Every conversation about being "chronically online" is the same.
The Wednesday edition of the Goods newsletter is all about internet culture, brought to you by senior reporter Rebecca Jennings. The Wednesday edition of the Goods newsletter is all about internet culture, brought to you by senior reporter Rebecca Jennings. ð£ï¸ Every "chronically online" conversation is the same ð In October, a woman named Daisey Beaton made a huge mistake: She tweeted about her personal life. âmy husband and i wake up every morning and bring our coffee out to our garden and sit and talk for hours,â [she wrote](. âevery morning. it never gets old & we never run out of things to talk to. love him so much.â If you felt a creeping sense of dread while reading about Daisey and her husband enjoying coffee in their garden, itâs possible you spend too much time online. Thatâs because despite its seeming innocuousness, Daiseyâs post has all the markers of Twitter rage-bait, and by rage-bait I mean a person sharing an experience that may not be entirely universal. Over the next day, Daisey received all kinds of angry replies: âWho has time to sit and talk for hours everyday? Must be nice,â one [woman wrote](. âWhat if we werenât inherently wealthy and have to work and stuff?â [replied another](. There were plenty more: â[Iâm happy for you but](itâs just smug, self satisfied bragging if itâs true. Your partner is most likely embarrassed by the tweet, or at least should be.â â[I wake up at 6am](, shower and go to work for a shift that is a minimum of 10 hours long. This is an unattainable goal for most people.â â[You havenât been married long have you](.â What happened next, though, was just as predictable: Other commenters had a field day replying to those replies (âI wake up every day fully engulfed in flames and being eaten alive by wolves. The fact that your tweet doesn't represent my experience is a personal affront,â wrote NBCâs Ben Collins, sarcastically), and then a [bunch of]([journalists]( [wrote articles]( about how wild it was that Twitter users were piling on an innocent woman just for the small sin of humblebragging about her nice mornings. Daisey had briefly become Twitterâs main character, but it was the angry people who became the story. Itâs become something of a sport to unearth these sorts of replies, the ones where strangers make willfully decontextualized moral judgments on other peopleâs lives. We give these people and these kinds of conversations names: âchronically onlineâ or âterminally online,â implying that too much exposure to too many peopleâs weird ideas makes us all sort of lose our minds and our sense of shared humanity. For years, people on TikTok and Twitter have delighted in recounting the most âchronically onlineâ takes theyâve ever seen; the compilation below includes a disabled woman being accused of elitism for using a grocery delivery service and a 21-year-old Redditor being accused of âgroomingâ her 20-year-old boyfriend. When I posed the [question to Twitter]( â âWhat was the most chronically online discourse you saw this year?â â the replies were telling: There was âgarden coffee lady.â There was someone likening playing fetch with a dog to abuse. There was, somehow, Anne Frank discourse [again](. There was a [spreadsheet]( of famous authors next to the reasons why they were âproblematicâ (sample: âJohn Green: 'harmful depictions of manic episodes,' William Shakespeare: 'misogynistic principles enforced in books'â). There was the accusation that the teen actor in a Netflix series was âqueerbaitingâ because he ⦠acted in the show ([he was eventually forced]( to come out as bisexual in real life). When indie rocker Mitski tweeted that sheâd prefer it if her fans didnât film her the entire time sheâs onstage, [some fans claimed]( that her request was insensitive to people with memory-related disabilities. What all of these arguments have in common is that very few people engage in them in real life. Sure, you might be privately annoyed at your friend whoâs always talking about how great their life is when they drone on about their perfect mornings, and you might rightfully point out when an author has an unsavory past, but itâs unlikely that the subject coming up in conversation would lead to mass ridicule. But online, itâs almost a given. A [frequently quoted tweet]( acts as a shorthand for this phenomenon: âHi, most annoying person youâve ever encountered here! I noticed this post you wrote in 3 seconds doesnât line up with every experience Iâve ever had. This is extremely harmful to me, the main character of the universe.â This is not to say that any accusation of sexism, homophobia, racism, ableism, or elitism is inherently whiny or baseless. In fact, itâs often in the reactions to these assertions where people extrapolate the most ungenerous reading and then dogpile on the person trying to call out injustice. Particularly in discussions of mental health and disability, itâs not always clear whether the person on the other side of the screen is in a safe state of mind. Itâs easy to forget, in other words, that writing a long and furious Twitter thread about something seemingly inconsequential isnât usually indicative of a logical headspace. The inherent contextlessness of platforms like Twitter also works in the opposite direction, though: Itâs easy to use the language of social justice to justify anything we want, and by doing so, weakens real, meaningful activism. Our collective thirst for gossip and controversy, particularly during and post-lockdown, has trained many to actively seek out content that aggravates us and immediately grasp onto its most extreme interpretation. Instead of âsome people got mad at a lady for tweeting about her morning,â the joke becomes âhaving coffee with your husband is classist.â Itâs a genre of content I like to call âType of Guyâ syndrome, where people on the internet create a mostly fictional straw man to represent a certain kind of person they dislike and then project it onto the one in front of them. No news story exemplified this dynamic so unsettlingly as [Johnny Deppâs defamation case against Amber Heard](, in which the public, the tabloid press, and social media were loudly and firmly on Deppâs side, [despite the nuances and facts of the case](. Instead, Heard was pilloried as a liar and a âpsychopath,â used as a scapegoat for the [bubbling backlash against the Me Too movement](. Ditto with âWest Elm Caleb,â the random 25-year-old in New York City who was [outed on TikTok]( in January for ghosting multiple women on dating apps and immediately became a national shorthand for a shitty person. âThe pathway from âbad tweetâ to âdeath threatâ is getting shorter and more well-trod,â the writer and prolific tweeter Brandy Jensen told me in 2020 when I wrote about [the year in bad posts](. We were already at the point in online culture where it felt like the water was getting uncomfortably hot, where a tweet about bodegas caused a days-long controversy and non-famous people were getting harassed for minor social misdemeanors. You can only scroll through so many angry replies to other peopleâs angry replies until you realize that nobody comes out looking good here. If the water was hot two years ago, itâs boiling now. Last month, when a Twitter thread by a woman who sent her neighbors homemade chili went viral, the woman was accused of being a â[white savior](â and [inconsiderate]( to autistic people (the woman who wrote the thread is autistic). Itâs just one example of how high the stakes seem to be for interpersonal encounters that are objectively nobodyâs business, and how so often our thirst for drama is really a thirst for punishment. Because none of these encounters matter. It literally doesnât matter that someone made chili for their neighbors because you were never meant to know about it in the first place. Itâs not your business. To demand retribution against someone who says they enjoy coffee with their husband or makes surprise chili for strangers â or even someone who complains about these things! â reflects something far more disturbing than humblebrags or being a presumptuous neighbor. Itâs that these reactions are so normalized online that theyâre almost boring. Of course people are going to freak out about someoneâs misguided problematic author spreadsheet even though it has zero bearing on the real world whatsoever, and of course people are going to accuse a beloved indie rocker of ableism for being annoyed by constant flash photography. It doesnât have to be this way! People in their regular lives donât react this way to things. Itâs only on platforms where controversy and drama are prioritized for driving engagement where weâre rewarded for despising each other. Perhaps, this holiday break, we could all use some time having a warm drink of choice with our loved ones in the proverbial garden, wherever that may be.
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