Though Weiss often argued that people should get more comfortable with those who offended or disagreed with them, she seemed mostly unable to take her own advice. During the Winter Olympics in 2018, she watched the figure skater Mirai Nagasu land a triple axel—the first American woman to do so in Olympic competition—and tweeted, in a very funny attempt at a compliment, “Immigrants: they get the job done.” Because Nagasu was actually born in California, Weiss was immediately shouted down. This is what happens online when you do something offensive: when I worked at Jezebel, people shouted me down on Twitter about five times a year over things I had written or edited, and sometimes outlets published pieces about our mistakes. This was often overwhelming and unpleasant, but it was always useful. Weiss, for her part, tweeted that the people calling her racist tweet racist were a “sign of civilization’s end.” A couple of weeks later, she wrote a column called “We’re All Fascists Now,” arguing that angry liberals were creating a “moral flattening of the earth.” At times it seems that Weiss’s main strategy is to make an argument that’s bad enough to attract criticism, and then to cherry-pick the worst of that criticism into the foundation for another bad argument. Her worldview requires the specter of a vast, angry, inferior mob.
It’s of course true that there are vast, angry mobs on the internet. Jon Ronson wrote the book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed about this in 2015. “We became keenly watchful for transgressions,” he writes, describing the state of Twitter around 2012. “After a while it wasn’t just transgressions we were keenly watchful for. It was misspeakings. Fury at the terribleness of other people had started to consume us a lot … In fact, it felt weird and empty when there wasn’t anyone to be furious about. The days between shamings felt like days picking at fingernails, treading water.” Web 2.0 had curdled; its organizing principle was shifting. The early internet had been constructed around lines of affinity, and whatever good spaces remain on the internet are still the product of affinity and openness. But when the internet moved to an organizing principle of opposition, much of what had formerly been surprising and rewarding and curious became tedious, noxious, and grim.
This shift partly reflects basic social physics. Having a mutual enemy is a quick way to make a friend—we learn this as early as elementary school—and politically, it’s much easier to organize people against something than it is to unite them in an affirmative vision. And, within the economy of attention, conflict always gets more people to look. Gawker Media thrived on antagonism: its flagship site made enemies of everyone; Deadspin targeted ESPN, Jezebel the world of women’s magazines. There was a brief wave of sunny, saccharine, profitable internet content—the OMG era of BuzzFeed, the rise of sites like Upworthy—but it ended in 2014 or so. Today, on Facebook, the most-viewed political pages succeed because of a commitment to constant, aggressive, often unhinged opposition. Beloved, oddly warmhearted websites like The Awl, The Toast, and Grantland have all been shuttered; each closing has been a reminder that an open-ended, affinity-based, generative online identity is hard to keep alive.
That opposition looms so large on the internet can be good and useful and even revolutionary. Because of the internet’s tilt toward decontextualization and frictionlessness, a person on social media can seem to matter as much as whatever he’s set himself against. Opponents can meet on suddenly (if temporarily) even ground. Gawker covered the accusations against Louis C.K. and Bill Cosby years before the mainstream media would take sexual misconduct seriously. The Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline challenged and overturned long-standing hierarchies through the strategic deployment of social media. The Parkland teenagers were able to position themselves as opponents of the entire GOP.
But the appearance of a more level playing field is not the fact of it, and everything that happens on the internet bounces and refracts. At the same time that ideologies that lead toward equality and freedom have gained power through the internet’s open discourse, existing power structures have solidified through a vicious (and very online) opposition to this encroachment. In her 2017 book, Kill All Normies—a project of accounting for the “online battles that may otherwise be forgotten but have nevertheless shaped culture and ideas in a profound way”—the writer Angela Nagle argues that the alt-right coalesced in response to increasing cultural power on the left. Gamergate, she writes, brought together a “strange vanguard of teenage gamers, pseudonymous swastika-posting anime lovers, ironic South Park conservatives, anti-feminist pranksters, nerdish harassers and meme-making trolls” to form a united front against the “earnestness and moral self-flattery of what felt like a tired liberal intellectual conformity.” The obvious hole in the argument is the fact that what Nagle identifies as the center of this liberal conformity—college activist movements, obscure Tumblr accounts about mental health and arcane sexualities—are frequently derided by liberals, and have never been nearly as powerful as those who detest them would like to think. The Gamergaters’ worldview was not actually endangered; they just had to believe it was—or to pretend it was, and wait for a purportedly leftist writer to affirm them—in order to lash out and remind everyone what they could do.
Many Gamergaters cut their expressive teeth on 4chan, a message board that adopted as one of its mottos the phrase “There are no girls on the internet.” “This rule does not mean what you think it means,” wrote one 4chan poster, who went, as most of them did, by the username Anonymous. “In real life, people like you for being a girl. They want to fuck you, so they pay attention to you and they pretend what you have to say is interesting, or that you are smart or clever. On the Internet, we don’t have the chance to fuck you. This means the advantage of being a ‘girl’ does not exist. You don’t get a bonus to conversation just because I’d like to put my cock in you.” He explained that women could get their unfair social advantage back by posting photos of their tits on the message board: “This is, and should be, degrading for you.”
Here was the opposition principle in action. Through identifying the effects of women’s systemic objectification as some sort of vagina-supremacist witchcraft, the men that congregated on 4chan gained an identity, and a useful common enemy. Many of these men had, likely, experienced consequences related to the “liberal intellectual conformity” that is popular feminism: as the sexual marketplace began to equalize, they suddenly found themselves unable to obtain sex by default. Rather than work toward other forms of self-actualization—or attempt to make themselves genuinely desirable, in the same way that women have been socialized to do at great expense and with great sincerity for all time—they established a group identity that centered on anti-woman virulence, on telling women who happened to stumble across 4chan that “the only interesting thing about you is your naked body. tl;dr: tits or GET THE FUCK OUT.”
In the same way that it behooved these trolls to credit women with a maximum of power that they did not actually possess, it sometimes behooved women, on the internet, to do the same when they spoke about trolls. At some points while I worked at Jezebel, it would have been easy to enter into one of these situations myself. Let’s say a bunch of trolls sent me threatening emails—an experience that wasn’t exactly common, as I have been “lucky,” but wasn’t rare enough to surprise me. The economy of online attention would suggest that I write a column about those trolls, quote their emails, talk about how the experience of being threatened constitutes a definitive situation of being a woman in the world. (It would be acceptable for me to do this even though I have never been hacked or swatted or Gamergated, never had to