[LittlePuss Press; 2024]
On July 12, New York Times columnist Pamela Paul published a column about transgender health care. It set off a firestorm online, particularly on the social media site Bluesky. But a large percentage of the hate wasn’t directed at Paul, who isn’t on Bluesky. Instead, posters focused on Jamelle Bouie, another New York Times opinion columnist. They demanded that Bouie, a Black man and progressive commentator, should either quit his job or stop pretending to be a liberal. Their arguments were largely an outcry of anger against someone who just happened to be in the way: Bouie, who was not mentioned in the column, presented an easy target because he was both an active poster on Bluesky and employed by the same newspaper. He temporarily deactivated his account until it blew over in a few days.
This cycle of anger and posting is familiar to anyone who has spent too much time on Twitter or any of its clone sites. Person A says or does something regrettable, but they’re either not on the site or don’t engage. So the mob turns to Person B—someone who takes the bait, as it were. And eventually nothing of value is actually accomplished. It’s a phenomenon that writer and scholar Katherine Cross looks at in depth in her new book, Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix.
Cross has been writing online for about a decade and is currently in grad school studying online harassment and social media. She was also a prolific poster on Twitter. These two make her uniquely suited to write this book: She’s witnessed many of the online harassment campaigns she writes about and also has the academic background to put them into context. In a series of related essays, she builds a compelling case that social media (and in particular, Twitter) acts as a replacement to conventional politics while also encouraging our worst instincts: backbiting, snide comments, and harassment. The site is easy, and direct access to American presidents, senators, and other political leaders makes people feel like posting is a form of political praxis. The quote-tweet feature makes it easy to dash off a mean, snarky reply to someone you don’t like.
But as Cross points out, neither of those are replacements for traditional, on-the-ground styles of politicking. While social media posting can make people feel as if they’re speaking truth to power or being seen and heard, it’s a false hope. Cross writes: “Posting can be useful on occasion . . . but it can’t change the world, at least, not in the way many might hope.”
She recounts several examples of how drama on Twitter and Bluesky are formed. Usually there’s a misunderstanding, then people try to score points by being rude and snarky, and eventually posters get mad and yell at each other until the next round of drama. But instead of waving this online drama away, Cross uses it to get at why people mistake yelling at politics as politics. “Like so much gestural activism of its ilk, its primary purpose was to signal affiliation, not to have an effect.” In other words, people post to show they’re part of the in-crowd.
Contrast this with the Bouie drama mentioned above. How many of the people posting were mad at him as compared to those posting because their friends were? Because they felt like they needed to say something—or because they felt that keeping quiet was a signal they agreed with Paul’s anti-trans rhetoric? Indeed, I felt conflicted by the events. I don’t agree with Paul, an arts critic-turned-TERF, but exploding at someone who neither wrote the piece nor seemed to agree with it (he’s posted his disagreement with banning trans care for teens) doesn’t seem like a productive use of time or energy, just a sort of collective expression of recklessly-aimed anger that feeds on itself and creates a recursive feedback loop of people posting about how angry they are.
Cross notes this too in Log Off. She identifies what she calls Third-Order Harassment: it’s not harassing a person directly, but hand-wringing about the situation at large and keeping it in the spotlight. She writes: “It is, in sum, the enabling, apologism, and justificatory discourse about the target that ensures most people participating feel as if they’re doing the right thing and makes more overt and intense forms of harassment possible.”
Her argument flags a little in the middle when she moves abruptly from the theme of internet posting to that of owning a gun and fantasies of revenge, self-resilience, and armed uprising. As she explains it, seeing acts of violence committed against marginalized people time and again while doomscrolling can inspire these same marginalized people to ideas of armed resistance or buying a weapon as self-protection. “Isn’t the Second Amendment there for you too—and isn’t that what it’s for,” she writes. “Arming the citizenry against tyranny?” But she sidesteps the question of if it’s justified to instead look at how social media feeds into a cycle of doom which can lead to violence.
In some ways, it’s a natural progression to go from posting about violence to actually committing it, but the move does feel a little out of place in a book that’s essentially about online life as opposed to offline. Cross does draw a connection between these spheres of life. “It’s easy to posture online, easy to joke about who belongs ‘up against the wall,’” she writes, “it’s infinitely harder to stand there, faced with a real human being, and pull the trigger.” Perhaps for some, but given the spate of online violence from the radicalized far-right that manifests in real-life mass shootings by them, maybe the line is closer than it’s comfortable to think about.
As an elder millennial, I remember when online activism was called slacktivism. It applied to a range of activities that were easily done online and gave the feeling of political praxis without the effort of materially changing circumstances: sharing a meme, putting a flag emoji in your Twitter bio. Despite a quick serotonin hit, they don’t accomplish anything tangible for the cause being advocated for. At best, they help you find a like-minded crowd; at worst, you get people harassing you in your mentions. There are countless examples of this from the past decade: Palestinian flag emojis, putting brackets next to your display name, engaging in a posting boycott. They may feel good at the moment, but none of them changes anything off social media: People are still dying in Gaza every day, emojis be damned. As Cross says, she hopes “we can use social media for what it’s best at and log the fuck off for the rest of the time.”
In her conclusion, Cross draws on Hannah Arendt and her view that real politics arises from action. “We can only realize political aims by acting in concert,” writes Cross. The allure of social media is that suddenly our friends are just a post away and that no matter where we are, we can find a group of like-minded friends. But the allure is a fake one: Everything we say online only goes as far as the app does. Real change—be it something as large and impactful as foreign policy or as local as a new community center—doesn’t come from a phone keyboard, it comes from on-the-ground activity, done as part of a group effort.
At times the scholar in Cross leaps out. She occasionally uses a ten-dollar word when a one-dollar one would do (phrases like Jovian, “oubliette of terror,” and “Bognostian techno-pessimism” pop up throughout her book), which give the sense that she’s directing her arguments to people who are in the academy. Conversely, when she stops to explain who Dril is, she’s repeating information that anyone who is too online already knows. Sometimes these traits combine, giving Cross’s prose the feeling of a university lecturer trying to explain a joke, like when she defines a shitpost: “They’re a kind of digital sprezzatura: a studied dishevelment of language that takes great effort to produce despite looking completely careless.”
It raises the question of who her intended audience exactly is: Is it the common poster who already knows the online lingo but has to look up what sprezzatura means? Or is it somebody else, someone who might look at this book as a piece of online sociology and Twitter as something to be studied? Who exactly is the kind of person who needs to log off?
Still, Cross’s insights and experience as both a scholar and a poster make Log Off a book that’s fascinating reading and bound to stir up arguments. Can people create meaningful change by posting? Is Twitter bad for politics? And should one, as the title suggests, log off? I don’t know about you, but I’m taking a break from posting after reading this.
Roz Milner is a freelance writer and critic who lives just north of Toronto. Her writing has appeared in the Toronto Star, Lambda Literary, PRISM International, Broken Pencil, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a book of short fiction.
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