It was probably months ago, now, but I saw someone Tweeting about the Block button. I was inspired by their musings enough that I wrote them down, but never followed through on my thoughts with them. The original idea was that they would make a great two-pages for a PLog entry. Then I found that I wasn't sure I had as much to say on the topic as I originally thought – and then my attention turned to other projects.
This is something like the OP: “Thinking tonight about the “block” feature, both as a social media tool and a way of setting a firm boundary. Dick move? Violent act? Healthy tool of self-preservation? I typically only block if it's clear that a proper discourse or conflict resolution won't be possible – in other words, when it feels like I'm wasting my energy. I think the internet has conditioned us to continue to engage with folks past the point of productivity, because the algorithm feeds on dissent and conflict.”
Before today I haven't often used the Block feature. I have been Blocked many times – and that's okay. Before now I've chosen just to Mute people. Largely because the Block feature says many more things than simply not engaging with a person anymore.
For starters, the Block tells the Blocked that they have been Blocked. Right? So, when you Mute someone, only you get the satisfaction of knowing they won't show up in your feed again, and you can kind of undermine your own mental health argument by taking the extra step to engage with their material. But I mostly still like that, because it's how I deal with people who annoy or irritate or in general bother me – I choose to ignore them.
My mother told me as a boy, “Mind over matter – I don't mind, because the problem doesn't matter.” So if I can frame a person and their behavior as something that ultimately doesn't matter because of my negative feelings about them (and my naturally arrogantly-framed superior feelings about myself and my competency), then I can also pay them no mind.
Putting that extra layer of effort between me and them is enough to not let them bother me. But it doesn't really work like that on Twitter. Maybe this is a Me Problem, but Twitter is an act of self-harm for me just to open the app.
That seems like a dangerously selfish thing to say. Like being exposed to that many people's thoughts is somehow harmful to me. But that's not what I mean. It is how I started to describe it. But my manager at GameStop was wrong: the first thing you say is not always exactly what you mean. In fact, the first thing I say is almost never anything like what I mean.
Maybe it's internet agoraphobia, but social media platforms give me near-crippling anxiety. This entire value by like society we've built for ourselves, the chemical stimuli of the internet plus socialization plus a scored reward system makes for a place which, for me and all my addictive personality and social anxiety, is both loathesomely confusing and an attractively intractable puzzle.
Anyway, I've recently been exploring the Block button as a permanent solution. Because while I agree that the Block button is a violent act, it's a lot more than that.
The Block button sends a message. It sends a lot of messages, actually. The one we're going to talk about today is maybe going to take me a little bit of working up to, because I don't know what to actually call it. And describing it is describing it. So I'll just describe it the long way round so you can maybe fully comprehend how I came to this idea and help me work out how it's wrong.
Because believe it or not, everything I say, everything I Tweet, everything I write, everything I think, I'm trying to prove it wrong.
I'm pretty sure I've told that story too well by this point. Insisting on it makes me look like a liar. Or like I'm insecure with how much of my work my audience have read. Or with the consistency within my own writing – which implies a lack of consistency in my thinking.
Dr. Jordan Peterson talks about the process that led to his creation of the Future Authoring Program. He says he started with the idea that he should make it free, but learned that putting a price tag on something implies value, where having no price tag implies no value.
That was interesting for me to learn, after already deciding in my head and in my heart that I was going to do this for tips and handouts. Not putting my writing behind a paywall suggests that I don't value what I'm saying – which is an interesting paradox, and one I plan to manipulate for liminality to see what comes out of the Space Between. (Aw, fuck. Now I have that Dave Matthews song stuck in my head.)
The Block feature, in that context, becomes maybe my greatest asset as a creator. The Block button says that these things I'm saying and writing and sharing for free are in fact worth something – and that the Blocked person doesn't meet whatever my criteria for receiving these things is. And, see, that arbitrary nature – especially as I exercised it with my experiment the other morning and afternoon – makes the Block button not a weapon but a... well, I was going to say a commodity. But I am the commodity. The Block button then becomes legislature that prevents the Blocked from gaining access to the commodity that is me.
It's like... The Block button is repealing the Fair Housing Act or something. Or a wall. It's a Conduct Wall. The behavior version of paywall.
I don't think the internet does this, but there is a conditioning in me which has led me to believe that socializing on the internet is exactly the same as socializing “in real life”. Because to me, a person is a person. There is no distinction between OL and IRL. But that's not how the internet works. Because passers by can't “like” what you're saying so that you and other observers are aware of it, IRL.
Arguing on Twitter is a dangerous behavior. Not only because strangers can get involved and take conversations in wildly unproductive directions, but because the more correct you are the fewer positive reactions you're going to get. But you are going to see people react positively to the people calling you stupid or otherwise representing reality inaccurately.
So I've started Blocking those people instead of the OP.
I initiated an argument with an irreligious person who was saying something ignorant and stupid about religion. By playing word games and asking them difficult questions, I both got them to confront their ignorance about what they were saying and how they think on the subject, but also made them look foolish for speaking at all. So they made some passive aggressive, ignorant comment that was meant to minimize me, but really just pointed to the depth and breadth of their ignorance.
So I just unfollowed them. NBD. I initiated the argument, they aren't a person I need to see Tweets from anymore. Problem solved.
Then people start liking her last comment, thinking she's won. Because this is a behavior I've observed. People will think that their “friends” online have won an argument or are losing an argument, and they will pile on – either with likes or comments. More IRL social behavior OL.
It's fine. This is how high school works, too.
I'm not even mad about it anymore.
But I got to thinking: What if, instead of Muting the conversation so I don't see the likes or comments on it anymore, I started Blocking the assholes liking the comment aimed at hurting my feelings?
It took exactly two Blocks before one of them was SHOCKED! that I would block her for simply liking the comment. Lol. Why does Twitter send you notifications of people @ing you when you have Blocked them/are Blocked by them? Then OP said some more hateful, condescending things about me, confident I wouldn't see them, so I blocked her, too.
And then a third newcomer to the series dropped by to say some more hateful stuff about me.
So I blocked him, too.
I'm new to this. You all probably already know it, the power that is the Block feature.
But it occurred to me as I was thinking over the situation in my mind and wondering whether that was the Upright thing to do: Jesus didn't share the deepest secrets of his teachings to even the Apostles – those twelve men in his closest circle. He taught them to the women, those people who supported and loved him. Those people who were in fact closest to his heart and who shared those things dearest in his mind.
So be ware the Block by the mighty V the Producer.
Lol.
I don't even really know what this post is about. I'm sure I'm just venting about a bad experience I had the other day and trying to get ahead of them talking shit about me and passing my blog among themselves to make fun of. Which would actually be fine – I'd be getting readers that way.
But more than anything, it's to try to take the lesson out of all the rage and frustration I'm feeling. None of it is really related to this Twitter interaction.
I typically manufacture good interactions. Today I'm in a negative place, of a frowning disposition. I know why. It's not going to improve. I don't know what to do about that.
This situation I'm in is a fingertrap – it is always working against me, and I don't want to be free of the trap anyway. So I don't even know what analogizing it as a soluble problem does for either of us. I'm sure it doesn't matter.
Which is what I say when it matters more than anything.
I don't like to write when I'm depressed. I don't like to do anything. That isn't to say that I like to do nothing, it's to say that I do not do-like to either do anything or not do anything.
Yeesh.
I prefer not to write when I'm depressed. I can feel my anger, I can see my hurt, in the words. But I'm reading Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing, and he says that I should. That I should write the most when I'm depressed. That I should let my anger and my hurt and my fear and my loneliness and my frustration speak for themselves. Because that is the writers art. It's setting down permanently how you feel and what you think, what you want and who you are.
Even if who that is was only a fleeting snapshot – and not even a good one: one where you're only partly in the frame, and it's your bad side, so your nose looks too big and your eyes are too small, and you've not red eye; and your mouth isn't visible, and for some reason your neck is tilted at a weird angle.
That isn't who you are now, it doesn't even capture who you were then. But it doesn't have to. A single snapshot can never capture the entirety of who you are in any minute.
And that's why I write. Because you need to know. Because I need to keep reminding myself.
My feelings are hurt. So I turned to this blog. And I'm proud of that.
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