Woke (up) like this
What happened to the "Let people enjoy things" crowd?
Okay, I apologize right off the bat for the misleading title. I went fishing yesterday on Lady Bird Lake to unwind and I might’ve gotten a little too comfortable with the concept of bait after hooking a good-looking largemouth bass on the other side of the MoPac bridge. Never again. Anyway…
Finally, a unique-to-Twitter pattern for us to take a closer look at.
Sunday morning, I woke up and opened Twitter around 7:00 and discovered that somebody named Ben Jay was upset about—oh, right—Auburn basketball players being baptized in the Jordan River.
Let’s all take a moment to recognize how 2022 that statement is. Then, I’ll point out to anyone who is confused that Bruce Pearl took his team to Israel last week for three summer exhibition games against the Israel Under-20 National Team, the All-Star Select Team, and the National Team. The team has also been touring the Holy Land, which many people do and have done for a long time now. So we’ll forgive your confusion at the sentence above if you weren’t aware of any of that.
But for anyone who salivates and champs at the bit anytime K.D. Johnson does anything, ever, this is not news. And it’s also not new to those people in particular that Bruce Pearl is an eccentric figure in the game of basketball. And it’s certainly not new that Bruce is a man of faith and that he not only vocalizes that everywhere he goes but he also attempts to instill that faith in his players. And to this day—to the best of my knowledge—as long as he’s been the head coach at Auburn, he hasn’t had one single player come out and complain or raise a concern about this aspect of his coaching.
But, but, by the way, it is relatively new that this thing called “Auburn Twitter” has evolved over the last several years to become an all-powerful hivemind when it comes to playful, skilled, and coordinated trolling, meme-ing, clapping back, and every other method of communication that operates under a deep-fried filter, laser eyes, and about a dozen emojis ranging from demon guy to sunglasses guy to guy-exhaling-through-nostrils-like-a-bull.
But, but, but, all of this is just how it’s been for Auburn basketball fans, particularly Auburn basketball fans who have a Twitter account, whether it’s a burner with thousands of followers or one with 258 followers where they post pictures of their family beach photos. The common understanding—at least around the country now and certainly within the SEC—is that if you poke Auburn Twitter, you have chosen poorly, and you’re about to become this:
So imagine my surprise when I spent a few minutes Sunday morning perusing the feed to find that Ben Jay was not only very upset about young men making the free decision to publicly proclaim their faith, but he also didn’t seem to get the memo about kicking the hive.
And therein lies the pattern I want to examine. You have a few options when you have either kicked the hivemind or later have been decisively “owned” by the same hivemind, and this doesn’t apply solely to Auburn Twitter:
You could block everyone who responds to your initial trolling
You could attempt to clap back at everyone who has clapped back at you (because, remember, you started this)
You could combine #2 and #1, in that order, thereby getting the last word in the way a middle school kid takes his basketball home after he’s come back to tie you in one-on-one
You could attempt any combination above, then very early on in that process realize what’s going on, and be like, “Oops, I farted. Yeah, y’all got me. That was good.” And if you do that, the hivemind is going to love you and bring you in—even after they’ve stung you!—and before you know it, you’re at work Googling how to deep-fry a picture you found of Chad Prewett. You don’t know how you got here, but it feels like home.
You could simply log off and/or not respond and drive people even crazier
And I should point out that at any point in this mudslide of your own making, as far as #5 is concerned, you still have that option. You always have that option.
Here is the quickest synopsis I can attempt to give regarding which options Ben chose.
Judging from Ben’s timeline, his location, his vocation, his sports team affiliation(s), his pictures, his bio, it appears that Ben likes to be mad about a lot of things. And guess what? That’s totally fine! You are free to be mad! In fact, you might be surprised to learn that Twitter is the perfect place for you because it cultivates outrage. That’s the whole point. More on that later.
What you won’t be surprised to learn is that this makes Ben—along with many others who don’t live as far away as Brooklyn—especially vigilant to point out things that make him mad that already have an established infrastructure of also-mad people. It’s not atypical for people on Twitter to be upset about some crossing of boundaries between religion and a public institution (or frankly, anything else). And I’m not here to discuss religion or politics because I’m not qualified to do that, and it’s not worth it, and y’all, it’s just not that interesting today.
Ben tweeted the following (it was actually Saturday morning—I saw it Sunday):
And at the risk of him blocking me (is it really that vain to assume?), below is a screengrab for posterity:
Now let me pause and say something controversial: I actually think this is a good tweet. Like, really good. Completely serious.
If this were the only thing he had tweeted all weekend, we wouldn’t even be talking about any of this. You can tell because of how little engagement it got initially (relatively speaking). If Bill Burr or Dave Chappelle said this, you would be laughing and sharing the bootlegged clip of it on your timeline. And to your credit, maybe you were laughing. I mean, it’s funny and it’s topical. And let’s be honest, it’s not attacking anyone directly. This kind of humor, whether Ben intended this or not, is exactly what this country could use more of. He’s representing the losing side of an argument or situation (in this case, a recent SCOTUS ruling about praying in public, which in my opinion was a fine ruling even if the circumstances that led to it are irritating to me) who’s taking it in stride. And you know what, let’s not even get into all that. The tweet is innocuous. INNOCUOUS.
But even if all that were true, and you were indeed laughing because you’re smart and sensible and the funniest person at work, you wouldn’t be laughing long, because while that was tweeted at 9:57 am on Saturday, this was added to the same thread just two minutes later, and you’ll notice a massive increase in engagement, particularly in the quote tweet department:
Again, just-in-case screengrab:
So now it appears that the original tweet was not, in fact, composed in good faith or in good will or in any kind of tongue-in-cheek manner. It was, at least now, with context, intended to be malicious. Or from a generous point of view, an intentional jab at a fan base (that later he would claim not to be familiar with). Now the buzz saw is turning.
And yet, Ben could’ve exercised Option #5 from above, and this whole thing probably would’ve fizzled out in time. But instead, once he saw the engagement he was getting, he exercised his right to Option #3:
He kicked the hive, he got stung, and he took his ball and went home. I’m told this went on for much of the morning as the hivemind got its marching orders. And if you’re familiar with how Auburn Twitter memes opposing Twitter accounts to death, you can imagine what those replies looked like. I’m not going to post all those here—you can go find them (if you’re not blocked).
AND YET (seriously how many times do I have to say it)…
This man who lives in Brooklyn and drinks craft beer and grows a beard could have exercised Option #5 and simply gone back to being mad about anything else—maybe being a Mets fan, perhaps. That’s a world of hurt understood in any and every language. It connects us...and binds us.
But at 7:34 pm Saturday, he added this to the thread (and note that it’s a thread, that’s not unimportant):
Insurance:
Okay, so here’s where we need to come back to “the pattern,” even though this tweet, much like the first one, is actually still kind of funny, truly.
And you might think that this is so stupid and pointless and we get it, in which case, feel free to stop reading, but I promise I’m getting to a point very soon.
This is the tactic we all use now when we’ve been cornered with a fragile ego (and we’re all guilty of it). This is actually Option #6: You could yell at both anybody and nobody in particular, whether in your own echo chamber or not, about the petard you found yourself hoisted with, smoke on your face and eyebrows charred off beyond recognition. Because that’s the safe option. It’s the inverse of Option #5. It’s doing the opposite of the challenging act of walking away and living to fight another day, maybe even owning up to it a week from now. Better late than never, Ben!
But beyond the general issue here of trying to act like he didn’t just explode in front of the entire Internet, he added stink to it. A stink bomb. He implied that it was silly to care…by caring.
He cared enough to point out that other people cared that he cared.
That right there is the Internet in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen. That’s the whole thing. The da Vinci code. The end.
And guess what? I care! It’s okay to care! It’s even okay for Ben to care! That’s my point. If you kick the hivemind, or even bump into it accidentally or run the lawn mower over the hole in the ground without paying attention, you have, in some form or fashion, announced to the rest of us that you care! Embrace it! I would much rather Ben keep caring than try to convince us that he doesn’t.
If you announce to us that you care, you also don’t get to pretend you don’t recognize any of the bees stinging you, either. If you’re upset at Auburn basketball, if you’re upset at Bruce Pearl, if you’re upset at any or all of his players, then you don’t get to feign ignorance when the memes come out.
Maybe he genuinely didn’t know—who am I to say. But Ben, you started this fight. You had *some* knowledge. And if you didn’t, you were going to be educated. This is how the hivemind works.
At the risk of this reading like a Buzzfeed hate-post—because I really don’t want it to be, I’m just getting this all down in writing so I can process it—let me wake you up before the bell rings by suggesting that maybe everybody needs to just take a breath. I know this is Twitter and that’s a futile request and a silly idea. After all, where’s the fun in that? I mean, I saw all this happening and I got in on it, too. I have just as much blood on my hands.
But do you see the point I’m making, even in that subtweet (which is along the same lines, in my opinion, as Ben’s initial freestanding tweet)? This whole thing is incredibly silly.
We’re *this* close to football season in a hot, boring summer, and somebody decided to bust through the swinging doors and challenge Auburn Twitter to a duel, if only because basketball was the only sport Auburn was actively participating in with a real opponent at the time. It wasn’t even a conference opponent or a March Madness opponent or even an exhibition game within these United States.
Maybe it really is that simple that Ben didn’t know how Auburn Twitter operates, and this was all just a big misunderstanding that got worse and worse and kept going and going and oh my gosh do these people ever quit with the laser eyes?
And look, maybe we’ve all been agreeing with something like this the whole time—that it’s all silly, just have fun with it—and none of this even needed to be examined. What do I know, anyway. Far be it from me to deprive Auburn Twitter of having fun and doing what it does best. I’m a card-carrying member, after all. I have zero ethos from which to form an oppositional take. I pick just as many fights, and often without tweeting at the instigator directly. So maybe I need to take my own medicine sometimes.
But this pattern is genuinely interesting to me because this is our public square now. And it’s the only place I care to keep up with most sports material. I also need something to write about to make this thing remotely interesting this week, and what happened over the weekend was too easy to pass up. And let’s face it, you’re not going to write about it. You’ve already moved on, in which case, congratulations.
Plus, let’s be super honest: I wanted to give all the Auburn podcasts a chance to say the following this week:
Host: “Did you see that…what was that post about this weekend…can we pull that up?”
Guest: “Ohh yeah, that Substack about that guy on Twitter who called out Bruce Pearl and the Israel thing?”
Host: “Yeah…can we talk about this? This is craaazzzyyyy…”
[Ad-read for home delivery service of kale protein shakes]
I guess personally, I’d just like to know where all the “Let people enjoy things” folks went. They were oddly quiet this weekend. Isn’t it at least possible that we could’ve avoided this whole mess if we’d let Ben enjoy being mad about SCOTUS and Auburn and Bruce and young men of ages 18-22 and the laughingstock of professional baseball? Maybe let him enjoy riding his bike and living in Brooklyn and drinking craft beers? And maybe Ben could’ve just let Auburn and Bruce and his players and the fans enjoy the last week in Israel? Maybe just let Auburn Twitter start a new meme relationship with Israel—the entire country? If Ben had done a little digging himself, he would’ve seen there’s already plenty of infighting among the fan base itself regarding what’s happened the last several days. We didn’t even need him or his fancy camera.
And yet, if he would’ve gone all-in with this kind of attitude at any point on Saturday, we would’ve welcomed him!
Truly! And that invitation still stands, Ben. I hope you read this and understand where I’m coming from, because I think I understand where you’re coming from, and that’s because we’ve all at some point or another been in the place where you’re coming from. Twitter manufactures and cultivates the outrage, the pile-on, the memes. This is the life we’ve chosen. It’s a game, and while we all gained something when we found new ways to use it to our own amusement, we also lost something when we simultaneously took it way too seriously. I’m guilty of it as much as the next guy who gets blown up with a bad take. It happens. I mean, y’all, I once tweeted, with zero irony, that Auburn Basketball wasn’t actually a blue blood program and that we needed to stop saying this and essentially admitted to [Norm Macdonald] THE WORLD that I had missed the bit somewhere down the line.
This isn’t about Ben.* This isn’t about Auburn Twitter. This isn’t about what’s happening overseas this week. This isn’t about politics. This is about the rules we’ve all agreed to live by in the Twitterverse. These are the wire fences we put up. These are the dumpster slums we built with our own hands. This is what happens. We both love and hate it, enjoy it and get irritated by it. We pledge allegiance to its rules and in the same breath declare anarchy and self-liberation from them.
I don’t know, maybe we all just need to calm down.** I didn’t like that song when it came out, but damn, if it isn’t catchy now. Thanks, Taylor.
Perhaps the lesson here, for those who skimmed to the end, is when it comes to resisting the urge, logging off, not saying anything at all, especially in a world where hey, maybe everybody is wrong here…Option #5…you still have that option. Whether you have the capacity or the willingness is a choice you get to make daily. Because frankly, we don’t have the attention span to remember what you said five minutes ago, anyway.
*It occurred to me that picking a fight with Auburn Twitter, especially in the middle of the summer, is more of a Kentucky fan M.O. than anyone else. So I did a little more digging and lo and behold:
Who knows, maybe she’s a Louisville fan. Either way, the Auburn Twitter hivemind would love to have both of you join us. Brooklyn has an Auburn Alumni club somewhere and real basketball will be here in November. Our deep-fried meme online academy also starts its fall semester soon and there are plenty of seats available.
**Maybe the football advent calendar isn’t silly, after all. Maybe it’s keeping us sane in the interim. How many days?