support, really showed us that we're kind of just on our own. And I think everyone is exhausted. We're working more and more and more. The cost of everything is going up, and so this is not sustainable. People have less leisure time, less time

to rest or even just process things. And so I feel like as a result, we're all just showing up tense and anxious and on edge. And when we are showing up online, we're bringing all of that tension with us. And of course this is all exploited by social media platforms that we already know specifically feed as content that enrages us and encourages us to pile on strangers and turn them into proxies for our pain. And I guess I just want better for us. I want better for

all of us. Yeah, we deserve it. I mean it. It is kind of a great American tradition to like find proxies and blame them for our problems. But it seems to really be showing up in a different way now that now that we've got social media. Yeah, I mean. And to be clear, people have been miserable since forever. There's gonna be miserable people out there until the end, until the end of time, and they've always been there. But I think social media obviously is inflaming something in us.

And I think as we grapple with you know, what it means to be a person in which is not always so fun, I think it can put us in a situation where it's really locking us into a cycle of misery where we're angry intense, algorithms are showing us things that are that are making us even more angry intense, and the cycle continues, and I just want better, and we all realize it. Like it's kind of surprising when you say it like that, that like we all know

what makes us angry, intense and anxious. Uh, and you know, reduces our ability to pay attention to things. It doesn't really seem sustainable, right, Like what don't you think like irrational people would figure out something else. I don't. I don't know what that is. Like obviously, I like the internet, you know, I work on this show even but like I don't know. It feels like this isn't it, This ain't it, this saint it. I can tell you. I

can tell you this is not it. And honestly, this is a lot of like wild speculation and anecdotal evidence on my part. This is not a typical show that we do. You can probably tell. But I also just really want to know what you all think. If you're listening, you know, have you been feeling this palpable anxiety in misery online or off? You know, I've seen people say that you shouldn't share any of your happy stuff with the internet because they're just gonna crap all over it

and tear it apart. Do you agree? Do you do you keep your happy stuff offline because you don't want someone to turn you into the next garden lady or the next book professor. I'm really curious. Let us know how you feel, how you've been dealing with all of this. Um, if I'm way off base, I want to hear that too. You can hit us up at Hello at tangoti dot com. I cannot wait to hear from you and Michael. Thank

you so much for being here. I know when something is going on on the internet, and I want to have a kind of offline perspective. I can always count on you. Yeah, it's generally pretty pretty offline perspective. Well, thanks for having me. I love talking with you, and it's an interesting topic. I'm glid you brought it up and wanted to talk about it, and I'm looking forward to seeing and hearing what listeners have to say me too. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or

just want to say hi? You can reach us at Hello at tangodi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangodi dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget Todd. It's a production of I Heart Radio and Unboss creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer. Terry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help

us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from I heeart Radio, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. And then I have to him with and then I have to m with