Conflict-Prone

Knebworth, 1996

The internet used to be an endless source of fuel for one of my least admirable traits.

I am conflict-prone and often reactive, a combination of traits that causes me and others around me a lot of grief. It has been a core tenet of my behavior for my entire life and it has made me the ideal type of person to spend all day on the internet.

The dissolution of Twitter as a platform has been fortuitous for me on a personal level. Over the span of many years, I built a large public profile for myself. Some of it was based on the reporting and writing that I worked very hard at, but more often than not, podcast interviewers and acquaintances would comment on my use of Twitter.

Some people seemed to think it was cool that I was, basically, spending all day demonstrating my various pathologies on a public forum. Others (the ones who didn’t express much of an opinion to me at all) seemed to see it as damaging and a waste of my energy.

Twitter, as a platform, held real value for the worst part of me. As my visibility grew, so did the amount of feedback I was getting from people operating in both good faith and bad. This combination allowed me to behave like Veruca Salt in the Grievance Factory. I could argue with so many people over so many things! Twitter was a conveyor belt of reasons to argue.

The truth is, I feel alive in states of conflict. It feels propulsive for me, like detonating all subtext and subtlety to get to the heart of an issue. In reality, the result of anger and conflict is more like detonating a bomb and then attempting to rebuild on its ruins. I can’t say it has always (or even rarely) moved my life forward for the better. Often, the other party just walks away from the ruins.

This dynamic — my own tendency toward anger and arguing combined with the general feeling of empowerment that causes people to say things online that they would never say in person — is something I have been considering quite a bit as Twitter has died. People are looking for new social media spaces. Bluesky seems to be the most promising. But as the platform has grown, it’s clear that the tendency toward internet aggression has migrated along with us, too.

My hope is that, in new internet spaces, we can discard the problems of the old ones. Getting into arguments online is not the path forward. It is antisocial behavior in a world where the internet is allegedly capable of making us more connected.

Trust me, I can say from a burdensome amount of experience that it’s just not worth being an asshole online.