on social media etiquette

tweet-thieving and credit debt

Something about Twitter heats the blood. The veil between your moral compass and your inner imp thins as soon as log in. One of social media’s biggest appeals is that it affords you relative safety from an in-person ass-whooping. But there’s something in the atmosphere of Twitter that makes people hungry to abuse that asylum.

I am not being holier-than-thou. I am also people. During the Parisian Olympics in August, I had some colourful words for the TERF-in-Chief, J.K. Rowling.

My disdain for Rowling is well-documented. We have been embroiled in a one-sided beef for the better part of a decade. A day after posting my outburst, a friend of mine alerted me that my tweet had been posted on Instagram to the tune of 20,000 likes.

Things like this have happened periodically throughout my creative life. In the brief time I’ve been using Substack, it’s even happened here. About a month ago or so, I noticed a writer had extrapolated one of my more popular notes into a larger essay. I read it. It didn’t add much to my commentary. It sort of just… languished in prose and orbited the points I’d already made until the word-count was a reasonable length. It was obvious I’d inspired the entire essay but inspiration was flirting dangerously close to appropriation. Nevertheless, I was flattered. I let it go. Everybody gets one.

I didn’t kick up a fuss with the J.K Rowling tweet either because—and I cannot stress this enough—I hate J.K. Rowling more than I care about my tweets being stolen. I’m willing to do anything that needs to be done to accelerate her downfall. I do not need credit. It’s a public service. If I let the chopper sing, everyone should join in like a football chant.

Plus, my handle is there in the picture, right? Slit at the top of the frame like an afterthought. Who needs to be tagged or mentioned in a caption just because its their writing? If someone wants to discover me, all they have to do is click off the current picture, consider if I’m on Instagram at all, decide I am, go to the search bar, type in Saveinigo and you’ve found me! Or perhaps—if they’re feeling particularly adventurous—exit Insta altogether, go onto Twitter, head for the search-bar there, type out Saveinigo and boom! They can engage with my rant directly! I reckon about… less than 1% of people are willing to do that sort of legwork over a tweet.

…I’m being facetious, of course. Its just a tweet about dunking on J.K Rowling.

There is something to be said about how we, the online dwellers, suffer from chronic convenience syndrome. We want it there and then or not at all. If information is not easily accessible, we lose interest.

Instances like this—taking my tweet and posting it on Instagram—fascinate me because technically, they didn’t do anything wrong. They simply put more effort in procuring my tweet than they did to credit me. Its more the thought-process that intrigues me.

Inigo, buddy—its just a tweet. It’s not that deep!

But its my tweet. I didn’t consent for it to be posted on someone else’s page. But because Twitter is a public forum, it doesn’t matter. Legalities and morals are church and state. Its moral to tell someone that you’re taking a photo of them. But it’s legal to photograph anyone in public. I’m wary of anyone who seeks to exploit legal loopholes over doing the right thing. This is one such case. No big deal. Its not the first time someone’s snuck a picture of me when I’m outside.

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Yesterday,

NJ

let me know that the opening line of my essay, mammy robotics inc. was going viral on Twitter. At the time she alerted me, it’d reached 5,000 likes and climbing.

At the time of writing this, the tweet is at 15,000 likes

Isn’t that a good thing? Your words are getting out there! What are you complaining about now, big man?

Well, for starters—there is absolutely no way to identify who wrote this. This tweet—which over 200,000 people have seen—has no discernible link to me and that is how it will remain etched in internet time.

Also, and I cannot stress this enough, I am writing to be a writer. I’m not doing this for bants. I do not romanticise being a struggling artist whose genius is only recognised post-mortem. I take this seriously and nebulous payments of exposure are a meagre translation of my worth.

So if you consider that I write my essays primarily for an audience of my own cultivation, who’ve very respectfully engaged with my work where it is, this is a trespass. It is unsettling to think that someone found my page (I do not know how), opened a specific article, took a screenshot and then posted it on Twitter without thinking to mention where they got it from. I wouldn’t have even known. It was only a day later when someone asked, “where is this from?” that they linked my essay in the replies. Which is fine, in the I’ve covered my tracks sense, but the optics of my words just with the caption, “there it is” is all that most people are going to know.

…Remember I said we all suffer from chronic convenience syndrome? Well, it’s story time.

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Once upon a time, this quote was the source of a massive argument.

It was retweeted into my worldview by a friend. I’d finished reading Angela Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete? not too many weeks before. Davies’ writing style was fresh in my mind. When my friend retweeted this, I messaged her. You probably shouldn’t retweet that, I don’t think Angela Davies said it.

Upon reflection, maybe I shouldn’t have lead with that. But slowly, an argument ensued. It descended into accusations of me being sensitive about the topic. “You just feel called out”. There were constant allusions to the fragility of my masculinity and the odd jabs about my dating history. I kept saying things along the lines of; that’s fine, we can chat about that whenever, init. I just don’t think Angela Davis said this.

I didn’t know she didn’t say it. But I knew she didn’t say it. You know?

Put plainly, I’d read enough Angela Davis to understand that there is no way on god’s green earth that she would utter the sentence, “straight black men and white women will always be the weakest links” —verbally or committed to text. It is not representative of Davis’ politics at any time in her life, it is not representative of how she writes, and it is certainly not representative of the way she generally speaks.

I ended up conceding that fight. At the time, I had no way to prove that Angela Davis didn’t say it and while googling the quote with Angela Davis’ name and getting no results, I was getting mollywopped with passive-aggressive accusations of misogynoir. There was only so many character digs I was willing to take over a quote I didn’t even care about.

A couple of months later, the tweet circulated again. Without the tension of a whatsapp conflict, I was able to do some digging of my own. Later in the twitter thread, “Court” attributes the quote to Women, Race and Class—a book by Davis published in 1981. I found the book and read it. Angela Davis does not write “straight black men and white women will always be the weakest links” in her 1981 Marxist feminist analysis of gender, race and class. By this point, my friend and I were no longer on speaking terms.

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Words spread like wildfire so it’s important to be vigilant about who said them. I’m realising that maybe I’m an anomaly; someone who seeks the source if something smells fishy or entices me. People do not generally care to pursue the origin of things that materialise on their timelines.

Robert Jones, Jr.

once said, “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”

If you google that quote, the first result you’ll find is its attribution to James Baldwin on Goodreads.

This was once an honest and careless mistake. At the time of writing the quote, Robert ran a popular social media platform called Son of Baldwin. I’m guessing at some point, someone reposted Robert’s words, saw the name “Baldwin” and automatically assigned them to James Baldwin. Honest. But careless. Every 6 months or so, the quote circulates around social media, typically accompanied by a black and white image of Jimmy and I get flush with premium-cut fremdschämen (Big love to

The Persistence of Change

for introducing me to that word) towards whoever posted it with the wrong citation.

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Suffice to say, I’ve not been as zen regarding my quote about robots as I have about other instances of uncredited reposting. I’m not so evolved that this volume of engagement doesn’t affect me. And I am especially grateful to everyone who did actively seek me out—you lot are real ones and I hope you enjoy your time here.

I recognise, however, that the bulk of my frustration stems from the fact that it is so ingrained in me to share things that move me and credit the ones who’ve sparked the movement. I’ve encountered awe-inspiring poems, prose, and pieces of art and spent hours hunting down their creators just so I can put their names in a post. I do this for the good of the artist but I also do it for me—because the worst feeling in the world is when I’ve seen something beautiful and I can’t find who’s responsible. I know how it feels when you think someone said something and you discover they didn’t—the pin-prick pang of betrayal that the source didn’t do due diligence and the shame of believing them. I refuse to be responsible for misleading someone or severing their loop of wonder. It makes me nauseous to think that my neglect could be the reason someone doesn’t discover a work that could gently nudge the trajectory of their life.

What frustrated me about my quote appearing in a random tweet wasn’t the volume of people who’ve liked it but the volume of people who’ve liked it divorced from its wider context. “Society's infatuation with robots is inseparable from its ancestral appetite for slavery” is the opening line—genetically engineered to be provocative and interest-piquing—but ultimately a fractural of a larger architecture of effort. The inevitable consequence of only highlighting the introduction to my essay is the procession of people responding about its insufficiency when they only need to read the full essay to get a deeper grasp:

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When this sort of thing happens it makes me lament how we treat the arts, specifically the craft of writing. Anyone can jump on a laptop and type so we diminish the worth of writing despite how we’re utterly transformed by words every single day.

The person who took my quote was happy to reap the rewards of “finding” my writing—not a sassy tweet but the fingernail of a larger body—and reduce it to bitesizeable “content” to bolster their own image. So many people have seen my words in this butchered context now and that’s how its going to be remembered. That is the consequence of lacking vigilance.

It’s funny because to find my writing worth taking means they are, at least, somewhat ideologically aligned with me. In these instances, I struggle to square the circle of sharing values with people who agree with me enough to see the merit of my words but don’t respect me enough to tether my name to them. There is a sense of entitlement there, one with an eerie similarity to the appetite of colonialism, that looks at all the internet as a realm for exploitation. I won’t even think about this, I’ll just take. How cosmetic are our principles that this small courtesy—when it comes to art that moves us or words that change us—is too difficult or banal or tedious or whatever reason you’d have, to not credit someone for the work they’ve done?

I put time, effort and dedicated thought into my writing and that’s all I really want of my readers in return. I’m trying to build something that I am proud of, something that circumnavigates the paycheck-to-paycheck social compensation of chasing viral moments in favour of something sustainable. I don’t mind chipping away at rocks in the diamond mine, convincing readers slowly and earning paid subscribers who see the value of my writing one at a time. I’ve made peace with slow and steady.

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In an episode of Millennials Killing Capitalism, Fred Moten talks about slavery being a “history of imposition” and how one of things imposed onto Black people was the very concept of property itself and “the legitimacy of property”.

I sit here writing, the sun rising cold as I continuously refer to my words as property—as things to be owned—and I wince every time because I do not truly feel ownership of my words or anything I will into existence. But we live under a callous, capitalist society. My frustration at being routinely exploited is more immediate than the inner utopia that wants only to be wellspring for others.

Moten goes on to explain how “Black cultural production, Black making and the aesthetic sociality of Blackness” have been understood as property in the context of cultural appropriation. He says something that is indelibly etched into my soul:

“I believe that it is not something that can be owned though it is, in fact, something that can be stolen.” —Fred Moten

My own Black makings are unownable—even by me—but stealable because stealable is a matter of sentiment, not legality or tangibility. If I feel you’ve stolen from me then you have and the stealable shares ideological territory with consumption.

I write for it to be experienced. In the last day or so, the way my writing has been experienced outside of the confines of this space I’m trying to construct for myself, has been one of gross consumption.

It is the imposition of consumption that erodes our relationship to each other. With ourselves. So much so that in our micro-interactions with inspirational strangers, we are more concerned with treating their craft as marketing content for our own gain over simply saying, “I got this from you”.

It is easier for us to siphon the essence of others to make ourselves look good than it is to sincerely send a message or earnestly write a comment that says, “this thing you’ve done really moved me.” To go out of our way to look for the email address of someone who’s work has changed the way our very heart beats and say to them, “thank you for what you’ve made.” To just run a quick check that something we’re posting is credited to the right source. To cite people in a way that accommodates for the fact that most of us have chronically online convenience brain and don’t want to journey more than 2 clicks away from something that’s interested us. To find someone who’s words you’ve discovered on one platform and say, “I really love this, do you mind if post this in a whole other echo-chamber altogether?” rather than make an indiscrete attempt to pass it off as your own.

Ultimately, it’s a matter of consent. I’ve felt what its like to get a piece of your soul chiselled off and taken from you by someone who won’t even look at you in the eye. I think we are doing that to each other in so many microbial ways. Not just by way of “not crediting the guy who thinks robots are slaves” but in the ways we withhold admiration, the way we only chew fragments and don’t go looking for fuller forms, the ways we thoughtlessly circulate words or art without thinking of the souls birthing them. Neglect is a harm with not much thought at all.

I write to give. I do not write to be taken from. And that’s an okay thing to want—to not feel like your essence has been sucked from you through a straw.