On Criticism, Conformity, and Why Following Someone Isn't An Endorsement

Inbox gremlins are trying to dictate my principles again...

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As a small-potatoes writer (that isn’t merely a slur based on my nationality but a simple fact), I don’t get enormous engagement in the form of emails and messages but like all of us, I live as much online as in material reality. There are many rules of the internet, all of them quite depressing if given too much thought. There’s Poe’s Law, which suggests that without obvious indicators of humour or sarcasm, both of which are clearly relative, parodies can (and will) be mistaken for sincere beliefs. There’s longstanding Rule 34, which states that ‘if it exists, there is porn of it’. That one really is better not to overthink — it will lead you to dark places. Or weirdly titillating ones, or both, depending on your personal inclination.

The rule I’ve been considering this week is that people are generally more forthcoming with negative feedback than positive online, as in material reality. They are more likely to email or message a stranger with a demand, a critique or a gripe than they are to say ‘I enjoyed that video you made about pandas’ or ‘this caesar salad recipe came out perfectly the first time I tried it, and if it hadn’t it would more likely have been my fault than the that of the writer or the New York Times Cooking Website. We’re more likely to say ‘The salmon at this restaurant was overcooked (subtext: I arrived for my mother-in-law’s birthday dinner filled with resentment and everything would have tasted like salted earth regardless) than to leave positive feedback. More likely to take to the keyboard after finishing a book we hated or found wanting than one we loved.

We are often spurred into action more readily by anger, or its gobbier cousins sanctimony and ego, than compassion or delight or other less bloviating or caustic forms of emotion. When we love something, we are more likely to quietly savour it as a small miracle. To hold it gently to our chest like a fragile, precious wonder than to yell about it online. We might tell our friends but usually we’ll go on about our day without any key-mashing. Without purpling over.

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A comment under a recipe for mushroom bourguignon… @nytimescookingcomments on Instagram

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I don’t get an overwhelming amount of feedback on my writing. It’s generally a few emails and messages each week, and a proportion of them are lovely. Kind. People taking time out of their one finite life to tell me something positive, or to share something well-intended and generous about their own experience because they felt a connection to something I wrote. That is a glimmering thing in an often grubby internet. It may even disprove my cantankerous point above to a degree. The world is full of goodness and positivity. The negative stuff is louder though, partly because we’re more attuned to it and partly because it really is just louder. Balanced, considered ideas sort of melt into the background when juxtaposed against political fanaticism, coercive impulses and pornography that melds the triumvirate of niche interests that are custard, medieval cosplay and extreme cold-weather tobogganing (see Rule 34 above).

All that is to say this — the feedback I do get is often negative. I read almost all of it. I respond to almost none of it, especially when it is unconstructive or clearly in bad faith. The exception here is old fashioned emails from readers when I write for newspapers - responding is kind of part of the gig so I’ll usually send one response email. When they get back again, as the most unreasonable email critics generally do if their unreason does not instantly cause you to roll over and die, I’ll delete their second email without reading it. Because this isn’t a relationship and we aren’t pen pals. We’re not ‘in a dialogue’ — you’ve just emailed in response to my logically sound, nuanced argument to tell me that having a baby is my civic duty and that’s that, actually, or that I should write your opinion on Irish politics rather than mine. This is not valuable, charitably-intended criticism. It is spraying your frustration into the wind like a randy alley cat with anger issues. Sometimes I just borrow (with attribution, of course) writer Shirley Jackson’s response, which is the best possible retort to someone who elects to read your work and then feels annoyed with a writer as though they’ve been coerced into something terrible — “if you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree”.

Some emails are lovely, but still I limit the amount of correspondence I engage in with people I don’t know. Doing this seems entirely reasonable, sane and necessary. That is my system. It works for me. When feedback comes, good or bad, I’m neither undone by imperious or abusive emails, or hinging my self-esteem on kind and complimentary ones.

This week alone I got eight unsolicited messages from women telling me (some politely asking me) to unfollow mma fighter Conor McGregor on social media after a jury at Dublin’s High Court found that McGregor assaulted Nikita Hand by raping her in a Dublin hotel in 2018. The civil case was very bravely fought by Hand, who pursued justice against the odds under huge emotional and financial strain. I sincerely hope that the result will change Irish culture and influence Irish law for the better. It’s heartening to see the public conversation it has generated, especially in more traditionally male-dominated environments like mma media. These are precisely the environments where change will have most impact. Women are not generally the perpetrators of this sort of crime, so there is only so much change that can come about from women talking to one another about gender-based and sexual violence. Women are tired of having to talk about it.

The campaign which saw women encouraging mutuals to unfollow McGregor on social media this week was designed in part to limit his social media reach and thereby his platform and earning power. That makes sense (if we overlook the fact that the majority of McGregor’s followers and those most likely to buy a product based on his endorsement are unlikely to be women like me, but more often men). Regardless, two things occur here. The first is that I still write for Irish newspapers, so keeping up to date with prominent Irish figures (particularly those at the epicentre of such a gigantic, culturally important news story) is sort of in the job description. In the name of information, I follow a lot of people and organisations on social media without offering them a personal endorsement. Without considering them valid moral agents or thinking they’re good people.

The Ayatollah Khamenei, for one. Not a great guy. Definitely a misogynist of the worst possible kind. I follow a number of representatives of religions I don’t practice and organisations I don’t endorse. Writers I think are hacky or unscrupulous, academics I think are misguided or silly, actors whose politics I think are performative, thoughtless and disingenuous, politicians who I consider unethical and odious, news outlets I don’t respect, experts whose expertise I doubt and more than one person I very much consider to be a bona fide criminal. I also follow Monty Don, who is a British national treasure and who writes very soothing books about gardening, but that’s beside the point.

The second factor here is that I’m not unfollowing anyone because someone else has decided what it means for me to do so or not to, and that following them on social media can only mean one thing. While the request (when made politely) might be well intended, it’s not well considered, and so I’m not doing it.

Readers do not come here to Peak Notions to read the work of someone who responds obediently when told (or asked) to think and behave primarily according to the reasoning of other people. Here, we think about things ourselves. The fact that we are, collectively speaking, so pressured to absorb ideas uncritically is what led me here in the first place, in all my irritation and irascibility. At Peak Notions, we come to conclusions based on our own beliefs and principles, and we reject flat, inherited thinking. If that means we think differently to one another, I assure you that the world will not implode and we don’t need to dehumanise one another to square that circle. We can both be well intended, compassionate human beings who are not merely misinformed dullards, and we can still reach a different conclusion. That’s okay. We can agree on an ideal end but differ on how best to get there. We can disagree on everything, or most things, and find value in one another.

Sure, you could look at the fact that I follow the ‘supreme leader of Iran’ on Twitter and think ‘she endorses bundling women into vans and torturing them when they go out with their hair uncovered or remove their clothing in public!’ ‘She is clearly in favour of Iranian students being imprisoned or expelled when they criticise the regime!’ ‘She’s all about that Iranian authoritarianism. Absolutely loves unquestioning deference to a coercive authority!’ And of course you’d be right. I’m very much against freedom of expression and think Iran does not go far enough with the misogyny stuff. It should be like Afghanistan, that uptight, medieval utopia. Those lads really know how to keep women quiet.*

I regularly receive emails from readers who praise me for advocating a counter-narrative or refusing to take a particular stance on X issue when it becomes the ‘popular’ social or political talking point of the day, and who will then email me later when something else is the popular talking point to express their deep and personal disappointment that I’m not on the bandwagon with their stance on Y. Y is their pet issue, which is of course objective and on which everyone should have only one valid view or they are a bad person with bad intentions, or a moron.

I’ve been writing the following for years now but it bears repeating for the people expressing disappointment or trying to exert pressure over various issues they care about in my DMs or my email inbox. Or for anyone new here (hello - you’re welcome even if you think I’m wrong!) It’s easy to tolerate questions or dissent or indifference, or a difference of opinion, means or ends when it comes to issues you don’t personally care about. It’s only when you care that it actually matters. How you think about people who don’t reflect your precise ideas back at you is a measure of your moral and intellectual maturity, not how quickly you can dismiss or demonise someone who won’t comply with your ideas.

So much of this stuff — this expressing disappointment in people we don’t know for failing to live up to our entirely constructed idea of who they should be — is a misguided attempt to make sense of an overwhelming and depressing digital reality. It is easier to encourage (or attempt to coerce) strangers online to conform to the idea of them constructed entirely in our head than it is to exert control over ourselves or to accept the overwhelming ideological chaos of the time we live in. It is an attempt to impose order in a disordered universe, because disorder makes us uncomfortable. You’re disappointed in me, SusanBarbaraKaren/JohnJamesJeremy? Okay, but I am not responsible for maintaining a frictionless veil between your internal tranquility and the delusions you construct to maintain it. Who I am in your mind is, frankly, none of my business.

An irascible week indeed. And I didn’t even tell you about the Irish woman who emailed to tell me to stop writing critically about Ireland. ‘People just want you to write about the lovely beaches in Australia’, she wrote, sniffily.

I live in Canberra. It’s inland.

So yes. You are so welcome here, whether or not you agree with me on every issue. I will not reflect your preferred version of reality back at you. Peak Notions has never been about that. Even if it were possible for me to maximise your comfort by mirroring your opinion in a disordered world, and even if I knew how to do that, I wouldn’t do it. I respect your intellectual capacity and your experience, which is necessarily different to mine. Besides, the online landscape is already overly tailored to serve us affirmation. To feed us more of the same. To cater to our niche interests (Rule 34).

This isn’t the place for that. We’re doing something else here. I hope you’ll stick around for it. If you don’t I can respect that:

‘If you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree.’

*remove all their rights and pass a law mandating them to be quiet. Also, before you email me, reread the reference to Poe’s Law above please.