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I was having a conversation in the moment, and then it became a conversation of the moment.
There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd and this is there Are No Girls on the Internet. So to really understand where we're headed next when it comes to platforms and internet discourse, we first need to really understand and reckon with where we've been, and that need is incredibly salient when it comes to online feminist discourse. Back in twenty thirteen, online feminism was still in its girl
Boss era. It was the era of Leslie Nope and notorious RBG T shirts bought on Etsy well meaning, sure, but perhaps not the most inclusive. Would it champion black women, poor women, trans women, and if these women were justifiably angry about not having been included in the movement, would that brand of feminism make room for that anger. Ten
years ago, writer Mickey Kendall had had enough. She started the hashtag solidarity is for White Women on Twitter, and it took off in a way that's almost kind of hard to imagine here in twenty twenty three, Solidarity is for White Women was meant to pull back the curtain and expose the ways that white feminism had left so many black and brown women to fend for ourselves. In exposing this, Mickey Kendall changed the face of online feminism, but it didn't necessarily make her well liked by the
people she was calling out. But for Mickey, if being liked by everyone is the cost of being able to speak her truth, that it's not worth it.
I was the most unpopular popular girl in feminism, and I know how that sounds, but it was like I was the mean black girl of sixth grade. And it was hilarious to me because I have a life offline and I have friends and things like that. But the things that I could say to make people mad that were perfectly innocuous. Everyone wanted me to know relatively regularly of that like RBG shirt whatever kind of into feminism.
So I was never gonna write for Jezebel that I was killing my career or whatever everyone want me to know these things. And the whole time I worked for the federal government, I had a regular job, so I wasn't sure what career I was killing right by saying things.
And then I had all of these black and brown, all of these other people who were fine, we got along great, but there was like a small core group of predominantly white, not entirely a predominantly white feminists who really wanted me to know that I was mean to them at regular intervals. And I understood the performance on display, and then I just was like, well, I guess you're going to get your feelings her today is You'll be all right.
In twenty thirteen, MPR does a piece about the hashtag Mickey created. They include responses from prominent online feminists, including a white feminist. Kendall specifically called out for failing to show up for black women. Now the piece was a response to something that she created, but they didn't even include her. There was pushback so much so that NPR was forced to address the oversight, saying Kendall kicked it off and we should have asked Kendall to participate from
the beginning. That was our mistake. NPR eventually invites Kendall to participate in the conversation, where she writes, this is a conversation after consent because sometimes the political is personal.
Now, there's really no way.
To engage with conflict as a black woman publicly without the stigma of angry or mean clinging to you wherever you go like smoke. A year later, Mickey is back at NPR as part of a feminist roundtable in the wake of a piece examining whether online feminism is too toxic, too mean, and in fact, a big part of the piece examines whether Mickey herself is mean or not. One of the questions that comes up is basically, Micky, do you think that you're a bully?
And your answer is spot on.
You're basically like you know you can can people feel however they're going to feel about the things I have to say and the frustrations that I have. Sure, but we're also at a time when people are being taught dosed, trans people are being threatened.
Your answer almost kind.
Of feels like looking into this crystal ball of horrible things to come, where we have people who are you know, losing their rights, being threatened, being killed, and there's always going to be this subsection of people who are like are they being nice enough about it? Though?
When they talk about it?
So funny story that roundtable happens basically because the Internet bullied in PR, and not even the Eye bullied in PR. The Internet bullied in PR. Right, So there's that. And then because INPR was going to have that roundtable about me without me, if that makes sense, And there's been several things already, and I was astonished at how just stupid the complaints were. And like, listen, I'm never going
to tell you I'm a nice person, right. I actually explicitly tell people if I had a brand, it would be affable asshole. Right. But also, it took absolutely nothing, in an era of doxing of harassment, to hurt the feelings of some of these people. And I do mean saying well, no, you're wrong, that's a really shitty thing to say. And they were like, you are so mean to me. Okay, you're still wrong, cry about it, and we're just not gonna talk about how you're fucking up
right here. And it is like this forecast of how we get here? Right where instead of us having what would be a perfectly normal conversation flex we're putting in a perfectly normal conversation about what is happening politically. We spend a lot of time, years in fact, on whether or not it was being said civilly enough, politely enough.
We needed to work with people who were big. It's all of this stuff about you know, coddling assholes that I still am not clear where it was supposed to get us, because it seems to have gotten us here. And now the same people who said it was important not to say these things are going on. How did we get here? Well, Susan, it started with you saying that it was perfectly okay to not fight for people
to have workplace protections if they were tramped right. We had to hear all about your gender criticism or your discomfort with knowing that people that were not you exist, and so that's how we end up here. And then on top of that, you had this like wild and wacky idea that anyone who pushed back needed to do so with a plate of cookies and a cup of warm milk and ask you daintily, pretty pretty pleased to care about someone's human rights. So now we're here, Well.
I do think that it's kind of gotten us to where we are today and where we might be headed in the future. You know, so much of this kind of both sides ask nicely coddling rhetoric. Your work does a great job of calling out institutions and individuals with power who maybe do have good intentions and that maybe you know, I admire or like, but that can let cozy relationships that they have dictate who gets included and
who gets left out. You know, if I'm an NPR editor, maybe I'm just reaching out to folks in my network, the folks that I have an existing relationship with, without really seeing or examining how that choice ends up shaping who gets to have a voice and can result in something like someone being excluded from a conversation they started.
Oh, And it's funny because I remember at the time people kept saying things like that, and I kept not even arguing, but I kept pointing out that the well I knew them, I didn't know you of it all meant that if you all went to the same school, or you hung out in the same circles, how are you an expert in anyone else's experience if the only
people you talked to were your neighbors. Right. Was fascinating to watch because I knew, as several people now do, that if you are talking about some of this class of feminists, they're married to hedge fund managers or whatever,
they come from money. Right. And I knew back then and obviously now know that some of the conversations we were having around race and class, it was like I was having a conversation with someone who with both their hand tied behind their back in terms of comprehending the stacks because they'd never been poor.
I don't think I ever really thought about the way that feminism and what it was and who it was for had been largely defined by this like white this like very well meeting white, comfortable, white lady class, you know, and like I don't think until honestly, I think it was really your hashtag solid Areas for white women that like broke something open in our culture that allowed us to see it and give us a language and point to it and talk about it and really start confronting it.
It's funny. One of the people when that hashtag happened, one of them said, I wonder how the world is going to feel when they realize the person who changed the face of feminism also likes cat gifts on Tumblr. And I just about died laughing. And I was like, well, what can I tell you? I'm a woman of many
tastes or something like that. And honestly, what happens is that we kept talking around the circles of feminism, right around the idea that all women mattered, but some women matter more kind of an approach, and that some women matter more was never explicitly stated, but it was obvious that that was the attitude, right because if it wasn't for that, we could talk about poverty, we could talk about police brutality or gun violence or any of these
other topics, not as it relates to the suburbs or as it relates to you know, Manhattan, but as it
relates to the entire rest of the country. And I think one of the reasons that the conversation residents so much too, because a lot of the women who wrote out kind of defending me when people were like, oh, she's being divisive, were low income white women who are like, this is the first time anybody has acknowledged we exist in forever and that we can be feminists, and that things are happening to us that are not happening to you, right like when we have those conversations are an anti
intellectualism in America, and that's definitely a problem. But I also understand how it's so easy to create if all you hear from the most prominent intellectuals who look like you is that you don't exist, or at least you don't exist enough for them to care about what's happening to you, except to blame you for you know, how you vote or whatever.
Let's take a quick break.
At our back.
Mickey was prompted to start Solidarity as for White Women in the aftermath of the downfall of Hugo Schweitzer, a college professor, blogger, and self described male feminist who wrote about feminism at feminist sites like jez bell Now. Back then, Schweitzer was kind of a big deal in online feminist spaces. He branded himself as a bad boy turned feminist, and on his blog wrote about his struggles with addiction, sleeping with his college students, and trying to murder his girlfriend
by turning on a gas stove in their house. It was feminism that turned him around and made him see the air of his ways, so he claimed. Black women, as we so often are, were skeptical of his rise to feminist quasi stardom, and even more skeptical of the white feminist online spaces that welcomed him. He had a penchant for attacking these black women online, but none of this. Not trying to murder his girlfriend or attacking black women kept him from building up a platform or being welcomed
in mostly white feminist spaces. Late night on August ninth, twenty thirteen, Schweizer has what he describes as a meltdown. In a succession of rapid fire confession tweets, he admits to all of this. He tells black feminists, who had been warning about his behavior, you were right. I was awful to you because you were in the way. He also admits that he did not have the credentials to be teaching college courses on feminism and that he quote built his career as a well known online male feminist
on fraudulent pretenses. Now, while this was all going down, white feminists who were friendly with Schweitzer expressed worry about his mental health and future job prospects. But where was the concern for the black women that he admitted attacking online. Where was the concern for the students that he admitted having inappropriate sexual relationships with. Where was the accountability for letting someone like Schweitzer rise up in the ranks of online feminism.
None of it.
Set right with Mickey. Solidarity is for White women? She tweeted, and it was like she had broken something open. What started is Mickey's response to the movement overlooking black way became a rallying cry, exposing all the tensions and fractures in feminist spaces online. Do you think if you tweeted solidarity is for White women today in twenty twenty three, it would take off the way that it did back in twenty thirteen.
I think in theory it couldn't. But in execution, what will happen is that Twitter will suppress the hashtag because the other reason I think solidary twitterment happens is that it is at the beginning of the concept of hashtags as calls, as a call to action. So Twitter didn't know what to do with me right, Most of the viral hashtag phenomenon hadn't studying it. I'm not saying I actually started it, but I'm one of the very early ones where that happened organically and Twitter didn't know what
it had either. Twitter was still figuring itself out. Right, Like if you were on Twitter in two thousand and nine, you remember a very different Twitter than Twitter of today. Right when the hashtag happened, it was still kind of like the wild Wild West in turn of the algorithm, because Twitter was still trying to figure out how to make the algorithm work for advertising revenue for all of
these things. It was still mostly third party clients making Twitter even a usable experience, right, Twitter had to buy everybody that made Twitter possible to use.
When you first started it, did you create it thinking this is going to like crack things open, this is going to hit on something, or were you just having a moment of frustration.
I was pissed off the I know you are playing in my face of it, all right, I got very to be honest on your twitterment comes out of a very south side of Chicago. You are fucking with my friend and you were playing in my face. And I don't know who you think you're lying to, but like, let's be real here, right. This is before the invention of the phrase be fucking for real as a popular thing,
but it was basically that. And then in the moment I figured I would say what I had to say, I think I fired off probably like one hundred tweets because Twitter were still doing the thing where they rate limit you to tweet too much in too small a period of time, and so I did all those tweets. It turned into this weird juggernauge thing.
Twenty thirteen was a different time on Twitter.
You know.
It was the platform where one off tweets could become big news stories or global movements. Solidarity is for White women allowed Mickey to access platforms that previously had been closed to her. Before maybe an editor might have just assigned the coverage of the hashtag that she created to whoever they had on staff, or maybe just invited whoever was already in their network to talk about it. But
now things were different. Not only was Mickey exposing the lack of inclusion and online feminism, but also she was pointing out the lack of inclusion and who gets to tell a story about it, and where before her voice was included late, almost as an afterthought, is something that she created. Now it was unignorable. Her voice full of all that truth and righteous anger, had to be included in the conversation. She remembers it as a defining moment.
Like it was one of those really bizarre moments that probably could not happen now in the same way, because now everybody knows what you say on social media matters. Now everybody does a lot of like careful pr constructing, interns tweeting for you. But at the time we were all just kind of using Twitter and thinking of a not necessarily shouting into the void, but as just you know, this will happen now, and then it will be ephemeral and go away and none of these things will really matter.
We were wrong. None of the people using social media, early social media that got it to where it is now understood what we were doing. I'm not even gonna say that I understood what I was doing. I was having a conversation in the moment, and then and it became a conversation of the moment for many topics right, and then piled into all of that, there's this thing where like a lot of places that had previously seemingly been impossible for anyone to write for. We're saying we
are missing this conversation. We wanted part of this conversation. And when they reached out to the people they were used to reaching out to, most of them didn't have a clue what was going on or didn't really have anything new to say because they were in my mentions getting yelled at. And so it was Matt Seton at The Guardian who was the first person to invite me to write about it for a major publication. And I think he sent me a DM that was something like,
I know you can yell, but can you write? Wow? And he always says I give him too much credit, but he does not understand that there's like this very difine moment of of I can get in a couple of places, but nothing above a certain level. And then I wrote for him with a piece about what was happening for him and The Guardian byline for reasons I will never completely understand, opened the door for me to write for all these other places. Right. And I didn't
know anything about pitching. I didn't know anything about anything. But what I can do is write. I have opinions. I can write them down really fast on a topic, and I learned pitching. I learned how to freelance kind of in the plane while it was being while it was in the air.
Is there a through line of you tweeting that, getting in the Guardian and now you're doing what you do now?
Like, do you think that's.
Really the through line if you had not tweeted that, if it had knock gone megaviral.
Do you see a world in which you would still be in this outcome?
I actually, weirdly enough, I do. It just would have been for a different hashtag. But I think it would have also opened a slightly different version of this path right where I would be known for talking about fast tailed girls or you know, one of the other hashtags. But we would have never had necessarily the same conversation about white feminism and race without salaries for white women.
And in some ways that challenging and acknowledging definitely puts me here in a very specific place where many of the things that people think I want that I never wanted in the first place, they would not necessarily be trying to, you know, tell me, well, you'll never get this,
you'll never get that. In the same way, I probably would have made more friends, and I probably also would not have been as popular as because I think tapping into that deep well of discontent and talking about it, like naming it and talking about my own feelings, but also giving people a sort of permission by proxy to talk about their feelings had not happened before.
I remember, like watching the Hugo stuff go down. It was just a really dark time. And one of the things that I think your work really helped us see was how little accountability there was for people who supported someone who was pretty open about a disdain for black women, you know, harassing black women in public, a literal abuser of women first of all, that he would be able to make a name for himself in online feminist spaces so easily, and that people would defend him publicly when all.
Of that stuff came out.
It's still surprising to me how little accountability there was, if not for folks like you. Do you feel that we ever really did a reckoning a look back of what we learned from that, Because I feel like these things happen, people say what they're going to say, and then everybody kind of moves on. We don't actually get a chance to look back and learn anything. Or glean anything about how to avoid this or what we should be taking from this. Do you feel that we ever had that moment?
People didn't want to have that moment. It was this embarrassing thing where people in the middle of whatever they were saying about me being divisive, were about this conversation taking feminism backwards whatever, realizing after the fact, especially by twenty sixteen, that they had been on the wrong side of history and never wanting to look backward again. More.
After a quick break, let's get right back into it. Mickey did the work of exposing existing tensions and fractures that exist in our movement, but in order to heal tensions there has to be reflection, honesty, and accountability, which just didn't really happen. So these tensions were left to be exploited by bad actors like the ones behind the end Father's Day hoax to inflame tensions and feminist online
spaces that would take place just a year later. Something that we have talked about quite a bit on this podcast is sort of what came immediately after things like the disinformation troll campaign hashtag and Father's Day and I think something that solidarity is for white women. It supposed is the reality and the rawness of these tensions between
black women, black feminists and white feminists. And I think that bad actors, trolls, what are extremists, whatever you want to call it, people who are interested in using social media spaces to cause confusion and chaos. I think the movement's lack of really taking accountability, really examining what happened, really figuring out how we navigate the navigate around each other and with each other. I think that you're right, there was broadly not no interest in really doing that
and having those conversations. And thus I think that bad actors know like, Okay, well, this is an attension that exists. It's a tension that is being kind of danced around. You know, everyone feels it, but no one's really People aren't really talking about it openly because they don't want to.
We can go in and exploit it, We can go in and like seize it and inflame it, and it might be effective because no one's really naming it, no one's really talking about it, nobody's really interested in taking
accountability for their part in it. Do you ever think that the lack of interest in real accountability and looking backward and taking stock just leaves these communities online vulnerable to people who who will step in and exploit and talk about it, just not in the way that maybe it's going to be helpful.
Oh, I think it appts resolutely. It's one of those things with just how we got all those feminists talking to like Meatleianopolis and engaging sort of disingenuously with the idea that Megan Kelly was not necessarily racist, right, because everyone started to kind of go, well, you know, people
can be swayed, people can be wooed. And I wonder often about the people who at that point kept saying, we have to reach out to the other side, because the other side was very clearly, very cogently planning to sow discord, very much trying to widen riffs, and also using those conversations, those educational conversations, to boost their own platforms, right because when you think back to twenty thirteen, to all they are twenty sixteen, actually even before twenty thirteen,
a lot of those well I want to talk to a white nationalist, a person who identifies as a white separatist whatever. You remember all of those news stories, all of the like inside the mind of a clansman kind of news stories. Right, for a while, nobody had ever given them a platform. I just saw this thing the other day. There's an account that shills itself as like
the American Nazi whatever. Right. They bought a blue check mark on Twitter, and they have millions of followers, and they said, essentially, this never could have happened ten years ago, which is true. It wouldn't have been able to happen ten years ago. Now they can look like they're a real legitimate account.
I mean, kind of just gives away the game where it's like, oh, thanks to Elon Musk, I would have never been able to build up this the legitimized platform I have now to spread my Nazi shit.
Thanks.
That is essentially what it said, essentially. And you know, we've seen several times now, even when we're talking about at protests and things, and we've been talking for years about inside police circles, the number of very clearly white nationalists, white supremacist whatever we're calling ourselves this week, white separatists police officers, complete with the visible ink, right, And when we bring it up and people say, oh, well, you know,
what can you do? And it's kind of like, actually, several years ago, we were trying to get people to do something about it, and you said that that wasn't a feminist issue. You said that that was just some guys online. They were harmless. You said, whatever, now here we are and I need you to not even just take accountability. I need you to start swinging, not still talk about how we can reach them.
Twitter was where people who were not traditionally centered or heard could really build power. Black Lives Matter championed racial justice in the wake of police violence. Survivors started me Too to push back against sexual violence. So when Elon Musk bought Twitter, one of my first questions was, what does this mean for the future of marginalized communities being
able to build power and start movements. It's a fair question, but Mickey reminds us that our communities are resilient and that we'll always find a way.
How do you.
See the state that Twitter is in, and sort of social media more broadly, how do you see that impacting marginalized community's ability to build up power and build up a voice.
I think in some ways, and this is going to sound real strange, but the existence of TikTok and all the competing other sites will help you master it on. All of these things will help marginalized communities find a place to rebuild the networks that they had on Twitter for some levels of rebuild here, but only because Twitter was already not particularly usable for community anymore. Once all eyes were on Twitter, it seemed like all the time.
I remember that like weird period of time where anything you tweeted could wind up on your television screen that night is news or in an article.
Yeah, that was a wild time.
Right. People have already started to kind of migrate away from Twitter. Right, Twitter's popularity as a social media app was on the decline. People were just abandoning their Twitter accounts whatever and moving to discord and all these other places. And so I think it will make it more difficult to kick off an initial group. But also in some ways now it is easier to have those conversations without
necessarily as much trolling. This weird split where like, yes, the loss of Twitter is a big deal, but also Twitter was already being lost before this because the focus hyper focused on black Twitter, but also generally the focus on whether those people over there talking about together had made people uncomfortable having certain conversations in public.
I think Sadet Harry has a great piece and wired that kind of speaks to this of like the feeling of kind of the inherent feeling of being both othered and also watched. Like I definitely felt that when it came to being part of black Twitter for a while, where you definitely feel like these people over here are doing something distinct of their own and let's lurk at it.
It kind of in a lot of ways you wanted to be having these insult conversations with them, but the feeling that they were happening and a bit of a fish bowl digitally.
And that I think that level of surveillance culture is not something I'm going to miss, right, I had already Twitter for me had been rendered largely unusable for like socializing with friends kinds of things a while before this, because and not even in a major way, but in a no matter what, there was always someone who had thoughts, feelings, opinions, right, and as like the API is being altered to prevent
a lot of third party clients. I know, like today someone was saying that one of the things that made Twitter usable for visually impaired users, it's no longer going to work. Hearing impaired users are going to have slightly more time, but some of the tools they use, it's not going to be there anymore, things like that, right, all text, all of these things. And I feel like Twitter served a very high level and low level sort
of purpose. But also we are going to have to go back to the pre Twitter days of jumping from platform to platform for a while, right, we got really comfortable with Twitter and Facebook kind of being seen as stable entities. But I don't know when the last time
I went on Facebook for any real meaningful purpose. I don't like the interface, and on Twitter, that surveillance level had made it so that you were kind of tweeting a little looking at what people were talking about, and leaving for a lot of users who are you know, like I'm a power user because I used to use Twitter all day long. I would send hundreds of tweet today, chatting it out, talking to people, having thoughts on in
public whatever. Because of all of the the eyes on me, which always sounds slightly paranoid, But because of that, I had already scaled back my Twitter usage heavily, not even in purpose, not even like, oh I'm going to keep these things to myself. It was just annoying. And now with what's what's happening? How much platform time do I want to spend with trolls? How useful is it?
I thought you're in your piece for MIT Tech Review, I think that you.
I can't remember exactly how you put it, but you had it like it's not it's not a plaque form to live one's life, you know, It's like it's not a place where you're where you're necessarily going to look for connection.
And it sounded like an even in your personal life.
That Twitter just wasn't it for you anymore, that like you just weren't interested that you described it. When you when you do show up there, it feels like it's out of habit more than anything else. It's not like you're going there looking for connection.
Oh yeah, because I can tell you a really stupid story about how I got I got done with using Twitter socially. I was talking to a friend of mine and we were talking about a workout routine that we had both tried, and someone briefly tried to turn that into like pro like fat phobic. Oh this is really fat phobic. Having this conversation in public, and we had said nothing about anyone's bodies, not even really our own, other than the usual uh yeah, I tried blah blah blah.
It was really rough, kind of you know, he talked about things, and I couldn't figure out how we got there. And then there's this entire conversation happening in my mentions about whether or not this conversation with my friend about a workout we had both tried was really about something else, and I thought I have hit the point where we
are reading into things. I always wondered how that would feel. Oh, I don't care for it, right, And so then me and my friends started to have those conversations not on public. On Twitter, we s don't have them, We just have them in a group chat, And as more things moved to the group chat, I have a hustling, bustling series of group chats going on. I don't necessarily think to go to Twitter in the same way in my personal
life anymore. I don't even necessarily react to everything on Twitter, because sometimes news stories pass by, or someone tweeting something passes by, and in my brain, I think this does not pass the smell test. But It's not worth getting into it with people who are buying in on the spot to whatever is being said, because they're going to find out in a few minutes or a few hours that they were wrong, and they're going to want to erase all of their tweets about this, all of their
engagement with this, you know. And I don't even need to jump in and participate. I can have this conversation with people who actually have a conversation.
Oh, this is something I have absolutely felt that the story that you told about the workout with your friend. I have this theory that, like so something, we've reached a point where we have visibility into too many conversations between strangers where people are just injecting their own and like injecting and projecting a lot of their own stuff onto the conversations of.
Strangers in ways that if you did it in real.
Life, if you were in a cafeteria and two people were talking about a workout they had done, and I walked up to their table and sat down and said, this conversation is pat phobic and maybe it's actually about something else altogether, you would think that was.
The weirdest thing in the world.
And I think that we've I do think that we've hit a point where these platforms cease to be useful when they when they are when they feel this way, because because it's just not it's not an enjoy it doesn't not a way to connect with people that feels enjoyable, that level of surveillance, every little thing that you say, feeling like someone's going to take it the wrong way or project their own their own stuff onto it.
Well, and this is the thing, because I definitely started to feel like and a certain point, is this about what I said? Or am I just where you put your feelings? And I think a lot of it is just where they put their feelings right, And that's the case. I don't I don't need to be here for this.
And I think that, and then I think about how many of my friends who like I have a friend who pointed out to me one day I ever tweeted something she said because I thought it was funny, and she says, I know you didn't mean any harm, but can you not retweet me because I always end up with all of this crap in my mentions And I was very apologetic, offeratedly tweet and she was like, no, no, No,
it's not like it's your fault. I just know your level of visibility is too much for me, and I hadn't I you know, like the frog and boiling water. I had gotten used to it, but I hadn't thought about what it feels like to kind of be thrust into this level of thing. And even though I was still occasionally retweet people or whatever or quote tweet them, I try to be more judicious. I'm not always successful.
I always think about it, but I try to be more judicious when I do do it, because there's this point in the hypervisibility where I don't want people to be having a conversation about the things they didn't say. I want to talk about the things they did say, or I have a thought about what they said kind of thing. And I don't know where we go on Twitter with that, Like I don't see a way to salvage that part at this point.
You know the way that you put that of like, am I just the place where you put your feelings. I'm not super visible on any social media platform, but I do wonder if that has something to do with you being a black woman, that do you something about the way that you show up online for folks as a black woman, means that you are the place where
a lot of their feelings go. That, whether it's feelings of anger or wanting to call somebody out or wanting to show you something so that you have a publicly angry reaction, and that feels a certain way for them, like we're we're you kind of aren't a real person, You're just this abstraction online for them to project whatever they want onto you.
Do you do you ever feel that?
Oh? Absolutely, it's one of the those things. First of all, I had to tell people to stop sending me things for me to respond to, right, Like, for a while their people would tagged me in their arguments with random people. I don't know you, I don't know them. I'm not joining into the middle of a conversation whatever. But also it started to feel like I am not a person. Oh God, so many people to go because and this is another sort of silly story, someone was mad about
something I had said. Apparently they started tweeting it about it at around three am my time. Okay, somewhere in the following four hours they had worked themselves up to the point that you know, I was avoiding them. I was ignoring them? How dare I was? You know, a coward? Blah blah blah, And I get up, I get my kids out the door to school. And I used to for a while on my way to work. I would, you know, far around on Twitter on the way in, and I log on and I'm like, what is is this?
Because I was asleep? It is seven am, right, what the heck are you doing? What is wrong with you? Kind of thing? And this person who had spun themselves into a frenzy in the middle of the night says, I completely forgot the difference in time zone. You weren't ignoring me. I'm sorry, and ends up deleting probably like forty tweets. But also, I had never responded to you, and you had never thought about the fact that I wasn't awake just because you were. It didn't even occur
to you. Person whose name I won't say that I was a person with a life and responsibility, so right, like had not even crossed their mind. I have a joke, I tell friends there are no sick days on the internet, and yet in real life people take off work, So how do we expect people to be available? Twenty four to seven online.
It makes no sense, and yet that is how everyone is operating.
Sometimes.
Oh yeah, I've seen people get very for lack of a way of putting it, get very in their feelings about someone not being available the moment they want them to be available online. And I sometimes have to also, and I have this whole thing I also say where I say parasocial relationships are beating people's asses every day right where. You enjoy this person, you enjoy their content whatever, or you don't, You hate them, you hate watch whatever.
You don't realize anymore that that person does not know you, however much you feel like you know them. They don't know you. They are online on whatever their schedule is, and the rest of their time they are doing whatever it is they're doing right, whether they've got a family, or they've got a day job, or heck, they're writing a book or making songs whatever. People for whom the Internet is life, and there are people for whom the Internet is a job, and they overlap, but they are
not necessarily the same people. And for people for whom the Internet is a job, there are specific times, hours, whatever that they are available and the rest of the time, no matter how much it may frustrate you person who perceives yourself to be in a parasocial relationship with them, they are not going to be available to And it happens to celebrities, and we've all kind of normalized that level of parasocial relationship, but increasingly it is happening to
people just who speaks on the internet. Right, you can get fans, followers, supporters, whatever we're calling them, just by being a person who speaks online. The problem is that every word you say will not be the gospel truth. Everything you think will not be right for none of us right. But also the people following you may or may not really be paid attention to the reality that you are a whole person. One of the things that always sticks out to me is this idea that because
you like someone, they can never be wrong. They absolutely can be wrong. Did that make sense outside of my head?
It made so much sense.
And the vibe of because I like this person, I am team them for life. If they say anything wrong, it must be right. I don't think there's a that's gotta be one of the most dangerous toxic vibes that we have, where I mean, I see it play out all the time and like, these are people. They're not gonna Just because somebody had a great take or wrote a great piece on one thing doesn't mean that you
should blindly sign up for their takes on everything. And I'm like, be invested in them never being wrong.
You know. It's like, like, I don't know how.
We got to such a weird place when it comes to relationships and how they function online.
I think part of what's happened, unfortunately, and I'm seeing this even more on TikTok, is that the entertainment people get right. Let's call it, like the skits you see on TikTok, the storytelling whatever on Twitter. All of these things that have happened over and over again on various platforms, makes people feel like this stuff is there for them. It is not necessarily that this person is doing something
to entertain themselves that you happen to like. It has become Oh, this performance is for me, this article, this writing is whatever is for me, and therefore everything here is about me for me, and I don't have to have any sense of boundaries or limits or really grasp that this was just someone making a thing that was in their head. Right, we feel an ownership stake in the things we are fans of.
I was a fan of Twitter ten years ago, as much as I criticized it, and that ownership stake Mickey describes well, as I watched the platform that I once loved become something else entirely I feel that too, So What's next? In a piece for MIT Tech Review, Mickey looks back on a career that she's built in part
on Twitter and what the future of platforms holds. Twitter's importance five years ago cannot be overstated, she writes, But now as we look at the possibility of a future without Twitter, will anything really change for the average person who uses the Internet but doesn't live on it? Seting the scene for where we are and where we go next? Like I've seen so many people, myself included, writing about how much Twitter sucks now that Elon Musk has taken
over blah blah blah. But in your MIT Tech Review piece you kind of pick up on something else that it, Yeah, Elon must sucks and Twitter sucks because of him and all of that, But really, do you think that something there's sort of a larger cultural shift happening that is actually being mirrored via our use of technology, that it's not just about elon Musk being like sucking and ruining Twitter.
Something else is happening where folks are just not that invested in showing in showing up on platforms like Twitter. Maybe they're spending more time on platforms like TikTok, Maybe they're less interested in social media as we all get older, Like, do you think something is happening more broadly in culture and that we're just visual experiencing that through technology in our relationship to it.
I think what's happening is that for a lot of people as we are getting older, the earlier social media users, but also for a lot of people who grew up with social media. And I was having this conversation with a college student last night. As a matter of fact, there is a sense that the need to always be on, to always think about what people are perceiving of you, that you have no privacy online is driving a lot
of people away from social media. Right once we started to hit a place where your social media could not just be used against your in terms of job stuff, but you don't know how it's going to be used because brands are using it. You're showing up on the news it can be used against you if you said something offensive, people dig up old offensive things you said. You may or may not still feel that way because it was seven, eight, nine years ago. All of these things.
People started to feel like, well, what's the use of social media if I can't actually enjoy it, if I can't just hang out and spend time with my friends and have fun. And we're seeing people sort of trend someone on TikTok. I suspect there will be another platform
or two before we settle wherever we're settling next. In terms of social media, we're seeing people kind of trend back almost to the days of like blogger and live journal, where you have a carefully curated private list of people you talk to, and maybe you have some things that are public, but you don't let everyone see what you're doing. You don't have your business in everyone's eyeballs because you
don't want everyone else's business in your eyeballs. I think that we're also going to see the rise of those kids who were the early mommy blogger content, right like parent blog blog content. Kids there are almost adults now,
some of them are legally adults. I think for a lot of them, the financial impact of having been content for twenty years but not necessarily being paid for being that content and having that experience shape their future means we're going to see a lot of people in court, in federal court very soon, right, Because for all that we have said, and about the most successful of them, the kids who were memes whatever, those kids have grown up, and yet when you google their names, it's the meme,
it's the mommy blog content, it's the pictures of them with a poopy diaper on their head or whatever that comes up. And mom and dad or grandpa grandpa are guardians whoever they may. The money, they got the checks, but the kids get consequences. I don't foresee those kids being interested in social media, and I think they will be part of a growing number of people who are just like we should not know this much about each other,
about total strangers. I think people will still use social media to some degree, but I think the way we use it is going to change again.
So you think that we should really be letting the younger generation take the lead. Where do you see them leading us?
Yeah? I think I think they will have some form. I think that they're going to like kind of reinvent private social media, right, whether it will be Snapchat or something else. But I think they're going to reinvent that kind of thing where they'll want to be able to talk to their friends. But I don't know that they're going to want to be able to talk to their friends in the way the general public can see. Because I'll be honest, not being able to like lock individual
tweets was always a weird thing about Twitter. It always invites a certain level of harassment and just unpleasant context. Because Twitter definitely knew right way before we got to any of the conversations Cie works around here. Twitter definitely knew about four chan and on Reddit and all of those things, right, And we're seeing people who post on Reddit say, oh man, this stuff is going all over these things are going viral. I'm sure some of that
is intentional. I just don't know that we really need to see everything with your face attached.
Yeah.
I hate being perceived on social media. I'm every time I have a few glasses of wine and spend like actually do some tweeting. When I wake up the next day and I see like, oh, you've got five replies, I'm like, oh no, why did I do this to myself.
I hate it so.
Much, and I mean, I think the answer, unfortunately is it used to be fun. It used to be great to like hang out and talk to your friends, and sometimes you slip up and you forget that. The way social media functions it also changed, right, like we've changed. But also now you have people who get online and they're looking for a fight, and they don't care who it's with, and it doesn't have to be on a
particular topic. It's not something they feel passionately about. It's something that they just want someplace to argue, right, And a lot of times, like we call it sea lioning, right, the guys that just want a good debate and then won't go away. What else do you do but decide, okay, well people have perceived me, this person won't leave me alone, or these people or whatever. Sure, you meet, the conversations,
you do all of these things. But at a certain point, where's the payoff for you in getting online in the first place? Right? I don't know if it wasn't still related to like my books, my work, my whatever. I don't know if I right now, if I were coming into social media now, right, like I was twenty four years old or whatever, and my job didn't require it. I'm not sure how much I'd use it.
Well, I guess this leads me to kind of my awkward final question, which is where can folks keep in touch with you?
After all? After all this?
It feels weird to be like, ohould they tweet at you? But where can folks like what? Like? What are you up to next? And where can folks keep in touch with all your work?
So I have a website, I'm on TikTok, I'm on Twitter, I'm on Instagram. My handle is always the same. I am Carnethia here, there, and everywhere, and if uh it is not Carnesia, you'll figure it out very quickly. And then I'm currently after I get back from this trip, I am working on my next book and it is really an autopsy of the American dream. So it's gonna be a lot. People are gonna hate it or you're gonna love it. They're they're not. There's not gonna be
a lot in between. We're gonna have some feelings.
Got a story about an interesting thing in tech. I just want to say hi. You can just have hello at Tangody dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tengody dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget Tod. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Almato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd.
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