Nuance is dead, long live Nuance

Posting online has started to wear me down. Not because I’ve suddenly decided I hate the internet. Quite the opposite, really. I grew up online. Most of my friends are people I know through the internet in some capacity, I am in a relationship with somebody on the other side of the Atlantic, most of the software I build exists because I found some niche community or protocol and thought oh, that’s neat, and I have spent an irresponsible amount of time building my own little corner of the web specifically because I like being here.

The problem is that being here increasingly feels like being permanently on call for an argument. I don’t mean politics or religion or AI or one of the other subjects where you know before pressing Post that somebody is probably going to disagree with you. I mean almost anything: software, music, something I bought, something I did, something about myself, a joke, or a sentence I wrote in thirty seconds and then immediately forgot about. Somebody can always turn it into a debate, and, worse, I have started writing for that person before they even arrive.

I’ll type something, read it back, and think about how somebody could interpret it incorrectly. So I add context. Then I realise the context introduces another possible interpretation, so I add a qualification. Then I rewrite part of it because someone could take that the wrong way. Sometimes I delete it entirely; other times I type the inevitable reply, stare at it for a minute, delete that too, and close the app. The latter is probably healthier.

I genuinely do not need to be arguing with somebody at 01:00 about whether Linux is technically an operating system or whether their interpretation of AT Protocol terminology is more spiritually correct than mine. I have done that before. It is rarely worth it. Still, I don’t like that this calculation is happening before anything has actually happened.

Every so often this makes me contemplate moving to Skye and abandoning the internet entirely. I could finally embrace the surname and become some sort of Croft², living on a croft, presumably staring dramatically over the landscape whilst the wind attempts to remove the roof.

This plan has several problems. I like computers, I like my friends, and I need the internet. I would probably last about three days before trying to work out which ISP could get fibre to the sheep. There are also some fairly obvious physical reasons why deciding to become a full-time manual agricultural worker would perhaps not be the greatest career move I have ever made. Still, a small house on Skye, no notifications, hills, weather, and sheep silently judging me from a distance without being able to quote-post me does sound appealing.

Not everything is a position

The obvious response to all of this is that I post publicly. Yes, I know. People are allowed to disagree with me. I have opinions, sometimes quite strong ones, and I am hardly renowned for keeping them to myself. I have also been wrong plenty of times. There are things on this very blog I would phrase differently now, and there have been plenty of situations where somebody has corrected me and they were entirely right to do so.

That is not what bothers me. What bothers me is this assumption that saying something publicly means I have volunteered to defend it for as long as another person wants me to. Sometimes I am making an argument and sometimes I am not.

If I say I like a song, I am not submitting a peer-reviewed paper on the objective quality of the artist. If I say I use a particular piece of software, I am not demanding that everybody who uses something else justify themselves before a tribunal. If I mention my religion, I am not inviting somebody to debate the existence of the Olympian Pantheon. If I describe something that happened to me, producing an example of somebody to whom that thing did not happen does not somehow cancel mine out.

Sometimes I just think something is neat. Sometimes I think something is shit. Sometimes I have a preference, and sometimes I will have a different preference six months from now because people change their minds. This seems like quite a normal way to be a human being, but online, somehow, it becomes evidence.

An opinion becomes a position. A preference becomes an ideology. A choice becomes a statement about every alternative choice you could have made. Because everything is a position, everything apparently needs an opposing position attached to it, and suddenly there must be a winner, a loser and a debate. I don’t really understand why.

The reaction machine

TikTok is probably where I notice this most. I have very mixed feelings about TikTok anyway, but comment sections on there seem almost uniquely capable of turning thirty seconds of somebody talking into a reconstructed war crime.

A person says something slightly inaccurately and someone immediately corrects them. Someone corrects the correction. Someone else has interpreted the original video in a completely different way. Another person watched seven seconds, opened the comments and is now extremely angry about something the creator actually addressed twenty seconds later. Then somebody makes another video responding to the comment responding to the video, and now we are three layers removed from whatever anybody originally meant.

None of this requires anybody to stop and think, and that is the part that bothers me. Critical thinking is good. Correcting misinformation is good. Disagreeing with somebody can be good. Immediate pattern-matching is not necessarily critical thinking.

Sometimes it feels as though people see a word they associate with an argument they have had before and simply continue that argument with the new person. The actual words in front of them become almost incidental. I have had this happen with religion repeatedly.

I’m Pagan. More specifically, my practice is Hellenic-Celtic and syncretic, Selene is my patron deity, and I follow the Gaelic Wheel of the Year. That is a description of part of my life. I am perfectly happy to talk about it, and I enjoy talking about religion when the other person is actually interested in talking about religion. What I do not particularly enjoy is somebody deciding that mentioning my own beliefs means I have invited them to prove those beliefs wrong.

I have had Christians on TikTok barge into my replies because I used the word “Gods.” That was it. Not a theological essay, not me attempting to convert anybody, and not some grand declaration about Christianity. Gods. Plural. Apparently this summons people.

Suddenly I am being told there is only one God, or being asked which god I supposedly mean, or being informed that my vocabulary is incorrect because it does not conform to somebody else’s theology. You do not have to believe in Selene. I do. There, we have resolved the issue.

There does not need to be a winner. I am not asking Christians to start referring to multiple Gods in their own religious practice, and I would rather they did not appear in mine demanding I stop. This is exactly what I mean by existing becoming debatable: something can simply be true about me, and somebody will treat that as a proposition I must defend.

Mister Armchair Technician has entered the replies

Technology has its own version of this, which manages to be both funnier and considerably more irritating because it is the area where I actually have formal education and practical experience. I hold an OCR Cambridge Technicals Level 3 Diploma in Information Technology. This does not mean I know everything about computers. Nobody does. Anyone claiming to know everything about computing has either discovered omniscience or has not yet discovered how much computing there is to know.

I do, however, generally know what I am talking about when I am talking about IT. I have studied it. I write software. I run servers. I maintain infrastructure. I spend far too much of my free time poking at operating systems, protocols, containers, networks and whatever else has caught my attention that week.

Enter Mister Armchair Technician. Mister Armchair Technician is extremely confident; this is his principal qualification. He has strong opinions on Linux despite having used it twice in VirtualBox. He understands networking because he changed the DNS server on his Xbox once. He has never used the software I am talking about, but somebody on Reddit said something about it in 2020 and therefore I am wrong.

If I eventually get bored and stop replying, he has won. I have genuinely had people do this: “I guess I won then.” No. You continued talking after I stopped. That is the conversational equivalent of arguing with the mirror after I have left the room.

Silence is not concession. Sometimes I stopped replying because I had explained myself three times already. Sometimes the other person was being condescending. Sometimes I realised they were not actually interested in understanding what I meant. Sometimes I had something better to do, or I wanted a cup of tea. The argument does not automatically become a competitive sport because one participant has started keeping score.

This extends to operating systems in a particularly stupid way. I use a Mac. Apparently, to some people, this means I am an idiot, and I have never quite understood the reasoning.

I use a Mac because I like macOS and it suits the work I do. It gives me a Unix-based environment, good hardware, the development tooling I need, and access to Apple platforms. I also use Linux. I use Linux for servers because I would be fairly concerned if my PDS suddenly booted into macOS. These things can coexist.

I can understand computers and prefer a Mac as my desktop. I can criticise Apple — and the Gods know there is plenty to criticise — whilst still liking their computers. I can think memory and storage pricing is daylight robbery whilst also thinking the machine itself is good. Nuance! Apparently horrifying.

“I don’t like Macs” and “people who use Macs are stupid” are not the same statement. Somewhere online these very frequently become the same statement anyway. It is a computer I bought with my own money. Please try to recover from this information in your own time.

The part that isn't particularly funny

Most of this is irritating. There was a period where it became genuinely frightening.

When I was psychotic, and not in the stereotypical horror villain sense but the hysterical crying out of nowhere kind, the anxiety around posting and other people’s perception of me became horrific. I don’t really know how else to describe it. The possibility that somebody might be angry with me, that I had said something wrong, that somebody was talking about me, or that something I had posted had been interpreted in some catastrophic way could become enormous.

Social media is a truly terrible environment for that because the horrible thing is that some of the raw ingredients are real. People do vague-post, quote-post strangers, deliberately misinterpret each other, dogpile people and become angry over incredibly minor things. Under normal circumstances you can look at most of this and put it in proportion. When your brain is already struggling with how much significance it should assign to things, an endless feed of ambiguous social information is not exactly ideal.

Ten people can reply normally and one person can be hostile, and guess which one suddenly feels important. Or nobody replies, and somehow that can become frightening too. I would think constantly about how I had worded something, whether somebody was upset, whether somebody was referring to me, whether I needed to explain myself, or whether the explanation had itself created another problem which now required another explanation.

It was anxiety being an ouroboros. I am not psychotic now, and I can recognise those thought patterns for what they are in a way that I could not then, but habits do not necessarily disappear because the circumstances that created them have.

I still catch myself writing for the hostile reply that does not exist yet. I still add the caveat before anybody has objected, and I still sometimes feel that little jolt when I see a notification under something I know somebody coulddisagree with. The difference is that now I can notice it, and sometimes I can even ignore it. Progress, I suppose.

Bluesky cannot fix people

Given the amount of this blog dedicated to AT Protocol, I feel contractually required to mention Bluesky here. I like Bluesky. Shocker.

I like chronological feeds, custom feeds, being able to host my own PDS, and the fact that my identity and repository are not supposed to be permanently chained to one application. I have built an unreasonable amount of software around AT Protocol, so there is no point pretending I am an impartial observer. Bluesky is significantly more pleasant for me than Twitter became.

It does not solve this, though. No protocol can. You can remove engagement algorithms and people can still enjoy arguing. You can give everyone excellent moderation tools and somebody can still decide they absolutely must tell a stranger why their choice of laptop indicates low intelligence. You can decentralise identity, data hosting, feeds and moderation and you will eventually run into the horrible architectural limitation known as other human beings.

Unfortunately, there is no Lexicon for fixing that. I have checked.

The more useful realisation for me is probably that somebody wanting an argument does not mean I have to provide one. If somebody disagrees with me, they can. If somebody thinks I am stupid for using macOS, okay. If somebody wants to tell me my Gods are not real, they are unlikely to be transformed by paragraph fourteen of my Bluesky reply thread.

If somebody deliberately misunderstands me, perhaps giving them more words to deliberately misunderstand is not actually the solution. If somebody declares themselves the winner because I stop replying, I hope they enjoy the trophy they have awarded themselves. I don’t have to convince everybody, and that still feels oddly radical to write considering how obvious it is.

I don't actually want to leave

The frustrating thing is that I still love the internet. This would all be much easier if I didn't.

I like posting stupid thoughts and getting stupid replies from friends. I like talking about software with people who understand why I am excited about some absurdly niche protocol detail. I like posting something I made and seeing another person actually use it, finding communities around things I would probably never encounter locally, maintaining a website with my name on it, and knowing that some thought I had at midnight can become a blog post and sit on my PDS alongside years of everything else I have written.

I do not want to retreat into a private diary, and I probably do not actually want to become a crofter on Skye either. Probably.

What I want is to stop treating the Post button as though it says I CONSENT TO DEFEND THIS STATEMENT UNTIL EVERY PERSON ON THE INTERNET IS SATISFIED. It doesn't. Sometimes I am wrong. Sometimes the person replying to me is wrong. Sometimes we are both basically right and are arguing about two different things. Sometimes neither position matters very much.

Sometimes I am still figuring out what I think. Sometimes I changed my mind. Sometimes there is actual nuance, nae a binary. And sometimes I posted because I looked outside and thought the Moon was pretty.

My Lady is beautiful, and I really don't need a debate about it.