On internet hostility
8th April 2025
Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me a tweet with some unpleasant comments about Indian people. I’ve noted a general uptick in this kind of content across platforms – it’s not clear to me whether this is because of predatory algorithms getting better at delivering inflammatory content to the intended targets, a genuine increase in this kind of animus, or some combination of the two. Either way, she noticed the same thing and it bothered her, and she asked me how I deal with it.
My first instinct was to say that there isn’t really anything to ‘do’ about such things. If you log off, it doesn’t exist; the world remains a startlingly normal place. You just need to surround yourself and imbibe what you want to see more of. Historical perspective helps; there is a Twitter account called @HindooHistory that posts archival newspaper clippings chronicling the reception and public sentiment towards Hindus in America over the last century or so. The tropes are identical to what’s being said today, except that back then these sentiments were headline items, and now they are unacceptable to state in polite company.
Nonetheless, it got me thinking about about hostility in general, and how particular kinds of cultural norms that we benefit from are not as durable as we might imagine them to be. I believe that it is beneficial to have some sort of prophylactic view towards navigating cultural pendulum-swings. There is of course the ‘sticks and stones’ approach, but I think it downplays the extent to which social media intensifies even highly niche and transient pendulum-swings. One mechanism for this is the share: regardless of intent, it is a potent algorithmic upregulator. My friend, as a result of sending that post to me, is more likely to see similar content. In my experience, the effect is rapid: sharing just 2 or 3 posts of this nature was enough for my Instagram feed to be choked up with similar content. I believe that for the vast majority of people continual exposure at this scale will demoralise and destabilise. As such, some sort of angle is necessary.
Insofar as I have developed an approach in response, it is this. The easiest win is to minimise exposure by restricting yourself to spaces in which you are wanted. Some talk about the benefits of awareness and keeping tabs on potential threats, but this is overdetermined: the threat is likely not material if its implications cannot be felt off the internet, and the benefit is vastly disproportionate to the psychological cost to exposing oneself to the hostility. The tradeoff is a quieter life. Alternative platforms which are typically less hostile continue to have poor uptake. Your other options are living with your thoughts or blogging into the void.
Exposure or not, I think it is also key to have your own operating principles. It seems to me that the people who are destabilised the most by shifts in the cultural tides receive, unthinkingly, their MO from the cultural streams that they are exposed to. What are your invariants? What do you believe in, what guides you through decisions at the border of what can be resolved rationally – and across that border? If you don’t have even prospective answers to these questions then there is no filter between externality and internality. The full force of external perturbations is passed to your psyche and your emotive systems. Having prospective answers to these questions allows you to engage in a dialectic with culture as opposed to being subsumed by it. I’m not asking you to be like a sea-wall, unshaken in the face of this stuff – that’s both unrealistic and unwise. I’m talking about something closer to policy-based reinforcement. Exposure to hostility biases your policy in one direction or another, but it doesn’t send the whole system into panic or scarcity mindset. Let it just be a datapoint.
Another way to think about ‘policy’ is as an independently formulated vision of the Good. I think this is necessary to not be taken as an intellectual hostage by the very cultural logic that is the source of the hostility. Instead, you are free to engage with the ambient culture with strategy and pragmatism; to engage on one’s own terms, to further one’s own ends. If I may be permitted a coinage, I would like to call this euselfishness, in the same vein as eustress: a psychologically beneficial level of self-preservation, contextualised and therefore legitimised by fitting into a broader vision of the kind of world you want to instantiate. When I think fixedly on this possible world, the hold of the commons lessens; the centre of gravity returns to me and the shore-line of acrid commentary recedes into irrelevance.