There Are No Girls on the Internet - Mikki Kendall built her career on Twitter. Here’s where she’s going next.

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

When writer, cultural critic and OG Twitter icon Mikki Kendall created the viral hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, she changed the face of online feminism.   Ten years later she looks back on where the platform, and all of us, are headed.   Mikki’s MIT Tech Review Piece: I made it big on Twitter. Now I don’t think I can stay: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/28/1062414/elon-musk-leaving-twitter-solidarity-is-for-white-women-virality/   Mikki’s NPR response about #SolidarityisForWhiteWomen (and NPR’s apology:) https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/05/219278156/twitter-feminism-and-race-who-gets-a-seat-at-the-table   SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PATREON FOR AD FREE BONUS CONTENT: PATREON.COM/TANGOTISee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your

business. Call 844-844-I-Hart. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. Timbo, in every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headline. And we're going straight to the source, the athletes themselves. Their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear. Listen to Sports Slice on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Sliced Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. To support there are no girls on the internet and get ad-free bonus content, subscribe to you. to our Patreon. Big thanks to Melina, Valerie M, Karen J, Chadenfreude, and CDE for being our first few patrons. Join us at patreon.com slash tangoity or check the link in our description. I was having a conversation in the moment and then it became a conversation of the moment. There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative.

I'm Bridget Todd and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. So to really understand where we're headed next when it comes to platforms and internet discourse, we first need to really understand and reckon with where we've been. And that need is incredibly salient when it comes to online feminist discourse. Back in 2013, online feminism was still in its girl boss era. It was the era of Leslie Knope and notorious RBG t-shirts bought on Etsy. Well meaning, sure, but first, but first of, perhaps not the most inclusive.

Would it champion black women, poor women, trans women? And if these women were justifiably angry about not having been included in the movement, would that brand of feminism make room for that anger? Ten years ago, writer Mickey Kendall had had enough. She started the hashtag Solidarity is for White Women on Twitter, and it took off in a way that's almost kind of hard to imagine here in 2023. Solidarity is for white women was meant to pull.

pull back the curtain and expose the ways that white feminism had left so many black and brown women to fend for ourselves. In exposing this, Mickey Kendall changed the face of online feminism. But it didn't necessarily make her well-liked by the people she was calling out. But for Mickey, if being liked by everyone is the cost of being able to speak her truth, then it's not worth it. I was the most unpopular, popular girl in feminism. And I know how that sounds. But it was like I was the mean black girl of sixth grade. And it was hilarious to me because I have a life offline and I have friends and things like that.

But the things that I could say to make people mad that were perfectly innocuous, everyone wanted me to know relatively regularly of that like RBJ. shirt, whatever, kind of into feminism. So that I was never going to write for Jezebel. I was killing my career or whatever. Everyone would be to know these things. And the whole time I worked for the federal government. Like, I had a regular job.

So I wasn't sure what career I was killing, right, by saying things. And then I had all of these black and brown and all of these other people who were fine. We got along great. But there was like a small core group of predominantly white, not entirely, a predominantly white feminists who really wanted me to know that I was mean to them at regular intervals. And I understood the performance on display. And then I just was like, well, I guess you're going to get your feelings here today says, you'll be all right.

In 2013, MPR does a piece about the hashtag Mickey created. They include responses from prominent online feminists, including a white feminist Kendall specifically called out for failing to show up for black women. Now, the piece was a response to something that she, created, but they didn't even include her. There was pushback, so much so that NPR was forced to to address the oversight, saying, Kendall kicked it off, and we should have asked Kendall to participate from the beginning. That was our mistake. NPR eventually invites Kendall to participate in the conversation, where she writes, this is a conversation after conflict, because sometimes the

political is personal. Now, there's really no way to engage with conflict as a black woman publicly without the stigma of angry or mean clinging to you wherever you go like smoke. A year later, Mickey is back at NPR as part of a feminist roundtable in the wake of a piece examining whether online feminism is too toxic, too mean. And in fact, a big part of the piece examines whether Mickey herself is mean or not. One of the questions that comes up is basically, Mickey, do you think that you're a bully? And your answer is spot on. You're basically like, you know, can people feel however they're going to feel about the things I have to say and the frustrations that I have?

Sure. But we're also at a time when people are being ducks, trans people are being threatened. Your answer almost kind of feels like looking into this crystal ball of horrible things to come where we have people who are, you know, losing their rights, being threatened, being killed. And there's always going to be this subsection of people who are like, Are they being nice enough about it, though, when they talk about it? So, funny story, that roundtable happens basically because the internet bullied NPR. And not even the I bullied NPR, the internet bullies NPR, right? So there's that.

And then because NPR was going to have that roundtable about me, without me, if that makes sense. And there's been several things already. And I was astonished at how just stupid the complaints were. And like, listen, I'm never going to tell you I'm a nice person, right? I actually explicitly tell people, if I had a brand, it would be affable asshole, right? But also, it took absolutely nothing in an era of doxing of harassment to hurt the feelings of some of these people. And I do mean saying, well, no, you're wrong.

that's a really shitty thing to say and they were like, you are so mean to me. Okay, you're still wrong. Cry about it and we're still going to talk about how you're fucking up right here. And it is like this forecast of how we get here, right? Where instead of us having what would be a perfectly normal conversation,

like that we were putting in a perfectly normal conversation about what is happening politically. We spend a lot of time, years, in fact, on whether or not it was being said civilly enough, politely enough. We needed to work with people who were big. It's all of this stuff about, you know, coddling assholes that I still am not clear where it was supposed to get us because it seems to have gotten us here.

And now the same people who said it was important not to say these things are going, how did we get here? Well, Susan, it started with you saying that it was perfectly okay to not fight for people to have workplace protections if they were trans, right? We had to hear all about your gender criticism or your discomfort with knowing that people that were not, you exist. And so that's how we end up here. And then on top of that, you had this, like, wild and wacky idea than anyone who pushed back needed to do so with a plate of cookies and a cup of warm milk

and ask you daintily pretty, pretty pleased to care about someone's human rights. So now we're here. Well, I do think that it's kind of gotten us to where we are today and where we might be headed in the future. You know, so much of this kind of both sides, ask nicely, coddling rhetoric,

your work does a great job of calling out institutions and individuals with power who maybe do have good intentions and that maybe, you know, I admire or like, but that can let cozy relationships that they have dictate who gets included and who gets left out. You know, if I'm an NPR editor, maybe I'm just reaching out to folks in my network,

the folks that I have an existing relationship with without really seeing or examining how that choice ends up shaping who gets to have a voice and can result in something like someone being excluded from a conversation they started. Oh, and it's funny because I remember at the time people kept saying things like that and I kept not even arguing, but I kept pointing out that the, well, I knew them, I didn't know you of

at all meant that if you all went to the same school or you hung out in the same circles, how are you then expert to anyone else's experience if the only people you talked to were your neighbors, right? It was fascinating to watch because I knew, as several people now know, that if you are talking about some of this class of feminists, they're married to hedge fund managers or whatever. They come from money, right? And I knew back then, and obviously now, that some of the conversations we were having around race and class, it was like I was having a conversation with someone who had both their hands tied behind their back in terms of comprehending the stakes because they've never been poor. I don't think I ever really thought about the way that feminism and what it was and who it was for had been largely defined by this like white, this like very well-meaning, white, comfortable white lady class, you know?

And like, I don't think until, honestly, I think it was really your hashtag Solidary is for Right Women that like broke something open in our culture that allowed us to see it and give us a language and point to it and talk about it and really start confronting it. It's funny. One of the people, when that hashtag happened, one of them said, I wonder how the world is going to feel when they realize the person who changed the face of feminism also likes cat gifts on Tumblr. And I just about died laughing and I was like, well, what can I tell you? I'm a woman of many tastes or something like that. And honestly, what happens is that we kept talking around the circles of feminism, right, around the idea that all women mattered, but some women matter more kind of an approach. And that some women matter more was never explicitly stated, but it was obvious that that was the attitude, right? because if it wasn't for that, we could talk about poverty.

We could talk about police brutality or gun violence or any of these other topics, not as it relates to the suburbs or as it relates to, you know, Manhattan, but as it relates to the entire rest of the country. And I think one of the reasons that the conversation resented so much, too, because a lot of the women who wrote out kind of defending me when, like, people were like, oh, she's being divisive, were low-income white women who are like, this is the first time anybody has acknowledged we exist in forever and that we can be feminist and that things are happening to us that are not happening to you, right?

Like when we have those conversations around anti-intellectualism in America, and that's definitely a problem, but I also understand how it's so easy to create if all you hear from the most prominent intellectuals who look like you is that you don't exist. Or at least you don't exist enough for them to care about what's happening to you, except to blame you for, you know, how you vote or whatever. Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite.

Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Street or Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart.

Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in.

I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise. Breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves. Their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaders to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context, and ask the questions everybody wants answered.

Sports slice brings you closer to the action, with stories told by the people who live there. them. Listen to SportsSlic on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Sliced Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. And we're back. Mickey was prompted to start Solidarity as for white women in the aftermath of the downfall of Hugo Schweitzer, a college professor, blogger, and self-described male feminist who wrote about feminism at feminist sites like Jezbo. Now, back then, Schweitzer was kind of a big deal in online feminist spaces. He branded himself as a bad boy turned feminist.

And on his blog, wrote about his struggles with addiction, sleeping with his college students, and trying to murder his girlfriend by turning on a gas stove in their house. It was feminism that turned him around and made him see the error of his ways, so he claimed. Black women, as we so often are, were skeptical of his rise to feminist quasi-stardom, and even more skeptical of the white feminist online spaces that welcomed him.

He had a penchant for attacking these black women. women online. But none of this, not trying to murder his girlfriend or attacking black women, kept him from building up a platform or being welcomed in mostly white feminist spaces. Late night on August 9, 2013, Schweizer has what he describes as a meltdown. In a succession of rapid fire confession tweets, he admits to all of this. He tells black feminists who had been warning about his behavior, you were right, I was awful to you because you were in the way. He also admits that he did not have the credentials to be teaching college courses on feminism and that he, quote, built his career as a well-known online male feminist on fraudulent pretenses.

Now, while this was all going down, white feminists who were friendly with Schweitzer expressed worry about his mental health and future job prospects. But where was the concern for the black women that he admitted attacking online? Where was the concern for the students that he admitted having inappropriate sexual relationships with? Where was the accountability for letting someone like Schweitzer rise up in the ranks of online feminism? None of it set right with Mickey. Solidarity is for white women, she tweeted. And it was like she had broken something open.

What started as Mickey's response to the movement overlooking black women became a rallying cry, exposing all the tensions and fractures in feminist spaces online. Do you think if you tweeted, Solidarity is for white women today in 2023, it would take off the way that it did back in 2013? I think in theory it could, but in execution, what will happen is that Twitter will suppress the hashtag.

Because the other reason I think solidity's what happens is that it is at the beginning of the concept of hashtags as a call to action. So Twitter didn't know what to do with me. Most of the viral hashtag phenomenon hadn't started yet. I'm not

saying I actually started it, but I'm one of the very early ones where that happened organically. And Twitter didn't know it had either. Twitter was still figuring itself out, right? Like if you were on Twitter in 2009, you remember a very different Twitter than Twitter of today. Right. When the hashtag happened, it was still kind of like the Wild Wild West in turn of the algorithm. Because Twitter was still trying to figure out how to make the algorithm work for advertising revenue for all of these things. it was still mostly third-party clients making Twitter even a usable experience.

Twitter had to buy everybody that made Twitter possible to use. When you first started it, did you create it thinking this is going to crack things open, this is going to hit on something, or were you just having a moment of frustration? I was pissed off the,

I know you are playing in my face of it all, right? I got very, to be honest, San Detroitman comes out of a very south side of Chicago, you are fucking with my friend and you are playing in my face. And I don't know who you think you're lying to, but like, let's be real here, right? This is before the invention of the phrase be fucking for real as a popular thing. But it was basically that.

And then in the moment, I figured I would say what I had to say. I think I fired off probably like 100 tweets because Twitter was still doing that thing where they rate limit you if you tweet too much and too small a period of time. And so I did all those tweets. It turned into this weird, juggernautish thing. 2013 was a different time on Twitter. You know, it was the platform where one-off tweets could become big news stories or global movements. Solidarity is for white women allowed Mickey to access platforms that previously had been closed to her.

Before, maybe an editor might have just assigned the coverage of the hashtag that she created to whoever they had on staff, or maybe just invited whoever was already in their network to talk about it. But now things were different. Not only was Mickey exposing the lack of inclusion in online feminism, but also she was pointing out the lack of inclusion in who gets to tell the story about it. And where before her voice was included late, almost as an afterthought to something that she created, now it was unignorable.

Her voice, full of all that truth and righteous anger, had to be included in the conversation. She remembers it as a defining moment. Like, it was one of those really bizarre moments that probably could not happen now in the same way. Because now everybody knows what you say on social media matters. Now everybody does a lot of like careful PR constructing interns tweeting for you. But at the time, we were all just kind of using Twitter and thinking of it is not necessarily shouting into the void, but as just, you know, this will have. happen now and then it will be ephemeral and go away and none of these things will really matter.

We were wrong. None of the people using social media, early social media that got it to where it is now, understood what we were doing. I'm not even going to say that I understood what I was doing. I was having a conversation in the moment and then it became a conversation of the moment for many topics, right? and then piled into all of that, there's this thing where like a lot of places that had previously seemingly been impossible for anyone to write for, were saying we are missing this conversation. We wanted part of this conversation.

And when they reached out to the people they were used to reaching out to, most of them didn't have a clue what was going on. Or didn't really have anything new to say because they were in my mentions getting yelled at. And so it was Matt Seaton at The Guardian, who was the first person to invite me to write about it for a major publication. And I think he sent him a DM that was something like, I know you can yell, but can you write? Wow. And he always says, I give him too much credit, but he does not understand that there's like this very divine moment of, I can get in a couple of places but nothing above a certain level

and then I wrote for him wrote a piece about what was happening for him and the guardian byline for reasons I will never completely understand opens the door for me to write for all these other places and I didn't know anything about pitching I didn't know anything about anything

but what I can do is write I have opinions I can write them down really fast on a topic and I learned pitching. I learned how to freelance kind of in the plane while it was being, while it was in the air. Is there a through line of you tweeting that, getting in The Guardian, and now you're doing what you do now?

Like, do you think that's really the through line? If you had not tweeted that, it had not gone mega-viral, do you see a world in which you would still be in this outcome? I actually, weirdly enough, I do. It just would have been for, a different hashtag. But I think it would have

also opened a slightly different version of this path, right? Where I would be known for talking about fast-tailed girls or you know, one of the other hashtags, but we would have never had necessarily the same conversation

about white feminism and race without salaries for white women. And in some ways, that challenging and acknowledging definitely puts me here in a very specific place where many of the things that people think I want that I never wanted in the first place, they would not necessarily be trying to, you know, tell me, well, you'll never get this, you'll never get that in the same way. I probably would have made more friends. And I probably also would not have been as popular

as because I think tapping into that deep well of discontent and talking about it, like naming it and talking about my own feelings, but also giving people a sort of permission by proxy to talk about their feelings had not happened before. I remember, like, watching the Hugo stuff go down, it was just a really dark time. And one of the things that I think your work really helped us see was how, little accountability there was for people who supported someone who was pretty open about a disdain for black women, you know, harassing black women in public, a literal abuser of women. First of all, that he would be able to make a name for himself in online feminist spaces so

easily and that people would defend him publicly. When all of that stuff came out, it's still surprising to me how little accountability there was, if not for folks like you. Do you feel that we ever really did a reckoning, a look back of what we learn from that? Because I feel like these things happen, people say what they're going to say, and then everybody kind of moves on. We don't actually get a chance to look back and learn anything or glean anything about how to avoid this or what we should be taking from this. Do you feel that we ever had that moment? People didn't want to have that moment. It was this embarrassing thing where people in the middle of whatever they were saying about me being pervasive or about this conversation taking feminism backwards, whatever, realizing after the fact, especially by 2016, that they had been on the wrong side of history and never wanting to look backward again.

More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman helped make you. You funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform?

We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.

Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind.

Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise. Breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves,

their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context and ask the questions

everybody wants answered. Sports Slice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to SportsSlice on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slic Life 12 and the TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. Let's get right back into it.

Mickey did the work of exposing existing tensions and fractures that exist in our movement. But in order to heal tensions, there has to be reflection, honesty, and accountability. which just didn't really happen. So these tensions were left to be exploited by bad actors, like the ones behind the End Father's Day hoax to inflame tensions in feminist online spaces

that would take place just a year later. Something that we have talked about quite a bit on this podcast is sort of what came immediately after, things like the disinformation troll campaign, hashtag End Father's Day. And I think something that, solidarity for white, it's for white, white women, exposed, is the reality and the rawness of these tensions between black women, black feminists and white feminists. And I think that bad actors, trolls, extremists, whatever you want

to call it, people who are interested in using social media spaces to cause confusion and chaos, I think the movement's lack of really taking accountability, really examining what happened, really figuring out how we navigate navigate around each other and with each other, I think that you're right. There was broadly no interest in really doing that and having those conversations.

And thus, I think that bad actors know, like, okay, well, this is a tension that exists. It's a tension that is being kind of danced around, you know, everyone feels it, but no one's really, people aren't really talking about it openly because they don't want to. We can go in and exploit it. We can go in and like, seize it.

it and inflame it and it might be effective because no one's really naming it. No one's really talking about it. Nobody's really interested in taking accountability for their part in it. Do you ever think that the lack of interest in real accountability and looking backward and taking stock just leaves these communities online vulnerable to people who will step in and exploit and talk about it, just not in the way that maybe it's going to be helpful? Oh, I think it absolutely It's one of those things Which is how we got all those feminists talking to like

Mealienopoulos and engaging sort of disingenuously with the idea that Megan Kelly was, you know, not necessarily racist, right? Because everyone started to kind of go, well, you know, people can be swayed, people can be, wooed and I wonder often about the people who at that point kept saying we have to reach out to the other side because the other side was very clearly very cogently planning to so discord very

much trying to widen rifts and also using those conversations those educational conversations to boost their own platforms right because when you think back to 2013 to really all they have 2016. And actually even before 2013, a lot of those, well, I want to talk to a white nationalist, a person who identifies as a white separatist, whatever. You remember all of those news stories, all of the like, inside the mind of a Klansman kind of news stories,

right, for a while. Nobody had ever given them a platform. I just saw this thing the other day, there's an account that chills itself as like the American Nazi, whatever, right? They bought a blue check mark on Twitter and they have millions of followers. And they said, essentially, this never could have happened 10 years ago, which is true. It wouldn't have been able to happen 10 years ago. Now they can look like they're a real legitimate account.

I mean, kind of just gives away the game where it's like, oh, thanks to Elon Musk, I would have never been able to build up the legitimized platform I have now to spread a person. my Nazi shit. Thanks. And that is essentially what it said. Essentially. And, you know, we've seen several times now, even when we're talking about at protests and things, and we've been talking for years about inside police circles,

the number of very clearly white nationalist, white supremacist, whatever we're calling ourselves this week, white separatist, police officers, complete with the visible, ink, right? And when we bring it up and people say, oh, well, you know, what can you do? And it's kind of like, actually several years ago, we were trying to get people to do something about it. And you said that that wasn't a feminist issue. You said that that was just some guys online. They were harmless. You said, whatever. Now here we are. And I need you to not even just take accountability. I need you

to start swinging, not still talk about how we can reach them. Twitter was where people who were not traditionally centered or heard could really build power. Black Lives Matter championed racial justice in the wake of police violence. Survivors started Me Too to push back against sexual violence. So when Elon Musk bought Twitter, one of my first questions was what does this mean for the future of marginalized communities, being able to build power and start movements? It's a fair question. But Mickey reminds us that our communities are resilient and that we'll always find a way. How do you see the state that Twitter is in and sort of social media more broadly?

How do you see that impacting marginalized community's ability to build up power and build up a voice? I think in some ways, and this is going to sound real strange, but the existence of TikTok and all the competing other sites will help, you know, know, Mastodon, all of these things, will help marginalized communities find a place to rebuild the networks that they had on Twitter for some levels of rebuild here. But only because Twitter was already not particularly usable for community anymore. Once all eyes were on Twitter, it seemed like all the time. Remember that weird period of time where anything you tweeted could wind up on your television screen that night is news?

or in an article. Yeah, that was a while time. Right. People already started to kind of migrate away from Twitter, right? Twitter's popularity as the social media app was on the decline, people were just abandoning their Twitter accounts, whatever, and moving to Discord and all these other places. And so I think it will make it more difficult to kick off an initial group,

but also in some ways now it is easier to have those conversations without necessarily as much trolling. This weird split where, like, yes, the loss of Twitter is a big deal, but also Twitter was already being lost before this because the focus, hyper-focused on Black Twitter, but also generally the focus on whether those people over there talking about together had made people uncomfortable having certain conversations in public. I think Sedet Harry has a great piece in WIRE that kind of speaks to this of like the feeling of kind of the inherent feeling of being both othered and also watched.

Like I definitely felt that when it came to being part of Black Twitter for a while, where you definitely feel like these people over here are doing something distinct of their own, and let's lurk at it. It kind of, in a lot of ways, you wanted to be having these insular conversations with the feeling that they were happening in a bit of a fishbowl digitally. And that, I think that level of surveillance culture is, not something I'm going to miss, right? I had already, Twitter for me,

had been rendered largely unusable for like socializing with friends kinds of things a while before this because, and not even in a major way, but in a, no matter what, there was always someone who had thoughts, feelings, opinions, right? And as like the API is being altered to prevent a lot of third party clients,

I know, like today, someone was saying that one of the things that made, Twitter usable for visually impaired users, it's no longer going to work. Hearing impaired users are going to have slightly more time, but some of the tools they use, it's not going to be there anymore, things like that, right? Alt text, all of these things. And I feel like Twitter served a very high-level and low-level sort of purpose, but also we are going to have to go back to the pre-Twitter days of jumping from platform to

platform for a lot, right? We got really comfortable with Twitter and Facebook kind of being seen as stable entities, but I don't know the last time I went on Facebook for any real meaningful purpose. I don't like the interface. And on Twitter, that surveillance level had made it so that you were kind of tweeting a little, looking at what people were talking about, and leaving for a lot of users who are, you know, like I'm a power user because I used to use Twitter all day long. I would send hundreds of tweets today chatting and up, talking to people, having thoughts on in public, whatever, because of all of the eyes on me, which always sounds slightly paranoid, but because of that, I had already scaled back my Twitter usage heavily, not even in purpose,

not even like, oh, I'm going to keep these things to myself. It was just annoying. And now, with what's happening. How much platform time do I want to spend with trolls? How useful is it? I saw in your piece for MIT TechRibu, I can't remember exactly how you put it, but you've had it, like, it's not a platform to live one's life.

You know, it's like, it's not a place where you're necessarily going to look for a connection. And it sounded like it, even in your personal life, that Twitter just wasn't it for you anymore, that like you just weren't interested. I think that you described it

When you do show up there, it feels like it's out of habit more than anything else. It's not like you're going there looking for connection. Oh, yeah, because I can tell you a really stupid story about how I got done with using Twitter socially. I was talking to a friend of mine, and we were talking about a workout routine that we had both tried. and someone briefly tried to turn that into like pro um like fat phobic oh this is really fatphobic having this conversation in public and we had said nothing about anyone's bodies not even really our own other than the usual uh yeah i tried blah blah blah it was really rough kind of you know how you talked about things and i couldn't figure out how we got there and then there's this

entire conversation happening in my mentions about whether or not this conversation with my friend about a workout we had both tried was really about something else. And I thought, I have hit the point where we are reading into things. I always wondered how that would feel. Oh, I don't care for it. And so then me and my friends started to have those conversations, not on public on Twitter. We still have them. We just have them in a group chat. And as more things move to the group chat, I have a hustling, bustling series of group chats going on. I don't necessarily think to go to Twitter in the same way in my personal life anymore. I don't even necessarily react to everything on Twitter because sometimes news stories pass by or someone tweeting something passes by. And in my brain, I think

this does not pass the smell test. But it is a little bit. But it's a new story. I'm not. It's a lot of It's not worth getting into it with people who are buying in on the spot to whatever is being said because they're going to find out in a few minutes or a few hours that they were wrong and they're going to want to erase all of their tweets about this, all of their engagement with this. You know, and I don't even need to jump in and participate. I can have this conversation with people who actually have a conversation. Oh, this is something I have absolutely felt. The story that you told about the workout with your friend,

I have this theory that like, so something, we've reached a point where we have visibility into the, into too many conversations between strangers, where people are just injecting their own, and like injecting and projecting a lot of their own stuff onto the conversations of strangers in ways that if you did it in real life, like if you were in a cafeteria and two people were talking about a workout they had done. and I walked up to their table and sat down and said, this conversation is fatphobic, and maybe it's actually about something else altogether, you would think that was the weirdest thing in the world. And I do think that we've hit a point where these platforms cease to be useful when they are when they feel this way. Because it's just not, it's not a, it's not a way to connect with people that feels enjoyable,

that level of surveillance, every little thing that you say, feeling like someone's going to take it the wrong way, or project their own stuff onto it. Well, and this is the thing because I definitely started to feel like, at a certain point, is this about what I said, or am I just where you put your feelings? And I think a lot of it is just where they put their feelings, right? And if that's the case, I don't need to be here for this.

And I think that, and then I think about how many of my friends, who, like I have a friend who pointed out to me one day, I retweeted something she said because I thought it was funny. And she says, I know you didn't mean any harm, but can you not retweet me because I always end up with all of this crap in my mentions? And I was, you know, very apologetic offered to tweet. And she was like, no, no, no, it's not like it's your fault. I just know your level of visibility is too much for me. And I hadn't, I, you know, like the frog in boiling water had gotten used to it. But I hadn't thought about what it feels like to kind of be into this level of thing.

And even though I will still occasionally retweet people or whatever or quote tweet them, I try to be more judicious. I'm not always successful. I don't always think about impact, but I try to be more judicious when I do do it because there's this point in the hypervisibility where I don't want people to be having a conversation about the things they didn't say. I want to talk about the things they did say or I have a thought about what they said

kind of thing. And I don't know where we go on Twitter with that. Like, I don't see a way to salvage that part at this point. You know, the way that you put that of like, am I just a place where you put your feelings? I'm not super visible on any social media platform, but I do wonder if that has something to do with you being a black woman, that you, something about the way that you show up online for folks as a black woman means that you are the place where you are the place where a lot of their feelings go, that whether it's feelings of anger or wanting to call somebody out

or wanting to show you something so that you have a publicly angry reaction and that feels a certain way for them. Like, where you kind of aren't a real person, you're just this abstraction online for them to project whatever they want onto you. Do you ever feel that? Oh, absolutely. It's one of those things,

first of all, I had to tell people to stop sending me things for me to respond to, right? Like for a while, people would tag me in their arguments with random people. I don't know you. I don't know them. I'm not joining into the middle of a conversation, whatever. But also, it started to feel like I am not a person.

Oh, God, so many people ago. Because, and this is another sort of silly story, someone was mad about something I had said, apparently. They started tweeting about it at around 3 a.m. my time. somewhere in the following four hours they had worked themselves up to the point that I was avoiding them I was ignoring them how dare I was I you know a coward blah blah blah and I get up I get my kids out the door to school and I used to for a while on my way to work I was you know fart around on Twitter on the way in and I log on and I'm like what is this because I was asleep It is 7 a.m. Right? What the heck are you doing?

What is wrong with you kind of thing? And this person who had spun themselves into a frenzy in the middle of the night says, I completely forgot the difference in time zones. You weren't ignoring me. I'm sorry. And ends up bleeding probably like 40 tweets. But also, I had never responded to you and you had never thought about the fact that I wasn't awake just because you were. It didn't even occur to you, person whose name I won't say, that I was a person with a life and

responsibilities, right, like had not even crossed their mind. I have a joke I tell friends, there are no sick days on the internet. And yet, in real life, people take off work. So how do we expect people to be available 24-7 online? It makes no sense. And yet, that is how everyone is operating sometimes. Oh yeah, I've seen people get very, for lack of a way of putting it, get very in their feelings about someone not being available the moment they want them to be available online. And I sometimes have to also, and I have this whole thing I also say where I say parisocial relationships are beating people's asses every day, right? where you enjoy this person, you enjoy their content, whatever,

or you don't, you hate them, you hate watch, whatever. You don't realize anymore that that person does not know you. However much you feel like you know them, they don't know you. They are online on whatever their schedule is and the rest of their time,

they're doing whatever it is they're doing, right? Whether they've got a family or they've got a day job or heck, they're writing a book or making songs, whatever, there are people for whom the Internet is life and there are people for whom the Internet is a job. And they overlap, but they are not necessarily the same people.

And for people for whom the Internet is a job, there are specific times, hours, whatever, that they are available. And the rest of the time, no matter how much it may frustrate you, a person who perceives yourself to be in a paris social relationship with them, they are not going to be available to you. when it happens to celebrities, and we've all kind of normalized that level of parasycial relationship.

But increasingly, it is happening to people just who speaks on the internet. You can get fans, followers, supporters, whatever we're calling them, just by being a person who speaks online. The problem is that every word you say will not be the gospel truth. Everything you think will not be right for none of us, right? but also the people following you may or may not really be paying attention to the reality that you are a whole person. One of the things that always sticks out to me is this idea that because you like someone,

they can never be wrong. They absolutely can be wrong. Did that make sense outside of my head? It made so much sense. And the vibe of because I like this person, I am team them for life. If they say anything wrong, it must be. right. I don't think there's a, that's got to be one of the most dangerous, toxic vibes that we have where, I mean, I see it play out all the time. And like, these are people, they're not gonna, just

because somebody had a great take or wrote a great piece on one thing, doesn't mean that you should blindly sign up for their takes on everything and, like, be invested in them never being wrong. You know, it's like, like, I don't know how we got to such a weird. place when it comes to relationships and how they function online? I think part of what's happened, unfortunately, and I'm seeing this even more on TikTok, is that the entertainment people get, right, let's call it, like the skits you see on TikTok, the storytelling, whatever, on Twitter, all of these things that have happened over and over again on various platforms, makes people feel like this stuff is there for them.

it is not necessarily that this person is doing something to entertain themselves that you happen to like. It has become, oh, this performance is for me, this article, this writing, this whatever is for me. And therefore, everything here is about me for me and I don't have to have any sense of boundaries or limits or really grasped that this was just someone making a thing that was in their head.

Right? We feel an ownership state. in the things we are fans of. I was a fan of Twitter 10 years ago, as much as I criticized it. And that ownership stake Mickey describes, well, as I watched the platform that I once loved become something else entirely,

I feel that too. So what's next? In a piece for MIT Tech Review, Mickey looks back on a career that she's built in part on Twitter and what the future of platforms holds. Twitter's importance five years ago cannot be overstated, she writes. But now, as we look at the possibility of a future without Twitter, will anything really change for the average person who uses the internet but doesn't live on it?

Setting the scene for where we are and where we go next. Like, I've seen so many people, myself included, writing about how much Twitter sucks now that Elon Musk has taken over, blah, blah, blah. But in your MIT tech review piece, you kind of pick up on something else. Yeah, Elon Musk sucks and Twitter sucks because of him and all of that. But really, do you think that something, there's sort of a larger cultural shift happening that is actually being mirrored via our use of technology? That it's not just about Elon Musk being like sucking and ruining Twitter. Something else is happening where folks are just not that invested in showing up on platforms like Twitter. Maybe they're spending more time on platforms like TikTok.

Maybe they're less interested in social media as we all get older. Like, do you think something is happening more broadly in culture? and that we're just experiencing that through technology and our relationship to it? I think what's happening is that for a lot of people, A, as we are getting older, the earlier social media users,

but also for a lot of people who grew up with social media, I was having this conversation with a college student last night, as a matter of fact, there is a sense that the need to always be on, to always think about what people are perceiving of you, that you have no privacy online is driving a lot of people away from social media.

Once we started to hit a place where your social media could not just be used against your in terms of job stuff, but you don't know how it's going to be used because brands are using it. You're showing up on the news. It can be used against you

if you said something offensive. People dig up old offensive things you said. You may or may not so feel that way because it was seven, eight, nine years for all of these things. People started to feel like, well, what's the use of social media? If I can't actually enjoy it, if I can't just hang out and spend time with my friends and have fun. And we're seeing people sort of trend somewhat on TikTok.

I suspect there will be another platform or two before we settle wherever we're settling next in terms of social media. We're seeing people kind of trend back almost to the days of like blogger and live journal, where you have a carefully curated private list of people you talk to. and maybe you have some things that are public, but you don't let everyone see what you're doing. You don't have your business in everyone's eyeballs because you don't want everyone else's business in your eyeballs. I think that we are also going to see the rise of those kids

who were the early mommy blogger content, right? Like parent blog blog content kids. They're almost adults now. Some of them are legally adults. I think for a lot of them, the financial impact of having been content for 20 years, but not necessarily being paid for being that content and having that experience shape their future means we're going to see a lot of people in court, in federal court, very soon.

Right? Because for all that we have said about the most successful of them, the kids who were memes, whatever, those kids have grown up. And yet when you Google their names, it's the meme. it's the mommy blog content, it's the pictures of them with a poopy diaper on their head or whatever that comes up. And mom and dad or grandpa, grandpa, our guardians, whoever, they made the money, they got the checks, but the kids get consequences. I don't foresee those kids being interested in social media. And I think they will be part of a growing number of people who are just

like, we should not know this much about each other, about total strangers. I think people will still use social media to some degree, but I think the way we use, it is going to change again. So you think that we should really be letting the younger generation take the lead. Where do you see them leading us? Yeah, I think they will have some form. I think that they're going to kind of reinvent private social media, right? Whether it will be Snapchat or something else,

but I think they're going to reinvent that kind of thing. Where they'll want to be able to talk to their friends, but I don't know that they're going to want to be able to talk to their friends in a way the general public can see. because I'll be honest, not being able to lock individual tweets was always a weird thing about Twitter. It always invited a certain level of harassment and just unpleasant context because Twitter definitely knew, right, way before we got to any of the conversations. I've heard so on here. Twitter definitely knew about 4chan and on Reddit and all of those things, right?

And we're seeing people who post on Reddit say, oh, man, this stuff is going all over. These things are going viral. and sure some of that is intentional. I just don't know that we really need to see everything with your face attached. Yeah, I hate being perceived on social media. Every time I, like, have a few glasses of wine and spend and, like, actually do some tweeting, when I wake up the next day and I see, like, oh, you've got five replies. I'm like, oh, no, why did I do this to myself?

I hate it so much. And I mean, I think the answer, unfortunately, is it used to be fun. It used to be great to like hang out and talk to your friends. And sometimes you slip up and you forget that the way social media functions is also changed, right? Like we've changed. But also now you have people who get online and they're looking for a fight and they don't care who it's with. And it doesn't have to be on a particular topic. It's not something they feel passionately about.

It's something that they just want someplace to argue, right? And a lot of times, like we call it sea lightning, right? The guys that just want a good debate and then won't go away. What else do you do but decide, okay, well, people have perceived me, this person won't leave me alone or these people or whatever. Sure, you meet the conversations, you do all of these things. But at a certain point, where's the payoff for you in getting online in the first place? I don't know if it wasn't still related to my books, my work, my whatever. I don't know if I, right now, if I were coming into social media now, right, like I was 24 years old or whatever, and my job didn't require it, I'm not sure how much I'd use it.

Well, I guess this leads me to kind of my awkward final question, which is, where can folks keep in touch with you? I mean, like, after all this, it feels weird to be like, oh, should they tweet at you? But where can folks like what are you up to next and where can folks keep in touch with all your work? So I have a website. I'm on TikTok. I'm on Twitter. I'm on Instagram. My handle is always the same. I am Karnithia here, there and everywhere. And if it is not Karnatia, you'll figure it out very quickly. And then I'm currently, after I get back from this trip, I am working on my next book. And it is really an auto. topsy of the American dream. So it's going to be a lot. People are going to hate it or they're going to love it. There's not going to be a lot in between.

They're going to have some feelings. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoody.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoody.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeart Radio and unbossed creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer.

Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy,

not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform?

We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. And nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in.

I'm Timbo. In every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headline. And we're going straight to the source the athletes themselves. Their locker room stories,

their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear. Listen to Sports Slice on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slical Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Life is full of hurdles.

So how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness. from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world, like, I can do anything.

I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.