[LIFE'S OLLE TRAILS 11] Worrying about comments section chaos

A bird sits in a tree on Jeju Island. Courtesy of Rachel Stine

By Rachel Stine

Want to know another secret?

I considered cutting the entire last section of this series, talking about IVF treatments. It seemed too intimate to publish. The face-to-face comments had stung, but I suspected the anonymous online comments would be a toxic typhoon of misogyny.

But the words of an old writing professor came to mind as I reviewed it. "Don't flinch," she said, meaning that pre-publication anxiety is an indicator that you've got good material. Once again, discomfort proves itself a valuable ally.

So the "single moms are ruining society" crowd will have to scream their way through the comments section. I'll learn to let it go…because just as the Olle Trails confronted the OCD demon, they taught me to confront the social media demon, too.

While in the woods, I didn't use the internet much…but I did think about it.

When I was young, nasty internet comments didn't really bother me.

I first hopped online in the late 1990s, as a kid trawling through Geocities and Angelfire websites in search of Game Boy cheat codes. My family was the only one on our block with a computer. As a 12-year-old, I mocked LiveJournal "flame wars" with my friends, and we recited the GIF Theory like a mantra. (This 2004 meme proposes that a normal person + anonymity + an audience becomes…well, not-so-pleasant, to keep it PG for The Korea Times.)

Stupid computer.

But by 2022, internet outrage had soaked through global society. Even before hiking the Olle Trails, I started to realize how being a social media spectator was dragging down my moods.

That's why, in January 2021, I deleted the Facebook app off my phone. This was in response to watching a rabid Twitter mob cancel bestselling author Lindsay Ellis because she…

…compared "Raya and the Last Dragon" to "Avatar: The Last Airbender."

Yes. You read that correctly.

A queer woman compared the plot of a Disney movie to the plot of a Nickelodeon cartoon from 2005, and Twitter goblins ran her off the internet for it.

Because comparing two fantasy worlds with Asian characters is…racist? Somehow?

Meanwhile, "Honest Trailers," a YouTube series run by men, made the exact same comparison and received zero backlash.

Interesting how that panned out.

While I don't have a Twitter account, I've sat in the bleachers watching this disturbing pattern manifest over and over and over. A marginalized content creator (almost always a woman) is harassed, threatened and doxxed by her own fans, sometimes to the brink of suicide. It's become a meme at this point. "The left cannibalizes itself," right?

Well, this long-time progressive has grown jaded. I decided to touch grass, as the TikTok kids say. Hiking the Olle Trails seemed a healthier way to spend my time than watching someone be pilloried as Twitter's next top supervillain.

While I'm no expert, social media seems to tap into a deeply rooted "witch hunting instinct" all human beings have. Outrage algorithms hijack the brains of otherwise good, sensitive people, pulling us into a vortex of confirmation bias. We're sucked in deeper and deeper until anyone who disagrees with us ― or is even perceived as disagreeing with us ― must be harassed out of a job.

Lindsay Ellis is a powerful progressive voice on YouTube. Anyone familiar with her compassionate, wide-ranging body of video essays knows these racism accusations were unfounded. And yet few people had the social courage to stand up for her.

It repulsed me. Watching this brutal, coordinated attack on someone's personhood left me feeling politically homeless.

These days, Lord Twitterbird's sledgehammer seems to shatter the lives of marginalized people the most. Lindsay Ellis rightly points out, marginalized people are held to impossible standards of political purity, and these days, harassment isn't always from alt-right neo-nazis.

I've noticed that bad-faith actors will hijack the language of social justice to destroy those they envy. As Contrapoints points out in a stellar video essay on the subject, the internet convinces us to sublimate envy, which is shameful, into an ego-pleasing sense of moral superiority.

And I can already hear the rebuttal ― "But this happens on the right, too!" Yes. Ideological purity tests exist everywhere, from Marxist chatrooms to the QAnon cult. But internet infighting has become so pervasive in progressive spaces that some of my queer friends now refuse to attend offline community events.

Personally? This isn't the world I've been fighting for since 2005.

Those were the days when a friend's mother scolded: "You can't play with Rachel Stine because she's going to grow up to be a lesbian." Another parent described the Gay-Straight Alliance of our school as "a dangerous sex club." Later, when I was giving a GSA announcement in the cafeteria, a male student screamed: "Shut up, dyke!"

But imagine if I now used Twitter to publicly name and shame my bully from 16 years ago. Should he be canceled for such an archaic moment of stupidity? He's probably been through university and unlearned the biases that made him yell that slur, anyway. If I called him out on Twitter in 2023, my motivation wouldn't be accountability. It would be revenge.

And revenge…well, that's never really been my vice. I prefer greed, because it enables me to waste thousands of dollars on Pokemon dolls.

Yet that is precisely where the outrage algorithms seem to be taking us. On social media, there's no forgiveness or potential for human growth. The witch hunt demands a witch, and since perfection is a human fever dream, anyone can be turned into pyre-fuel. That's why I encourage fellow leftists to spend less time engaging in internet discourse.

Being chronically online myself, I thought it would be difficult to kick the screen time habit. And yet the Olle Trails made quitting relatively easy; the more time I spent hiking, the more dust my Facebook account accumulated.

Standing in front of the Pacific Ocean is a quick reminder of our own smallness. Mama Universe whispers of our hubris. In this way, hiking helped me articulate a firm thesis on the phenomenon of cancel culture ― that I refuse to participate, and I encourage other leftists to do the same. My democratic socialism has always been about inalienable human dignity. It has always been about granting individuals the grace and space to change.

When you're on a seaside cliff, gazing out over the ocean, manifesting jeong towards strangers seems critical. There is just the planet before us ― a wounded planet we have to take care of together.

At the end of our lives, when we sink back into the ground, what do we want our legacy to be? A strand of shattered families and friendships? The ostracization of friends who were infected by fascist ideas? Or a legacy of helping others recover from hate?

The Olle Trails reminded me that it's essential to honor the divine spark in each person ― even when they say or do things that hurt us.

LIFE'S OLLE TRAILS 1 How hiking Jeju's 437km of trails changed my life
LIFE'S OLLE TRAILS 2 Fighting agrarian anxiety attacks on Jeju's paths
LIFE'S OLLE TRAILS 3 Carrying a grandma through Yaksu Station
LIFE'S OLLE TRAILS 4 Going full white lady in the woods
LIFE'S OLLE TRAILS 5 Getting ice cream and umbrellas from strangers
LIFE'S OLLE TRAILS 6 Discovering deer carcasses at the tea museum
LIFE'S OLLE TRAILS 7 Healing perfectionism on Pyoseon Beach
LIFE'S OLLE TRAILS 8 Confronting OCD in Woljeong-ri
LIFE'S OLLE TRAILS 9 Reading a poem about death in the woods
LIFE'S OLLE TRAILS 10 Confronting the subconscious saboteur
LIFE'S OLLE TRAILS 11 Worrying about comments section chaos
LIFE'S OLLE TRAILS 12 Saying goodbye in Gueok-ri
LIFE'S OLLE TRAILS 13 Walking back, fast or slow

Rachel Stine has volunteered in the North Korean human rights sphere for over a decade. Her writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, The Korea Times and other major news outlets. You can view nature photography from her journeys around the world at flickr.com/photos/rachelstinewrites.