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regarding blocklists, trolls, twitter’s systemic inaction against abuse, and the responsibility of wielding great power

Posted on By Wil

Jesus what a day.

Apparently, a couple of exceptionally popular YouTube creators were talking on Twitter about being blocked by me. Their fans grabbed their jump to conclusions mats, torches and pitchforks in hand, and went on a rampage through my mentions.

So I guess it’s time for the obligatory blog post that I don’t want to write but need to write, about how I use social media.

First off: I think I know what happened in this case. A couple months (or maybe it was weeks; in 2018, hours can feel like days) ago, a toxic YouTube personality with a large and unsurprisingly toxic following just went after me one day, without provocation. Over the years, people have tried to create the illusion of a feud with me, in an effort to get my attention and grab some free publicity to drive up views and subscriptions. I always ignore these things, because they are childish at best, and they invite a kind of negativity and vitriol that I would prefer not to have in my life. (As a side note, if someone claiming to be a social media expert pitches the fake feud idea to you, fire them and burn their contact information to the ground. That person is an idiot.)

Anyway. This person already had a following that eclipsed mine by several a factor of at least ten, so they weren’t going to gain anything if I gave them the attention they were looking for. It honestly felt like a young person who was feeling powerful and wanted to use the power of their following to make my life miserable, to entertain the shitty people who follow them. In my efforts to be empathetic to this person, I will freely admit that, when I was in my teens or early twenties, I probably would have thought that what they were doing was harmless, and that the person who was being attacked and dogpiled probably deserved it for some reason, and that they shouldn’t take everything so seriously. Thankfully, I grew up and out of that mentality.

So awhile ago, when this person turned my Twitter mentions into a goddamn Nazi rally, I did a little work to track down patient zero. I found this person, blocked their account, and then blocked their followers, so they would lose one of their attack vectors. I freely accept that a lot of innocent people were caught up in this massive blocking, and many of them are YouTube personalities (because it appears that, at some point, an explicit or implicit agreement was made among YouTubers that a lot of them would follow each other on social media. I wonder why good and decent people would follow this toxic person, but that’s on them, not on me.) In the aftermath, a lot of these YouTube personalities have, at some point, made a bunch of noise about being blocked by me. “Oh why did this happen,” they wonder, “I’ve never interacted with this guy. Please tell me, dear followers who worship me, whatever did I do to deserve this great injustice.”

Real quick: In this example, I present the imagined locutor as acting in bad faith, but can sincerely relate to that feeling. From time to time, someone I know and like RTs someone, but I can’t see it because I’ve been blocked by that person. I usually a have a little bit of a sad, because most of the time that person who has blocked me is someone I would like to see on Twitter, but I don’t pitch a fit about it, because I am a goddamn adult, and they don’t owe me anything.

I have said this on Twitter in a thread before, but I don’t think I’ve said it here: if you think you were wrongly or inadvertently blocked by me on Twitter, I’m painfully easy to get in touch with so you can ask about it and get it removed. Like, you certainly don’t have to, but you can if you want to. If you throw a fit about it and send your followers after me, you’ve made me feel like I don’t regret blocking you by accident. If you do this thing that people do where they are just asking about it and don’t really mean anything wink wink (sealioning), I don’t regret blocking you by accident. I want everyone to understand that Twitter is a mess, because Jack is a terrible CEO and doesn’t act like he cares at all about limiting Nazis, trolls, Russian bots, and other bad people. I believe that he doesn’t care because every single time someone or some group of people work hard to solve his problem (which is all of our problem) for him, he treats it like a public relations problem, not a systemic problem on the platform he runs, that is making the world a worse place due to his inaction. Because Twitter does not make it easy to manage and reduce attacks and other bad acts, we have to rely on imperfect tools like shared blocklists, extensions that help us identify and block trolls and bots, and tools that do mass blockings of an account’s followers. I’ve said many times, it’s a blunt and messy and imperfect instrument. It’s a nuclear bomb where what’s really needed is a rapier, but we go to war with the tools we have. Thanks for nothing, Jack. I hope you believe that the money you are earning is worth the damage you are inflicting on the world, and I hope you sleep really well at night.

Back to this morning. My mentions turn into this morass of anime avatars, poor grammar and racist, bigoted attacks. So, as I said above, I felt like I didn’t particularly care that I blocked these people, if this is the way the people they attract behave. If you attract a lot of bigots and trolls, you may just be a bigot and a troll, goes the math.

But that’s where I think, hey, maybe things are a little more complex than that. Because when multiple millions of people follow a person, that person can’t be reasonably held to account for everything every one of those followers does. Sure, there’s the glaring and profound exception of people who encourage and condone terrible behavior because they engage in it themselves, but most of us who have large audiences are going to end up with a few bad folks in that audience, because of math and human psychology. A few people who follow and/or know these guys reached out and said, essentially, “hey, these guys are good people and knowing what I know about you, I think you’d probably get along in regular circumstances. Please don’t let a small representation of their audience affect the way you feel about them.” I will admit and own that I can intellectually agree with that statement entirely, while emotionally struggling to be as graceful as I’d like to be in my idealized self.

Part of me really wants to unblock these people, because they seem like genuinely good people who exercised poor judgment. Another part of me doesn’t want to reward bad behavior. The biggest part of me believes that in about 18 hours nobody will care about this and they’ll go back to rolling in towers of YouTube cash, forgetting that I ever existed.

So I don’t know what I’m going to do in this instance, but since I’m spending the time writing about it, I want to make the following points very clear, so I have something to point to the next time this happens:

  • I actually use Twitter and other social platforms the way people use them. I’m not a hashtag brand who doesn’t care. I’m a real person who really looks at mentions and stuff. I’ve said it before: if you cut me, I will bleed.
  • Nobody is entitled to my time and attention. Yes, I block thousands of people on Twitter, because it’s that bad for me on Twitter. Yes, I block lots of people who I’ve never talked to and never will talk to. Usually, that’s because they’ve announced to the world that they’re garbage by following a garbage account that trolls and bullies and attacks people. Occasionally, it’s a mistake, and when that mistake is brought to my attention in a mature and respectful way, I do my best to correct it.
  • Chris Hardwick gave me great advice that I’m going to paraphrase here. He said that when you’re interacting with a person, and your first reaction is GO FUCK YOURSELF, think about all the times you’ve wanted to unleash Hell on someone, but three or four or seven messages later, you can talk like people and move on with your lives. Hardwick says that he does his best to start out at that seventh message, so he doesn’t blow up at someone in a way he’ll regret. I do my best to follow this advice, but I admit and own that when something like tearing children away from their parents is the issue at hand, I don’t have any patience or understanding or acceptance of someone who is anything other than sickened and outraged and horrified by it. There’s never gonna be a seventh message with that person, because that person holds beliefs that are reprehensible to me. But when someone is pissed about a joke they didn’t like on Big Bang Theory or thinks I ruined tabletop gaming by making it more accessible, or has taken a friendly sports rivalry too far, it’s a lot easier to get to that seventh message.
  • When Twitter treats abuse as a serious, systemic, societal issue with real consequences, and not as a public relations challenge, all of this will change. Until then, I will continue to use clumsy and blunt instruments to make my experience on the platform as nontoxic as possible. In other words, I’d love to use a lightsaber, but right now, I only have a blaster at my side.
  • Remember that there’s a real person on the other side of your social media interactions. This is especially important for young people, because there is not a person alive who can hurt and be hurt like a teenager. I promise you that you’re going to get older, and you’re going to be mortified by the terrible things you did when you know that you should have known better. If I blocked SuperYouTube6969 and you think they’re the greatest thing since memes, don’t take it personally. I can assure you that it has nothing to do with you.
  • Let’s all do our best to start out at the seventh message.
  • If you’re a creator with a large audience, whether you like it or not you have a tremendous responsibility, and you have an incredible opportunity to decide if you’re going to use that audience to enrich yourself, or if you’re going to use the privilege you have to make the world a better place. How do you want to be remembered?
  • As always, don’t be a dick.

I know there’s more I want to say, but I have a raging headache right now and what I really want to be doing is working on my novel, so that’s where I’m going. Feel free to discuss this in a non-shitty way in comments here. And if you’re one of those people who was inadvertently blocked by me, let me know so I can take a look.

Thanks for listening.

 

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this is brilliant

Posted on By Wil

When we worked on Next Generation, Brent Spiner and I would sit at our consoles on the bridge, and make up lyrics to our show’s theme song. I vaguely recall coming up with some pretty funny and clever stuff, but nothing that held together as perfectly as this, from the weirdos over at meh.com:

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i got better

Posted on By Wil

Thanks for all your kind thoughts and empathy about my damn panic attacks. It really means a lot to me, and it makes me feel like less of a weird alien who is doing his best human impression.

Since I shared my shitty night terror experiences, things have gotten significantly better. A lot of you recommended looking into CBD, and because California is a state that ended cannabis prohibition (get with the program, rest of America), I was able to talk with my doctor about using it for my anxiety and insomnia. He recommended that I give it a try, and it’s made all the difference for me. I put a dropperful of this tincture under my tongue every morning, and … it just works. I don’t feel intoxicated or weird or anything. I just feel calm and not anxious. In just four days, I went from having nightmares every night, waking up every couple of hours with a panic attack, and living every waking moment surrounded by a swarm of anxiety bees, to sleeping soundly and all the way through the night, and feeling like a regular person who isn’t terrified and worried and afraid all the time. It really is a miracle, and it’s going to be a significant challenge for me to not become one of those obnoxious evangelists about it. Blaze it bro you can make rope out of it man!

Because I was able to get the constant fear and anxiety under control, I was able to look back on things as objectively as possible, and see what the triggers for the latest round of Mental Health Funtimes were. I’m not ready to share those publicly, but I am fairly certain that the CBD got my shit under control enough to allow me the insights I needed, and I was able to confront what was causing the fear and anxiety that was controlling me. I’m not sure that I’m like 100% back to normal (for my personal values of normal) but I feel like a person again. In fact, I told Anne that I felt so good day before yesterday, I wasn’t sure if it was genuinely feeling great, or if it was just the absence of that terrible anxiety and worry that had been engulfing me. I guess the end result is what really matters, and the end result has been really good.

Part of that end result? Oh, let me show you the most recent entry in my daily writing word count blog thing:

840 words (70782 total) on the rewrite of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything.

And that is a completed first rewrite. I thought for sure I would have to do massive rewriting in the last 10K words, because I wrote them all in a single day, but they really (surprisingly) hold up!

I’m going to send my manuscript to a few close, trusted friends for feedback, so I can get fresh eyes and perspectives on the story. Once I have that information, I’ll be able to do a second rewrite, and then I think it’ll be time to give it to my editor and start making plans to publish it.

You guys. I totally finished the rewrite! It felt so good and so rewarding. And the coolest thing, ever, is that I don’t worry that it’s terrible. I worry that it isn’t long enough. THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID HEYOOO.

I’m sharing it with some early readers, and when they get their feedback to me, I’ll do another pass based on what they tell me. Then it goes to my editor for the Red Pen of Doom.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to shop it, yet. I think that it’s a solid story that readers will relate to, so I think it’ll be a reasonably easy pitch, but after the less than awesome experience I had with Just A Geek, I am very concerned that I won’t find the right publisher for it.

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panic attacks suck

Posted on By Wil

This is a reprint and expansion of today’s word count entry on my tumblr thing.

I had panic attacks all night long, last night. Each time I fell asleep, I woke up what felt like minutes later, in absolute terror. Like, imagine that you’re on an airplane and everything seems fine, and then it suddenly drops like 1000 feet. You know how you think you’d feel? The rush of adrenaline, the certainty that you were about to die, the helplessness to do anything about it … that’s how I felt all night long (all night, yeah).

I recall four specific times this happened, because each one had some different physical sensation when I woke up. There was the hot tingling in my arms and legs, there was the sense that I was not quite awake, but awake enough to know that the terror was about to hit, and then struggling in vain to prevent it, this cold wave that started in my chest and spread out all over my whole body like ripples in a pond, and the time my heart was beating so hard, I thought I was having a heart attack. Oh, and each time I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. Once, I didn’t know who I was. So I guess that’s five times I can recall, but I know it happened more than that because I didn’t get any meaningful rest. Also, a lot of the neurochemicals that I need to function are only created in my brain when I’m sleeping, so my dumb brain, which is already sort of challenged to give me the juice I need to exist, didn’t get to do its thing. That’s been really great.

I’m lucky that I didn’t have anywhere to be today, so when I finally fell to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time, around 6am after my dog asked to go outside, I slept until almost 11. I can function on five hours of sleep, but I can’t function on five hours of sleep after eight hours of intense, adrenaline-draining night terrors.

So this is a long way of saying that I really wanted to work on my rewrite today, but I am mentally exhausted the way I would be physically exhausted if I’d been forced to walk on a treadmill for hours at a time.

I honestly don’t know what to do about this. I’ve had a sleep study done, and I don’t have sleep apnea. I’ve changed my meds more than once, hoping to find one that works for my depression and anxiety when I’m awake, and also when I’m asleep, but there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between these panic attacks and one med or another. I’ve tracked my food (and I don’t drink any more, but it was nights like last night that, until I quit two years ago, drove me to drink so much that I wasn’t capable of waking up), I’ve tried meditation. I’ve tried tons of exercise. I’ve tried no exercise. I’ve tried every bullshit herbal tea pseudo science hokum whatever (and of course none of those things work because they are bullshit, but … desperate people and such). Nothing works, and these panic attacks are the most terrifying and frustrating and upsetting things that just show up without warning, and then just as suddenly go away. I really wish there was something I could do to make them stop, or at least to understand what causes them, so I could get to work on getting my sleeping life back from them.

And because it wasn’t bad enough overnight, all day today, I’ve been anxious and afraid, with a generous helping of existential dread thrown in, because fuck me, right. Go back to imagining that you’re on a plane. Now imagine that the plane is in terrible turbulence, bouncing around, shaking side to side, with a violence that makes you worry that the plane will be torn apart in midair. That’s how I’ve felt all day, like I’m in a swarm of bees. It’s totally irrational, and I know that it’s all in my head and isn’t real, but when the part of my body that is responsible for how I perceive the world and how I exist in it is fucked up, it’s challenging to separate what’s real from what’s just in my head. I’m super grateful that I’ve done so much work with so many licensed professionals over the years, so I can do my best to manage this … because I can assure you that while this is a challenge for me now, it would be close to impossible to deal with if I didn’t have that professional help (ask for and use professional help if you deal with any of the mental health issues I deal with, gang. Please. Trust me on this.)

All of these things go together to ruin my ability to be creative, which is a giant bummer, because I really love being creative. I’m having the time of my life rewriting this manuscript, and I’m so excited to finish this pass so I can give it to some early readers for their feedback. I hope that tonight goes better than last night, so that I can work on it tomorrow. And I just love it that I am having such a good time with this draft, and it’s so satisfying to work on, that I want to stay at my desk and work on the weekend.

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this is a post about sweaters (no, not those sweaters)

Posted on By Wil

It’s been a strange couple of weeks, here in Castle Wheaton. Anne was gone for six days, came home for literally twenty-two minutes and left again for another day. When she got home, we saw each other for about an hour, and then I had to go to sleep early to wake up early to fly across the country for two days. When I got back, she had to leave again for Piggy and Pug promotion, and it wasn’t until last night that we finally had an opportunity to make dinner together and catch up on all the stuff we did while we were gone.

“I have been feeling this strong compulsion to clean stuff up,” I told her while we were finishing dinner. “I wonder if it’s some kind of Spring Cleaning impulse that I’ve never noticed before.”

“More like never had before,” she reminded me.

“Okay, that’s fair,” I said.

We ate the empanadas we’d made. They were better than I expected.

“Hey, speaking of that,” she said, “will you come into our bedroom with me for a minute?”

Heckyeahsexytimesdottumblrdotcom I thought. “Sure,” I said.

I have this big pile of sweaters and hoodies at the foot of our bed. I keep meaning to put them away, but my closet is a shitshow and the shelves are a disaster. I have a box on the top shelf where most of my sweaters and scarves live when we aren’t having our three to five weeks of winter in Los Angeles. It is currently … not optimal.

“What’s going on with …” she indicated with her hand, sort of twirling it around like Vanna White, but with a little more distaste, “… this … stuff. Here.”

“Oh, those are all my dumb sweaters. I already put a bunch of them away, and I just need to find some room in the closet to put the rest of them away.”

“Isn’t that what your box is for?”

“Yes, but it’s already full. I must have added sweaters to my life this winter, and now I’m past the critical mass for sweaters.” I shrugged. “But don’t worry, I’m going to put them away tomorrow. I just need to clean up that shelf and get it more organized.”

“You’re going to put them in the bin that’s already full?”

“No, I’m going to put them in the spot next to the box, which is currently a jumble of kilts and horsemasks.”

She looked at me with a mixture of amusement and disbelief.

“…a jumble … of …” she was unable to finish the thought.

“This is who you married,” I said. “You did this on purpose.”