Why we can’t talk about pizza
Okay, we actually can talk about pizza. But that’s why I’m using it as a stand-in here, for other things that are a lot harder to talk about.
I’ve seen a few different posts like this already, addressing some of these problems. But I haven’t seen one addressing all of them– or exploring all the interconnected conflicts between the problems, which make a full solution pretty much impossible.
For pizza, substitute any controversial topic that people post about online.
The kind of thing some love and and some hate. Some love to hate on it. Some love to hate on the haters. Some don’t want to see any mention of it at all, ever, because it’ll set off flashbacks and panic attacks.
Whole range of perspectives.
Now let’s assume “pizza” stands for a topic of that kind.
And let’s assume we’re just debating how posts about that topic should be tagged– not whether any type of discussion about it should ever be outright banned. Just gonna go into the problems of tagging, right now.
Because that’s plenty.
So, suppose you post about how much you love pizza. You want make your posts about pizza findable for other pizza lovers, so you can geek out together– but also findable for anyone who wants to avoid seeing any pizza posts ever, so that they can filter it out and live their life blissfully free of pizza.
For that purpose, you gotta tag it with #pizza or some other such obvious, intuitive tag. Otherwise it’s not gonna be recognized, by either group.
But… then come the haters.
Maybe there’s an especially nasty faction of the anti-pizza side of the discourse, whose favorite activity in life is to search every tag that could refer to pizza, and go into the notes flaming and doxxing everyone who expresses any positive interest in pizza.
Your reasonable tags are now a danger to you. The only way around it is to leave it untagged or make up an obscure tag– #p//zz//a, #9122@, #peetzah, etc.
And this is no good, because it immediately ruins the findability– for both those who like pizza and those who want to avoid it. Unless they are all somehow aware of the secret tag while the haters aren’t.
Which even if they are, that won’t last long. The haters will catch on, and they’ll invade the tag eventually.
There’s no tagging option that preserves both Connections (with contacts you want) and Safety (from those you don’t).
Same thing if you want to talk about how you don’t like pizza. Tag it with “pizza” or anything straightforward like that, and suddenly you’re putting hate in the tag where pizza-lovers go to find stuff to be happy about. Mean!
But if you leave off the tag, or use an obscure one, then you’re being mean to those who are trying to avoid all mentions of pizza, good or bad, for their own mental health.
If there were enough widespread agreement on one small set of tags (for instance, “pizza” for positive talk, and “pizza-critical” for negative talk)…. Well, that’d get us somewhere.
But it would still have the problem that the predatory haters– the ones looking for a fight, on either side– can easily find people saying things they hate, and swoop in to attack.
As long as there are those types of haters, no system is gonna work all the way.
In a way, it’s kind of like the debate over whether heterosexual people should use the word “partner” for their significant other.
The history behind that is, gay people have for some time been saying “my partner” because it can balance Communication (to signal to each other that they have that thing in common) and Safety (not explicitly outing themselves to any homophobes who might be around).
And the problem is split between Communication and Safety:
1. Since safety relies on “partner” not always necessarily meaning “same-sex partner,” the Safety part only works if heterosexuals also talk about their “partners” sometimes.
2. But the Communication part of it doesn’t work if heterosexuals also use that term.
That type of balance between communication and safety never lasts for long, and it’s never perfect while it does. It requires a term that is known by all of one group, but not known by any of a different group.
And that stasis never, ever lasts, because information spreads.
You can’t stop it. You can only do your best to shift from one semi-secret term to a new one when the old one wears out.
As long as there’s hate, words will always be in an arms race.