[E]To Forget is an Ethical Act
Twitter users had a preternatural ability to infer context that was never present in a post. They’d assume the worst possible intention, they’d latch onto an extremely common and benign turn of phrase and then just destroy you over it. Everyday people logged onto the timeline looking for blood and if they didn’t find it they would create it themselves. The worst part of it was the self-certain belief that in doing so they were engaged in a legitimate and effective form of activism. If there was ever a valid criticism to be leveled against the perjoratively-designated “SJW” Twitter (once upon a time, before it was “CRT”, before it was “DEI”), it’s that people would simply badger someone until they changed the very language they spoke. Most of the time, it was just someone literally making something up thinking it sounded smart and progressive and then suddenly it became a shibboleth. God forbid you logged off to watch, I don’t know, a movie or a baseball game, and then logged back on to find that vocabulary shifted under your feet. Oh, you’re using transphobia instead of transmisia? Ableist swine. Oh, you’re using “MtF?” It’s “AMAB.” Oh, you’re using “AMAB?” Binarist asshole.1 These battles rage on today, and every time I poke my head back in I see people who by every other measure should be in community with each other tearing each other apart instead over minor invectives that have no analog-world equivalents.
Having used Twitter for ten years meant being around long enough to have fought for normalizing certain language in everyday speech only to see people suddenly allege it to be bad as literal fascism. I’ve been openly queer for a very long time, and I remember keenly the fights to encourage straight people to use “partner” for their loved ones because it made social interactions more inclusive to queer people, only to watch a few years later as people would launch hundred tweet invectives about how it was “queer appropriation.” It was a dizzying experience. A shocking number of posts that I gleefully purged were deep threads about exactly these kind of debates.