Somebody posts, and you reply. Different kinds of things might happen.#
1. Maybe you allow your thinking to become entangled in the other person’s thinking, and the other person sees that entanglement as useful and joins in, replying to you, and together you see where that leads. Maybe it’s like late-night conversations in a dorm room or maybe it’s like the Lincoln-Douglass debates, but nobody knows until it happens.#
2. Maybe you use the other person’s post as an occasion for a speech you wanted to give anyway. No need, really, to reply to anything in particular the person has said. No need to honor the specifics of the other person’s thinking — well, that’s how you treat the situation, anyway.#
3. Maybe you use the reply platform as an opportunity to try to drown out voices of which you disapprove. A place to make noise that distracts from conversation. A place for self-flattering self-aggrandizing rants. A move typical of cancel culture.#
4. Maybe the post was by someone more well-connected than you are. Maybe you want to be seen by and speak to the readership that person has built up over time. Maybe you just want to grab the microphone and steal the audience, if you can.#
5. Maybe you think you’re funny and the whole world is your straight man. Maybe you love the sound of your own voice. Maybe you aren’t a good reader and so you don’t even know that you think in cliches and empty generalities that are too fuzzy-headed to contribute something to the conversation. Maybe you just like being thinly social in the arm’s-length way the web makes possible.#
6. Maybe you’ve never experienced the kind of public speech that builds community and energizes activism, maybe you don’t know what it sounds like or how to think and talk that way. Maybe you think individualism is good enough to hold together a democracy.#
Somebody posts, and you reply. Different kinds of things might happen.#
1. Maybe you allow your thinking to become entangled in the other person’s thinking, and the other person sees that entanglement as useful and joins in, replying to you, and together you see where that leads. Maybe it’s like late-night conversations in a dorm room or maybe it’s like the Lincoln-Douglass debates, but nobody knows until it happens.#
2. Maybe you use the other person’s post as an occasion for a speech you wanted to give anyway. No need, really, to reply to anything in particular the person has said. No need to honor the specifics of the other person’s thinking — well, that’s how you treat the situation, anyway.#
3. Maybe you use the reply platform as an opportunity to try to drown out voices of which you disapprove. A place to make noise that distracts from conversation. A place for self-flattering self-aggrandizing rants. A move typical of cancel culture.#
4. Maybe the post was by someone more well-connected than you are. Maybe you want to be seen by and speak to the readership that person has built up over time. Maybe you just want to grab the microphone and steal the audience, if you can.#
5. Maybe you think you’re funny and the whole world is your straight man. Maybe you love the sound of your own voice. Maybe you aren’t a good reader and so you don’t even know that you think in cliches and empty generalities that are too fuzzy-headed to contribute something to the conversation. Maybe you just like being thinly social in the arm’s-length way the web makes possible.#
6. Maybe you’ve never experienced the kind of public speech that builds community and energizes activism, maybe you don’t know what it sounds like or how to think and talk that way. Maybe you think individualism is good enough to hold together a democracy.#