When Is the Right Time?
When is the right time to get mad? The Internet makes this difficult to decide. Before the Internet, because of the long lead times required for responses - columns, letters to the editor, protest marches - the time was NOW. Get mad now! Because otherwise you might not. And then who benefits (probably a lot of people, but anyhoo…)?
Now, getting mad seems to be a waiting game. If you get mad too early, you are the one everyone else self-righteously responds to. Your anger is locked into a frenzied state that, with each moment past, seems overblown. “How can he be so blind?” “Why doesn’t she have any perspective?” Now that other people have read your anger, they feel that your anger at the offensive thing is a thing they need to respond to in itself - after all, all anger is something to get angry about. You become the person that everyone else parodies. “I mean, I get angry at offensive things, but not like that.”
There’s a bit more back-and-forth where the angry side tries to get people to pay attention to the spirit of the argument, and the smugly-unangry side focuses on semantics. “But let’s focus on what I meant!” “No, let’s focus on what you said!” And then, just as everyone is about to not care, someone comes along - one of those “wise” figures on tumblr, for instance, the ones that no one disagrees with (you know who they are) - and they sum up everything in a bit of “isn’t life funny?” sort of way that makes it impossible to get angry at, or really interpret which side of the argument they are on.
And so the thing that seemed so worthy of your anger is deflated and turned into a “life is such a varied tapestry!” doodad. But that thing that pissed you off is still there, festering away, being a piece of shit. And here you are, aware that getting angry is utterly pointless, because really, isn’t everything, at bottom, kind of the same? Or at least, this is what every argument turns into after awhile, when the point is no longer about some increasingly muddled set of ideas, but the fact that we should all agree and stop fighting and accept life as being some great lifey thing.
So, I suppose the time to get angry on the Internet is never. Anger drives the Internet, but it is also the part that seems to doom its content to permanent impermanence. The Internet often doesn’t drive ideas. It simply digests them. And it leaves behind a smear of self-satisfaction or annoyance, depending on the side you happen to be trapped on. IRL, this digestive process is left as hot air that disperses before the real work is begun. But the Internet generally ignores the real work, and sets the digestive process in stone. These arguments are the monuments of our age.
