Hate Club

the first rule of hate club is you DO talk about hate club

[This is just a quick off-pace post, for reasons that will be clearer in my next installment.]

I’ve inched a little closer to being Very Online in the past year (so Pretty Online?), mostly by subscribing to some of the larger newsletters and sites that drive the Discourse. Barring the occasional coincidence¹, I’m still pretty far downstream, which is just fine by me.

So I only just heard about this: a few weeks ago, Delia Cai of Deez Nuts staged what she described as a pop-up newsletter, called Hate Reads, “where a dozen of our favorite writers from the internet rant and review about stuff they hate—anonymously.” The pop-up newsletter part of it shares some DNA with what used to be known as blog carnivals and Hate Reads mixes in the unpopular opinion trend that surfaces from time to time on most social media platforms. There’s a bit of trolling (in the classic sense) too: as Kate Lindsay explained in her interview with Cai, “Twitter has taken the hate-read bait almost every time.”

On the one hand, I think something like this would be fun to take part in—and that’s one thing that Cai emphasizes, the fact that it’s “fun hate.” On the other, it’s a style that I’ve never really been that good at. Not that I don’t do my fair share of snarking, but I get worked up over something as a way of getting it out of my system. I’m not interested in making it part of my system. But it did get me thinking.

One thing I thought about was how much I’ve come to hate the expression that the internet (or the cell phone) “puts the world at our fingertips.” I mentioned my distaste for the phrase last month, and a weird thing happened. In the same way that, when you buy a new car and start seeing that brand everywhere you look, all of a sudden I feel like I’ve been seeing that metaphor/cliché everywhere, even in places where I least expect it.

There’s no telling where it started, although I did come across a 25+ year old piece from Edutopia that used the phrase as its title. It’s interesting, and perhaps even a little embarrassing, to think about how that essay has aged. To be fair, it predates social media. I think we forget sometimes that, in the early days, we thought of the web much more like a constantly updated, interactive set of resource materials—Wikipedia is the one site I can think of that’s really survived from those days (and that vision).

More than anything, I wince at the naive confidence that the ways that the web could (and we believed, should) evolve would shape how it ultimately did. The switch didn’t occur overnight, but it’s at least as accurate to say that we’ve put ourselves at the world’s fingertips. And a fair bit of it is bad touching.

Could it have happened differently? I don’t know. But there’s a Goodhart moment in there too, where the idea of having the world at our fingertips involved forgetting that there were still important parts of the world beyond what we could access online. The (partial, partisan, problematic) map became more vivid to us than the territory. Small wonder that lately, we’re seeing another cliché circulate, the idea that we should “touch grass" as an antidote to our onlineness.

“The world at our fingertips” hearkens from a much earlier and more idealistic vision of the internet, but nowadays it’s mythified and marketed back to us as a way of papering over the enshittified ugliness of so much of what the net became. So, yeah. It’s like nails on the chalkboard to me at this point.

1. Not that I’m bragging, but XKCD and Cory Doctorow both referenced Goodhart’s Law a couple of days after my post. Okay, I’m sort of bragging. I did experience the momentary glow of feeling like I was part of the Discourse.