That Time the Internet Meanies Taught Me How to Be More Fearless
by Sarina Bowen
Courtesy of Unsplash
by Sarina Bowen
Once upon a time in 2022, I was away at an author convention, delivering a talk. It was a great weekend of focusing on friendships and authorcraft. That same weekend, unbeknownst to me, the operators of one of the biggest pirate sites on the internet were arrested, and the site was shuttered.
“Oh interesting,” I thought when I saw the email from an authors’ organization.
But then, a few hours later, we realized (either me, or one of my helpers) that I was getting some very weird comments on social media. Like, scary weird. Like “you should go off yourself” weird.
When I saw these, I was immediately terrified. I was looking at some of the same internet hate that women had previously endured. Writers like Lyz Lenz and Taylor Lorenz have covered these episodes in great detail, but this was my first time at bat.
What Happened?
A year or so earlier, I had given a one-line quote to an authors’ organization about the damage that pirate sites cause to authors. That quote had been used as part of a congressional committee meeting. Then, long after I’d forgotten all about it, the pirate site arrests had driven journalists to write about piracy, and someone dug up my old quote and stuck it in an article on FastCompany. Where it proliferated.
Some dumbnuts immediately decided that I must be singlehandedly responsible for the demise of an international pirate site. Like, there I was eating tacos in Houston with other authors while also singlehandedly arresting internet fraudsters in Argentina. It boggles the mind.
But then…
Logic doesn’t rule on yonder internets. Soon enough, dozens of people began emailing me and commenting on my social media posts. Here’s a sample, received as an email to one of my accounts:
Go f*** yourself, you dumb c***. Nobody gives a f*** about you in comparison to all the students helped by [pirate site.] Kill yourself you human trash heap.
Wow, okay. This person wanted those stolen books so bad, amirite?
It’s funny now, but when this vitriol filled my inbox, I was shaking. I’m a pleaser, and pleasers melt down at first sight of an inbox full of hate. So much so that I’d already spent years worrying about this very thing! And here it was!
But then a crumb of logic penetrated my fog. As my helpers spent the weekend deleting and blocking comments like these from my social media posts, it occurred to me that I’d always predicted my moment of Big Mad Cancel Doom™ would be the result of something I actually did. A gaffe I’d made. Misinformation that I’d unwittingly shared. A mistake. A bad take.
Because we all make mistakes, and we all have bad takes. I’m no better—although I want to be. So I’d wasted a pile of emotional energy trying to avoid this exact shitstorm. But here it was anyway! All that effort, and I was still at the wrong end of the pitchforks.
I wanted to speak to the manager. But there is no manager. And that’s the valuable lesson I learned that day. The internet does not operate on truth or context. It runs on velocity and outrage. It doesn’t care who you are, what you did, or whether you deserve what’s coming. And you’ll never be able to control it.
Instead of getting depressed about it, though, I felt freer instead. I let go of the exhausting fantasy that if I could just be good enough, careful enough, small enough, I could avoid being targeted at all.
Note: I’m not arguing that we can ignore thoughtful critique. Listening to feedback is an essential writerly goal, and so is personal integrity. So I try to tell the truth. I try to listen. I try to apologize when I’ve actually screwed up. I try to leave people better than I found them.
But when strangers show up with torches over something that never belonged to me in the first place, I don’t have to carry that. I get to draw a line. I get to protect my time, my energy, and my sense of self.
The internet lives by its own rules.
I live by mine.
“Anything you feed your brain, it will internalize. Anything you feed the internet, it will kill.”