May 24, 2023 • 53 mins
When writer, cultural critic and OG Twitter icon Mikki Kendall created the viral hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, she changed the face of online feminism.
Ten years later she looks back on where the platform, and all of us, are headed.
Mikki’s MIT Tech Review Piece: I made it big on Twitter. Now I don’t think I can stay: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/28/1062414/elon-musk-leaving-twitter-solidarity-is-for-white-women-virality/
Mikki’s NPR response about #SolidarityisForWhiteWomen (and NPR’s apology:) https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/05/219278156/twitter-feminism-and-race-who-gets-a-seat-at-the-table
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 2 (00:17):
I was having a conversation in the moment, and then
it became a conversation of the moment.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd and this
is there Are No Girls on the Internet. So to
really understand where we're headed next when it comes to
platforms and internet discourse, we first need to really understand
(00:52):
and reckon with where we've been, and that need is
incredibly salient when it comes to online feminist discourse. Back
in twenty thirteen, online feminism was still in its girl
Boss era. It was the era of Leslie Nope and
notorious RBG T shirts bought on Etsy well meaning, sure,
(01:12):
but perhaps not the most inclusive. Would it champion black women,
poor women, trans women, and if these women were justifiably
angry about not having been included in the movement, would
that brand of feminism make room for that anger. Ten
years ago, writer Mickey Kendall had had enough. She started
(01:33):
the hashtag solidarity is for White Women on Twitter, and
it took off in a way that's almost kind of
hard to imagine here in twenty twenty three, Solidarity is
for White Women was meant to pull back the curtain
and expose the ways that white feminism had left so
many black and brown women to fend for ourselves. In
exposing this, Mickey Kendall changed the face of online feminism,
(01:54):
but it didn't necessarily make her well liked by the
people she was calling out. But for Mickey, if being
liked by everyone is the cost of being able to
speak her truth, that it's not worth it.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I was the most unpopular popular girl in feminism, and
I know how that sounds, but it was like I
was the mean black girl of sixth grade. And it
was hilarious to me because I have a life offline
and I have friends and things like that. But the
(02:29):
things that I could say to make people mad that
were perfectly innocuous. Everyone wanted me to know relatively regularly
of that like RBG shirt whatever kind of into feminism.
So I was never gonna write for Jezebel that I
was killing my career or whatever everyone want me to
know these things. And the whole time I worked for
the federal government, I had a regular job, so I
(02:52):
wasn't sure what career I was killing right by saying things.
And then I had all of these black and brown,
all of these other people who were fine, we got
along great, but there was like a small core group
of predominantly white, not entirely a predominantly white feminists who
really wanted me to know that I was mean to
them at regular intervals. And I understood the performance on display,
(03:19):
and then I just was like, well, I guess you're
going to get your feelings her today is You'll be
all right.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
In twenty thirteen, MPR does a piece about the hashtag
Mickey created. They include responses from prominent online feminists, including
a white feminist. Kendall specifically called out for failing to
show up for black women. Now the piece was a
response to something that she created, but they didn't even
include her. There was pushback so much so that NPR
(03:44):
was forced to address the oversight, saying Kendall kicked it
off and we should have asked Kendall to participate from
the beginning. That was our mistake. NPR eventually invites Kendall
to participate in the conversation, where she writes, this is
a conversation after consent because sometimes the political is personal.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Now, there's really no way.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
To engage with conflict as a black woman publicly without
the stigma of angry or mean clinging to you wherever
you go like smoke. A year later, Mickey is back
at NPR as part of a feminist roundtable in the
wake of a piece examining whether online feminism is too toxic,
too mean, and in fact, a big part of the
(04:25):
piece examines whether Mickey herself is mean or not. One
of the questions that comes up is basically, Micky, do
you think that you're a bully?
Speaker 3 (04:35):
And your answer is spot on.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
You're basically like you know you can can people feel
however they're going to feel about the things I have
to say and the frustrations that I have. Sure, but
we're also at a time when people are being taught dosed,
trans people are being threatened.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Your answer almost kind.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Of feels like looking into this crystal ball of horrible
things to come, where we have people who are you know,
losing their rights, being threatened, being killed, and there's always
going to be this subsection of people who are like
are they being nice enough about it? Though?
Speaker 3 (05:07):
When they talk about it?
Speaker 2 (05:09):
So funny story that roundtable happens basically because the Internet
bullied in PR, and not even the Eye bullied in PR.
The Internet bullied in PR. Right, So there's that. And
then because INPR was going to have that roundtable about
me without me, if that makes sense, And there's been
(05:32):
several things already, and I was astonished at how just
stupid the complaints were. And like, listen, I'm never going
to tell you I'm a nice person, right. I actually
explicitly tell people if I had a brand, it would
be affable asshole. Right. But also, it took absolutely nothing,
(05:52):
in an era of doxing of harassment, to hurt the
feelings of some of these people. And I do mean
saying well, no, you're wrong, that's a really shitty thing
to say. And they were like, you are so mean
to me. Okay, you're still wrong, cry about it, and
(06:13):
we're just not gonna talk about how you're fucking up
right here. And it is like this forecast of how
we get here? Right where instead of us having what
would be a perfectly normal conversation flex we're putting in
a perfectly normal conversation about what is happening politically. We
(06:35):
spend a lot of time, years in fact, on whether
or not it was being said civilly enough, politely enough.
We needed to work with people who were big. It's
all of this stuff about you know, coddling assholes that
I still am not clear where it was supposed to
get us, because it seems to have gotten us here.
(06:55):
And now the same people who said it was important
not to say these things are going on. How did
we get here? Well, Susan, it started with you saying
that it was perfectly okay to not fight for people
to have workplace protections if they were tramped right. We
had to hear all about your gender criticism or your
(07:15):
discomfort with knowing that people that were not you exist,
and so that's how we end up here. And then
on top of that, you had this like wild and
wacky idea that anyone who pushed back needed to do
so with a plate of cookies and a cup of
warm milk and ask you daintily, pretty pretty pleased to
(07:37):
care about someone's human rights. So now we're here, Well.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
I do think that it's kind of gotten us to
where we are today and where we might be headed
in the future. You know, so much of this kind
of both sides ask nicely coddling rhetoric. Your work does
a great job of calling out institutions and individuals with
power who maybe do have good intentions and that maybe
you know, I admire or like, but that can let
(08:01):
cozy relationships that they have dictate who gets included and
who gets left out. You know, if I'm an NPR editor,
maybe I'm just reaching out to folks in my network,
the folks that I have an existing relationship with, without
really seeing or examining how that choice ends up shaping
who gets to have a voice and can result in
something like someone being excluded from a conversation they started.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Oh, And it's funny because I remember at the time
people kept saying things like that, and I kept not
even arguing, but I kept pointing out that the well
I knew them, I didn't know you of it all
meant that if you all went to the same school,
or you hung out in the same circles, how are
you an expert in anyone else's experience if the only
people you talked to were your neighbors. Right. Was fascinating
(08:45):
to watch because I knew, as several people now do,
that if you are talking about some of this class
of feminists, they're married to hedge fund managers or whatever,
they come from money. Right. And I knew back then
and obviously now know that some of the conversations we
were having around race and class, it was like I
(09:05):
was having a conversation with someone who with both their
hand tied behind their back in terms of comprehending the
stacks because they'd never been poor.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
I don't think I ever really thought about the way
that feminism and what it was and who it was
for had been largely defined by this like white this
like very well meeting white, comfortable, white lady class, you know,
and like I don't think until honestly, I think it
was really your hashtag solid Areas for white women that
like broke something open in our culture that allowed us
(09:34):
to see it and give us a language and point
to it and talk about it and really start confronting it.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
It's funny. One of the people when that hashtag happened,
one of them said, I wonder how the world is
going to feel when they realize the person who changed
the face of feminism also likes cat gifts on Tumblr.
And I just about died laughing. And I was like, well,
what can I tell you? I'm a woman of many
(10:02):
tastes or something like that. And honestly, what happens is
that we kept talking around the circles of feminism, right
around the idea that all women mattered, but some women
matter more kind of an approach, and that some women
(10:22):
matter more was never explicitly stated, but it was obvious
that that was the attitude, right because if it wasn't
for that, we could talk about poverty, we could talk
about police brutality or gun violence or any of these
other topics, not as it relates to the suburbs or
as it relates to you know, Manhattan, but as it
(10:44):
relates to the entire rest of the country. And I
think one of the reasons that the conversation residents so
much too, because a lot of the women who wrote
out kind of defending me when people were like, oh,
she's being divisive, were low income white women who are like,
this is the first time anybody has acknowledged we exist
(11:06):
in forever and that we can be feminists, and that
things are happening to us that are not happening to you,
right like when we have those conversations are an anti
intellectualism in America, and that's definitely a problem. But I
also understand how it's so easy to create if all
you hear from the most prominent intellectuals who look like
(11:28):
you is that you don't exist, or at least you
don't exist enough for them to care about what's happening
to you, except to blame you for you know, how
you vote or whatever.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Let's take a quick break.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
At our back.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Mickey was prompted to start Solidarity as for White Women
in the aftermath of the downfall of Hugo Schweitzer, a
college professor, blogger, and self described male feminist who wrote
about feminism at feminist sites like jez bell Now. Back then,
Schweitzer was kind of a big deal in online feminist spaces.
He branded himself as a bad boy turned feminist, and
(12:17):
on his blog wrote about his struggles with addiction, sleeping
with his college students, and trying to murder his girlfriend
by turning on a gas stove in their house. It
was feminism that turned him around and made him see
the air of his ways, so he claimed. Black women,
as we so often are, were skeptical of his rise
to feminist quasi stardom, and even more skeptical of the
(12:38):
white feminist online spaces that welcomed him. He had a
penchant for attacking these black women online, but none of this.
Not trying to murder his girlfriend or attacking black women
kept him from building up a platform or being welcomed
in mostly white feminist spaces. Late night on August ninth,
twenty thirteen, Schweizer has what he describes as a meltdown.
(13:00):
In a succession of rapid fire confession tweets, he admits
to all of this. He tells black feminists, who had
been warning about his behavior, you were right. I was
awful to you because you were in the way. He
also admits that he did not have the credentials to
be teaching college courses on feminism and that he quote
built his career as a well known online male feminist
(13:23):
on fraudulent pretenses. Now, while this was all going down,
white feminists who were friendly with Schweitzer expressed worry about
his mental health and future job prospects. But where was
the concern for the black women that he admitted attacking online.
Where was the concern for the students that he admitted
having inappropriate sexual relationships with. Where was the accountability for
(13:44):
letting someone like Schweitzer rise up in the ranks of
online feminism.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
None of it.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Set right with Mickey. Solidarity is for White women? She tweeted,
and it was like she had broken something open. What
started is Mickey's response to the movement overlooking black way
became a rallying cry, exposing all the tensions and fractures
in feminist spaces online. Do you think if you tweeted
solidarity is for White women today in twenty twenty three,
(14:11):
it would take off the way that it did back
in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
I think in theory it couldn't. But in execution, what
will happen is that Twitter will suppress the hashtag because
the other reason I think solidary twitterment happens is that
it is at the beginning of the concept of hashtags
as calls, as a call to action. So Twitter didn't
know what to do with me right, Most of the
(14:36):
viral hashtag phenomenon hadn't studying it. I'm not saying I
actually started it, but I'm one of the very early
ones where that happened organically and Twitter didn't know what
it had either. Twitter was still figuring itself out. Right,
Like if you were on Twitter in two thousand and nine,
you remember a very different Twitter than Twitter of today.
(14:57):
Right when the hashtag happened, it was still kind of
like the wild Wild West in turn of the algorithm,
because Twitter was still trying to figure out how to
make the algorithm work for advertising revenue for all of
these things. It was still mostly third party clients making
Twitter even a usable experience, right, Twitter had to buy
everybody that made Twitter possible to use.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
When you first started it, did you create it thinking
this is going to like crack things open, this is
going to hit on something, or were you just having
a moment of frustration.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
I was pissed off the I know you are playing
in my face of it, all right, I got very
to be honest on your twitterment comes out of a
very south side of Chicago. You are fucking with my
friend and you were playing in my face. And I
don't know who you think you're lying to, but like,
let's be real here, right. This is before the invention
(15:51):
of the phrase be fucking for real as a popular thing,
but it was basically that. And then in the moment
I figured I would say what I had to say,
I think I fired off probably like one hundred tweets
because Twitter were still doing the thing where they rate
limit you to tweet too much in too small a
period of time, and so I did all those tweets.
(16:12):
It turned into this weird juggernauge thing.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Twenty thirteen was a different time on Twitter.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
You know.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
It was the platform where one off tweets could become
big news stories or global movements. Solidarity is for White
women allowed Mickey to access platforms that previously had been
closed to her. Before maybe an editor might have just
assigned the coverage of the hashtag that she created to
whoever they had on staff, or maybe just invited whoever
(16:38):
was already in their network to talk about it. But
now things were different. Not only was Mickey exposing the
lack of inclusion and online feminism, but also she was
pointing out the lack of inclusion and who gets to
tell a story about it, and where before her voice
was included late, almost as an afterthought, is something that
she created. Now it was unignorable. Her voice full of
(17:02):
all that truth and righteous anger, had to be included
in the conversation. She remembers it as a defining moment.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Like it was one of those really bizarre moments that
probably could not happen now in the same way, because
now everybody knows what you say on social media matters.
Now everybody does a lot of like careful pr constructing,
interns tweeting for you. But at the time we were
all just kind of using Twitter and thinking of a
(17:31):
not necessarily shouting into the void, but as just you know,
this will happen now, and then it will be ephemeral
and go away and none of these things will really matter.
We were wrong. None of the people using social media,
early social media that got it to where it is
now understood what we were doing. I'm not even gonna
(17:54):
say that I understood what I was doing. I was
having a conversation in the moment, and then and it
became a conversation of the moment for many topics right,
and then piled into all of that, there's this thing
where like a lot of places that had previously seemingly
been impossible for anyone to write for. We're saying we
(18:17):
are missing this conversation. We wanted part of this conversation.
And when they reached out to the people they were
used to reaching out to, most of them didn't have
a clue what was going on or didn't really have
anything new to say because they were in my mentions
getting yelled at. And so it was Matt Seton at
The Guardian who was the first person to invite me
(18:38):
to write about it for a major publication. And I
think he sent me a DM that was something like,
I know you can yell, but can you write? Wow?
And he always says I give him too much credit,
but he does not understand that there's like this very
difine moment of of I can get in a couple
(19:02):
of places, but nothing above a certain level. And then
I wrote for him with a piece about what was
happening for him and The Guardian byline for reasons I
will never completely understand, opened the door for me to
write for all these other places. Right. And I didn't
know anything about pitching. I didn't know anything about anything.
(19:24):
But what I can do is write. I have opinions.
I can write them down really fast on a topic,
and I learned pitching. I learned how to freelance kind
of in the plane while it was being while it
was in the air.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Is there a through line of you tweeting that, getting
in the Guardian and now you're doing what you do now?
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Like, do you think that's.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Really the through line if you had not tweeted that,
if it had knock gone megaviral.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
Do you see a world in which you would still
be in this outcome?
Speaker 2 (19:54):
I actually, weirdly enough, I do. It just would have
been for a different hashtag. But I think it would
have also opened a slightly different version of this path
right where I would be known for talking about fast
tailed girls or you know, one of the other hashtags.
(20:18):
But we would have never had necessarily the same conversation
about white feminism and race without salaries for white women.
And in some ways that challenging and acknowledging definitely puts
me here in a very specific place where many of
the things that people think I want that I never
(20:41):
wanted in the first place, they would not necessarily be
trying to, you know, tell me, well, you'll never get this,
you'll never get that. In the same way, I probably
would have made more friends, and I probably also would
not have been as popular as because I think tapping
into that deep well of discontent and talking about it,
(21:01):
like naming it and talking about my own feelings, but
also giving people a sort of permission by proxy to
talk about their feelings had not happened before.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
I remember, like watching the Hugo stuff go down. It
was just a really dark time. And one of the
things that I think your work really helped us see
was how little accountability there was for people who supported
someone who was pretty open about a disdain for black women,
you know, harassing black women in public, a literal abuser
(21:38):
of women first of all, that he would be able
to make a name for himself in online feminist spaces
so easily, and that people would defend him publicly when all.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
Of that stuff came out.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
It's still surprising to me how little accountability there was,
if not for folks like you. Do you feel that
we ever really did a reckoning a look back of
what we learned from that, Because I feel like these
things happen, people say what they're going to say, and
then everybody kind of moves on. We don't actually get
a chance to look back and learn anything. Or glean
anything about how to avoid this or what we should
(22:11):
be taking from this. Do you feel that we ever
had that moment?
Speaker 2 (22:15):
People didn't want to have that moment. It was this
embarrassing thing where people in the middle of whatever they
were saying about me being divisive, were about this conversation
taking feminism backwards whatever, realizing after the fact, especially by
twenty sixteen, that they had been on the wrong side
of history and never wanting to look backward again. More.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
After a quick break, let's get right back into it.
Mickey did the work of exposing existing tensions and fractures
that exist in our movement, but in order to heal
(22:58):
tensions there has to be reflection, honesty, and accountability, which
just didn't really happen. So these tensions were left to
be exploited by bad actors like the ones behind the
end Father's Day hoax to inflame tensions and feminist online
spaces that would take place just a year later. Something
that we have talked about quite a bit on this
(23:20):
podcast is sort of what came immediately after things like
the disinformation troll campaign hashtag and Father's Day and I
think something that solidarity is for white women. It supposed
is the reality and the rawness of these tensions between
black women, black feminists and white feminists. And I think
(23:43):
that bad actors, trolls, what are extremists, whatever you want
to call it, people who are interested in using social
media spaces to cause confusion and chaos. I think the
movement's lack of really taking accountability, really examining what happened,
really figuring out how we navigate the navigate around each
(24:05):
other and with each other. I think that you're right,
there was broadly not no interest in really doing that
and having those conversations. And thus I think that bad
actors know like, Okay, well, this is an attension that exists.
It's a tension that is being kind of danced around.
You know, everyone feels it, but no one's really People
aren't really talking about it openly because they don't want to.
(24:27):
We can go in and exploit it, We can go
in and like seize it and inflame it, and it
might be effective because no one's really naming it, no
one's really talking about it, nobody's really interested in taking
accountability for their part in it. Do you ever think
that the lack of interest in real accountability and looking
backward and taking stock just leaves these communities online vulnerable
(24:51):
to people who who will step in and exploit and
talk about it, just not in the way that maybe
it's going to be helpful.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Oh, I think it appts resolutely. It's one of those
things with just how we got all those feminists talking
to like Meatleianopolis and engaging sort of disingenuously with the
idea that Megan Kelly was not necessarily racist, right, because
(25:22):
everyone started to kind of go, well, you know, people
can be swayed, people can be wooed. And I wonder
often about the people who at that point kept saying,
we have to reach out to the other side, because
the other side was very clearly, very cogently planning to
(25:42):
sow discord, very much trying to widen riffs, and also
using those conversations, those educational conversations, to boost their own platforms,
right because when you think back to twenty thirteen, to
all they are twenty sixteen, actually even before twenty thirteen,
(26:04):
a lot of those well I want to talk to
a white nationalist, a person who identifies as a white
separatist whatever. You remember all of those news stories, all
of the like inside the mind of a clansman kind
of news stories. Right, for a while, nobody had ever
(26:24):
given them a platform. I just saw this thing the
other day. There's an account that shills itself as like
the American Nazi whatever. Right. They bought a blue check
mark on Twitter, and they have millions of followers, and
they said, essentially, this never could have happened ten years ago,
which is true. It wouldn't have been able to happen
ten years ago. Now they can look like they're a
(26:46):
real legitimate account.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
I mean, kind of just gives away the game where
it's like, oh, thanks to Elon Musk, I would have
never been able to build up this the legitimized platform
I have now to spread my Nazi shit.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
Thanks.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
That is essentially what it said, essentially. And you know,
we've seen several times now, even when we're talking about
at protests and things, and we've been talking for years
about inside police circles, the number of very clearly white nationalists,
(27:20):
white supremacist whatever we're calling ourselves this week, white separatists
police officers, complete with the visible ink, right, And when
we bring it up and people say, oh, well, you know,
what can you do? And it's kind of like, actually,
several years ago, we were trying to get people to
do something about it, and you said that that wasn't
(27:40):
a feminist issue. You said that that was just some
guys online. They were harmless. You said, whatever, now here
we are and I need you to not even just
take accountability. I need you to start swinging, not still
talk about how we can reach them.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Twitter was where people who were not traditionally centered or
heard could really build power. Black Lives Matter championed racial
justice in the wake of police violence. Survivors started me
Too to push back against sexual violence. So when Elon
Musk bought Twitter, one of my first questions was, what
does this mean for the future of marginalized communities being
able to build power and start movements. It's a fair question,
(28:23):
but Mickey reminds us that our communities are resilient and
that we'll always find a way.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
How do you.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
See the state that Twitter is in, and sort of
social media more broadly, how do you see that impacting
marginalized community's ability to build up power and build up
a voice.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
I think in some ways, and this is going to
sound real strange, but the existence of TikTok and all
the competing other sites will help you master it on.
All of these things will help marginalized communities find a
place to rebuild the networks that they had on Twitter
(29:01):
for some levels of rebuild here, but only because Twitter
was already not particularly usable for community anymore. Once all
eyes were on Twitter, it seemed like all the time.
I remember that like weird period of time where anything
you tweeted could wind up on your television screen that
night is news or in an article.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
Yeah, that was a wild time.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Right. People have already started to kind of migrate away
from Twitter. Right, Twitter's popularity as a social media app
was on the decline. People were just abandoning their Twitter
accounts whatever and moving to discord and all these other places.
And so I think it will make it more difficult
to kick off an initial group. But also in some
(29:47):
ways now it is easier to have those conversations without
necessarily as much trolling. This weird split where like, yes,
the loss of Twitter is a big deal, but also
Twitter was already being lost before this because the focus
hyper focused on black Twitter, but also generally the focus
on whether those people over there talking about together had
(30:10):
made people uncomfortable having certain conversations in public.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
I think Sadet Harry has a great piece and wired
that kind of speaks to this of like the feeling
of kind of the inherent feeling of being both othered
and also watched. Like I definitely felt that when it
came to being part of black Twitter for a while,
where you definitely feel like these people over here are
(30:34):
doing something distinct of their own and let's lurk at it.
It kind of in a lot of ways you wanted
to be having these insult conversations with them, but the
feeling that they were happening and a bit of a
fish bowl digitally.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
And that I think that level of surveillance culture is
not something I'm going to miss, right, I had already
Twitter for me had been rendered largely unusable for like
socializing with friends kinds of things a while before this,
because and not even in a major way, but in
a no matter what, there was always someone who had thoughts, feelings, opinions, right,
(31:12):
and as like the API is being altered to prevent
a lot of third party clients. I know, like today
someone was saying that one of the things that made
Twitter usable for visually impaired users, it's no longer going
to work. Hearing impaired users are going to have slightly
more time, but some of the tools they use, it's
not going to be there anymore, things like that, right,
(31:34):
all text, all of these things. And I feel like
Twitter served a very high level and low level sort
of purpose. But also we are going to have to
go back to the pre Twitter days of jumping from
platform to platform for a while, right, we got really
(31:55):
comfortable with Twitter and Facebook kind of being seen as
stable entities. But I don't know when the last time
I went on Facebook for any real meaningful purpose. I
don't like the interface, and on Twitter, that surveillance level
had made it so that you were kind of tweeting
a little looking at what people were talking about, and
(32:15):
leaving for a lot of users who are you know,
like I'm a power user because I used to use
Twitter all day long. I would send hundreds of tweet today,
chatting it out, talking to people, having thoughts on in
public whatever. Because of all of the the eyes on me,
which always sounds slightly paranoid, But because of that, I
(32:35):
had already scaled back my Twitter usage heavily, not even
in purpose, not even like, oh I'm going to keep
these things to myself. It was just annoying. And now
with what's what's happening? How much platform time do I
want to spend with trolls? How useful is it?
Speaker 3 (32:53):
I thought you're in your piece for MIT Tech Review,
I think that you.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
I can't remember exactly how you put it, but you
had it like it's not it's not a plaque form
to live one's life, you know, It's like it's not
a place where you're where you're necessarily going to look
for connection.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
And it sounded like an even in your personal life.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
That Twitter just wasn't it for you anymore, that like
you just weren't interested that you described it. When you
when you do show up there, it feels like it's
out of habit more than anything else. It's not like
you're going there looking for connection.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Oh yeah, because I can tell you a really stupid
story about how I got I got done with using
Twitter socially. I was talking to a friend of mine
and we were talking about a workout routine that we
had both tried, and someone briefly tried to turn that
(33:44):
into like pro like fat phobic. Oh this is really
fat phobic. Having this conversation in public, and we had
said nothing about anyone's bodies, not even really our own,
other than the usual uh yeah, I tried blah blah blah.
It was really rough, kind of you know, he talked
about things, and I couldn't figure out how we got there.
(34:07):
And then there's this entire conversation happening in my mentions
about whether or not this conversation with my friend about
a workout we had both tried was really about something else,
and I thought I have hit the point where we
are reading into things. I always wondered how that would feel. Oh,
(34:28):
I don't care for it, right, And so then me
and my friends started to have those conversations not on public.
On Twitter, we s don't have them, We just have
them in a group chat, And as more things moved
to the group chat, I have a hustling, bustling series
of group chats going on. I don't necessarily think to
(34:48):
go to Twitter in the same way in my personal
life anymore. I don't even necessarily react to everything on Twitter,
because sometimes news stories pass by, or someone tweeting something
passes by, and in my brain, I think this does
not pass the smell test. But It's not worth getting
into it with people who are buying in on the
(35:09):
spot to whatever is being said, because they're going to
find out in a few minutes or a few hours
that they were wrong, and they're going to want to
erase all of their tweets about this, all of their
engagement with this, you know. And I don't even need
to jump in and participate. I can have this conversation
with people who actually have a conversation.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
Oh, this is something I have absolutely felt that the
story that you told about the workout with your friend.
I have this theory that, like so something, we've reached
a point where we have visibility into too many conversations
between strangers where people are just injecting their own and
(35:50):
like injecting and projecting a lot of their own stuff
onto the conversations of.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
Strangers in ways that if you did it in real.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Life, if you were in a cafeteria and two people
were talking about a workout they had done, and I
walked up to their table and sat down and said,
this conversation is pat phobic and maybe it's actually about
something else altogether, you would think that was.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
The weirdest thing in the world.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
And I think that we've I do think that we've
hit a point where these platforms cease to be useful
when they when they are when they feel this way,
because because it's just not it's not an enjoy it
doesn't not a way to connect with people that feels enjoyable,
that level of surveillance, every little thing that you say,
feeling like someone's going to take it the wrong way
or project their own their own stuff onto it.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
Well, and this is the thing, because I definitely started
to feel like and a certain point, is this about
what I said? Or am I just where you put
your feelings? And I think a lot of it is
just where they put their feelings right, And that's the case.
(36:58):
I don't I don't need to be here for this.
And I think that, and then I think about how
many of my friends who like I have a friend
who pointed out to me one day I ever tweeted
something she said because I thought it was funny, and
she says, I know you didn't mean any harm, but
can you not retweet me because I always end up
with all of this crap in my mentions And I
was very apologetic, offeratedly tweet and she was like, no, no, No,
(37:20):
it's not like it's your fault. I just know your
level of visibility is too much for me, and I
hadn't I you know, like the frog and boiling water.
I had gotten used to it, but I hadn't thought
about what it feels like to kind of be thrust
into this level of thing. And even though I was
still occasionally retweet people or whatever or quote tweet them,
(37:43):
I try to be more judicious. I'm not always successful.
I always think about it, but I try to be
more judicious when I do do it, because there's this
point in the hypervisibility where I don't want people to
be having a conversation about the things they didn't say.
I want to talk about the things they did say,
(38:04):
or I have a thought about what they said kind
of thing. And I don't know where we go on
Twitter with that, Like I don't see a way to
salvage that part at this point.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
You know the way that you put that of like,
am I just the place where you put your feelings.
I'm not super visible on any social media platform, but
I do wonder if that has something to do with
you being a black woman, that do you something about
the way that you show up online for folks as
a black woman, means that you are the place where
(38:36):
a lot of their feelings go. That, whether it's feelings
of anger or wanting to call somebody out or wanting
to show you something so that you have a publicly
angry reaction, and that feels a certain way for them,
like we're we're you kind of aren't a real person,
You're just this abstraction online for them to project whatever
they want onto you.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
Do you do you ever feel that?
Speaker 2 (38:58):
Oh? Absolutely, it's one of the those things. First of all,
I had to tell people to stop sending me things
for me to respond to, right, Like, for a while
their people would tagged me in their arguments with random people.
I don't know you, I don't know them. I'm not
joining into the middle of a conversation whatever. But also
it started to feel like I am not a person.
(39:21):
Oh God, so many people to go because and this
is another sort of silly story, someone was mad about
something I had said. Apparently they started tweeting it about
it at around three am my time. Okay, somewhere in
the following four hours they had worked themselves up to
the point that you know, I was avoiding them. I
(39:44):
was ignoring them? How dare I was? You know, a coward?
Blah blah blah, And I get up, I get my
kids out the door to school. And I used to
for a while on my way to work. I would,
you know, far around on Twitter on the way in,
and I log on and I'm like, what is is this?
Because I was asleep? It is seven am, right, what
(40:08):
the heck are you doing? What is wrong with you?
Kind of thing? And this person who had spun themselves
into a frenzy in the middle of the night says,
I completely forgot the difference in time zone. You weren't
ignoring me. I'm sorry, and ends up deleting probably like
forty tweets. But also, I had never responded to you,
(40:28):
and you had never thought about the fact that I
wasn't awake just because you were. It didn't even occur
to you. Person whose name I won't say that I
was a person with a life and responsibility, so right,
like had not even crossed their mind. I have a joke,
I tell friends there are no sick days on the internet,
(40:50):
and yet in real life people take off work, So
how do we expect people to be available? Twenty four
to seven online.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
It makes no sense, and yet that is how everyone
is operating.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
Sometimes.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Oh yeah, I've seen people get very for lack of
a way of putting it, get very in their feelings
about someone not being available the moment they want them
to be available online. And I sometimes have to also,
and I have this whole thing I also say where
I say parasocial relationships are beating people's asses every day
(41:27):
right where. You enjoy this person, you enjoy their content whatever,
or you don't, You hate them, you hate watch whatever.
You don't realize anymore that that person does not know you,
however much you feel like you know them. They don't
know you. They are online on whatever their schedule is,
and the rest of their time they are doing whatever
(41:49):
it is they're doing right, whether they've got a family,
or they've got a day job, or heck, they're writing
a book or making songs whatever. People for whom the
Internet is life, and there are people for whom the
Internet is a job, and they overlap, but they are
not necessarily the same people. And for people for whom
(42:10):
the Internet is a job, there are specific times, hours,
whatever that they are available and the rest of the time,
no matter how much it may frustrate you person who
perceives yourself to be in a parasocial relationship with them,
they are not going to be available to And it
happens to celebrities, and we've all kind of normalized that
level of parasocial relationship, but increasingly it is happening to
(42:32):
people just who speaks on the internet. Right, you can
get fans, followers, supporters, whatever we're calling them, just by
being a person who speaks online. The problem is that
every word you say will not be the gospel truth.
Everything you think will not be right for none of
(42:53):
us right. But also the people following you may or
may not really be paid attention to the reality that
you are a whole person. One of the things that
always sticks out to me is this idea that because
you like someone, they can never be wrong. They absolutely
(43:13):
can be wrong. Did that make sense outside of my head?
Speaker 3 (43:16):
It made so much sense.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
And the vibe of because I like this person, I
am team them for life. If they say anything wrong,
it must be right. I don't think there's a that's
gotta be one of the most dangerous toxic vibes that
we have, where I mean, I see it play out
all the time and like, these are people. They're not
(43:38):
gonna Just because somebody had a great take or wrote
a great piece on one thing doesn't mean that you
should blindly sign up for their takes on everything. And
I'm like, be invested in them never being wrong.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
You know. It's like, like, I don't know how.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
We got to such a weird place when it comes
to relationships and how they function online.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
I think part of what's happened, unfortunately, and I'm seeing
this even more on TikTok, is that the entertainment people
get right. Let's call it, like the skits you see
on TikTok, the storytelling whatever on Twitter. All of these
things that have happened over and over again on various platforms,
(44:19):
makes people feel like this stuff is there for them.
It is not necessarily that this person is doing something
to entertain themselves that you happen to like. It has
become Oh, this performance is for me, this article, this
writing is whatever is for me, and therefore everything here
is about me for me, and I don't have to
(44:41):
have any sense of boundaries or limits or really grasp
that this was just someone making a thing that was
in their head. Right, we feel an ownership stake in
the things we are fans of.
Speaker 1 (44:55):
I was a fan of Twitter ten years ago, as
much as I criticized it, and that ownership stake Mickey
describes well, as I watched the platform that I once
loved become something else entirely I feel that too, So
What's next? In a piece for MIT Tech Review, Mickey
looks back on a career that she's built in part
on Twitter and what the future of platforms holds. Twitter's
(45:18):
importance five years ago cannot be overstated, she writes, But
now as we look at the possibility of a future
without Twitter, will anything really change for the average person
who uses the Internet but doesn't live on it? Seting
the scene for where we are and where we go next?
Like I've seen so many people, myself included, writing about
(45:38):
how much Twitter sucks now that Elon Musk has taken
over blah blah blah. But in your MIT Tech Review
piece you kind of pick up on something else that it, Yeah,
Elon must sucks and Twitter sucks because of him and
all of that, But really, do you think that something
there's sort of a larger cultural shift happening that is
actually being mirrored via our use of technology, that it's
(46:01):
not just about elon Musk being like sucking and ruining Twitter.
Something else is happening where folks are just not that
invested in showing in showing up on platforms like Twitter.
Maybe they're spending more time on platforms like TikTok, Maybe
they're less interested in social media as we all get older, Like,
do you think something is happening more broadly in culture
and that we're just visual experiencing that through technology in
(46:24):
our relationship to it.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
I think what's happening is that for a lot of
people as we are getting older, the earlier social media users,
but also for a lot of people who grew up
with social media. And I was having this conversation with
a college student last night. As a matter of fact,
there is a sense that the need to always be on,
to always think about what people are perceiving of you,
(46:49):
that you have no privacy online is driving a lot
of people away from social media. Right once we started
to hit a place where your social media could not
just be used against your in terms of job stuff,
but you don't know how it's going to be used
because brands are using it. You're showing up on the
news it can be used against you if you said
(47:11):
something offensive, people dig up old offensive things you said.
You may or may not still feel that way because
it was seven, eight, nine years ago. All of these things.
People started to feel like, well, what's the use of
social media if I can't actually enjoy it, if I
can't just hang out and spend time with my friends
and have fun. And we're seeing people sort of trend
(47:33):
someone on TikTok. I suspect there will be another platform
or two before we settle wherever we're settling next. In
terms of social media, we're seeing people kind of trend
back almost to the days of like blogger and live journal,
where you have a carefully curated private list of people
you talk to, and maybe you have some things that
are public, but you don't let everyone see what you're doing.
(47:55):
You don't have your business in everyone's eyeballs because you
don't want everyone else's business in your eyeballs. I think
that we're also going to see the rise of those
kids who were the early mommy blogger content, right like
parent blog blog content. Kids there are almost adults now,
(48:16):
some of them are legally adults. I think for a
lot of them, the financial impact of having been content
for twenty years but not necessarily being paid for being
that content and having that experience shape their future means
we're going to see a lot of people in court,
in federal court very soon, right, Because for all that
(48:40):
we have said, and about the most successful of them,
the kids who were memes whatever, those kids have grown up,
and yet when you google their names, it's the meme,
it's the mommy blog content, it's the pictures of them
with a poopy diaper on their head or whatever that
comes up. And mom and dad or grandpa grandpa are
guardians whoever they may. The money, they got the checks,
(49:01):
but the kids get consequences. I don't foresee those kids
being interested in social media, and I think they will
be part of a growing number of people who are
just like we should not know this much about each other,
about total strangers. I think people will still use social
media to some degree, but I think the way we
use it is going to change again.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
So you think that we should really be letting the
younger generation take the lead. Where do you see them
leading us?
Speaker 2 (49:25):
Yeah? I think I think they will have some form.
I think that they're going to like kind of reinvent
private social media, right, whether it will be Snapchat or
something else. But I think they're going to reinvent that
kind of thing where they'll want to be able to
talk to their friends. But I don't know that they're
going to want to be able to talk to their
friends in the way the general public can see. Because
(49:48):
I'll be honest, not being able to like lock individual
tweets was always a weird thing about Twitter. It always
invites a certain level of harassment and just unpleasant context.
Because Twitter definitely knew right way before we got to
any of the conversations Cie works around here. Twitter definitely
(50:10):
knew about four chan and on Reddit and all of
those things, right, And we're seeing people who post on
Reddit say, oh man, this stuff is going all over
these things are going viral. I'm sure some of that
is intentional. I just don't know that we really need
to see everything with your face attached.
Speaker 3 (50:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:29):
I hate being perceived on social media. I'm every time
I have a few glasses of wine and spend like
actually do some tweeting. When I wake up the next
day and I see like, oh, you've got five replies,
I'm like, oh no, why did I do this to myself.
Speaker 3 (50:44):
I hate it so.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
Much, and I mean, I think the answer, unfortunately is
it used to be fun. It used to be great
to like hang out and talk to your friends, and
sometimes you slip up and you forget that. The way
social media functions it also changed, right, like we've changed.
But also now you have people who get online and
(51:06):
they're looking for a fight, and they don't care who
it's with, and it doesn't have to be on a
particular topic. It's not something they feel passionately about. It's
something that they just want someplace to argue, right, And
a lot of times, like we call it sea lioning, right,
the guys that just want a good debate and then
won't go away. What else do you do but decide, okay,
(51:28):
well people have perceived me, this person won't leave me alone,
or these people or whatever. Sure, you meet, the conversations,
you do all of these things. But at a certain point,
where's the payoff for you in getting online in the
first place? Right? I don't know if it wasn't still
related to like my books, my work, my whatever. I
(51:49):
don't know if I right now, if I were coming
into social media now, right, like I was twenty four
years old or whatever, and my job didn't require it.
I'm not sure how much I'd use it.
Speaker 1 (52:00):
Well, I guess this leads me to kind of my
awkward final question, which is where can folks keep in
touch with you?
Speaker 3 (52:07):
After all? After all this?
Speaker 1 (52:08):
It feels weird to be like, ohould they tweet at you?
But where can folks like what? Like? What are you
up to next? And where can folks keep in touch
with all your work?
Speaker 2 (52:15):
So I have a website, I'm on TikTok, I'm on Twitter,
I'm on Instagram. My handle is always the same. I
am Carnethia here, there, and everywhere, and if uh it
is not Carnesia, you'll figure it out very quickly. And
then I'm currently after I get back from this trip,
I am working on my next book and it is
(52:38):
really an autopsy of the American dream. So it's gonna
be a lot. People are gonna hate it or you're
gonna love it. They're they're not. There's not gonna be
a lot in between. We're gonna have some feelings.
Speaker 1 (52:56):
Got a story about an interesting thing in tech. I
just want to say hi. You can just have hello
at Tangody dot com. You can also find transcripts for
today's episode at tengody dot com. There Are No Girls
on the Internet was created by me Bridget Tod. It's
a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative Jonathan Strickland is
our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer.
Michael Almato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd.
(53:19):
If you want to help us grow, rate and review
us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check
out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
To support There Are No Girls on the Internet and
get ad free bonus content. Subscribe to our Patreon. Big
thanks to Molina, Valerie, m Karen J. Schadenfreud and CDE
for being our first few patrons. Join us at patreon
dot com, slash Tangoti or check the link in our description.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I was having a conversation in the moment, and then
it became a conversation of the moment.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd and this
is there Are No Girls on the Internet. So to
really understand where we're headed next when it comes to
platforms and internet discourse, we first need to really understand
(00:52):
and reckon with where we've been, and that need is
incredibly salient when it comes to online feminist discourse. Back
in twenty thirteen, online feminism was still in its girl
Boss era. It was the era of Leslie Nope and
notorious RBG T shirts bought on Etsy well meaning, sure,
(01:12):
but perhaps not the most inclusive. Would it champion black women,
poor women, trans women, and if these women were justifiably
angry about not having been included in the movement, would
that brand of feminism make room for that anger. Ten
years ago, writer Mickey Kendall had had enough. She started
(01:33):
the hashtag solidarity is for White Women on Twitter, and
it took off in a way that's almost kind of
hard to imagine here in twenty twenty three, Solidarity is
for White Women was meant to pull back the curtain
and expose the ways that white feminism had left so
many black and brown women to fend for ourselves. In
exposing this, Mickey Kendall changed the face of online feminism,
(01:54):
but it didn't necessarily make her well liked by the
people she was calling out. But for Mickey, if being
liked by everyone is the cost of being able to
speak her truth, that it's not worth it.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I was the most unpopular popular girl in feminism, and
I know how that sounds, but it was like I
was the mean black girl of sixth grade. And it
was hilarious to me because I have a life offline
and I have friends and things like that. But the
(02:29):
things that I could say to make people mad that
were perfectly innocuous. Everyone wanted me to know relatively regularly
of that like RBG shirt whatever kind of into feminism.
So I was never gonna write for Jezebel that I
was killing my career or whatever everyone want me to
know these things. And the whole time I worked for
the federal government, I had a regular job, so I
(02:52):
wasn't sure what career I was killing right by saying things.
And then I had all of these black and brown,
all of these other people who were fine, we got
along great, but there was like a small core group
of predominantly white, not entirely a predominantly white feminists who
really wanted me to know that I was mean to
them at regular intervals. And I understood the performance on display,
(03:19):
and then I just was like, well, I guess you're
going to get your feelings her today is You'll be
all right.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
In twenty thirteen, MPR does a piece about the hashtag
Mickey created. They include responses from prominent online feminists, including
a white feminist. Kendall specifically called out for failing to
show up for black women. Now the piece was a
response to something that she created, but they didn't even
include her. There was pushback so much so that NPR
(03:44):
was forced to address the oversight, saying Kendall kicked it
off and we should have asked Kendall to participate from
the beginning. That was our mistake. NPR eventually invites Kendall
to participate in the conversation, where she writes, this is
a conversation after consent because sometimes the political is personal.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Now, there's really no way.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
To engage with conflict as a black woman publicly without
the stigma of angry or mean clinging to you wherever
you go like smoke. A year later, Mickey is back
at NPR as part of a feminist roundtable in the
wake of a piece examining whether online feminism is too toxic,
too mean, and in fact, a big part of the
(04:25):
piece examines whether Mickey herself is mean or not. One
of the questions that comes up is basically, Micky, do
you think that you're a bully?
Speaker 3 (04:35):
And your answer is spot on.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
You're basically like you know you can can people feel
however they're going to feel about the things I have
to say and the frustrations that I have. Sure, but
we're also at a time when people are being taught dosed,
trans people are being threatened.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Your answer almost kind.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Of feels like looking into this crystal ball of horrible
things to come, where we have people who are you know,
losing their rights, being threatened, being killed, and there's always
going to be this subsection of people who are like
are they being nice enough about it? Though?
Speaker 3 (05:07):
When they talk about it?
Speaker 2 (05:09):
So funny story that roundtable happens basically because the Internet
bullied in PR, and not even the Eye bullied in PR.
The Internet bullied in PR. Right, So there's that. And
then because INPR was going to have that roundtable about
me without me, if that makes sense, And there's been
(05:32):
several things already, and I was astonished at how just
stupid the complaints were. And like, listen, I'm never going
to tell you I'm a nice person, right. I actually
explicitly tell people if I had a brand, it would
be affable asshole. Right. But also, it took absolutely nothing,
(05:52):
in an era of doxing of harassment, to hurt the
feelings of some of these people. And I do mean
saying well, no, you're wrong, that's a really shitty thing
to say. And they were like, you are so mean
to me. Okay, you're still wrong, cry about it, and
(06:13):
we're just not gonna talk about how you're fucking up
right here. And it is like this forecast of how
we get here? Right where instead of us having what
would be a perfectly normal conversation flex we're putting in
a perfectly normal conversation about what is happening politically. We
(06:35):
spend a lot of time, years in fact, on whether
or not it was being said civilly enough, politely enough.
We needed to work with people who were big. It's
all of this stuff about you know, coddling assholes that
I still am not clear where it was supposed to
get us, because it seems to have gotten us here.
(06:55):
And now the same people who said it was important
not to say these things are going on. How did
we get here? Well, Susan, it started with you saying
that it was perfectly okay to not fight for people
to have workplace protections if they were tramped right. We
had to hear all about your gender criticism or your
(07:15):
discomfort with knowing that people that were not you exist,
and so that's how we end up here. And then
on top of that, you had this like wild and
wacky idea that anyone who pushed back needed to do
so with a plate of cookies and a cup of
warm milk and ask you daintily, pretty pretty pleased to
(07:37):
care about someone's human rights. So now we're here, Well.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
I do think that it's kind of gotten us to
where we are today and where we might be headed
in the future. You know, so much of this kind
of both sides ask nicely coddling rhetoric. Your work does
a great job of calling out institutions and individuals with
power who maybe do have good intentions and that maybe
you know, I admire or like, but that can let
(08:01):
cozy relationships that they have dictate who gets included and
who gets left out. You know, if I'm an NPR editor,
maybe I'm just reaching out to folks in my network,
the folks that I have an existing relationship with, without
really seeing or examining how that choice ends up shaping
who gets to have a voice and can result in
something like someone being excluded from a conversation they started.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Oh, And it's funny because I remember at the time
people kept saying things like that, and I kept not
even arguing, but I kept pointing out that the well
I knew them, I didn't know you of it all
meant that if you all went to the same school,
or you hung out in the same circles, how are
you an expert in anyone else's experience if the only
people you talked to were your neighbors. Right. Was fascinating
(08:45):
to watch because I knew, as several people now do,
that if you are talking about some of this class
of feminists, they're married to hedge fund managers or whatever,
they come from money. Right. And I knew back then
and obviously now know that some of the conversations we
were having around race and class, it was like I
(09:05):
was having a conversation with someone who with both their
hand tied behind their back in terms of comprehending the
stacks because they'd never been poor.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
I don't think I ever really thought about the way
that feminism and what it was and who it was
for had been largely defined by this like white this
like very well meeting white, comfortable, white lady class, you know,
and like I don't think until honestly, I think it
was really your hashtag solid Areas for white women that
like broke something open in our culture that allowed us
(09:34):
to see it and give us a language and point
to it and talk about it and really start confronting it.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
It's funny. One of the people when that hashtag happened,
one of them said, I wonder how the world is
going to feel when they realize the person who changed
the face of feminism also likes cat gifts on Tumblr.
And I just about died laughing. And I was like, well,
what can I tell you? I'm a woman of many
(10:02):
tastes or something like that. And honestly, what happens is
that we kept talking around the circles of feminism, right
around the idea that all women mattered, but some women
matter more kind of an approach, and that some women
(10:22):
matter more was never explicitly stated, but it was obvious
that that was the attitude, right because if it wasn't
for that, we could talk about poverty, we could talk
about police brutality or gun violence or any of these
other topics, not as it relates to the suburbs or
as it relates to you know, Manhattan, but as it
(10:44):
relates to the entire rest of the country. And I
think one of the reasons that the conversation residents so
much too, because a lot of the women who wrote
out kind of defending me when people were like, oh,
she's being divisive, were low income white women who are like,
this is the first time anybody has acknowledged we exist
(11:06):
in forever and that we can be feminists, and that
things are happening to us that are not happening to you,
right like when we have those conversations are an anti
intellectualism in America, and that's definitely a problem. But I
also understand how it's so easy to create if all
you hear from the most prominent intellectuals who look like
(11:28):
you is that you don't exist, or at least you
don't exist enough for them to care about what's happening
to you, except to blame you for you know, how
you vote or whatever.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Let's take a quick break.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
At our back.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Mickey was prompted to start Solidarity as for White Women
in the aftermath of the downfall of Hugo Schweitzer, a
college professor, blogger, and self described male feminist who wrote
about feminism at feminist sites like jez bell Now. Back then,
Schweitzer was kind of a big deal in online feminist spaces.
He branded himself as a bad boy turned feminist, and
(12:17):
on his blog wrote about his struggles with addiction, sleeping
with his college students, and trying to murder his girlfriend
by turning on a gas stove in their house. It
was feminism that turned him around and made him see
the air of his ways, so he claimed. Black women,
as we so often are, were skeptical of his rise
to feminist quasi stardom, and even more skeptical of the
(12:38):
white feminist online spaces that welcomed him. He had a
penchant for attacking these black women online, but none of this.
Not trying to murder his girlfriend or attacking black women
kept him from building up a platform or being welcomed
in mostly white feminist spaces. Late night on August ninth,
twenty thirteen, Schweizer has what he describes as a meltdown.
(13:00):
In a succession of rapid fire confession tweets, he admits
to all of this. He tells black feminists, who had
been warning about his behavior, you were right. I was
awful to you because you were in the way. He
also admits that he did not have the credentials to
be teaching college courses on feminism and that he quote
built his career as a well known online male feminist
(13:23):
on fraudulent pretenses. Now, while this was all going down,
white feminists who were friendly with Schweitzer expressed worry about
his mental health and future job prospects. But where was
the concern for the black women that he admitted attacking online.
Where was the concern for the students that he admitted
having inappropriate sexual relationships with. Where was the accountability for
(13:44):
letting someone like Schweitzer rise up in the ranks of
online feminism.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
None of it.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Set right with Mickey. Solidarity is for White women? She tweeted,
and it was like she had broken something open. What
started is Mickey's response to the movement overlooking black way
became a rallying cry, exposing all the tensions and fractures
in feminist spaces online. Do you think if you tweeted
solidarity is for White women today in twenty twenty three,
(14:11):
it would take off the way that it did back
in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
I think in theory it couldn't. But in execution, what
will happen is that Twitter will suppress the hashtag because
the other reason I think solidary twitterment happens is that
it is at the beginning of the concept of hashtags
as calls, as a call to action. So Twitter didn't
know what to do with me right, Most of the
(14:36):
viral hashtag phenomenon hadn't studying it. I'm not saying I
actually started it, but I'm one of the very early
ones where that happened organically and Twitter didn't know what
it had either. Twitter was still figuring itself out. Right,
Like if you were on Twitter in two thousand and nine,
you remember a very different Twitter than Twitter of today.
(14:57):
Right when the hashtag happened, it was still kind of
like the wild Wild West in turn of the algorithm,
because Twitter was still trying to figure out how to
make the algorithm work for advertising revenue for all of
these things. It was still mostly third party clients making
Twitter even a usable experience, right, Twitter had to buy
everybody that made Twitter possible to use.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
When you first started it, did you create it thinking
this is going to like crack things open, this is
going to hit on something, or were you just having
a moment of frustration.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
I was pissed off the I know you are playing
in my face of it, all right, I got very
to be honest on your twitterment comes out of a
very south side of Chicago. You are fucking with my
friend and you were playing in my face. And I
don't know who you think you're lying to, but like,
let's be real here, right. This is before the invention
(15:51):
of the phrase be fucking for real as a popular thing,
but it was basically that. And then in the moment
I figured I would say what I had to say,
I think I fired off probably like one hundred tweets
because Twitter were still doing the thing where they rate
limit you to tweet too much in too small a
period of time, and so I did all those tweets.
(16:12):
It turned into this weird juggernauge thing.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Twenty thirteen was a different time on Twitter.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
You know.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
It was the platform where one off tweets could become
big news stories or global movements. Solidarity is for White
women allowed Mickey to access platforms that previously had been
closed to her. Before maybe an editor might have just
assigned the coverage of the hashtag that she created to
whoever they had on staff, or maybe just invited whoever
(16:38):
was already in their network to talk about it. But
now things were different. Not only was Mickey exposing the
lack of inclusion and online feminism, but also she was
pointing out the lack of inclusion and who gets to
tell a story about it, and where before her voice
was included late, almost as an afterthought, is something that
she created. Now it was unignorable. Her voice full of
(17:02):
all that truth and righteous anger, had to be included
in the conversation. She remembers it as a defining moment.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Like it was one of those really bizarre moments that
probably could not happen now in the same way, because
now everybody knows what you say on social media matters.
Now everybody does a lot of like careful pr constructing,
interns tweeting for you. But at the time we were
all just kind of using Twitter and thinking of a
(17:31):
not necessarily shouting into the void, but as just you know,
this will happen now, and then it will be ephemeral
and go away and none of these things will really matter.
We were wrong. None of the people using social media,
early social media that got it to where it is
now understood what we were doing. I'm not even gonna
(17:54):
say that I understood what I was doing. I was
having a conversation in the moment, and then and it
became a conversation of the moment for many topics right,
and then piled into all of that, there's this thing
where like a lot of places that had previously seemingly
been impossible for anyone to write for. We're saying we
(18:17):
are missing this conversation. We wanted part of this conversation.
And when they reached out to the people they were
used to reaching out to, most of them didn't have
a clue what was going on or didn't really have
anything new to say because they were in my mentions
getting yelled at. And so it was Matt Seton at
The Guardian who was the first person to invite me
(18:38):
to write about it for a major publication. And I
think he sent me a DM that was something like,
I know you can yell, but can you write? Wow?
And he always says I give him too much credit,
but he does not understand that there's like this very
difine moment of of I can get in a couple
(19:02):
of places, but nothing above a certain level. And then
I wrote for him with a piece about what was
happening for him and The Guardian byline for reasons I
will never completely understand, opened the door for me to
write for all these other places. Right. And I didn't
know anything about pitching. I didn't know anything about anything.
(19:24):
But what I can do is write. I have opinions.
I can write them down really fast on a topic,
and I learned pitching. I learned how to freelance kind
of in the plane while it was being while it
was in the air.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Is there a through line of you tweeting that, getting
in the Guardian and now you're doing what you do now?
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Like, do you think that's.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Really the through line if you had not tweeted that,
if it had knock gone megaviral.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
Do you see a world in which you would still
be in this outcome?
Speaker 2 (19:54):
I actually, weirdly enough, I do. It just would have
been for a different hashtag. But I think it would
have also opened a slightly different version of this path
right where I would be known for talking about fast
tailed girls or you know, one of the other hashtags.
(20:18):
But we would have never had necessarily the same conversation
about white feminism and race without salaries for white women.
And in some ways that challenging and acknowledging definitely puts
me here in a very specific place where many of
the things that people think I want that I never
(20:41):
wanted in the first place, they would not necessarily be
trying to, you know, tell me, well, you'll never get this,
you'll never get that. In the same way, I probably
would have made more friends, and I probably also would
not have been as popular as because I think tapping
into that deep well of discontent and talking about it,
(21:01):
like naming it and talking about my own feelings, but
also giving people a sort of permission by proxy to
talk about their feelings had not happened before.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
I remember, like watching the Hugo stuff go down. It
was just a really dark time. And one of the
things that I think your work really helped us see
was how little accountability there was for people who supported
someone who was pretty open about a disdain for black women,
you know, harassing black women in public, a literal abuser
(21:38):
of women first of all, that he would be able
to make a name for himself in online feminist spaces
so easily, and that people would defend him publicly when all.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
Of that stuff came out.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
It's still surprising to me how little accountability there was,
if not for folks like you. Do you feel that
we ever really did a reckoning a look back of
what we learned from that, Because I feel like these
things happen, people say what they're going to say, and
then everybody kind of moves on. We don't actually get
a chance to look back and learn anything. Or glean
anything about how to avoid this or what we should
(22:11):
be taking from this. Do you feel that we ever
had that moment?
Speaker 2 (22:15):
People didn't want to have that moment. It was this
embarrassing thing where people in the middle of whatever they
were saying about me being divisive, were about this conversation
taking feminism backwards whatever, realizing after the fact, especially by
twenty sixteen, that they had been on the wrong side
of history and never wanting to look backward again. More.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
After a quick break, let's get right back into it.
Mickey did the work of exposing existing tensions and fractures
that exist in our movement, but in order to heal
(22:58):
tensions there has to be reflection, honesty, and accountability, which
just didn't really happen. So these tensions were left to
be exploited by bad actors like the ones behind the
end Father's Day hoax to inflame tensions and feminist online
spaces that would take place just a year later. Something
that we have talked about quite a bit on this
(23:20):
podcast is sort of what came immediately after things like
the disinformation troll campaign hashtag and Father's Day and I
think something that solidarity is for white women. It supposed
is the reality and the rawness of these tensions between
black women, black feminists and white feminists. And I think
(23:43):
that bad actors, trolls, what are extremists, whatever you want
to call it, people who are interested in using social
media spaces to cause confusion and chaos. I think the
movement's lack of really taking accountability, really examining what happened,
really figuring out how we navigate the navigate around each
(24:05):
other and with each other. I think that you're right,
there was broadly not no interest in really doing that
and having those conversations. And thus I think that bad
actors know like, Okay, well, this is an attension that exists.
It's a tension that is being kind of danced around.
You know, everyone feels it, but no one's really People
aren't really talking about it openly because they don't want to.
(24:27):
We can go in and exploit it, We can go
in and like seize it and inflame it, and it
might be effective because no one's really naming it, no
one's really talking about it, nobody's really interested in taking
accountability for their part in it. Do you ever think
that the lack of interest in real accountability and looking
backward and taking stock just leaves these communities online vulnerable
(24:51):
to people who who will step in and exploit and
talk about it, just not in the way that maybe
it's going to be helpful.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Oh, I think it appts resolutely. It's one of those
things with just how we got all those feminists talking
to like Meatleianopolis and engaging sort of disingenuously with the
idea that Megan Kelly was not necessarily racist, right, because
(25:22):
everyone started to kind of go, well, you know, people
can be swayed, people can be wooed. And I wonder
often about the people who at that point kept saying,
we have to reach out to the other side, because
the other side was very clearly, very cogently planning to
(25:42):
sow discord, very much trying to widen riffs, and also
using those conversations, those educational conversations, to boost their own platforms,
right because when you think back to twenty thirteen, to
all they are twenty sixteen, actually even before twenty thirteen,
(26:04):
a lot of those well I want to talk to
a white nationalist, a person who identifies as a white
separatist whatever. You remember all of those news stories, all
of the like inside the mind of a clansman kind
of news stories. Right, for a while, nobody had ever
(26:24):
given them a platform. I just saw this thing the
other day. There's an account that shills itself as like
the American Nazi whatever. Right. They bought a blue check
mark on Twitter, and they have millions of followers, and
they said, essentially, this never could have happened ten years ago,
which is true. It wouldn't have been able to happen
ten years ago. Now they can look like they're a
(26:46):
real legitimate account.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
I mean, kind of just gives away the game where
it's like, oh, thanks to Elon Musk, I would have
never been able to build up this the legitimized platform
I have now to spread my Nazi shit.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
Thanks.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
That is essentially what it said, essentially. And you know,
we've seen several times now, even when we're talking about
at protests and things, and we've been talking for years
about inside police circles, the number of very clearly white nationalists,
(27:20):
white supremacist whatever we're calling ourselves this week, white separatists
police officers, complete with the visible ink, right, And when
we bring it up and people say, oh, well, you know,
what can you do? And it's kind of like, actually,
several years ago, we were trying to get people to
do something about it, and you said that that wasn't
(27:40):
a feminist issue. You said that that was just some
guys online. They were harmless. You said, whatever, now here
we are and I need you to not even just
take accountability. I need you to start swinging, not still
talk about how we can reach them.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Twitter was where people who were not traditionally centered or
heard could really build power. Black Lives Matter championed racial
justice in the wake of police violence. Survivors started me
Too to push back against sexual violence. So when Elon
Musk bought Twitter, one of my first questions was, what
does this mean for the future of marginalized communities being
able to build power and start movements. It's a fair question,
(28:23):
but Mickey reminds us that our communities are resilient and
that we'll always find a way.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
How do you.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
See the state that Twitter is in, and sort of
social media more broadly, how do you see that impacting
marginalized community's ability to build up power and build up
a voice.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
I think in some ways, and this is going to
sound real strange, but the existence of TikTok and all
the competing other sites will help you master it on.
All of these things will help marginalized communities find a
place to rebuild the networks that they had on Twitter
(29:01):
for some levels of rebuild here, but only because Twitter
was already not particularly usable for community anymore. Once all
eyes were on Twitter, it seemed like all the time.
I remember that like weird period of time where anything
you tweeted could wind up on your television screen that
night is news or in an article.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
Yeah, that was a wild time.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Right. People have already started to kind of migrate away
from Twitter. Right, Twitter's popularity as a social media app
was on the decline. People were just abandoning their Twitter
accounts whatever and moving to discord and all these other places.
And so I think it will make it more difficult
to kick off an initial group. But also in some
(29:47):
ways now it is easier to have those conversations without
necessarily as much trolling. This weird split where like, yes,
the loss of Twitter is a big deal, but also
Twitter was already being lost before this because the focus
hyper focused on black Twitter, but also generally the focus
on whether those people over there talking about together had
(30:10):
made people uncomfortable having certain conversations in public.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
I think Sadet Harry has a great piece and wired
that kind of speaks to this of like the feeling
of kind of the inherent feeling of being both othered
and also watched. Like I definitely felt that when it
came to being part of black Twitter for a while,
where you definitely feel like these people over here are
(30:34):
doing something distinct of their own and let's lurk at it.
It kind of in a lot of ways you wanted
to be having these insult conversations with them, but the
feeling that they were happening and a bit of a
fish bowl digitally.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
And that I think that level of surveillance culture is
not something I'm going to miss, right, I had already
Twitter for me had been rendered largely unusable for like
socializing with friends kinds of things a while before this,
because and not even in a major way, but in
a no matter what, there was always someone who had thoughts, feelings, opinions, right,
(31:12):
and as like the API is being altered to prevent
a lot of third party clients. I know, like today
someone was saying that one of the things that made
Twitter usable for visually impaired users, it's no longer going
to work. Hearing impaired users are going to have slightly
more time, but some of the tools they use, it's
not going to be there anymore, things like that, right,
(31:34):
all text, all of these things. And I feel like
Twitter served a very high level and low level sort
of purpose. But also we are going to have to
go back to the pre Twitter days of jumping from
platform to platform for a while, right, we got really
(31:55):
comfortable with Twitter and Facebook kind of being seen as
stable entities. But I don't know when the last time
I went on Facebook for any real meaningful purpose. I
don't like the interface, and on Twitter, that surveillance level
had made it so that you were kind of tweeting
a little looking at what people were talking about, and
(32:15):
leaving for a lot of users who are you know,
like I'm a power user because I used to use
Twitter all day long. I would send hundreds of tweet today,
chatting it out, talking to people, having thoughts on in
public whatever. Because of all of the the eyes on me,
which always sounds slightly paranoid, But because of that, I
(32:35):
had already scaled back my Twitter usage heavily, not even
in purpose, not even like, oh I'm going to keep
these things to myself. It was just annoying. And now
with what's what's happening? How much platform time do I
want to spend with trolls? How useful is it?
Speaker 3 (32:53):
I thought you're in your piece for MIT Tech Review,
I think that you.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
I can't remember exactly how you put it, but you
had it like it's not it's not a plaque form
to live one's life, you know, It's like it's not
a place where you're where you're necessarily going to look
for connection.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
And it sounded like an even in your personal life.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
That Twitter just wasn't it for you anymore, that like
you just weren't interested that you described it. When you
when you do show up there, it feels like it's
out of habit more than anything else. It's not like
you're going there looking for connection.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Oh yeah, because I can tell you a really stupid
story about how I got I got done with using
Twitter socially. I was talking to a friend of mine
and we were talking about a workout routine that we
had both tried, and someone briefly tried to turn that
(33:44):
into like pro like fat phobic. Oh this is really
fat phobic. Having this conversation in public, and we had
said nothing about anyone's bodies, not even really our own,
other than the usual uh yeah, I tried blah blah blah.
It was really rough, kind of you know, he talked
about things, and I couldn't figure out how we got there.
(34:07):
And then there's this entire conversation happening in my mentions
about whether or not this conversation with my friend about
a workout we had both tried was really about something else,
and I thought I have hit the point where we
are reading into things. I always wondered how that would feel. Oh,
(34:28):
I don't care for it, right, And so then me
and my friends started to have those conversations not on public.
On Twitter, we s don't have them, We just have
them in a group chat, And as more things moved
to the group chat, I have a hustling, bustling series
of group chats going on. I don't necessarily think to
(34:48):
go to Twitter in the same way in my personal
life anymore. I don't even necessarily react to everything on Twitter,
because sometimes news stories pass by, or someone tweeting something
passes by, and in my brain, I think this does
not pass the smell test. But It's not worth getting
into it with people who are buying in on the
(35:09):
spot to whatever is being said, because they're going to
find out in a few minutes or a few hours
that they were wrong, and they're going to want to
erase all of their tweets about this, all of their
engagement with this, you know. And I don't even need
to jump in and participate. I can have this conversation
with people who actually have a conversation.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
Oh, this is something I have absolutely felt that the
story that you told about the workout with your friend.
I have this theory that, like so something, we've reached
a point where we have visibility into too many conversations
between strangers where people are just injecting their own and
(35:50):
like injecting and projecting a lot of their own stuff
onto the conversations of.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
Strangers in ways that if you did it in real.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Life, if you were in a cafeteria and two people
were talking about a workout they had done, and I
walked up to their table and sat down and said,
this conversation is pat phobic and maybe it's actually about
something else altogether, you would think that was.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
The weirdest thing in the world.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
And I think that we've I do think that we've
hit a point where these platforms cease to be useful
when they when they are when they feel this way,
because because it's just not it's not an enjoy it
doesn't not a way to connect with people that feels enjoyable,
that level of surveillance, every little thing that you say,
feeling like someone's going to take it the wrong way
or project their own their own stuff onto it.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
Well, and this is the thing, because I definitely started
to feel like and a certain point, is this about
what I said? Or am I just where you put
your feelings? And I think a lot of it is
just where they put their feelings right, And that's the case.
(36:58):
I don't I don't need to be here for this.
And I think that, and then I think about how
many of my friends who like I have a friend
who pointed out to me one day I ever tweeted
something she said because I thought it was funny, and
she says, I know you didn't mean any harm, but
can you not retweet me because I always end up
with all of this crap in my mentions And I
was very apologetic, offeratedly tweet and she was like, no, no, No,
(37:20):
it's not like it's your fault. I just know your
level of visibility is too much for me, and I
hadn't I you know, like the frog and boiling water.
I had gotten used to it, but I hadn't thought
about what it feels like to kind of be thrust
into this level of thing. And even though I was
still occasionally retweet people or whatever or quote tweet them,
(37:43):
I try to be more judicious. I'm not always successful.
I always think about it, but I try to be
more judicious when I do do it, because there's this
point in the hypervisibility where I don't want people to
be having a conversation about the things they didn't say.
I want to talk about the things they did say,
(38:04):
or I have a thought about what they said kind
of thing. And I don't know where we go on
Twitter with that, Like I don't see a way to
salvage that part at this point.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
You know the way that you put that of like,
am I just the place where you put your feelings.
I'm not super visible on any social media platform, but
I do wonder if that has something to do with
you being a black woman, that do you something about
the way that you show up online for folks as
a black woman, means that you are the place where
(38:36):
a lot of their feelings go. That, whether it's feelings
of anger or wanting to call somebody out or wanting
to show you something so that you have a publicly
angry reaction, and that feels a certain way for them,
like we're we're you kind of aren't a real person,
You're just this abstraction online for them to project whatever
they want onto you.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
Do you do you ever feel that?
Speaker 2 (38:58):
Oh? Absolutely, it's one of the those things. First of all,
I had to tell people to stop sending me things
for me to respond to, right, Like, for a while
their people would tagged me in their arguments with random people.
I don't know you, I don't know them. I'm not
joining into the middle of a conversation whatever. But also
it started to feel like I am not a person.
(39:21):
Oh God, so many people to go because and this
is another sort of silly story, someone was mad about
something I had said. Apparently they started tweeting it about
it at around three am my time. Okay, somewhere in
the following four hours they had worked themselves up to
the point that you know, I was avoiding them. I
(39:44):
was ignoring them? How dare I was? You know, a coward?
Blah blah blah, And I get up, I get my
kids out the door to school. And I used to
for a while on my way to work. I would,
you know, far around on Twitter on the way in,
and I log on and I'm like, what is is this?
Because I was asleep? It is seven am, right, what
(40:08):
the heck are you doing? What is wrong with you?
Kind of thing? And this person who had spun themselves
into a frenzy in the middle of the night says,
I completely forgot the difference in time zone. You weren't
ignoring me. I'm sorry, and ends up deleting probably like
forty tweets. But also, I had never responded to you,
(40:28):
and you had never thought about the fact that I
wasn't awake just because you were. It didn't even occur
to you. Person whose name I won't say that I
was a person with a life and responsibility, so right,
like had not even crossed their mind. I have a joke,
I tell friends there are no sick days on the internet,
(40:50):
and yet in real life people take off work, So
how do we expect people to be available? Twenty four
to seven online.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
It makes no sense, and yet that is how everyone
is operating.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
Sometimes.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Oh yeah, I've seen people get very for lack of
a way of putting it, get very in their feelings
about someone not being available the moment they want them
to be available online. And I sometimes have to also,
and I have this whole thing I also say where
I say parasocial relationships are beating people's asses every day
(41:27):
right where. You enjoy this person, you enjoy their content whatever,
or you don't, You hate them, you hate watch whatever.
You don't realize anymore that that person does not know you,
however much you feel like you know them. They don't
know you. They are online on whatever their schedule is,
and the rest of their time they are doing whatever
(41:49):
it is they're doing right, whether they've got a family,
or they've got a day job, or heck, they're writing
a book or making songs whatever. People for whom the
Internet is life, and there are people for whom the
Internet is a job, and they overlap, but they are
not necessarily the same people. And for people for whom
(42:10):
the Internet is a job, there are specific times, hours,
whatever that they are available and the rest of the time,
no matter how much it may frustrate you person who
perceives yourself to be in a parasocial relationship with them,
they are not going to be available to And it
happens to celebrities, and we've all kind of normalized that
level of parasocial relationship, but increasingly it is happening to
(42:32):
people just who speaks on the internet. Right, you can
get fans, followers, supporters, whatever we're calling them, just by
being a person who speaks online. The problem is that
every word you say will not be the gospel truth.
Everything you think will not be right for none of
(42:53):
us right. But also the people following you may or
may not really be paid attention to the reality that
you are a whole person. One of the things that
always sticks out to me is this idea that because
you like someone, they can never be wrong. They absolutely
(43:13):
can be wrong. Did that make sense outside of my head?
Speaker 3 (43:16):
It made so much sense.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
And the vibe of because I like this person, I
am team them for life. If they say anything wrong,
it must be right. I don't think there's a that's
gotta be one of the most dangerous toxic vibes that
we have, where I mean, I see it play out
all the time and like, these are people. They're not
(43:38):
gonna Just because somebody had a great take or wrote
a great piece on one thing doesn't mean that you
should blindly sign up for their takes on everything. And
I'm like, be invested in them never being wrong.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
You know. It's like, like, I don't know how.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
We got to such a weird place when it comes
to relationships and how they function online.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
I think part of what's happened, unfortunately, and I'm seeing
this even more on TikTok, is that the entertainment people
get right. Let's call it, like the skits you see
on TikTok, the storytelling whatever on Twitter. All of these
things that have happened over and over again on various platforms,
(44:19):
makes people feel like this stuff is there for them.
It is not necessarily that this person is doing something
to entertain themselves that you happen to like. It has
become Oh, this performance is for me, this article, this
writing is whatever is for me, and therefore everything here
is about me for me, and I don't have to
(44:41):
have any sense of boundaries or limits or really grasp
that this was just someone making a thing that was
in their head. Right, we feel an ownership stake in
the things we are fans of.
Speaker 1 (44:55):
I was a fan of Twitter ten years ago, as
much as I criticized it, and that ownership stake Mickey
describes well, as I watched the platform that I once
loved become something else entirely I feel that too, So
What's next? In a piece for MIT Tech Review, Mickey
looks back on a career that she's built in part
on Twitter and what the future of platforms holds. Twitter's
(45:18):
importance five years ago cannot be overstated, she writes, But
now as we look at the possibility of a future
without Twitter, will anything really change for the average person
who uses the Internet but doesn't live on it? Seting
the scene for where we are and where we go next?
Like I've seen so many people, myself included, writing about
(45:38):
how much Twitter sucks now that Elon Musk has taken
over blah blah blah. But in your MIT Tech Review
piece you kind of pick up on something else that it, Yeah,
Elon must sucks and Twitter sucks because of him and
all of that, But really, do you think that something
there's sort of a larger cultural shift happening that is
actually being mirrored via our use of technology, that it's
(46:01):
not just about elon Musk being like sucking and ruining Twitter.
Something else is happening where folks are just not that
invested in showing in showing up on platforms like Twitter.
Maybe they're spending more time on platforms like TikTok, Maybe
they're less interested in social media as we all get older, Like,
do you think something is happening more broadly in culture
and that we're just visual experiencing that through technology in
(46:24):
our relationship to it.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
I think what's happening is that for a lot of
people as we are getting older, the earlier social media users,
but also for a lot of people who grew up
with social media. And I was having this conversation with
a college student last night. As a matter of fact,
there is a sense that the need to always be on,
to always think about what people are perceiving of you,
(46:49):
that you have no privacy online is driving a lot
of people away from social media. Right once we started
to hit a place where your social media could not
just be used against your in terms of job stuff,
but you don't know how it's going to be used
because brands are using it. You're showing up on the
news it can be used against you if you said
(47:11):
something offensive, people dig up old offensive things you said.
You may or may not still feel that way because
it was seven, eight, nine years ago. All of these things.
People started to feel like, well, what's the use of
social media if I can't actually enjoy it, if I
can't just hang out and spend time with my friends
and have fun. And we're seeing people sort of trend
(47:33):
someone on TikTok. I suspect there will be another platform
or two before we settle wherever we're settling next. In
terms of social media, we're seeing people kind of trend
back almost to the days of like blogger and live journal,
where you have a carefully curated private list of people
you talk to, and maybe you have some things that
are public, but you don't let everyone see what you're doing.
(47:55):
You don't have your business in everyone's eyeballs because you
don't want everyone else's business in your eyeballs. I think
that we're also going to see the rise of those
kids who were the early mommy blogger content, right like
parent blog blog content. Kids there are almost adults now,
(48:16):
some of them are legally adults. I think for a
lot of them, the financial impact of having been content
for twenty years but not necessarily being paid for being
that content and having that experience shape their future means
we're going to see a lot of people in court,
in federal court very soon, right, Because for all that
(48:40):
we have said, and about the most successful of them,
the kids who were memes whatever, those kids have grown up,
and yet when you google their names, it's the meme,
it's the mommy blog content, it's the pictures of them
with a poopy diaper on their head or whatever that
comes up. And mom and dad or grandpa grandpa are
guardians whoever they may. The money, they got the checks,
(49:01):
but the kids get consequences. I don't foresee those kids
being interested in social media, and I think they will
be part of a growing number of people who are
just like we should not know this much about each other,
about total strangers. I think people will still use social
media to some degree, but I think the way we
use it is going to change again.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
So you think that we should really be letting the
younger generation take the lead. Where do you see them
leading us?
Speaker 2 (49:25):
Yeah? I think I think they will have some form.
I think that they're going to like kind of reinvent
private social media, right, whether it will be Snapchat or
something else. But I think they're going to reinvent that
kind of thing where they'll want to be able to
talk to their friends. But I don't know that they're
going to want to be able to talk to their
friends in the way the general public can see. Because
(49:48):
I'll be honest, not being able to like lock individual
tweets was always a weird thing about Twitter. It always
invites a certain level of harassment and just unpleasant context.
Because Twitter definitely knew right way before we got to
any of the conversations Cie works around here. Twitter definitely
(50:10):
knew about four chan and on Reddit and all of
those things, right, And we're seeing people who post on
Reddit say, oh man, this stuff is going all over
these things are going viral. I'm sure some of that
is intentional. I just don't know that we really need
to see everything with your face attached.
Speaker 3 (50:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:29):
I hate being perceived on social media. I'm every time
I have a few glasses of wine and spend like
actually do some tweeting. When I wake up the next
day and I see like, oh, you've got five replies,
I'm like, oh no, why did I do this to myself.
Speaker 3 (50:44):
I hate it so.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
Much, and I mean, I think the answer, unfortunately is
it used to be fun. It used to be great
to like hang out and talk to your friends, and
sometimes you slip up and you forget that. The way
social media functions it also changed, right, like we've changed.
But also now you have people who get online and
(51:06):
they're looking for a fight, and they don't care who
it's with, and it doesn't have to be on a
particular topic. It's not something they feel passionately about. It's
something that they just want someplace to argue, right, And
a lot of times, like we call it sea lioning, right,
the guys that just want a good debate and then
won't go away. What else do you do but decide, okay,
(51:28):
well people have perceived me, this person won't leave me alone,
or these people or whatever. Sure, you meet, the conversations,
you do all of these things. But at a certain point,
where's the payoff for you in getting online in the
first place? Right? I don't know if it wasn't still
related to like my books, my work, my whatever. I
(51:49):
don't know if I right now, if I were coming
into social media now, right, like I was twenty four
years old or whatever, and my job didn't require it.
I'm not sure how much I'd use it.
Speaker 1 (52:00):
Well, I guess this leads me to kind of my
awkward final question, which is where can folks keep in
touch with you?
Speaker 3 (52:07):
After all? After all this?
Speaker 1 (52:08):
It feels weird to be like, ohould they tweet at you?
But where can folks like what? Like? What are you
up to next? And where can folks keep in touch
with all your work?
Speaker 2 (52:15):
So I have a website, I'm on TikTok, I'm on Twitter,
I'm on Instagram. My handle is always the same. I
am Carnethia here, there, and everywhere, and if uh it
is not Carnesia, you'll figure it out very quickly. And
then I'm currently after I get back from this trip,
I am working on my next book and it is
(52:38):
really an autopsy of the American dream. So it's gonna
be a lot. People are gonna hate it or you're
gonna love it. They're they're not. There's not gonna be
a lot in between. We're gonna have some feelings.
Speaker 1 (52:56):
Got a story about an interesting thing in tech. I
just want to say hi. You can just have hello
at Tangody dot com. You can also find transcripts for
today's episode at tengody dot com. There Are No Girls
on the Internet was created by me Bridget Tod. It's
a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative Jonathan Strickland is
our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer.
Michael Almato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd.
(53:19):
If you want to help us grow, rate and review
us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check
out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
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