A while back, a good friend of mine shared a link to a YouTube video on Facebook, and I had Opinions about it, as I often do. It doesn’t matter what the content of the video was, nor does it matter what my response to it was (or would have been).* The point is that I realized, as I was thinking about all the various things I wanted to say in response to the video, that I could not actually imagine a situation in which anything I wrote would result in a net positive outcome for anyone. I knew I’d feel worse. I knew my friend would likely feel worse. Not because of some character flaw of his, not because I had been a dick, not for any reason except that the default posture of being online, in the way that we are across all these platforms, is one of performative adversity—and not because of anything you or I actually do, but because of how the platforms are built.

So I didn’t write anything. And I felt terrible about that. Why couldn’t I find a way to say something to one of my old friends, someone with whom I’ve had any number of difficult, personal, confrontational, and ultimately very productive conversations in the past, without expecting a negative outcome? This is surely a failure of my own, I thought, that I cannot make the words do my bidding without chumming the comment section waters with that anxious “Someone is typing a comment (…)” energy.

I like confrontation, in the right situation. Confrontation illuminates. Confrontation forces willing conversation partners to examine the flaws in their own thinking and adjust accordingly. Confrontation in good faith between people who respect each other can be far more beneficial than mere conversation.

At the same time, when I try to write a post or an essay online, I (generally) try to write it in such a way that it is difficult to confront. I don’t particularly want someone to read what I write and have a million things to say about it. I would rather they read it, absorb it, and allow it to become a small part of how they see the world going forward, or, alternatively, just ignore it. I know how well I have succeeded in this goal by two measures: (1) the wonderful silence with which I am confronted when I post something—being ignored as self-reinforcing success, brilliant!—or (2) how fair it is to reply to any of the responses with “asked and answered,” before quoting the original piece in slightly different language. I know how much time and effort and pain I put into what I wrote—if it’s clear that there was not anything close to a corresponding amount of effort dedicated to the response, it’s likely not worth the inevitable loggerheads-y back and forth.

This sounds almost unimaginably arrogant on the page, reading it back, but it’s just a reflection of how I interact with and absorb things I read myself, online or otherwise. It’s not that I don’t want the interaction or the conversation or even the confrontation—I just don’t think the comment section is even close to the right forum for productive versions of those things. I didn’t always think this. I once had a very starry-eyed picture of what the Online Discourse could and should look like, but many years of actually being here, online, have beaten that right out of me. (I still, deep down, hope and believe it’s possible, because I am an idiot.) You need only look so far as the nearest comment section that didn’t go completely off the rails to see the point illustrated. Whenever two people, usually millennial or millennial-adjacent in age, have an empathetic meeting of hearts and minds from ideologically distinct positions, the fact of the collective magnanimity on display is just about always remarked upon, usually with some mutual appreciation from a third party and lots of diverse heart emojis—the kumbuya circle-jerk exception that proves the trollface rule.

This wasn’t a case of adhering to the old adage about staying quiet when one has nothing nice to say. The things I wanted to say were “nice,” by my estimation—an attempt to change the conversation a bit and point to what I saw as flaws in reasoning or relevant facts left unmentioned. And I am good at this, when I want to be. I can often—with great anxious effort of self-deprecation, attempted humor, and the incessant ego-soothing lowering of the stakes—pull off the trick of seeming nice online, even as I disagree vehemently with the person on the other end of my words. But it doesn’t matter.

The comment section stage in the middle of the panopticon is inherently adversarial, no matter who is holding the conch, the tenor set not by the conversationalists but by the fact of the platform itself, and the unspeaking, unacknowledged audience of voyeurs looking on from the little brightly-lit glass windows of their own cells.

Fifteen years ago, or whatever, I could’ve disagreed with my friend about the content of the video he shared without the weight of the audience on both our backs. We would have been hanging out, maybe drinking some beers, probably with some other friends, having a vehemently confrontational conversation about something we fundamentally disagreed about—and found a million ways we also agreed with each other, subconsciously communicating nuance in every raised eyebrow and elongated vowel—because we are close friends, after all. And we would have interrupted each other and had awkward silences and raised our voices and laughed and laughed and laughed, because we would know that it really, deeply doesn’t matter. The stakes are not high, in such a conversation. We’re just two people who love and respect each other who disagree about something. And that’s fine, actually! It’s all fine, it’s mostly all fine.

Not everything speaks to the underlying character of the person saying it. Every tweet is not an opportunity to determine the moral worth of the person tweeting it. These things we say online, they really are just some things a person said. They don’t matter, not really—certainly not any more than they would when spoken aloud with a basketball or baseball game on television in the background. The panopticon knows we’re not fully formed, not done growing, haven’t got it all figured out, but the audience takes it all in as iterative final form—a friend or family member who demands that level of self-realization in person isn’t terribly likely to be invited to the next cookout.

But there’s no denying the finality that comes with looking at a bad post or comment or tweet. “Holy shit,” I find myself saying to…myself, standing in line to pick up my daughter from pre-school, or sitting on the toilet, or waiting for the water to boil, “how can this asshole possibly think that? How did they possibly traverse the distance from thinking it, and then deciding to put it out in the world for all of us to see, and then actually doing it?”

Any number of times a day, I feel vicarious humiliation for friends and strangers I encounter on the internet, ranging from the weird little twinge of embarrassment I feel on someone’s behalf when I am briefly annoyed by a spammy Ray-Ban’s scam they’ve been tagged in by one of their hacked friends, all the way to the dehumanizing indignity of posting a facts-free, easily disproven, inflammatory meme. If the same long-ago co-worker said the same thing in front of me at work, I’d laugh and tell him he was crazy and offer a series conversational counterpoints. In the online panopticon, though, I sit quietly and watch this fucking moron debase himself for us all again, just a couple of scrolls down the page.

I have listened to many lengthy interviews given by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and read quite a few thousands-words-long posts by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and I’ve never heard either one of them make a compelling moral case for why their platforms should exist. I know we all use them. I know it’s how a lot of news and politics and social interaction happen these days. I recognize the fact of their ubiquity. But I’ve never gotten the sense from either one of those guys that they have an answer for what seems to me to be an undeniable truth—that the world would be a measurably better place if their products simply blinked out of existence.

I don’t think we are all the exhibitionist and voyeuristic kinksters that Being Online makes us into. (Brief aside: I recognize that I am generalizing here. I know, I know—hashtag not all Online-ers.) I don’t think we signed up for this, exactly—I think we just kinda found ourselves here. The exhibitionist exhibits because he wants to be seen—whatever other weird stuff is going on in there psychologically, the exhibitionist wants to be judged, a petty attention tyrant. Most of us don’t think of posting online—a news article, a political meme, a YouTube video, pictures of our kids or of a night out with friends or on a date—in terms of exhibitionism. We’re just sharing, trying to connect, trying to be human with the means we’ve been provided. I don’t think we’re seeking judgement, mostly, no more than we are voyeurs seeking to pass judgement as we navigate the infinite scroll. It’s just how the machine was built.

The panopticon’s observation tower has been remodeled as a stage, and we are all on it and watching it at the same time, every moment of human expression and interaction digitized and immortalized and made to be totalizing. But it’s all fine, actually! These are not the stakes with which we’re meant to be playing, all the time. Mostly, it’s fine.

If this seems to you like a rather lengthy way of explaining why I’m unlikely to get into a back-and-forth flame war in the comments (note the default commenter avatar, and the picture atop this post) in like the second real post on this website…you’re sorta right! Send me an email! Ask me to publish a column of yours in response! Call me up! But let’s not run in circles around each other in the comments while everybody watches.

*It wasn’t racist, or advocating for violence against children, or anything like that. It was just a bad take. And it’s fine! It’s all fine, it’s mostly all fine.