I had a brief conversation with a friend on a private Slack channel about South by Southwest and their decision to cancel a panel about harassment. Well, for values of conversation equal to two lines each before we all had to go back to work. He pointed out that if SXSW was going to host an anti-harassment panel, they’d be a martyr. If they dropped it, they’d be screwed from the backlash—and he’s not wrong, either—certainly not on that second point. As for being a martyr? Well, having the harassment conversation sure didn’t hurt XOXO Fest last year with Anita Sarkeesian’s talk, or this year with Zoe Quinn’s talk. (No video for that one yet.)
If there’s a hill any conference, or indeed any decent human being should be willing to die on, it’s the hill of saying “stop being terrible to other people.†It’s certainly a hill I’d choose to die on, having been on the receiving end of more than anyone’s fair share of real life harassment and abuse, and on the giving end of more than anyone’s fair share of digital harassment and abuse. It’s not something I want to suffer through again, and it’s not something I would wish to happen to anyone, either.
For reference, by the way, anyone’s fair share of harassment and abuse is zero. Harassment and abuse shouldn’t happen, but it’s an inevitability of the human condition. The entire point of civilization is to save ourselves from the animal instincts we have to harm each other, be it through word or deed. We’re all stuck on a rock, spinning through the endless void at countless millions of miles per second, and we’re all stuck here together, in an ideal case, for seventy or so years a pop. Maybe we can try to make those years as pain-free as possible for each other, yeah?
But let’s bring this discussion back down from the cosmic level. In the last year or so, online harassment and abuse has become a major issue, in no small part because of organized campaigns like GamerGate. Despite this, the attitude remains among people who should know better, that online harassment and abuse is less than real and worthy of their time. The idea that a harassed person can just turn off their phone, unplug their computer, and go about their life, blissfully free from the virtual slings and digital arrows of outrageous fortune is a myth. It has been for over a decade. The Internet is real life, not some sort of magical cyberspace that we can slip into and out of at will. It a part of nearly everything we do, and the people who are decidedly not connected to it are a shrinking minority.
Zooming back out a bit, there’s over seven billion people on this rock, and nearly half of them are online. We’ve managed to cram an estimated 3.2 billion people into a room, given them all megaphones, and told them to go nuts. Admittedly, most of those 3.2 billion are hanging around with the other people in the room who speak their language, but there’s still a lot of people crammed together with megaphones. More than we’ve ever had to deal with before in the history of the species. This is going to have consequences.
A few days ago, I made a flippant tweet about how “[t]he average human capacity for empathy does not reach Internet Scale.†Judging from the number of Retweets and Favorites it got, including one from Arthur Chu (!), it struck a nerve. All the people who are bemoaning the passing a more civilized Internet age are either privileged nerds, deluded about the past, or—likely—both. I mean, we’ve been having this same basic discussion about online harassment for over twenty years! (Trigger Warning: descriptions of sexual assault.) We’re still no closer to solving the problem, and it’s not for lack of trying.
Actually, I’ll take that back. In many cases, of which the recent South by Southwest debacle is only the latest, harassment and abuse has been an afterthought at best. Whether in—for lack of a better term—real world spaces, or digital ones, most people are content to just cover their eyes and ears to the potential for humans to be thoroughly terrible to each other for reasons. To quote some musical philosophers, “If you can not see it, you think it’s not there. It doesn’t work that way.â€
The creators and caretakers of our public and private meeting places, online and off, disregard the potential for abuse either because they are not likely to be victims themselves, or only focus on protecting themselves and people who pay the bills. What they don’t know can’t hurt them, at least not until their space becomes a toxic hellstew of abuse towards people who aren’t like them. The numbers bear his out: It’s been shown time and time again that women get a disproportionate amount of online harassment. Women of color get an even worse deal than white women. These are facts. They are not negotiable.
For anything to change, more people need to see that online abuse matters. It matters to abuse victims, and it matters to abuse enablers, both the willing and the negligent alike. This is especially true for the people who create and run the online spaces we congregate in. It’s clear to see the tide is starting to turn in a few places, but only because there’s enough people screaming bloody murder about their victimization. We need to have conversations about how to design systems to prevent abuse before it happens. We need to engineer systems that reward constructive community building, not just the latest hot take, outrage, snarky comment, or threat of violence.
Cynical as my opinion that human empathy doesn’t reach Internet Scale may be, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be proven wrong. A cynic is, to quote George Carlin, “a disappointed idealist,†after all. Online harassment and abuse matters, and the discussion around how to stop it matters. That people are willing to make threats of violence to shut down the discussion is proof alone of how much it matters. What will have to happen for the rest of the world to take it seriously? When I ask that question, the disappointed idealist in me has all kinds of answers, none of which I want to put down in words. It also desperately wants to be proven wrong. It’s time to take all that utopian rhetoric around the Internet, and actually do something with it.
Before the Internet, bullying ended when you withdrew from whatever environment you were in. But now, the bullying dynamic is harder to contain and harder to ignore. If you’re harassed on your Facebook page, all of your social circles know about it; as long as you have access to the network, a ceaseless stream of notifications leaves you vulnerable to victimhood.
Frightening. As a victim of bullying, the Internet used to provide an avenue of escape from the horrors of real life. For bullied kids growing up now, there is no escape. The Internet is real life. “Cyber-bullying” is as real as schoolyard bullying. The sooner we adults realize this, the better.
SXSW’s response at first was simply to assure us that the public vote was only one part of the panel approval process and we wouldn’t be automatically disqualified if flooded with downvotes, which was nice but not my primary concern. My primary concern was that every time a shitstorm develops around a harassment target and lots of people start joining in the fun, gamified activity of mobbing the target increases the chances of it jumping out of the current venue into a more dangerous one—someone getting a little too excited and starting to make phone calls or send nasty packages.
I was, not to put too fine a point on it, blown off.
Arthur Chu details not only the events leading up to South by Southwest’s cancellation of a panel on anti-harassment technology, along with a GamerGate panel, but also the shameful disregard SXSW organizers have towards online harassment, starting with their own system for organizing panels. An important read for anyone concerned with the continuing saga of online abuse.
Okay, I’m not saying that, like proper KonMari, every single thing in your feeds has to bring you joy. You want to know about the bad things too, at least when it’s people close to you. And you’ll never be truly free from all the sheer frustrations and annoyances of social media. What these steps will do is just help make your feeds a place that’s just a little less anxiety-inducing.
It’s way too easy to add someone to your friends list on social media, so the best place to begin is to unfollow and unfriend as many people as you can get away with. Take your time on this. The friend of a friend of a friend you met at a party whose posts you see and never comment on? Unfriend him. Your aforementioned Sarah Palin loving cousin? Unfriend her, but only if you’re sure nobody’s going to guilt-trip you about it.
There is a better way, at least on Facebook, to deal with the guilt-tripping family and friends you have to be friended with, if you want to keep up appearances. On most services, you have a binary relationship with the people in your feeds: you either follow them, or you don’t. I’m no fan of Facebook, but one of the few things they do right is let you “Unfollow” someone while still being friends with them. What this means is that you don’t see anything they post, share, like, comment, or whatever in your news feed, but they can still see yours—but there’s a way around that, which I’ll explain later.
Another way to tame your Facebook News Feed is to set your friends as either “Close Friends” or “Acquaintances” instead of merely being Friends. Close Friends shows you more of their posts, Acquaintances less. Another wonderful benefit of these lists is that you can set posts to only be visible to certain groups. To go back to your Sarah Palin-loving cousin, if you assign her to Acquantances, and set any political posts you make to “Friends, except Acquiantances” you won’t have to worry about drowning in a sea of angry notifications as a flamewar erupts on your profile page.
On Twitter, things can be a little more complicated. There’s two ways to get your timeline in order, beyond just unfollowing people, and they both work best when you’re using a Twitter app that isn’t the official one. (I love Tweetbot.) The first is Twitter Lists. If you want to keep up with certain accounts, but don’t want them clogging up your timeline all the time, you can set up a list and check it whenever you prefer. I keep lists for the bands I like, technology news sites, apps I use, and for local stuff.
The second thing Twitter lets you do is muting. Twitter offers basic muting features, but some apps, especially Tweetbot, let you mute with more ruthlessness and effectiveness. You can mute key words, hashtags, and even entire accounts for a single day, a week, a month, or for eternity. Tweetbot also lets you mute all retweets from a particular account, so if someone cool is retweeting a lot of stuff you’re not interested in, you’re only two taps away from a quieter timeline.
If only all the other social networks were as flexible in how well you can manage your feeds. For things like Instagram and Tumblr, where it’s just a binary, follow or unfollow, the only way out is to just up and unfollow anything that’s causing you more angst than it’s worth. Even if it’s your Sarah Palin-loving cousin. Especially if it’s your Sarah Palin-loving cousin. Don’t feel guilty about it.
I’ve long struggled with how to keep the various flotsam and jetsam of my digital live in some semblance of order. One of the oldest pieces on this site is about that very issue. I’ve yet to find the right solution, bouncing between Evernote, nvALT, and a few other dalliances along the way. Until recently, I’ve been using a hybrid of Evernote and nvALT, but the multiple silo approached irked me.
What I need is something flexible, that’ll store almost anything I can throw at it, something that syncs across all my devices: iPhone, iPad, and the Mac. It should let me sort, and search with easy. Preferably, it wouldn’t be a subscription service, but if it leverages something I’m already using and paying for, that’s fine. Finally, it has to be a company I can trust.
I found my solution about a week ago in the last place I expected. It’s the stock Apple Notes app for Mac and iOS.
I’m not alone. Aside from Stephen Hackett, other smart people I know and trust have switched to Notes, or at least away from Evernote. I can’t blame them for ditching Evernote. The Mac app is a bloated piece of junk with useless features you can’t turn off and constant nagging to upgrade—even if you’ve already paid. It got to the point where I paid five dollars for a replacement Evernote Mac client, rather than use the first-party app.
Not worth it.
What was worth it was Evernote’s flexibility. I kept manuals for all my gizmos and gadgets in Evernote, as well as scans of business cards and other various documents. With IFTTT, I was able to pipe highlighted passages from Instapaper articles and receipt emails from purchases right into their own Evernote notebooks. I even kept my tax documents, encrypted, in Evernote.
Notes.app does not have quite that level of flexibility or security, but I’ve found a way to pipe Instapaper highlights into Drafts using the IFTTT iOS app, which is super handy. The only thing I don’t have now is a way to deal with receipt emails, but they’re all in my gMail archive anyway, so I won’t worry about it. As for the tax info? I keep that in 1Password now.
It’s early days in Notes.app land, but it’s looking good. Sync is perfect. Even the switch was fairly painless, considering how strongly Evernote likes to hold on to your data. I was able to drag and drop the PDFs and Images Files right into Notes.app, and some clever scripting got me the rest of the way there, for both exported notes from Evernote, and my notes from nvALT. Getting notes out might be a hassle later, but there’s a tool for that, at least to get the plain text. [1]
Had it not been for braver souls, I might not have even considered switching. To me, Notes was that terrible stock app with the lined paper and Marker Felt text. It was the app where data goes to sit and decompose until you accidentally opened it. It’s sat in the bottom of iOS folders of stock Apple apps I never use and can’t remove. I’m amazed at how much power and flexibility Apple’s given such a neglected app. Sure, it’s still ugly, with that gross paper texture and the drop shadows on the text—and the Mac app isn’t much better—but it works so well that I can overlook it.
For anyone who’s in the same boat, and just needs something ubiquitous, reliable, and flexible to put their digital life into, by all means, look at Notes.app. Especially if you haven’t given it a look since iOS 4, like I have. If this is what Apple’s going to do with a lowly stock app like Notes, I can’t help but wonder what to expect in future versions of iOS. Things are getting exciting. Now, if only Evernote actually let you delete accounts, instead of just deactivating them…
