Internet Memory, SnapChat's CEBro, and Bad Things I've Said In the Past

As Ben Folds so eloquently put it in "Rockin' the Suburbs": you better watch out, because I'm gonna say 'fuck'."

Less than a year ago, I made a huge deal out of locking this blog and starting a new one. That post remains one of my favorite things I've written anywhere, blog or no, and I still firmly believe the things I said regarding social networking and the changes it's working in how I communicate, how it's negatively effecting my ability to have meaningful conversations and interactions online and elsewhere, and how it's making talking at length and in depth online, publicly, a very scary proposition.

Yet, here I am, making Defiantly, Maybe public again. So, what's changed?

Well, two things, really. First, I realized that nobody really cares what I write about and where I write about it because I'm not an important person.

Brad knows how I feel.

I don't mean that self-deprecatingly. I just mean that I don't post enough and don't have enough interested followers to make a private blog a hub for conversation and debate (and, by extension, for unintentional controversy). Being able to post to a broader audience again might mean that I'll occasionally get a response that isn't a) nothing or b) "tl;dr." But I'll also be slightly more likely to get a response that's something like "OMG HOW CAN YOU THINK SUCH THINGS I HATE YOUR WHOLE LIFE NOW." Which brings me to my next reason...

I've recently become sort of incensed* by the culture of judgment I've seen growing exponentially on the internet, and somewhere in my mind the best way to combat this sort of thing seems to be to go online in front of everyone and say whatever the fuck** I want.

So, it seemed appropriate to "celebrate" making this blog widely accessible again by writing about internet memory and potentially saying things that people could later take out of context and use to decide that I'm a Bad Person. Because that's apparently all we do on the internet, now.

I didn't have to dig far to find some examples of what I want to talk about. One is a bit close to my heart and the other requires me to try to empathize with a guy who is almost definitely a hardcore misogynist. So this should be interesting.

I present case number one. If you don't like clicking on things or looking at webpages other than this one (good on you), case number one is the story all about how Jack White and the Black Keys got flip-turned upside down. The story, as it's been propagated across the internets, is that some private letters*** of Mr. White's were leaked as part of his custody battle with his ex-wife, and in these letters it turns out he said some things about not liking the Black Keys.

So, to recap thus far: a man gets divorced and in addition to having to deal with probably a pretty shitty situation involving falling out of love with his wife and all, there's also a custody battle, adding an extra-shitty legal dimension to the already-existing shitty emotional dimension of divorce to create a pulsing quadrilateral of personal shittiness.

This was the first result for "shit quadrilateral."

And what do we take from this? Oh, right. That he wrote in some letter to someone that was never intended to be seen by everyone that he sort of doesn't like another band that some other people who are reading this letter that they shouldn't be reading like. And oh my god is that so much more important than the marriage-ending thing and the sadness thing and the custody-battle thing, not to mention the give-the-poor-guy-room-to-suffer thing!

To be fair, though, Jack White is probably pretty good at suffering. Just look at that vulture.

Right. But Jack White is a celebrity, which means that it totally makes sense that his private words were made public and scrutinized ad nauseum by lots of people who don't know him or his private circumstances at all, who don't know the context those comments were made in. Right?

No. It's not right. I'm not even going to explain to you at length why it's not right. If you don't know, then go away and think about it until you figure it out on your own and then come back and finish reading.

So, now we've got things like this assholish A.V. Club article (and I usually love the A.V. Club) that explains that White has for some reason issued a very public apology to the people who read his private writings against his (implicit) wishes, but makes sure to cast White as the bad guy before you even get to read the story by using the title "Jack White tries to pull his foot out of his mouth with lengthy apology." We, the culture, have clearly decided after rifling through this guy's personal mail that he is guilty. Jack White is a bad guy, and we should not like him now nor should we purchase his records. Why again? Oh, yeah, because he doesn't like some other band in private, and somehow that is an unpardonable offense. To us. Whose souls are as pure as the driven snow.

Okay, well, let's graduate to a case where the thing the bad guy did actually matters, and is probably worthy of widespread criticism and ridicule, as least when looked at a certain way.

So here we have Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat, a guy who is also rich and famous and thus has implicitly agreed (according to us) to make his entire life available for public scrutiny. This case is a little tougher to me because Spiegel's past-comments are pretty terrible and misogynist. And in criticizing the way that we've gone after him for them I don't want to imply that I condone the comments themselves, because I don't. He said some pretty terrible things (in the past, under the assumption that he was saying it to a small, discrete audience).

But here's the thing. I've said some terrible things, too. You've said some terrible things. We've probably both thought even more terrible things and had the good sense not to utter them out loud so that they wouldn't come back to haunt us. Does this make the things that Spiegel said okay, because we're all jerks sometimes? No. But I'd like to try to put into perspective the idea of going after someone you've never met for a few comments he made years ago in a context that you aren't aware of because I believe that the judgmental ways we choose to respond to these stories about people we don't know (which seem to be happening more and more often lately) don't just have consequences for which records we buy and which apps we download, but also for how we treat the people we do know.

First off, context is important. Because this is a hill I'm absolutely willing to die on, I'll use examples from my own life. I have had, on occasion, good Asian-American friends. A part of my friendship with one such friend in particular consisted of us trading racial jibes and jokes: me tossing Asian stereotypes at him and he tossing white-guy stereotypes at me. It was part of our rapport, and we were both comfortable with it. Now, had we talked like this over, say, email, and one of those emails came to light years down the road and was made public, I would not want the same "consideration" that Spiegel has received from us over the last few weeks. If I were to issue an (unnecessary) apology for my once-private, now-public communication, I would not want to be met with the cynicism that Jack White's seemingly earnest apology has been met with throughout the rock music blogosphere. What I said was acceptable in context because in that context it had a certain meaning, granted it by that very context. Because I am a semi-intelligent and considerate human being, outside of that context, I would have said things differently, or not at all. That's how context works.

When it comes to this sort of thing, your example, I'm sure, is different, but I'm equally sure that there is an example, at least one, for each of us. Think about that before you roll your eyes at White, before you shake your fist at Spiegel. You don't have to not condemn them, but at least think about it.

Second, people grow old, if not up. They change, and maybe even learn. I try. I hope I succeed from time to time. A lot of people attacked Spiegel for his recitation of what seems to be the required response to these ever-more-popular situations: "[The messages] in no way reflect who I am today." The general internet response was "These messages were sent 3-4 years ago; how much does one person change in 3-4 years?! I call bullshit!"

Really?! How much does one person change in 3-4 years? Have you ever grown up before?

The variations on this response and the frequency with which they seemed to pop up blows my mind. To me, it communicates a very deep cynicism toward the idea that others can change, grow, and most importantly, learn. That we can make mistakes and still turn out okay, overall, in the end. I have bad news: mistakes are what learning is made of. What do we become when we stop allowing others to make them?

I've been an NFL football fan my entire life. I grew up watching every single game I could, collecting trading cards, memorizing player rosters, the whole ten yards. For the longest time, the Washington Redskins were just one of the teams in the league. It wasn't until I got to grad school and spent a few years studying critical race theory and assorted/related other cultural theories that I gained a real appreciation for why calling your team "the Redskins" might be insulting to Native Americans (or others). But I still didn't really see why anyone was bothering talking about the name of a football team when there were so many other, seemingly bigger problems in the world to worry about.

I don't even know what changed my mind, but it was a few weeks ago that, in the midst of grading student papers, it finally really, decisively hit me how shittily racist the team's name is and how stupid and backward we are in general as a culture for not demanding it be changed back in, oh, 1890 or so. I'm embarrassed to admit that it took me this long to understand. It's embarrassing to write about in a blog post that I'm going to post to Facebook. I want people to think I'm understanding, and nice, and considerate, and smart, and after reading this, some people might think the opposite.

But hell, we're learning all the time, a lot if we're paying attention, a little even if we're willfully trying to pretend that we can stay the same person for our entire lives. This is just one of my many, many examples. There's not, but what if there was an email from a few weeks ago in which I'd written something like "Oh, I don't see what the big deal is about the Washington Redskins, people should just get over it!" and someone read that email and was upset at me and I tried to explain myself by saying "Those messages sent 3 weeks ago don't reflect who I am today"?

It would be absolutely true, and I suspect that a great many people wouldn't care.

Honestly, my worry about our propensity to judgment, especially on the internet, has less to do with who we're judging and more to do with us. Evan Spiegel is going to be fine. Jack White will probably survive. But what's the cost to us of this kneejerk cynicism, this rush to judgment, this assumption that a few lines of text or a few moments of speech tell us all we need to know about a person?

I've had 30-odd years of issues with the vast majority of the Bible, but John 8:7 has always been near to my heart, the part where Jesus says "Let the one among you who is guiltless be the first to throw a stone." This certainly hasn't kept me from judging all my life, and it certainly hasn't kept me from doing things that have been, at times, likely deserving of a harsh judgment from others, but I often think of it when I read about people like Evan Spiegel and realize that I really do want to believe that he's learned something in the last 3-4 years, to think that there's more to him than a few nasty emails. And that's just as much, if not more, for my own sake as it is for his.

Would we rather live in a world where it's just understood that every single thing you put out on the internet (or elsewhere) is immediately available for public scrutiny and any statement that could be even mildly misconstrued should be kept to ourselves, or a world where we still live with the (potentially illusory) idea of different audiences and treat each other with that understanding in mind when one audience unexpectedly bleeds into another? Because based on how we're treating each other right now, we're definitely creating the former, but I'm pretty sure just about everyone, given a choice, would prefer the latter.

* Is it possible to be "sort of incensed" by something?
** Told you.
*** What's a "letter"? I think they meant "emails."