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12

Jan

Earlier in my Tumblr career, I pushed back at the edges of what I saw as rank incivility on Twitter. I got more praise than grumbles, for which I’ll always be grateful, but I did make some amazingly bitter enemies (for an artist’s representation of such persons, see above). For a time, their accusations of holier-than-thou sanctimoniousness stung a bit. After all, this is a free-for-all kind of place, they said. You can’t put laws on it, Mr Censor Who The Hell Do You Think You Are Man?They’d been using it for culling of the weak, or even the popular or the politically different whom they’d go after in packs, and they didn’t like getting called out. They let out xenophobic rants now and again when the banal pressure of their mundane existences, the radon levels in their mothers’ basements, or the sodium deposits in their crania from the three-squares-a day Ramen catering, built up to toxic degrees.

Just last week one of our friends called it quits on here because of it.  It’s real and navigating around a threatening crazy person can take it out of you.

I came to think of such people as dinks and moved on. And they are dinks. There’s no other word for them. 

But I no longer see the specific behavior I was seeing, and it’s because we’ve settled down into a do-unto-others kind of routine, for the most part, and only take arrows from outsiders.  And we unfollow and block. And the dinks, who started off on Twitter like gangbusters, have been eclipsed and are waning. They kick against the dying of the light, and I wish them all the La Brea tar pits in the world.

If you can believe it, I sat down to write something else instead.

Earlier in my Tumblr career, I pushed back at the edges of what I saw as rank incivility on Twitter. I got more praise than grumbles, for which I’ll always be grateful, but I did make some amazingly bitter enemies (for an artist’s representation of such persons, see above). For a time, their accusations of holier-than-thou sanctimoniousness stung a bit. After all, this is a free-for-all kind of place, they said. You can’t put laws on it, Mr Censor Who The Hell Do You Think You Are Man?They’d been using it for culling of the weak, or even the popular or the politically different whom they’d go after in packs, and they didn’t like getting called out. They let out xenophobic rants now and again when the banal pressure of their mundane existences, the radon levels in their mothers’ basements, or the sodium deposits in their crania from the three-squares-a day Ramen catering, built up to toxic degrees.

Just last week one of our friends called it quits on here because of it. It’s real and navigating around a threatening crazy person can take it out of you.

I came to think of such people as dinks and moved on. And they are dinks. There’s no other word for them.

But I no longer see the specific behavior I was seeing, and it’s because we’ve settled down into a do-unto-others kind of routine, for the most part, and only take arrows from outsiders. And we unfollow and block. And the dinks, who started off on Twitter like gangbusters, have been eclipsed and are waning. They kick against the dying of the light, and I wish them all the La Brea tar pits in the world.

If you can believe it, I sat down to write something else instead.

  1. adamfogle said: Wow… looks like the divorce is hitting Russell Brand pretty hard.
  2. uncledynamite posted this