Freaks and Geeks

A flame war veteran writes

The term ‘stay-at-home parents’ is used to distinguish parents without paid work from parents with jobs; but it’s also pleasingly literal, because when you’re looking after small children it becomes extremely difficult to leave the house. If you run out of milk, for instance, you cannot simply ‘go to the shops’. Instead, you have to: 

• persuade some of the world’s most unreasonable people to stop what they’re doing and fall in with your plans; 

• take a quick stocktake of everyone’s bladder and bowel capacity, bearing in mind that your companions either cannot or will not answer accurately; 

• use guile (and, when that fails, force) to get everyone appropriately dressed; 

• gather milk, wipes, nappies, snacks, toys and spare clothing; and then 

• strap everything and everyone into an unbreakable formation, so that nobody can wander under the wheels of a bus. 

As a result, parents in sole charge of young children spend a lot of time at home, where everything breakable is above head-height and nobody really minds if a small child becomes irretrievably stuck to a hard surface. 

If you’ve been around these parts for a while you might know that for a long time I worked at Mumsnet, ‘the UK’s biggest website for parents’. (This is Mumsnet’s tagline, and I still find it difficult to say one without the other.) But before I worked there I was an ordinary poster on Mumsnet’s forums, which is where the madness really began for me. I was a ‘super-user’, meaning that for about three years there was barely a waking moment when I was not posting on Mumsnet. It’s how I got the job: the position required a deep understanding of the site, so who better to recruit than the wild-eyed devotee who never logged off?

The genius of Mumsnet is that it allows parents to simultaneously be alone with their kids and be in adult company; to supervise a nap or a mealtime while also discussing Israel/Palestine, feminism, Citroen trade-in prices, evergreen shrubs for shady gardens, and cervical mucus. I remember the exact moment in early 2007 when I first became entranced by it. It all started because I was resentfully watching Handy Manny with my younger son. (Parents of young children will tell you that they enjoy some kids’ programmes, but this is a coping mechanism.) Worried that I might die of irritation, I decided I’d check out the site for mothers that The Guardian kept publishing articles about. 

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I wandered over to the computer and fired it up, and within ten minutes I had found a discussion about whether women should take their husband’s names when they get married. There was a mixture of views, but a large proportion of the women posting were saying that they had jettisoned their ‘maiden’ (urgh) name because it had been ‘difficult to spell’ or ‘difficult to pronounce’; or their first name just ‘went better’ with their husband’s surname; or they didn’t really mind either way while their husband definitely did; or they wanted ‘us all to be a family’, as though having different surnames was an impenetrable barrier to intimacy. 

In face-to-face conversations I tend to clam up if I think my opinion will be controversial. But faced with the same situation online, I experienced a literal quickening of the pulse and a dampening of the palms, a material, adrenalised cardiovascular BOOM. My body was telling me that this matter was overwhelmingly important; clearly, it was absolutely imperative that I should step forwards and Speak My Truth. I’ve had that sensation maybe ten thousand times since then, and every single time I find it very difficult to resist.

I can’t remember exactly what my first post on the discussion thread said, but the general import was ‘Women who take their husband’s names are neither as feminist as I am, nor as clever.’ This, again, was an insanely supercharged version of anything that I would ever say aloud in real life, not least because some of my favourite people took their husband’s name when they got married. But we weren’t in Kansas any more; we were on the social web. I confidently expected everyone on the thread to fall back in thoughtful admiration; I was pretty confident most of them had never heard of feminism. So I pressed ‘Send’; stood back; and watched, amazed, as hundreds of women repeatedly kicked my arse.

I’ve seen similar scenarios play out many times since then, and the person getting yelled at tends to respond in one of two ways. They either unplug the computer, and then set it on fire just to make sure; or they instantly become addicted. You already know which category I fell into. In my defence, see the first few paragraphs of this piece.

I’m not going to add to the pile of think-pieces about the exodus from X (Oliver Johnson and Charles Arthur have run through some of the issues, if you’re interested). Some readers won’t have heard of Bluesky, the rival network set up by Twitter’s original, pre-Musk owners; others will already be using it. Either position is fine with me, not that any of you should care what I think about it. I’ve started a Bluesky account because my day job requires me to keep up with The Journalists, who used to be on Twitter but have now largely decamped; but otherwise I would have stayed away. Partly because – as laid out in Tess’s piece here (our most-read piece of the year!) – despite all their benefits, large social networks almost always end up having anti-social outcomes. But mostly because of something else, which is that large social networks almost always end up being dominated by people with gaping personality problems. And I know this because, for a while, I got close to being one of them.

By their very nature, social networks are like Centerparcs for the socially maladapted. People who, for whatever reason, find it convenient to socialise online – busy people, parents of small children, people with illnesses or disabilities, carers, people who live in remote locations, introverts, wordcels – share online spaces with those who cannot socialise in real life because they are, fundamentally, extremely unpleasant. The aggressive, the abusive and the narcissistic are provided with an instant audience of captive parasocial acquaintances who cannot get away from their bullshit. 

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The word for these unstable online personalities is ‘troll’, but trolls come in lots of different flavours. There’s the Classic Troll, a stunningly offensive nihilist. But there’s also the Victim Troll, who demands sympathy with menaces; the Activist Troll, whose monomaniacal devotion to a single issue – any issue – is backed up by abuse; and the Plain Speaking troll, who blurts out the baldest possible rejoinders to deeply painful revelations. And I reserve a specific animus towards the Tech Guru Troll, who furiously demands that every website on the internet be re-coded to their personal satisfaction.

It’s possible, of course, to do any these things — to be strongly politically partisan, to be brusque and a bit rude, to quibble about UX — without actually being a troll. The thing that distinguishes trolls is that, like toddlers, they believe that negative attention is better than no attention. The advice is to ignore them, but whatever you do – dispute, pacify, fight back, laugh, ignore, log off – you’re responding, and response is this only thing they want. Like a virus, their function is to stimulate a reaction in the host. The moment I realised this was the moment I began to take a step back from online networks. I can cope with algorithms and bots and stupid ads and juiced numbers, but the knowledge that my ordinary human responses were being coercively instrumentalised by individuals made me want to scrape my skin off. 

You might be thinking ‘sounds like a problem for the moderators’, and you’re right. By the time a network has grown to any sort of scale, 1% of the user base will be taking up 99% of the moderators’ time. The ordinary users slide out of view; the only thing the moderators see is the Mad. Female obstetricians are apparently more likely than the average woman to have elective Caesarean sections, because their professional lives revolve around difficult births, and something similar happens with moderators; you start to see psychopaths around every corner. At Mumsnet we reviewed and replied to every single moderation report individually, thereby providing the most demented users with attractively personalised side-missions. There are some user names I cannot see to this day without twitching.

I don’t think I ever became a full-bore troll back in my days of posting on Mumsnet, although really that’s for other people to say. But I do know when I got closest to it. It was during an incident that became known as ‘Moldies’, which remains my yardstick for just how totally berserk I can become on the internet if I’m not careful.

Looking back, all that actually happened was that at the end of 2007 some of Mumsnet’s most venerable users became disenchanted with the growing popularity of the site, and decided to go off and start an invite-only private forum. (Their forum was called ‘MN Oldies’, and thus ‘Moldies’.) But this mild description of the facts doesn’t come anywhere close to conveying the whipcrack of hysteria that broke over Mumsnet when we found out what the old-timers had done. We stayed online for hundreds of hours without a break, using words like ‘betrayal’ and ‘liar’ and ‘traitor’. We gave ourselves permission to say astonishingly unpleasant things about women we had happily interacted with the week before. Tens of thousands of children went without baths, hot meals and bedtime stories as their mothers lost their shit online. The whole steaming mess broke open just before Christmas, and the duty moderators begged us all to stop so that they could pack their children’s stockings, but we didn’t listen; we had become Mad. (Bluesky and X are currently going through a similarly painful separation stage, and both are filled with partisans posting snidely about everyone on the other site. This is obviously an extremely good use of everyone’s time.)

And then it all stopped, as quickly as it had started. I think we all woke up a few days after the New Year and thought: hang on. It’s just some people, most of whom I’ve never met, starting their own private forum. That’s… allowed. But the experience has stayed with me, because I was one of the prime instigators of the hysteria. I wasn’t calling people traitors, but I was inhabiting the worst version of my online persona; pious and relentless, ‘just asking questions’, and always backed up by members of my cool-girl gang who were guaranteed to laugh at my mean jokes.

Even as I was contributing to the nonsense, posting thousands of times in the space of a few days, I knew that I was being propelled by my stupidest instincts. But I found it incredibly difficult to stop myself, and after a while I stopped trying. In the end I was saved by a sense of my own ridiculousness. (I suspect that this is what the most deranged posters lack.) But I understand what’s so compelling about it: the conversations that move with such an urgent rapidity, the emotional return on investment. I understand what it’s like to keep posting just because you want to see the effect of your behaviour on your antagonist. Whenever I briefly looked up from the screen I would realise that my heart was hammering. 

Humans are not meant to have interactions like this. We are not supposed to live with anxiety punctuated by explosions, like it’s 1944 and we’re pinned down in the Ardennes; our biology revolts against it. But then, we’re also not supposed to live in a society where so many people are bored and isolated and deprived of human interaction. Thankfully, these days, if I want to leave the house I just have to put on some shoes.

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For more social media regrets, there’s Tess Dixon’s piece on how the form has evolved: