January 24, 2025

The pressure to stay genteel

For years, one of the highlight shows of Anthrocon, a furry convention in Pittsburgh, was a comedy act put on by an aspiring professional comedian who was part of that community. He was good friends with the con’s chairman—a guy who’s a pretty good comedic storyteller in his own right, and who did his own show at the con. They often shared the stage together.

Now, that aspiring comedian always played with a kind of cynical “it’s funny because I’m a bastard” sort of persona, and over the years—this was the 2010s—this metastasized into a genuine meanness. He was still often funny, but he was ever more frequently punching down. Jokes about transgender people. Jokes about depressed and suicidal people. Attacking gays who didn’t fit his conception of how queers should behave in public. (The comedian was gay, but didn’t like pride parades due to the “out there” behavior of some participants: e.g., don’t make the straights uncomfortable.) A growing chorus of regular con attendees wanted them to stop inviting this guy to put on shows, arguing that supporting him in that way—in this case, literally giving him a stage—was tantamount to supporting his noxious views.

And the con chairman really, really resisted this. Wouldn’t giving into the mob be even more divisive? Wasn’t there a better way to handle this? He took a lot of heat for it, faced accusations that defending the comedian made him just as bad.

But the chairman knew that guy. He was friends with that guy. And that guy just couldn’t be that bad! The picture of the comedian painted by his critics had to be, just had to be, an exaggeration, because dammit, he wouldn’t be able to be friends with someone like that.

So I understood where the chairman was coming from: our instinct is to defend our friends.

There was a little explosion, of sorts, in another community I’m in over the last week. Adam Newbold, the developer of the delightfully weird omg.lol service, called out developer Vincent Ritter, a contractor who works with Micro.blog. Micro.blog is “a unique platform that combines blog hosting with a social media-style timeline and community,” as their about page puts it—a spiritual competitor to X/Twitter started by Manton Reece, a developer who left Twitter years ago due to his dissatisfaction with the site’s direction. I’d argue Micro.blog is a cornerstone of the IndieWeb, an approach to decentralizing internet publishing using existing tools like RSS and webmentions.

What set Newbold off was discovering that Ritter is not only still an active X/Twitter user, not only pays for a blue checkmark, but posted cheerful congratulations to Musk for SpaceX’s recent successes, adding that he sure hopes he gets to buy a Tesla someday in the future and that he’s “happy to be living through this age.”

Newbold continued by linking to a post he wrote in mid-2024 about another one of Ritter’s social media posts, where Ritter wrote,

When a game asks for “pronouns” and doesn’t let you skip that part. Uninstall. Sigh.

As Newbold wrote in that mid-2024 post,

There’s only one reason to write that, and let’s be real: it’s not about the pronouns themselves. When someone puts the word pronouns in disgust quotes, and when they complain about being asked to provide theirs, it’s never about the pronouns.

And, boy, did this set off a firestorm. Reece effectively leapt to Ritter’s defense, Newbold fired back with, in so many words, “how can you keep defending this guy,” and it got worse from there. People accused Reece of gaslighting. People accused Newbold of being super-aggressive and confrontational. Daniel Jalkut, Reece’s friend (and co-host with Reece of the Core Intuition podcast), accused everyone of failing to see the nuance in it all, and people accused him of trolling.

I want to make my position clear here: while I think there’s some value to all those takes, there’s not equal weight to them. Newbold’s take on Ritter is fundamentally correct, for the simple reason that everything he said is true. Saying that a game merely asking you to select pronouns for your avatar is reason to uninstall it is transphobic. Full stop. If someone wrote “When a game asks for ‘race’ and doesn’t let you skip that part. Uninstall. Sigh,” we would not be having a discussion about whether that was racist. Unless, perhaps, we were having that discussion on X—which is why calling out Ritter for paying for his blue checkmark is also appropriate. X has become undeniably right-wing in the past two years, to the point where it has helped Elon Musk drive our country toward actual, non-metaphorical fascism. And again, that point’s not seriously debatable. Aspiring to buy a Tesla now, in the year of our lord 2025, is aspiring to drive around in a rolling MAGA hat.

Now, it is arguably true that Newbold was aggressive and confrontational about this all, and no, it wasn’t a conversation with a great deal of nuance. But I don’t know that being confrontational was that inappropriate, or that there really is a lot of nuance to the situation.

However, I don’t have the same feeling of ill will toward Reece as it appears Newbold does, for the same reason that I didn’t have ill will toward the chairman of that convention. The picture of Ritter painted by his critics had to be, just had to be, an exaggeration, because dammit, he wouldn’t be able to be friends with someone like that.

And our instinct is to defend our friends.

I love many things about the Micro.blog community (I backed them on Kickstarter and had a Micro.blog account for years; I don’t anymore, but that’s more for financial reasons than anything else). It’s hard not to notice, though, that there’s a distinct vibe of “no politics” there. While I have no statistics to back this up, my subjective observations were that the user base is proportionately whiter, older, and more well off than old Twitter was and that Bluesky and Mastodon are now. And it’s decidedly more genteel. Shitposting, even meme-sharing, is all but absent; so are strident political expressions of virtually any stripe. It doesn’t have Twitter-style reply guys as much as tut-tutters.

When participants in the spiraling “is Micro.blog secretly horrible” threads express shock and dismay at one another, that centrist “can’t we all get along” culture may be responsible for a chunk of it: one side can’t believe the other side is saying such impolitic things, while the other side grows ever more frustrated that important questions about inclusivity and safety are being shunted aside to argue about phrasing. I’ve read some discussion on Micro.blog itself about this, and it’s all pretty civil—and all mostly about, as one person put it, “distaste for the way this was executed.” Tut-tut!

Having a genteel social media site is, in many ways, nice. But it can also provide cover for people who are, if not openly advocating for those harms, approving of them. Ritter seems genuinely apologetic about the firestorm he precipitated, but as Micro.blog user Hollie notes, there’s an air of I’m sorry that I made you all so upset to his response that lacks both a clear explanation (for instance, “I see now how that earlier post was transphobic, and I understand why you are all upset that I am paying eight bucks a month to a Nazi so I have a better experience on a platform that the service I develop for was explicitly founded to counter”) and amends (for instance, “I will stop sending eight bucks a month to the Nazi and drop the Transgender Law Center fifty bucks instead”).

So what’s the solution to this? I don’t know, man. Like most social media explosions, it’ll die down, and leave everyone with vaguely bad feelings. Some people will come away thinking that Adam Newbold is taking a principled stand (yes), and/or that he’s too confrontational about it (eh?); that Manton Reece is a transphobe (doubtful), and/or that he veers centrist in ways which undercut his allyship (hmm); that Vincent Ritter is MAGA-aligned (signs point to yes).

And, I get that this particular instance has a tempest in a teapot aspect to it, that—like the comedian at the convention—it’s become what it has due to existing relationships rather than the world being on fire. The thing is, the world is on fire now, and I can’t help but worry how much of this is a harbinger of the next four years—or, God help us, decade or longer. There’s going to be pressure to not take strong stands. To shift uncomfortably and stay silent when someone says, “I support the transgenders, you know, but don’t you think they’re asking too much?” instead of saying, “No, I don’t, and ‘transgender’ is not a noun, you absolute fucking tomato.” To defend friends and coworkers when they’re the ones Just Asking Questions™.

There’s going to be, in other words, pressure to be genteel. That means not calling people out when they deserve to be called out. It means looking the other way. Maybe there are times in history where that’s fine, or at least not harmful, but we’re not in such a time. We’re in a time where staying above the fray, where tut-tutting people sounding the alarm for being so uncouth about it, is choosing a side. You’d better be damn sure it’s the side you want to be on.