Offline with Jon Favreau - The Worst Tweets of 2022 with Rebecca Jennings

Episode Date: December 18, 2022

Rebecca Jennings, senior correspondent at Vox, talks with Jon about the year’s most chronically online conversations––those seemingly innocuous threads and videos that, for some reason, got people up in arms. Jennings’ recent article “Every ‘chronically online’ conversation is the same,” describes the predictability of people being vilified on social media, and she joins Offline to discuss how much of our thirst for drama is really a thirst for punishment. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

You end up concluding in the piece that these reactions are now so common and so predictable that they've actually become pretty boring. Yeah. Do you have any hope that chronically online discourse may get so boring that we all eventually move on from it? I do, actually. Like, that is something that I think is a positive thing because, like, there are a lot of things that, you know, would have been such bigger deals had they happened like 10 years ago. Like, you know, when something went viral 10 years ago, it was like Rebecca Black Friday that lasted for months.

And now that would have been like an afternoon, you know, like it would have been like stuck to this like niche portion of TikTok or YouTube or whatever. People would have laughed at it. It would have been over. And I think the same thing can be said for these kind of discourses. Like, you know, half of these things and I'm online all the time, like I didn't even hear about them until people dropped them in the tweet. And so I think like, because they happen so often, they'll become just kind of irrelevant the way that they should be, really, which is like, you know, a tiny, tiny percentage of people can read something in the complete, like, opposite way that it's meant to be read. And that becomes its own

conversation. But I think it'll just be increasingly, like, shunted to the side where it belongs. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest this week is journalist Rebecca Jennings, who writes about social media and Internet culture for Vox. A few weeks ago, Rebecca asked Twitter for examples of the most chronically online discourse of 2022. The replies were incredible. A woman who was accused of elitism for tweeting about how much she enjoys drinking coffee with her husband in their garden. Another woman who was attacked as a white savior because she wanted to bring her neighbors chili. A debate about whether telling people to touch grass is ableist. And another debate about whether Anne Frank had white privilege. Now, I am one of the most chronically online

people I know, and somehow I had still missed most of these examples and couldn't believe they were real. They were fun to laugh at and send to friends, but they also made me wonder, who are these people? Why are they posting this shit? Do they represent views that are more widespread than the musings of random internet strangers? And why do the rest of us love to mock and share and even engage with this nonsense? What's wrong with everyone? Fortunately, Rebecca has some answers. She recently wrote a piece for Vox called Every Chronically Online Conversation is the Same.

We talked about why that is, how much of our thirst for drama is really a thirst for punishment, and why she's hopeful that we might finally be ready to move on from caring so much about these very bad tweets. As always, if you have comments, questions, or concerns, please email us at offline at crooked.com. And do please rate, review, and share the show. Here's Rebecca Jennings. Rebecca Jennings, welcome to Offline. Thank you so much for having me. So about a week ago, I saw a tweet from you that said, All right, folks, it's time.

What was the most chronically online discourse you saw this year? Which led to a long thread of replies filled with examples that just shook me to my core. And I'm a chronically online person. You then ended up writing a fantastic piece about this for Vox, which I want to my core. And I'm a chronically online person. You then ended up writing a fantastic piece about this for Vox, which I want to get to. But just to start, for people who don't know, how would you describe chronically online discourse? That's a great question. I would describe chronically online discourse as conversations that can only exist between people who have spent way too much time on

Tumblr and or Twitter, and now increasingly TikTok, where a lot of these kind of chronically online discourses are happening. You know, the stereotype is like, okay, I tweeted about like, a cute thing that I did with my family, maybe. And someone would be like, well, actually, I don't have a family. So how dare you? It's sort of like making a post about something that may not be entirely universal. And then having you be this kind of like villain of their personal story. Because your personal experience did not reflect everyone else's experiences on Twitter or whatever platform this is happening on. Yes.

What were the most popular examples that popped up in your worst of 2022 thread? Yeah, I think by and large, the discourse that has been shortened to just chilly neighbor became kind of the one that and the gist is yeah. Yeah, we have to talk about chilly neighbor because I have to say, again, I'm a chronically online person. I had no, I totally missed the Chili Neighbor thing. And then I went down, because of your thread, I went down a rabbit hole. And I was just like, oh, my God. So, please, go ahead and tell us what Chili Neighbor is.

Sure. So, there's this woman who did, you know, a decently long Twitter thread about how, like how she lives next door to these kind of like frat bros, I would say, who they're constantly ordering food in, like a lot of pizza boxes outside. And she was like, I think like a neighborly thing to do would be like make them some chili and like leave it on their doorstep or whatever, which is like very sweet. How dare she i know how dare she uh and so basically the replies like she already had like a pretty big like fan base online but when once a certain pocket of twitter or whatever platform you're on finds something like this it becomes like open season on whoever is around um so she was told that like she was being insensitive to um people that may

have been autistic and didn't want to deal with the labor of like having to thank her for it uh this the woman who wrote the thread is autistic uh which is right you know which is part of the point yeah key point um she was told that she was uh engaging in like white saviorism i don't think she referenced the race of these frat boys uh but who knows she was told that you know other people have like weird things about cleanliness and how dare you know someone bring over something that they didn't know what was in it or like being presumptuous, essentially like, oh, like people can't feed themselves. So, yeah, it's just very like bastardization of this of this idea that wouldn't be out of place. And like, you know, like portrait of a beautiful socialist, like utopia of like we all make making food for each other.

Like, how great is that? Yeah, like, literally nothing more fundamental in terms of relationships with other people than to, like, treating thy neighbor as you would like to be treated. Wasn't there someone who also was like, what if they don't have bowls? Isn't it insensitive if they don't have bowls? As if she was going to, like, walk over there with, like, chili in her hands. Well, what if they ate with their hands? Yeah, that's right. What's your personal favorite of the last year? Oh my gosh.

I think there was this one thread about how this girl just like randomly tweeted this one thing and it was funny. It was just like, you ever like think, you know, like you see one of your friends and they say they can't cook and you're like, okay, but like, you know, let's cook together. Like, it'll be easy. And then you realize like they literally cannot like chop a tomato. So it's like they really can't do like the bare minimum of cooking. That tweet, it was like a month ago.

Like that tweet was subject to like the most bad faith readings of it. It was sort of like, you know, people with disabilities can't chop food, which is like not what they're talking about. People, you know, weren't given like the time and space growing up to cook. How dare you assume that someone knows how to cook and chops their own vegetables and anything like that. And she ended up having to like respond to all of these.

And you can see like the thread of when she first posted it and she was just like, I'm not going to engage in all this like bullshit replies. Like whatever, y'all can go crazy in their replies. And then you see her start to actually reply because people were making like really, you know, really harsh judgments on her intentions. And she felt like she had to defend herself. So it was just like this complete breakdown of the social contract and her having to engage in it. And it was impeccable. Chopping tomatoes, both elitist and ableist. Yes, correct. I've learned. So there are a few levels of awful in these examples to unpack what you do in the piece. So the first is the group of people who pile on

the person who shares an experience that may not be entirely universal, right? So these are like the initial round of anger replies to the chilly neighbor, or the coffee garden woman. That was another big one. This is where a woman said, I love to sit with my husband and drink coffee in our garden every morning. And everyone was like, what if you don't have a garden? What if you don't have a husband? That's pretty, yeah, so that was a bad one too. Like, who are these people replying and what do you think is going on with them? Like, what is fueling all that rage? So yeah, so I think, you know, doing that Twitter thread, it sort of just like made me feel bad, you know, seeing everyone replying and then, you know, this has become kind of like a contact sport where it's

like, let's see the most chronically online take we can possibly find. And then, like, there's a part of that that is extremely fun and funny and, like, hilarious. The other part of it is, like, you know, when you think about what kinds of people tweet things like making chili for your neighbors is being, like, a white savior or being, you know, ableist or elitist or whatever. Like, you think about what those people are like or what they're doing. Like they're spending a lot of time on Twitter tweeting things that like may or may not have any like grounding in reality or context or they also have like no business talking about it. And, you know, there's probably an element of maybe like loneliness and anger and like rightful anger, right?

Because it's like the world is ableist and like sexism is everywhere and so is classism and racism and like everything. And it permeates like every aspect of our culture. to kind of show their like moral groundedness through little instances of like, like interpersonal instances that do not involve them at all. You're like, you're probably not in like a logical place of mind or, you know, whatever. Are you going through something? Yeah, you're going through something. You know, they might not have, you know, a big world outside of their computer. And it just sometimes feels bad to pile on those people, however insane their takes may

be. I mean, you make the great point that very few people engage in these kinds of arguments offline in real life. Like, if you overheard someone at a party talking about how much they love having coffee with their husband in the garden, like, you wouldn't go tell them their privilege was showing. Right. Like why do you think that is? What do you think it is about social media that makes it so easy to pile on?

Yeah. I mean I think that people don't see the humanity, especially on Twitter and Tumblr, these like faceless platforms where all you're seeing is text for the most part. You don't grasp the same sense of humanity as you would on like a YouTube video or a TikTok where there's like, you know, you feel on TikTok and YouTube, like you're kind of FaceTiming with a friend or you know these people because you know their mannerisms, like you see them physically as another person. Whereas on Twitter, I think especially with people who don't have a lot of followers and they're and they're piling on someone who, like, more followers than them, they get the sense that they're yelling at a celebrity. And it's like, no. Like, these are normal people.

They just happen to have, like, Twitter followings. And, you know, they're probably not making money off of that. They're probably just, like, love to tweet. And so I think there's that element. There's also, you know, this idea that like in the normal world, we have like the natural gatekeepers of time and space. So like to disallow this many people from yelling at one another. Like if we were all, you know, like in a town square or whatever, not to use like the hackiest metaphor or whatever. But like if we were all in a town square fighting about this, it would be a nightmare. Right. And like that, therefore, Twitter is kind of a nightmare.

But like physically, those spaces don't really exist. You know, I talked to Ian Bogost last week about Twitter specifically. And, you know, his theory is we're all just not meant to talk to this many people at once or hear this many people at once. And there are, especially on Twitter, specific functions of the platform that make this kind of pylon easy. Like imagine if you didn't have the quote tweet, right? Like a lot of you're not just replying to the person, you're replying to your people about how you would respond to this person. And you're like blasting it out to everyone that follows you. Therefore, like you get points based off of your reaction to something else.

And so obviously we get rewarded for reacting to these kinds of things that don't necessarily need to be reacted to, but are, you know, there's a human instinct in us to, to dunk on people. Why do you think so much of this chronically online discourse uses sort of the language of social justice to shame people? Because it does seem like those are the ones that really go viral,

at least as I've seen. And it's like, you know, suddenly we're debating whether Anne Frank had white privilege and you're just like, what the right, which was another which was another real one. Yeah, I mean, I think like what social media has done is really allowed people to understand how the world is extremely racist and ableist and sexist and classist. And like that has been such a powerful force of progressive democracy, I would argue. But at the same time, you know, when you're used to having these conversations that can kind of be shut down by like, you know, identity politics or something like that, where it's like, I could never be wrong because I'm a woman or I could never be wrong because whatever. You get the sort of like the bastardization of that kind of conversation

when, you know, you're looking for reasons why you alone are the moral arbiter of this conversation. And that can get really messy when you have people from different sides of, you know, it's just like a constant give and take between like what is acceptable in debate and what isn't. And that's just always going to be there. But I think that there's this moment of, you know, you get brownie points for moral judgment on other people in like this kind of space. And so it incentivizes people to find the thing that makes that person morally suspect and weaponizing against them yeah and it's fraught too because you don't ever want to dismiss accusations of racism or ableism or elitism like out of hand and so these things sort of take on a life of

their own because everyone else is watching and you're like well i don't want to jump in and just you know say just automatically that that person is is out of line there so you just kind of like watch it get out of control which is like brings me to the next point i mean there's another level of online discourse where the even larger group of people jump in to mock the angry replies yeah and i have absolutely been guilty of this myself. Same. But I never really feel great after I do it, you know? And I do wonder if, like, and I sometimes worry about this, if, like, highlighting these bad tweets from a few random strangers just, like, ends up fueling the argument you hear from a lot of right-wing pundits that, like, half the country is too woke. How do you think about that? No, I think that's like such a crucial point here because it's so, so hard to talk or write about these things without coming across as some like, woke culture has gone too far. And like, you know, it's PC, whatever, you know.

And I never, ever want to do that. But it's not nothing. You know, like there is, you know, using the, I think using the language of social justice activism is to kind of defend something that I wouldn't argue is rightful. Like it doesn't like demand this like seriousness of social justice, like language. But my argument would be that it kind of like weakens actual social justice activism, whereas I think a conservative's argument would be like that just means it's all crap and we shouldn't have to listen to them. And so I think people are coming at it from two sides and we both find these people kind of annoying, but for different reasons or for or at least to like achieve different ends. So I try to, you know, make that clear. But yeah, it's at a certain point, it's like, okay, you're dunking on a disabled person who's really angry about something that they perceive to be ableist. It's like, is this my fight? Not really. It's like, I don't need to, you know,

however many times I've been yelled at on Twitter for being, quote unquote, ableist. It's like, I have no desire to dunk on those people further because a i don't really want to get people to be angry at me but also just because like i do have a privilege over them being a non-disabled person it's like it's you know it's it's not not worth to punch down you know right well and then there's the question is this tweet just an individual tweet opinion from one person who as we said may be going through something or is this indicative of a larger set of beliefs that's out there and a lot of times i think social media especially twitter sort of obscures whether that opinion is representative of something larger or just a single opinion and if it's a single opinion then

it's like what are we really wasting our time on? Yeah, exactly. And I think like the reason that these conversations are called chronically online is because they're not mainstream. They are extremely centered to these platforms where these things are incentivized. And so, yeah, like this is for the most part when someone calls me whatever, it's like I know that this is a really small sliver of the population who is not representative of what most people actually think when they're reading something. And I think like that, that kind of warped sense of other people's reactions

to our work or our posts is doing nothing good for discourse i always think about this tweet that uh you know twitter is 90 someone imagining a guy tricking themselves into believing that guy exists and then getting mad about it now these are a little different because these are actual examples but there is this tendency and i think it's on both the left and the right and just cross the political spectrum to just go online whether it's on Twitter or some other platform, and really want to get angry. Yeah. Oh, my God. And you're sort of like looking for reasons to get angry. And a lot of times these tweets, these chronically online tweets, like give us somewhere safe to land.

We can all be angry about this now. It's like, why do we want to be that angry? I know. And I think like, you know, there's a really good piece on this from the writer P.E. Moskowitz, where it's called Fuck Puritanism. And it's sort of about like the Marxist theory that like as things get materially worse, we become more sensitive to like moral transgressions and want to like be the arbiter of what's okay to say or do or be and what isn't. And I think like people who are, feel out of control in their finances or in their life in any other ways, because like, obviously society is insane right now. Um, like they latch onto things that they can, you know,

feel okay about, which is like, I am a good person. I know I'm right. But, and by saying that you are wrong, that makes me feel better and i think that really has a lot to do with the type of guy syndrome where it's like i bet there's someone who's mad at me for enjoying this walk right now and like there probably is but like thinking about that person isn't helping anybody so yeah i have a theory that like not really an innovative theory, but that the pandemic made all this worse because we were all like, oh, yeah, trapped at home and people were feeling a little lonely. And then the world that you come in contact with every day is just

all of these people yelling at everyone else. And that becomes contagious. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. So I think like this story that I wrote, you know, last week, it's a continuation of a story I wrote in at the end of 2020, which kind of like the be all end all of our connection with people and so we got like you know the the black squares to you know to to say that we're good white people and you get the apologies from brands that are just like in these cutesy aesthetics you get like those infographics that are adorable but have misinformation in them uh and you get these same kind of chronically online discourses it It was like, is infinite jest a sign that your man is terrible? It's like, oh, my God, it's a great book. Sorry, that's my pet topic.

We all have them. We all have them. You know, we talked a lot about Twitter, and this is a problem that is, you know, special to Twitter. But you've seen this on TikTok, too, right? You were just saying and like, is there any difference in the type of online discourse you get there or on Tumblr? And does this happen on other platforms? Yeah, I would say that, you know, Twitter's user base is quite a bit older on average than TikTok. And obviously TikTok isn't just, you know, young people, but you do get a lot more responses from people who, you know, were maybe like raised on

Tumblr and now they're on TikTok without maybe ever having gone to Twitter at all. And so you get a lot of like, I mean, this is maybe just like what my TikTok shows me, but it's a lot of like young women discourse that is kind of like, is Lana Del Rey a TikTok shows me, but it's a lot of like young women discourse that is kind of like, is Lana Del Rey a feminist? But like, they're not actually like that, but they sort of boil down to these kinds of things. It's very heavy on, you know, feminism, body image, womanhood, lifestyle, things like that,'s it's so much more visual than twitter so i think you get a lot more discussion of aesthetics and presentation as you would on twitter which i would argue is more about like ideas and like philosophy didn't west elm caleb start on tiktok it sure did um so yeah somehow that happened this year in january uh a girl on

tiktok was just like she was you know made, made a little TikTok about how this guy that she had a good date with ghosted her. And then she said, I think she said his name. And then someone in the comments was like, oh my God, like, I think I went out with that guy too. And they all like, you know, made a couple of videos just being like, yeah, he sucks, like whatever. And then it kind of spiraled out of control. And I don't think it was really the fault of the original women. It was just like people kind of projecting their own type of guy syndrome onto this guy who turned into like West Elm Caleb because he worked at West Elm. And then he became like the most hated man on the Internet just because he like, you know, ghosted and sent a dick pic. And it's like, OK, have you ever dated in New York, honey? Like this is what it is.

No, you know, lest we think Twitter is the only bad platform. Right, right. Or the only platform where something like this can happen. Don't worry. You can get that kind of mob everywhere. You end up concluding in the piece that these reactions are now so common and so predictable that they've actually become pretty boring. Yeah. Do you have any hope that chronically online discourse may get so boring

that we all eventually move on from it? I do, actually. Like, that is something that I think is a positive thing because, like, there are a lot of things that, you know, would have been such bigger deals had they happened, like, 10 years ago. Like, you know, when something went viral 10 years ago, it was, like, Rebecca Black Friday. That lasted for months. And now that would have been, like, years ago. Like, you know, when something went viral 10 years ago, it was like Rebecca Black Friday that lasted for months. And now that would have been like an afternoon, you know, like it would have been like stuck to this like niche portion of TikTok or YouTube or

whatever. People would have laughed at it. It would have been over. And I think the same thing can be said for these kind of discourses. Like, you know, half of these things and I'm online all the time, like I didn't even hear about them until people drop them in the in the tweet. And so I think like because they happen so often, they'll become just kind of irrelevant the way that they should be, really, which is like, you know, a tiny, tiny percentage of people can read something in the complete like opposite way that it's meant to be read. And that becomes its own conversation. But I think it'll just be increasingly shunted to the side where it belongs.

Yeah, because we've got to hit a saturation point at some point, which feels like we're hitting. Speaking of moving on, how are you feeling about Elon's Twitter these days? Are you getting ready to leave? Or do you plan to, in the words of one chronically online tweet stand your ground like a ukrainian oh no yes so good excellent tweet that was that was unbelievable i'm like that person has spent too much time well it's funny like i actually have probably tweeted more maybe but i think i go on it less I I really haven't seen any of the bugs that people

have complained about or I I've seen an uptick in like spammy dms but nothing like heinous or you know not an uptick in harassment or anything like that to me it's kind of just twitter but messier um and yeah I I'll continue being there and probably until my, you know, hands fall off and I can't, but it's fine. I think it'll just like become increasingly irrelevant. I don't think it's going to like blow up one day. I don't think it's going to blow up. I will probably be one of the people turning the lights off there.

Um, and I also haven't noticed, like the only thing I've noticed that's changed is that the main character is Elon now. Yeah, totally. Who's like, who's somehow turning out to be an even worse main character than Trump was. I know. Like Trump was a much more dangerous figure since he was president of the United States and like, you know, had the new codes. But Elon Musk is like both annoying and boring. And it's like, what are we all talking about this guy all day long for?

I know. like both annoying and boring and it's like what are we all talking about this guy all day long for i know he's just like turned into like a like a reactionary conservative and it's like okay find another place but i do think that like at the same time it is kind of funny to see the elon heads or like former elon heads start to realize that like oh this guy is a psycho like he's a nut and he should not be a billionaire or in charge of anything much less you know something like twitter or a car company or a rocket company he is chronically online he is he is he is a chronically online person who is clearly going through something yeah and like i but i i do not have empathy for him that's like that's one guy that i feel zero empathy no he's he but he is like the exactly this type of person the only difference is he's like one of the richest people in the world and now owns the fucking platform

I read that you uh didn't grow up online that you were introduced to internet culture as an adult what did you see that made you want to write about it instead of like you know moving off the grid and getting a burner phone uh well I think the the truth is is that truth is that as someone who I've written since I was five, little stories, whatever, and a lot of writing is just about human observation. And there's no better place to observe humanity than on the internet where you don't even have to leave your house. So I think that's part of it. And you just see the breadth of the human experience online in a way that, yeah, you can't necessarily do in real life. You're kind of fenced in by your immediate surroundings. Yeah, no, I hear that.

I was like a social major in college and I feel like there is no better window into all of the upsides and mostly downsides of humanity than studying people's behavior. Exactly. Rebecca Jennings, thank you so much for joining Offline. Fantastic piece. Everyone go check it out and check out that thread as well. It's both infuriating, but mainly enjoyable. And I had a lot of fun reading it. Thank you so much for having me. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher.

Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Amelia Montooth, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Narmel Konian, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.