How to exist online (if you're you)

Today is going to be a non-Magic post - but it is about something I think almost every Magic player, at least those who found & enjoy my content, might relate to. It's also something that discusses the same skills that are required to be successful at Magic in a very long-term sense: taking a zoomed-out view of your own brain and behavior, and trying to recognize its patterns while you exist within them.

Today, I'm talking about being online.

It's something we all do to varying extents and intensities. Everyone's relationship with the internet and social media is very different, but I think there are some universal principles that are really important for everyone to understand.

I think we've all been dealing with the emotional fallout from the American Presidential election, and part of this for me has been realizing how much the "real world" is now shaped by our individual online worlds. It's made me reflect on my own behavior and emotions, and think about how I can manage them more responsibly. As I'm thinking through these things myself, I thought they might be valuable to put into words and share with others.

Today I'm going to do my best to share all of the nuanced, trippy, paradoxical, confounding, frustrating, and beautiful things I've been able to learn from being a person who spends a lot of time on their "devices". Obviously this will be highly personal and subjective in unavoidable ways, but I hope different parts will also be applicable to others depending on where their "online-ness" overlaps with mine.

One of the defining features of the internet, in my opinion, is its ability to contain contradictions. As such, this piece is not going to be one long, connected argument. It's going to be a series of disconnected thought bubbles that might not neatly congeal into a larger picture, but hopefully point at some true, but unnameable things. You ready? Let's ride.

Each section will be titled by a statement I agree with (some of them may seem contradictory), and I'll be explaining why or how I think each is true.

Table of Contents

• Online is full of real people

• Every kind of person exists

• Your behavior is being shaped by large forces

• No one is in charge

• You can do anything you want to do

• You can't fix the big things

• No one knows the answers, but they still might exist

• Old ideas matter

• New ideas matter

• Images have power

• Your body matters

• Be a real person

Online is Full of Real People

There's this common idea that you'll encounter people expressing online, that the other people they interact with on there are somehow less real or less normal than they are. It doesn't help that this is at least sometimes true; there are obviously a lot of spam and "bots", but I still believe that this sentiment is, and will likely always be, more prevalent than its "truth value". The fact is that most interactions you have on the internet are going to be interactions with another full person, who exists physically somewhere on planet earth, who is trying to communicate to you through their phone.

Try to feel the reality of this for a second. I think this is somewhat sacred knowledge that everyone should try and feel, in their gut, as much as they can while they spend time on their phone and computer. Even the most bizarre interactions we have online, even with those who seemingly don't treat us like fellow people, are, generally, actual humans, and remembering this can both be important for keeping some level of accurate views about other people and how their brains can work, and also for treating them with as much respect and kindness as is realistically possible.

If you've ever checked the replies under a controversial political post, you'll know what I'm talking about. You so often see two people who are clearly very real and passionate, who both have beliefs that you probably don't agree with at all, simultaneously calling each other bots and disregarding anything the other says. If you lose the capacity to believe that there are actual human beings that hold opinions that are completely illogical and nonsensical to you, you've lost this sacred knowledge.

The lowkey belief that a lot of folks have when interacting with others online that they aren't "really" interacting with people is the more invisible equivalent of the woman who went viral for screaming "that motherfucker is not real" as she was escorted off of a plane. That person was lost in her own head (I mean that she was genuinely not mentally well!) and unable to see how the way she treated and acted around others on the plane was affecting them, because she lost the ability to see them as people like her. Just because it's being done through a digital medium doesn't mean it's any less what's happening when you decide to treat someone as "fake" because internet interactions "don't matter" and "aren't real life".

Another place where it's really apparent to see this kind of knowledge being lost is the genre of post that is "publicly violating a stranger's privacy for behavior that you find personally weird or distasteful". This is commonly seen via screenshots of people's profiles on dating apps, which often may include very personal desires or information that the person didn't really consent to being shared publicly. It could also look like taking a picture of someone in public and mocking them for the imagined "genre" of person they might be (in this case, it doesn't really matter if the accusation is true, because it's impossible to know with the knowledge the sharer had at the time).

This even happened with the woman from the viral video! A woman who was clearly very mentally unwell became widely shared in one of her lowest moments, and experienced all sorts of horrible treatment based on this "fame":

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/airplane-lady-tiffany-gomas-meltdown-speaks-out-1234806522/

It's cliche but true that we lose something of our own humanity when we treat others like things, ideas, and images, and not people. If you're about to have an interaction online, especially a negatively charged one, I really encourage everyone to ask themselves the question "am I prepared to behave this way towards another REAL human being in real life?". If the answer is yes, go ahead, but if it's no, you've gotta be very, very sure you're not actually dealing with a person. You usually are.

Every Kind of Person Exists

I mentioned that remembering people online are real is an important way to maintain accurate views about how other people's brains work, and this is sort of what I mean by that. Go exploring online outside of your usual communities, and you will find all sorts of people who believe all sorts of things - often many things that you never thought could exist together within one mind.

The simplest and clearest example of this are sports fandoms. Normally, we assume that most people have allegiance to the teams nearest to their hometown, or else the teams their parents raised them to support. We also assume those relationships are uncomplicated by personal politics or like/dislike of certain players. They also likely wouldn't involve allegiance to teams or cities that are normally rivals.

And yet, there are so many people who exist online, that some are bound to break these rules quite cleanly. I am one of them! For those who don't know, one of my other hyperfixations besides Magic is basketball - while people might be aware of this if I tweeted about hoops more on my MTG account, I actually have an entirely separate twitter (and now bluesky) for basketball!

What's my basketball allegiance? I'm so glad you asked...

I'm a New York Liberty fan who is a former hardcore Boston Celtics fan once popular on Celtics twitter, who intentionally abandoned their Celtics fandom after the team traded my favorite player away for an alleged rapist. Now I am a general NBA fan with a minor rooting interest for the Memphis Grizzlies and a main focus on the Liberty, as well as a Celtics fan in exile until Kristaps Porzingis is off of the team.

Simple enough, right?

The point is, people like me exist everywhere, with similarly patchwork opinions and loyalties, even outside the realm of sports. The internet allows people to get extremely niche in their opinions and communities they cultivate, and sports twitter is just the clearest example because it often includes very explicit and clean-line delineations between "tribes".

It's hard to even invent characters that are as weird as the ones you'll actually find online, but let me try to give a few examples--

• You'll find Taylor Swift superfans who are into NFTs and crypto, believe in free markets and deregulation, but are frustrated that everyone isn't masking anymore

• You'll find hardcore communists who support Donald Trump and think he's an inside asset of the Chinese government working to bring communism to the US

• You'll find white people deeply invested in racial justice and indigenous medicine practices who are also big opponents of trans healthcare, but nevertheless LOVE Chappell Roan.

It's very important to believe these people are real, and try and practice cognitive empathy to at least roughly understand how someone could realistically come to such an inconsistent and non-stereotypical set of beliefs. A key part of this is recognizing that you, yourself, are no exception to this. Of course you think that the beliefs you've come to are correct, logically consistent, and reasonable, and I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong - this isn't an argument in favor of epistemic relativism or moral relativism. Some people have better processes for thinking about the world and forming beliefs, and some have worse ones (though always important to remember that everyone is still imperfect). But what I am saying is that some of your beliefs and interests probably look weird and contradictory, often deeply so, to other people. Remember this and act accordingly!

If you can't at least come to some level of literal understanding of others and why they might be the way they are, it's going to be impossible to talk to them and difficult to trust that they are real people, but they are. The internet is (still) largely made up of human beings sitting at their phones and computers, who are not that different in many ways from you, even if they are in some important ones.

Your Behavior is Being Shaped by Large Forces

This is, of course, true even in the real world, however you want to define "large forces". But there's something about the internet that makes these forces clearer and somehow closer to us. We can see our participation in and shaping of them in a way that we don't feel connected to "real-world" systems.

The term most people use to refer to this is "the algorithm". Algorithms are a concept that got popularized with the proliferation of content serving algorithms on social media apps like Facebook and YouTube. Specifically what they refer to are the programs those companies use to decide which content to show you when you're browsing. In the earlier days of the internet, these decisions were made simply, usually by sorting through some ranking of properties like popularity, recency, and and whether someone was "following" the creator of the content.

Nowadays, everyone knows that these algorithms are much more complex, dynamic, and personalized. The content we see online is usually highly optimized to keep us engaged on the site we're currently on. Our attention is being repeatedly farmed and harvested for profit - everyone knows this.

However, I do think that when people call this "the algorithm", they're referring to a larger set of forces than just the specific algorithms of code that decide what content to show you -- or at least they should be.

Have you ever heard the phrase "if it bleeds, it leads?" This is referring to traditional news's tendency to highlight stories of danger and violence in the world, because that's what activates people's fear response and leads to more engagement. I think the internet has shown that there are far more emotions than fear that can be activated for powerful effect (though fear still remains one of the strongest).

One of these emotions/dynamics that the internet thrives on is controversy. This video does a pretty good job of summarizing it: Get people to disagree and fight about something, doesn't matter how inconsequential, and you've got a recipe for engagement.

My least favorite of these are the all-too-common "viral math problems", where someone will post a simple-looking problem that has some type of ambiguity baked into what order you're supposed to evaluate the operations in and spits out a different answer depending on the results. These are, frankly, an instant recipe for getting people to disagree with each other and call each other stupid, all of whom are missing the point that the problem is ambiguous, because we're not culturally trained to recognize ambiguity in math.

Try to recognize when you're engaged in a debate about one of these problems. They don't always come in such obvious forms. The key thing to look out for is a fuzziness in either terms or methods. Once you see them, you see them everywhere (and you're probably still missing more). Most things people debate about on the internet don't have an unambiguously correct answer, because if they did, people wouldn't want to argue.

I'll try to give some real examples of this that have ensnared me in the past. Most of these are about real, meaningful issues that people should care about, which is why it becomes tricky to see the fruitlessness of the conversation. I'll try to give some (note: extremely short and insufficient) summaries on why I believe these questions are recipes for endless unproductive controversy.

• Should we talk about "all men" when we talk about misogyny?

• (In most senses, but not in the most hyper-literal one)

• Is it morally permissible to vote for a candidate who supports evil policies? Is it morally permissible to abstain from it if the other side is worse?

• (Morally permissible is not a good framework for thinking about voting, and neither is morally praiseworthy)

• Are "woke" concepts like privilege, implicit bias, and intersectionality "correct"?

• (They are extremely good tools for understanding the world and how deeply systems of injustice can be embedded in society, but they translate extremely poorly to short debates on social media & often governmental policy)

The prevalence of debate about questions like this is just one example of how "the algorithm" plays on our emotions, like fear, frustration, feelings of superiority and inferiority, desire for love and validation, etc in order to keep us "engaging". But one thing I want to point out is that the term "algorithm" becomes deceptive when we think of it like a single entity or program with agency shaping our behavior.

No one is in charge

One of the easiest ways to have your critical thinking skills compromised is to reach for a false simplicity. The internet is one of the most complex structures to ever exist (the most?), and it can be easy to shortcut our understandings of it in unproductive ways.

I think the concept of "the algorithm" is unfortunately one of these, at least when taken too literally (and the expression is unfortunate because it's based on a very literal, and specific, concept, the actual lines of code that are deciding which content to serve you).

Conspiracy theorists love to fall back on the idea that someone is in charge and pulling the strings. An incredibly powerful force who is able to shape information systems against you can be an easy explanation for any countervaling evidence. This belief in a controlling force comes from a desire for simplicity in a confusing and messy world, and it leads to flawed thinking.

A well-known philosophical razor states:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

I think a corollary to this is:

Never attribute to intentional agents that which is adequately explained by messy systems

Market incentives, social dynamics, and human psychology are all incredibly messy, complicated, dynamic systems that are more than sufficient to explain all the weird stuff we see on the internet. Be wary of attributing broad patterns to individual actors that can be better explained by these forces. No one is in charge.

"No one is in charge" obviously isn't the same thing as "No one has power". There are lots of individuals or groups with immense power to shape the online space, and analyzing their behavior can be very useful for understanding outcomes. Elon Musk buying Twitter and the actions he has taken to change it have obviously changed the platform, and by extension the world, in many ways for the worse. But he can only do that by, for lack of a better word, firing nukes into the hurricane, not carefully engineering the weather.

You can do anything you want to do

This is a classic tweet, because it's both true and not true. In one sense, it's obvious that "cyber" "bullying" is a bit of an oxymoron, because "bullying" used to imply some sort of present physical danger or social context that was inescapable, and it's very easy to escape the immediate experience of being cyberbullied.

In another sense though, it's really not. Most actual bullying between kids today I'd assume takes place in mostly digital form, and that's because it's effective. Social media isn't really "escapable" in the same way it used to be, it's intricately woven into the fabric of our lives. People's perceptions of you online carry over offline, and moreover, so much of our lives actually have to be conducted online.

But... I do think that, at its core, there is a lesson here. Most of the negative experiences we (or, at least, I) have with the internet these days are not related to targeted harassment. They are instead experiences I cultivate for myself through my own behavior, whether that's replying to someone who is expressing a cruel opinion, doomscrolling during a depressing news event, or falling down an unproductive rabbit hole just trying to distract myself from responsibilities.

If your own behavior is causing these negative experiences - despite the fact that our psychology is being taken advantage of to keep us engaging - we actually do have it in our physical power at almost all times to choose differently.

Obviously, you can just turn off the phone. If you get good at noticing when you're having a bad time online, simply Logging Off is a good place to start. If you notice that you're usually being pulled away from your phone instead of choosing to put it down, it might be a good idea to try and start noticing more when you're not having a good time, and try to train the muscle of putting it away.

Believe me, it's hard. I'm not trying to be flippant about this at all - this can be an immensely difficult skill to train. But you are allowed to do it, and I'd encourage trying.

Beyond this, I think everyone could also utilize a bit more freedom when it comes to how we choose to interact online. A few years ago, I was coming to terms with the idea that I wasn't having as good of a time engaging so much with the my favorite basketball team, the Boston Celtics. I wrote this post about it.

A couple months later, when they made a trade for an alleged rapist, I tweeted that I simply wasn't a fan of the team anymore -- and I meant it.

I'm very glad I made that choice to spend my time on the internet in different ways than incessantly tweeting during Celtics games. I'm not sure I'd have gotten here if I hadn't.

Don't get me wrong, it can sometimes feel like a special kind of hell that even our smallest idiosyncrasies are going to be manipulated and exploited by those forces larger than us online. Feeling like you have to avoid ever engaging with something out of anger, or desire, or simply curiosity, just in case "the algorithm" learns that you will engage with this type of content and starts feeding you more of it, can be exhausting and feel like work, the kind of work that we're not really looking to do when we reach for our phones as a break from the kind of executive function and decision fatigue that we struggle with in our daily lives. but the flipside of this is that we actually do have meaningful control over our online worlds - it's just hard to exercise it sometimes.

You can really do anything you want to, there are no rules.

You can't fix the big things

The week after the election was hard for me and most of my friends. I think it's important to take some time to grieve when something clearly tragic happens in the world, and I count the most powerful country in the world electing an openly authoritarian leader as one of those events. It is good and necessary that we feel connected to the wellbeing of humanity as a whole (we can even take a much broader view and care about the entire ecosystem of life or the entire universe!). Care and compassion for the entire world is not a bad instinct by any means.

However.

Especially on the internet, it can be easy to forget how small we are. While a lot of social media is full of people diagnosing our culture and our world with problems and trying to rally people collectively to solve them, the fact remains that YOU, and I, are just people in a very, very, VERY large world. No one is in charge, and that includes us. On the internet, you are almost guaranteed to become aware of far too many problems than you'll ever be able to individually solve, and this can become a little maddening if you're not careful to manage your own self-image and expectations.

The smallness of a human life, the one we are all living, can certainly be taken in a negative way. There is a lot of pain in the world, and when awareness of this fact combines with a natural (and good) instinct to care for all of humanity, that can cause us a lot of personal pain and grief. I really want to stress that some amount of this is good and healthy. When bad things happen in the world, they should affect you psychologically, even if they don't affect you materially.

However.

There is also a real danger of letting that sadness and grief and anger at the existence of pain and injustice in the world build up to a point where it becomes an all-encompassing feeling - that there are just too many problems and not enough ability to solve them. That unless we can fix big things, we'll never be able to fix the small things. That everyone else can't see the forest for the trees in the ways you can, and no one understands what needs to be done except for you.

Here is where the positive aspects of smallness can be useful. Despite the internet allowing us to cultivate an awareness of all the problems, the fact remains that none of us, especially individually, are able to solve them. Let me say that again, more personally. You will not be able to solve any of the big problems you see in the larger world. Is this depressing? Possibly, if your expectations were that you could. But frankly, I don't see those as reasonable expectations. Big problems are big, people are small. To me at least, an important part of this realization is that it is emotionally freeing. It lets us escape from the trap of doing nothing because we can't do everything.

Human lives are small in the scheme of the world, but they are big in the scheme of our souls. All you are responsible for is building a life you can be proud of - and this question of what is worth being proud of is a completely subjective one. That's the responsibility that comes with being an adult - we get to decide for ourselves what constitutes a genuinely well-lived life. The pressure of this can be overwhelming, and it's good to feel that sometimes, but it can be equally important for there to be a bit of a release valve.

You're small, and the world is big. Let yourself be a part of it, and don't try to be an outside observer all the time, despite how good the online world is at giving us the feeling that we are one.

No one knows the answers, but they still might exist

No one is in charge, and you can't fix the big things. So what gives? Are we totally screwed, only able to live our small little lives while the world gets worse? Not exactly.

Despite believing that big problems are not controllable by individual actors, I do believe that there are meaningful ways for them to be affected. The "catch" is that they are affected by precisely those things that are bigger than us - dynamic systems, complex interactions, and the cumulative wave of individual behaviors.

This is to say that while you can't fix the big problems, your behavior still matters, just not in cleanly definable ways. Watching the internet churn through "discourses" is like watching the beast that is human culture metabolize information and events in realtime. Sometimes what comes out the other end will make sense, and sometimes it won't in the slightest. What we put into that digestive system I believe does affect the outcome, albeit in ephemeral and mysterious ways.

History is full of times where the problems were big, and people didn't know how to solve them. Sometimes they got better, and sometimes they got worse. Human culture has been through a lot, and most of it hasn't been pretty, but it has come out successfully the other side every time so far. There is some solace to take in that.

This is not an argument for complacency. I am not arguing that this outcome is inevitable, far from it. It is, instead, the result of the efforts of people who came before us. I don't think of these efforts as mainly being the decisions of politicians, intellectuals, or even laborers. There are just too many aspects of human behavior, and how we shape one another and the systems around us, to isolate cause and effect to one domain.

How we conduct ourselves from day to day is input to these big systems. How we care for each other is input. How we argue with each other is input. How we materially construct the physical basis for many of the systems of modern life is input (and how we exploit one another in order to do so). How we think is input. How we learn is input. How we teach is input. How we make political decisions is input. The art we make is input. The art we consume is input. Everything is input. Grist for the mill.

The answers to the big problems are found somewhere in this infinite churning. The online world gives us a unique and beautiful way to glance into this system. I'm not sure I trust the right answers to rise to the surface every time, but I do believe that they can, sometimes. We get sidetracked if we try and force this to happen through individual effort alone, but it's equally foolish to pretend we're not contributors to the outcome.

Old Ideas Matter

It turns out that people have been thinking about systems like these, and about individuals' roles in them, since the beginning of human history. I'm no expert in these studies, but they have names like History, Sociology, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology.

A lot of discourse on the internet is ephemeral. You'll see people rehashing the same arguments, about the same topics, over and over. Often these will be debates that you, personally, have moved on from and know how to personally reconcile with. Being familiar with which ideas, concepts, and debates are "old news" can be an incredibly useful tool for figuring out where to spend your time.

One of these old concepts that I think we've all been seeing make something of a comeback, both in terms of its frequency in public discourse and its real world manifestations, is the word fascism.

This is a word that conjures many images, but especially in the American consciousness, it's mostly associated with World War II and specifically the Nazis. There is a reason for this, of course - fascist Germany and the Axis Powers more broadly, are the enemy that the United States has faced that was most justifiable in terms of waging and winning a war against. It's no surprise that this is the part of our history that we prefer to remember.

This is why when you call parts of our current political moment fascist, many people will have a very difficult time understanding what you mean. Fascism is an idea from the past, an idea that was roundly defeated by the American Capitalist Democratic Empire.

What might come as a surprise to people with this conception of fascism is that this is a political ideology that goes far beyond America's opponents in WWII. It is a force that has been talked about throughout human history in different words, and has consistently been a part of every political discourse we've ever had. It surprises a lot of people to learn that there were very large fascist movements in the United States that were explicitly eugenicist and pro-Nazi in the years leading up to the war. In other words, fascism is an old, internal enemy, not a 20th-century external one.

The internet is full of people who are aware of this history using the word 'fascist' to describe behaviors and ideologies that are rooted in dominance and enforcing hierarchies of race, gender, ability, and class through violence... arguing with folks who think they're being called a German political official in the 1940s.

It's one thing to be aware of the different meanings of the word and recognize that one comes from a much more grounded and holistic historical perspective, but it's equally important to recognize linguistic dead ends when we encounter them. A lot of the time I see people online insisting on using the word in contexts where it's not likely to be carrying the meaning they intend to convey.

The fluidity of words and meaning are another old philosophical and linguistic concept that would take forever to get into, but safe to say I think it's possible to communicate the same concept in different words, and that there are occasions where it's necessary to be more direct and specific in our discussions of dangerous ideology than using a word with a very specific and salient cultural context.

Zooming back out a bit, my main point is that we can only reason our way through how to behave online by being aware of and able to effectively put into practice very old ideas. In the case of online discourse about fascism, it's important to both understand the long history of human political and sociological thought that has allowed us to understand it as a constant, and dangerous cultural force, and equally important to understand the fickleness of language when it comes to communicating meaning - a very tricky, and very old, philosophical problem.

When we're online, it can be easy to waste time rehashing the same discussions over and over - one way to break out of this cycle is by looking at old ideas that can help us break through the dichotomy.

New ideas matter

Continuing in the pattern of seemingly contradictory section titles, I also think that it can be very important to recognize places online where old, bad ideas continue to get rehashed and find new adherents.

One place where I think this kind of thing happens a lot currently is in online debates about feminism. Most recently, this has been happening with the 4B movement, a separatist feminist movement started in South Korea that echoes many of the separatist strains of second-wave feminism.

I won't pretend to be intimately familiar with the philosophy or arguments behind this movement, but I can say that I'm broadly extremely sympathetic to them. I am generally of the opinion that we haven't had nearly the level of cultural reckoning we're going to need to confront the wide and deep spread of violence that is embedded into our patriarchal culture. What these separatist movements are essentially attempting to say is that we cannot continue with intimacy between men and women as normal until we have this reckoning.

The response to these types of separatist movement, which previously had been associated primarily with second wave feminism has, to some, already been mounted in various forms. The umbrella of "third wave feminism" is famously an ambiguous and broad one, but some phrases you might associate with philosophies that are counter to a separatist one, depending on how charitably you feel, are "sex positive feminism", "choice feminism", or "white feminism".

It's almost impossible to summarize such a broad swath of ideology as the ones I just described, so forgive me if I do this deeply imperfectly, but I'm going to do my best. The big-picture, vibes-based response to these separatist movements has been that they fall victim to oversimplified thinking and ineffective tactics. By removing the possibility to construct more genuine and revolutionary forms of intimacy, shaming individual women for their choices around how they treat the specific men in their lives, and failing to account for non-binary and transitional possibilities of gender, these separatist movements fail to provide a realistic and effective path to addressing patriarchal violence.

I largely agree with these critiques, but also find them to be a deeply insufficient solution structure in and of themselves. It can be very easy to fall back into behavior that unconsciously or unintentionally upholds systems of oppression and violence if we revert back to thinking that feminism can be anything we want it to be, and all that matters are the decisions of individuals and the intimacies, desires, and relationships we create in our own lives.

Frankly, I think this is simply a debate that hasn't been sufficiently resolved. Feminism is, from a long term perspective, an incredibly new area of philosophy, and one that I deeply hope is still only in its infancy. As such, a willingness to embrace new perspectives and ideas is crucial.

These new perspectives often won't come with institutional endorsement or support. They are most likely to be found in the fringes of culture, in spaces for folks who are not easily understood by others and have ideas that may seem strange and incomprehensible to people who first encounter them. This is a necessity when it comes to breaking new ideological ground, especially in a field that tends to run counter to the material interests of some of our largest institutions.

All this is to say, many of the most insightful and coherent feminist thinkers I know are trans women on twitter.

Social media can be a place where the old discourses get hashed, and re-hashed, and re-re-re-re-hashed, to the point of insanity, but it can also be a place where new ground gets broken as people start to be unsatisfied with both sides of the debate. For a lot of reasons that are hard to get into here but essentially boil down to being at the sharpest edge of marginalization, I believe that trans people are uniquely positioned at this moment to recognize the ways in which the canon of feminist theory is insufficient (or insufficiently utilized) for resolving the issues we currently face - and social media is one of the strongest tools we have for listening to these marginalized voices and figuring out when they have extremely important things to say.

This is also not to say that these kinds of voices can't be associated with mainstream institutions or publications. Some of the people I'm referring to are actually practicing current feminist or queer scholars, and real, new works of feminist theory are being published all the time. One example I want to highlight is a set of essays called "The Right to Sex", to my understanding the first commercially published work of Amia Srinivasan, a professor at Oxford. These essays, in my opinion, touch on many of the debates currently raging online around the 4B movement in deeply insightful and genuinely new ways that gain meaningful traction towards resolving the tensions between separatist and non-separatist feminism.

This is all to say that, while understanding old ideas is crucially important to being able to exist in a sane way online, so is being open to new ones.

(Here is a set of mostly trans people I suggest following on twitter/bluesky, with an openness to new and challenging ideas):

• @bloomfilters

• @uncanny_eli

• @reproutopia

• @cervixpiercer

• @nrduford

• @btwnrevolutions

• @ihatecogsci

Images Have Power

Online is a place of ideas and words, but it's also a place of images. Specifically, I want to talk briefly about the effect the internet can have on one's own body image and perception of other bodies. The most egregious example of this is how pornography and exposure to it can shape young people's views of sex (a much-too-big topic that I have complicated and nuanced feelings on, which The Right To Sex includes a wonderful essay about), but I think it would be a mistake to attribute this all to porn or think the problem stops there.

Social media especially is a competitive ecosystem for attention, and one of the most trustworthy ways to mine attention is by manipulating desire. In short, this means that the images we are most often exposed to online are images of bodies that we have been conditioned to desire. Spending too much time consuming these images without thinking critically about why and how they are such a ubiquitous part of existing online can be incredibly damaging to our mental health.

Different mediums have this problem to different extents. Places like Instagram and TikTok, being mainly visual in nature, are unavoidably going to prioritize content from conventionally attractive people and downplay equally good content from others. Dating apps are going to learn your visual "type" and try and feed you people who match it - regardless of whether they are good real-world matches.

In general, it is just really, really easy to get used to consuming these kinds of images and let them affect how we view ourselves and our bodies. It is important to fight this slippage from reality as much as possible in order to stay sane. Online as in real life, try to notice if you're uncritically drifting towards the aesthetically pleasing, especially when it comes to bodies, in a way that causes you to dehumanize yourself or others.

Your Body Matters

Okay, this piece has gotten a bit heady and theoretical. Things can often get that way on the internet, especially if you're someone who lives in my brain, with its tendency to intellectualize things. Online is a place where exchanges of information are (for the most part) unmediated by the physical world. It can be easy to forget that we also just simple have bodies while we're using them to stare at a screen.

But much like in the first section of this piece I wanted to emphasize that the internet is full of real, embodied people that you're interacting with every time you log on, it is equally true that YOU, the person reading this, are just a human with a body. One that carries you from place to place, competes in Magic the Gathering tournaments, hugs your friends, builds things, holds your phone in front of your face, plays games, protects you and your loved ones, and sometimes fails or runs into limitations.

Lots of folks reading this will know about the ways my body has failed me and run into limitations over the past few years. My chronic pain has been a source of a lot of despair and fatigue, but becoming disabled in this way has also given me a real hands-on education in how our physical needs can be crucially important to address, even online.

I can no longer spend an entire evening staring at my phone or computer without feeling the punishing effects on my body. I'm still learning to read the signals that I need to step away, look at something in the real world, expose my skin to natural light, and feel my feet on the ground (touch grass, if you will). All I can say is that listening to these signals almost always ends up being the right decision, and learning to hear them might be an important first step if you find yourself spending an amount of time online that doesn't feel physically (or mentally) healthy for you.

Be a real person

It's about time to wrap this up. Clearly I have a lot of disparate thoughts about what it means to be a citizen of the internet and the physical world at the same time, and how they are more intermingled than we like to believe.

If I had to summarize a central theme of what I've been talking about today, (and I don't really want to, but conclusions gotta conclusion), it would be that viewing the internet as "real" is central to having a healthy relationship with it. This doesn't mean that everything that happens online is important or worth paying attention to, far from it in fact -- there are lots of meaningless things that happen "IRL" as well. But I think where we get lost is when we start imagining the world in our phones as a magical, disconnected one that has no power to shape our lived, embodied realities.

The world the internet creates is one where identities can merge and lines can blur. It can be easy to start conflating our own personhood with the collective consciousness being generated in realtime in front of our eyes, but it's important to remember that we are merely a part of it, not the whole thing. In doing this we should recognize that there is value in participation in the crowd and the moment, but equal value in taking a step away and protecting within ourselves a long-term perspective and a personal life that is separate from our public one. Online can be a great place for finding genuinely new and innovative ideas and pushing the boundaries of thought, but it can also be a place where we fall prey to the most basic tendencies of our psychology and the limits of our frail bodies.

All that can be expected of us is to live authentically as real people through it all.

Good luck out there. I love you. ❤️