The Hardening of the Online Heart

How the response to the Hamas attack illuminated the damage living online has done to us all

Once again, I wasn’t going to say anything.

I really wasn’t. Because I deeply believe that you do not actually have to have a scorchingly viral opinion about everything that happens, and you super definitely don’t need to share that opinion on the internet over and over again, and maybe, just maybe, it might possibly be morally acceptable to just shut the fuck up sometimes.

I had every intention of shutting the fuck up.

But the online reaction to the Hamas attack and ongoing Gaza conflict, on the right, sure, but particularly among the left, has been some gnarly, festering, dark shit and I feel like I went over to my neighbor’s house for a somber wake and found a bunch of ghouls partying it up and swinging from the chandeliers singing a bunch of disturbing meme-shanties and showing about as much empathy and humanity as that pile of screaming dollar store rubber geese.

What the fuck, guys.

And yeah, I’m putting the rest of this under a paywall because I don’t want to fucking argue about the shit everyone’s arguing about. I’m not trying to get into the weeds about who’s right (no one) and who’s wrong (everyone) or the history of the Levant (because as much as I know about it, I don’t know a lot more, and the internet hive mind generally knows three half-remembered bullet-points in a trench-coat and thinks that’s PLENTY to post a 32-tweet thread that just sounds so very tweed-and-velvet-elbows authoritative people toddle happily off to repeat the pithiest lines without so much as a quick fact-check) or sit my ignorant ass down in a plush chair and opine about solutions (thousands of people have been trying to fix this for thousands of years, but sure, you’ve really figured it out, IPAlover420).

Obviously, I want to argue about something different.

Because I cannot recall a moment of butchery like this where I saw such a cold overwhelming response of well, they kind of deserved it because their government sucks. This is definitely a fine and normal thing to say and way to be. When so many seem to have poked their head out of a series of hothouse internet rhetoric bubbles, tossed out something their friends sure thought was sticking it to the man, and ended up actively defending rape, murder, infanticide, desecration of corpses, and beheading, all for the little drop of dopamine social media has to spare.

And as I was just talking about how pain is not actually an individualized bespoke punishment from the cosmos, I’m gonna need to yell for a minute.

A couple of minutes.

Many minutes.