Writing, Online Rage and Punching Iced Coffee
How do we develop a healthy relationship with feedback when people online are mad as hell?
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Pictured on my first day in Australia last August
Writers are swaddled here on Substack. We know this. If you take a look at Substack Notes, which is Substack’s version of social media, it’s littered with writers saying precisely that, as though we can’t quite believe our luck. As I approach the second anniversary of writing Peak Notions here – before that it lived entirely behind a paywall on Patreon – it’s hardly surprising that it’s prompted some contemplation. Culture shapes the ways in which we behave in particular contexts. Despite its increasing popularity over the last year especially, as both exemplified and helped by more legacy names with large followings setting up shop here, the culture of Substack remains warm overall. This just isn’t a place – for the moment at least – where there is major social traction in engaging with other people in a spirit of outrage or entitlement, or where attempts at dunking on strangers are considered a valid proxy for personal virtue.
The kind of vitriol formerly found on the Twitter of old hasn’t made the trek over here for a series of practical and cultural reasons. Long may it remain that way. We are clearly in the middle of a cultural shift in terms of the relationship between online media and culture more widely – I found this piece from Freddie DeBoer pretty compelling on that subject –and it helps to contextualise the relative mellowing that has occurred, at least in comparison to the mania of the late 2010s. There was a time when, on Twitter, there was potential for both material and pragmatic gain in semi-professional trolling. Here, pathologically negative people are sort of silently passed by, like the guy I passed in my local supermarket earlier today, who randomly and violently punched the shelf of chilled coffee bottles for some reason, scaring a handful of pensioners. The bottles toppled from the shelf. The man was evidently furious and not dealing well with same. He might blame the coffee, or the shelf, but the rest of us have to presume that kind of rage is something he walked in with.
In a legacy and general social media context, there are a lot of iced coffee-punchers. This is why Substack has been such a haven for people who make considered things out of words or images or sounds and nudge them out into the online ether. I have worked in newspapers and magazines for a long time now, and that game is a very different one. I once had a senior editor contact me to ask that I write an article on some controversial topic or other, saying something along the lines of “I count on you for a contrarian point of view”. It made me feel mildly nauseated. I have never written anything to be contrary – I write what I actually think and reserve the right to change my mind with new information.
Sometimes my perspective gels with consensus opinion and sometimes it doesn’t. I’d imagine that’s true for most of us. What was concerning in this instance was the idea that this editor was deliberately contacting me in the belief that I would provide a non-consensus opinion because that is what would help get the publication the eyeballs it needed that week. Anyone who thinks media doesn’t work this way is naïve, and yet the fact that it so often (though not always) does is profoundly depressing. Publishing multiple sincere perspectives on issues of public interest is critically important. However, I would like to believe that no one claims an opinion in public or otherwise that they don’t actually hold. That is surely a minimum requirement for ethical journalism – or any non-fiction writing.
While I have been swaddled here on Substack, writing for an audience of readers who have electively subscribed and presumably being ignored by the many people who understandably just aren’t interested in what I’m doing here, I’ve continued working in media in other contexts. Substack is my primary source of income these days, which remains astonishing (and I’m so grateful to everyone who pays for my work, shares it or finds value in it) but it is still not quite making enough to cover costs and live on. I’m hoping that will change – Peak Notions is not huge by any means but it has grown by more than 6,000 subscribers in the last twelve months alone. Besides, I’ve always been a freelance writer. We live without any job security, in pathological terror of penury or relying too much on any one gig which can disappear with a sudden email or brief phone call, so we invariably have more than one income stream trickling in.
My early career overlapped with the period of peak culture wars mania, when social media was an unrelentingly vicious and unhinged place in terms of trolling. Where there was still major social and status-related traction in attempting to cancel writers and journalists at worst or at best telling them how stupid and valueless they are in the cruellest possible language. I’ve never much minded. I’m from Ireland. Our culture inculcates everyone with a sense of valuelessness as a matter of course. There’s little to be gained from taking it on board. The point is this – there was a period when writing absolutely anything on the internet made somebody, somewhere, incandescently angry, every time. Often many somebodies.
I’ve had the gamut of online abuse and hassle, and understood it to be part of the job, if a weird and less desirable part. As a writer, it generally entails people arguing with a version of an article which doesn’t substantively resemble the one you wrote in any real way. Sometimes the reaction is so objectively disproportionate that you understand instantly that the person is using an imagined version of you as a proxy for something going on in their own life. I once wrote an article discussing why I no longer identify as a feminist and received an email from a woman saying she hoped I was sexually assaulted so I learn the value of equal treatment. She could not imagine the possibility of any argument for gender equality beyond the particular feminist lens through which she saw the world. All I could think was “This seems a smidge excessive. Is everything okay at home?”
When you touch on people’s political or ideological sensitivities on legacy platforms, which have the benefit of connecting a writer with a general audience, they often respond in ways which range from irritated and intrigued to positively unhinged. There are the people of course who disagree and express that politely, and even more I suspect who simply go about their business without feeling any need to communicate their feelings about something they read – or didn’t read – online.
For the last six or seven months, I have been writing a weekly column in the Wednesday edition of The Irish Times, documenting my experience of being a new Irish immigrant in Australia. The global Irish diaspora is gigantic and we have an intimate historical relationship with emigration, making it an evergreen topic for Irish people as well as a major theme in my own life at present. Unfortunately, conditions in Ireland are once again such that people – particularly young people – are leaving in large numbers. Many of them are coming here to Australia; a country generally considered a land of permanent sun and opportunity within Irish culture.
Usually, the column is overwhelmingly uncontroversial. Certainly not a place for contrarian opinion. It’s mostly just me being mildly baffled by basic things on a weekly basis. This is my honest experience of finding myself on the other side of the planet. ‘Magpies here are enormous and possibly have malign sentience’. ‘Someone heard my accent and presumed I was British and it’s both refreshing and annoying to be in a place where the nuances aren’t relevant to anyone but me’. ‘Here’s a particularly interesting fruit I’ve never seen before which has traumatised people in my Instagram DMs’ (pictured below). ‘They have healthcare in Australia – I wonder if the UK has ever considered having any?’ That kind of thing. Uncontroversial. You know yourself.
Buddha’s Hands at my local supermarket
So it’s been a while since I touched a nerve in media at home. I didn’t mean to last week but it apparently happened anyway. It was this article which started the furore. Writers don’t write headlines, and the headline did not help the column to land softly among those sensitive to criticism of my homeland. However, it was an accurate account of what my particular – non-standard – circumstances would look like if I moved home to Ireland now. It would indeed be a return to working nightly until 10pm and later as I did for years in both Dublin and London as a freelancer. There is no other way to make freelance life work in my situation. It would mean a total inability to afford a home of my own (like many of my generation) and a return to the terrible chain coffee that fuelled me through working days in both Dublin and London. Australia is as flawed as everywhere else but the coffee is sublime. They invented the flat white. Any notions person must respect that.
Here on Substack, writers have a direct relationship with the subscribers who support them. Generally, this is a lovely thing. It has its minor elements of darkness; I suspect more frequently for female writers. There have been a very small number of people who I’ve removed from my subscriber lists after strange or inappropriate interaction. One guy who sent me hundreds of Instagram DMs – the clincher was when he sent more than ninety of them in the course of a single night. I woke up to them one morning, horrified, and booted him without reading them. The environment here is collegial, friendly and interactive. I’m pretty ruthless in protecting that. I can be – it’s my space, after all.
The direct relationship with readers necessitates reading comments on Substack articles, which are very rarely anything but scrupulously polite and well-intended, even when someone takes the time to disagree with something I’ve written. My favourite aspect of Peak Notions is the kindly and curious people who seem to congregate here. I’m not sure how that happened but I deeply value it and constantly benefit from reader comments – new information, reading recommendations and just good old fashioned human connection. People here are clever, warm and open-minded. They tend not to be reactive, ungenerous or (usually) likely to send me hundreds of unanswered Instagram DMs. It is unremittingly lovely here. Most of the time engaging with readers is a joy.
But here is the thing about writing outside Substack. I don’t read the comments. Ever. I generally don’t read tweets I’m tagged in anymore and rarely respond to any communication unless someone has taken the time and effort to write me an email outlining their grievance with something I’ve written. I only know that an article has had a weird and intense impact when the emails start coming or I get a message from a friend reading ‘You okay?’ or ‘Have you seen the reaction to your article?’ There is a philosophical dilemma in writing online in the era of Substack, where writer engagement is – to an extent, but not an unlimited one – something to which subscribers (especially paid subscribers) are entitled. The middle figure of an editor or a publisher is removed. It is just writer and reader with nothing in between. That is unprecedented on the scale of Substack, and it changes the relationship between the person writing and the person reading. It reifies it in a new way. Older forms of media still have that divide and, given the climate, it’s needed.
I don’t think that something I’ve written is bad if it annoys strangers on the internet. I don’t think it’s good if strangers on the internet like it. As a writer, I need engagement. Writing is given meaning through the reading but there is not an objectivity to how valuable it is. This is not something anyone else can clutch in their fist and drop into my hand. I have spent my life working to see value in what I like and enjoy whether or not that value is reflected back. I’ve worked to see that the emotional response of others to something they read is not an objectivity they find inside the writing but an addendum they staple onto it.
Criticism that is grounded and constructive is fair but it is in the minority in the genpop of social and legacy media where people will happen upon a piece of writing rather than reading it electively. Most of the criticism in this context boils down to ‘I didn’t like this and it triggered a series of subjective, negative emotions that I now blame you for and wish to vent about’. The solution to disliking something is generally recognising that it may not be for you and simply moving on. I’m aware that this is a level of mental health uncommon to the loud minority of people who spend the majority of their lives expressing anger on social media.
So there is a dilemma in the comments section for writers. You can’t take the praise without the critique (unless you’re a complete arse), but you must delineate some means of separating rational critique from emotional effluent or insanity (and responses to the version of you and your ideas that someone has constructed inside their own mind). There are also questions about whether writing entails reciprocity. Is it possible – or valid – to make something, put it into the world, and then forget about it? Is sharing something tantamount to an invitation for feedback? Of course feedback is how you improve but regardless it is impossible to make a living as a writer without inviting, and to some extent heeding, feedback on your work.
However, reading – especially reading about someone else’s particular experience – might be best compared to listening. It’s taking in someone else’s story. That does provide opportunity for connection but in a world where comments sections are so often full of people treating the space under an article like someone in a conversation just impatiently awaiting their turn to talk, becoming angry when a writer’s particular experience does not identically mirror their own, there must be a sane approach to considering feedback. Some feedback is valuable for the receiver and the giver, and some feedback is noise.
Swaddled here on Substack, it has been a while since I’ve experienced the strangeness that occurs when a lot of people feel very strongly about something you wrote and which they may or may not have actually read. While I was knee deep in ‘are you okay?’ messages from caring friends and a couple of ‘omg it’s the most read article on the site! Are you getting hassle?’ texts something did occur to me – how nice it is to have somewhere to write about that experience, for a reader who is here specifically to read it. To write something that is long by traditional standards, something that breaks the fourth wall, that is just one person’s potentially futile effort to wrap a mind that isn’t fast enough around a changing world that is much, much too fast. How lovely to have a cultural space where people read what they’re interested in and avoid what they’re not, and where readers go into a piece of writing with curiosity, good will and no inclination to punch the iced coffee. That is transformative.
"I’ve worked to see that the emotional response of others to something they read is not an objectivity they find inside the writing but an addendum they staple onto it."
This articulates how I feel about working in a particular bit of the public sector. I need to engage people with the service I run to persuade them that it's of value to them and to get them through the door. It's an archive and local studies service and, you'd think, entirely devoid of controversy. Until you meet with people on social media who are angry and take everything personally. Sometimes in person, too. While I am a person and take a personal approach to my job, I have to work to remember that often, in the eyes of the furious, I am not a person but a representative part of a larger, faceless organisation that has the ability to frustrate. I try to remember this, too, when I am feeling furious at a faceless organisation and need to interact with a person who represents it. It's hard. Anger makes us simultaneously not ourselves and a very very concentrated version of ourselves.
I was also interested by what you say about your relationship with your readers here and with the comments we leave. Interested because it never occurs to me that you or anyone else would do anything more than read what I write. Which now has me pondering why I sometimes feel like I want to comment (often I don't, I'm happy to enjoy my thoughts in my own head). Anywhere, not just here. I think it's that I want whoever I'm responding to to know that what they have said has struck a chord. I'm not expecting a conversation. It's a bit like being on a bus/tram/tube/train and making a momentary connection with a fellow passenger about something seen or heard. It's a passing thing with no expectation of depth, a thing to delight in.
And I'm fully with you on moving on from things that aren't for you without feeling the need to say so.
I'm rambling now. Thank you as always for your writing and the clarity with which you express ideas. I'm so pleased to have made my way to your Substack.
I hold my breath waiting for the invasion of the meatheads who infest every other form of social media. I hope it never comes because Substack so often feels like the beautiful little lake I used to go to with an old girlfriend and her dog. It was covered in water lillies and marsh marigolds and nobody else seemed to know about it and, both spookily and happily, I could never find it when I wasn't with her.