The BBC’s children’s television station CBBC – home of Dennis the Menace, Danger Mouse and The Dog Ate My Homework – was very excited one day to send out a new press release.
It came from the channel head Cheryl Taylor and read as follows:
Today we wave goodbye to our very hard worked green and black logo (it’s been a sturdy companion for almost a decade) and say hello to a colourful and versatile identity that is box fresh and fit for purpose in a mercurial and constantly shifting media landscape.
You can just imagine how excited the children who read this quote in their Media Guardian or copies of Broadcast must have been. ‘She’s right!’ they’d have called across a crowded classroom at break. ‘A logo for a children’s television network must be fit for purpose when you consider the mercurial and constantly shifting media landscape!’
The point is, the kids didn’t care. Whatever. It was a new logo. A bit more colourful. A little more modern. So long as CBBC still had 4 O’Clock Club on at four o’clock they couldn’t care less.
But some people did care. Some people cared very much.
There was immediate, knee-jerk outrage. People HATED the logo. They hated it SO MUCH. They were personally offended by it. Why had the BBC done this to them in particular? Why would it DO that?!
Sure, they were largely in their twenties, with no children of their own, and holding down full-time jobs that might make watching 4 O’Clock Club live just a little trickier without cancelling meetings and so on. But you’re missing the real issue: this was their Children’s BBC. Not the children’s Children’s BBC!
I read the comments, tweets and updates with fascination.
Still so upset by the fact they have changed the cbbc logo and jingle.
You are a 34-year-old butcher from Croydon.
The new cbbc logo makes me angry.
You’ll live.
Who the fuck changed the cbbc logo?
CBBC did.
First they change the cbbc logo and now it’s off air at 9 pm.
WHY ARE YOU WATCHING CBBC AT 9 PM?
It went on and on.
‘Still can’t get over cbbc getting a new logo what the heck is that about???’ wrote one person, late at night, probably staring at the ceiling, still finding the idea of a new logo so absolutely mind-blowing that I pray they never see the moon, or someone tells them what electricity is. As they drifted into slumber, the impotent yells continued to echo around the chamber …
The new CBBC logo is a DISGRACE!
This has destroyed my childhood.
My childhood is gone.
Bye bye childhood.
Childhood is literally over.
Me me me. My my my.
I am important. My opinion matters. I will be heard.
There are a billion things written every day about the internet, outrage and rudeness, so I just want to focus on a couple of things.
The writer Paul Ford has spent years considering exactly what happens to us when we sit in front of a keyboard or reach for our phones in the face of any minor slight, whether it’s to complain about customer service or to scream about a channel we stopped watching 15 years earlier changing its logo for a new generation who genuinely enjoy it.
He sums it up with the phrase ‘Why wasn’t I consulted?’44
It has, he says, become the fundamental question of the web.
I think he’s right. The internet is a beautiful thing – a never-ending place of ideas – but it is also an IV drip that feeds us what we need: to be heard. To be heard on anything and everything. Whether we care about it or not.
When it was announced that 84-year-old billionaire Rupert Murdoch was to be married to 59-year-old former model Jerry Hall, the internet responded in the way you might expect. But whatever you think of either of these two people, you’d do well to convince me it was any of your business. Yet off we go, firing conjecture, snide remarks, knowing asides, sarcastic attacks. We assign motivations we can’t justify to people we’ve never met. We include them in messages – a couple who’d just announced their engagement. We’re rude to them and about them.
This isn’t a defence of Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall, by the way. It’s not about the ‘victims’; rather the perpetrators.
Because just as interesting are the people who think about this coupling, weigh it all up in their heads, and finally come to a conclusion like this poster’s:
Fair enough. Good luck to them.
The fact this person thinks this opinion worth including in the cultural conversation speaks volumes about our inflated new sense of self-worth and our approach to the internet.
He is giving the couple his blessing.
Some guy. Sitting there. Sipping coffee at his keyboard. In Rhyl. He’s saying they can get married. It’s the decision we were all waiting for.
This sums up the ‘Why wasn’t I consulted’ phenomenon.
It hit Paul Ford when he spent 18 months carefully curating a website for Harper’s Bazaar and studied the immediate reactions it got from its brand new users.
‘Brace yourself for the initial angry wave of criticism,’ he wrote. ‘How dare you, I hate it, it’s ugly, you’re stupid. The internet runs on knee-jerk reactions. People will test your work against their pet theories: It is not free, and thus has no value; it lacks community features; I can’t believe you don’t use dotcaps, lampsheets, or pixel scrims; it is not written in Rusp or Erskell; my cat is displeased.’
People were working from a standing start of rage. They did not see an individual trying his best. They were blinded; offended by his decisions; wounded by his fonts.
‘The ultimate question lurks beneath these curses,’ he wrote. ‘Why wasn’t I consulted ?’
When I speak with him, Paul sounds wise but weary of the web.
‘The person who sees the Google logo changing and becomes outraged …’ he starts, and I think he’s about to start slating them, but instead he sounds like he understands them. ‘People are territorial animals, and I think this is very emotional. You have a huge global effort to brand things, whether it’s a clothing brand or soft drinks. Billions of dollars are spent creating a relationship, and then they change the nature of the relationship. Humans, being territorial, felt they had some control or understanding and it’s taken away. So it’s like your girlfriend saying “I’m going to see someone else” or your mom saying “we changed your room”. It’s a reminder that we’re powerless when those things get changed. A lot of the relationships and control we think we have in the world are fake. By pretending you have a link with a soft drink company, we can have the relationship that we think we want.’
When Google did in fact excitedly unveil a brand new, yet very similar, logo one day, there was uproar. It was the subject of TV news items. Furious radio diatribes. A writer for the New Yorker magazine said that by unveiling a new corporate logo, Google ‘symbolically diluted our trust’.
It is precisely that sense of powerlessness that drives us to demand we have our say.
This can go wrong in so many ways.
In 2016, when Delta Airlines cheerfully announced their brand new Delta Pulse scheme – where passengers could give real-time feedback during their flight to the airline staff responsible for their comfort and safety – everyone agreed it was a brilliant idea.
It would have been a brilliant idea, too, if it hadn’t involved actual people.
The entire air-travel experience in general could have been designed as an experiment in cultivating rudeness. They try and make it better. New airports are more spacious, lighter. Some have free water dispensers so you can refill your bottles. There are children’s areas, and ‘dignity’ spaces for passengers to put their shoes back on without hopping around.
But still. The rest of it.
Let’s make people queue for hours in confined spaces, make them take off their shoes, bark at them if they haven’t put their laptop in a separate container or their make-up in a see-through bag we all know is too small. Let’s get some underpaid passive-aggressive staff to act like authority figures because they did a couple of training days in the conference room of a Hilton near a motorway; let’s make people take their belts off and then brush the genitals of randomly selected passengers; let’s charge them £40 for a coffee and a disappointing croissant; let’s crowd them all into a hot confined space after taunting them by making them walk past Business Class; let’s keep them waiting on tight seats which become tighter the second the guy in front hits ‘recline’; let’s feed them weak, warm recycled air with all the power and strength of an old woman breathing on them from above while they work out whose thin metal armrest is whose; let’s immediately run out of meal selections and offer them OF ALL THINGS Tofu Bolognese (American Airlines flight 119, 18 June 2016); let’s be late; let’s make them wait at little carousels for bags that won’t then arrive. Then let’s do passport control again!
For Delta Airlines and their Delta Pulse initiative, their mistake was not just in asking for ‘honest’ immediate comments without understanding that, with the best will in the world, no one wants to fly anywhere – they just want to get there. A flight should never be memorable. If a flight is memorable, it’s because something went wrong.
Delta’s second, worse mistake was in accidentally allowing the feedback to be seen by staff unfiltered.
So employees were getting ‘honest’ real-time feedback like:
I chose these three because they show three different types of rudeness. None is particularly constructive in its criticism. All are more about the person sending the feedback than the people it’s about.
But this is another example of an outlet that should be a wonderful thing going wrong the second you add humans. Humans who overlook something.
As Paul says when we speak, though with no hint of sadness, ‘it is so easy for people to be their worst selves and forget the person on the other side is a human being’.
Perhaps the rudest anyone has ever been to me on the internet happened on a beautifully sunny Friday afternoon one day several years ago.
I was sitting in our living room, the sun streaming through the trees outside the window, beside my then heavily pregnant wife. I remember thinking what a wonderful day it was. I felt lucky.
And then because there was nothing on TV, I idly checked Twitter and saw the following message.
YOU ARE THE WORST WRITER IN HISTORY AND IF I EVER MEET YOU I WILL PUNCH YOUR CUNT FACE. #DannyWallacedeservesAIDS
Looking at it now, it doesn’t seem quite as bad as it did then. It just seems a bit playground. But at that moment, this violent, ugly, all-caps threat from a complete stranger seemed far worse, far more shocking. Everything had been so lovely! And now a man seemed to hate me. Really hate me. Wanted to punch me. Said I deserved something no one on Earth actually deserves.
It played on my mind for days. What if I ran into him? What if he was the guy walking behind me at night? Or as I pushed my soon-to-be-born son around the park? I looked at the guy’s profile. He had a website. I read his poetry. He didn’t seem like he’d have a very strong punch. But the way things do, his face became familiar, burned into my mind.
The rage the internet stirs up and allows us to vent threatens to derail the thing that once made it beautiful. Newspapers, once so proud to welcome the community in and get a discussion going, are now wary of their own below-the-line commenters. Those who stick their necks out sigh as they press ‘publish’, knowing that whatever they say and no matter how clearly they say it they will be accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, stupidity, thoughtlessness.
And, as you already know, they have their favourite targets.
A study by the Guardian newspaper showed that although the vast majority of their comment articles were written by white men, the ones most likely to receive ‘abuse or dismissive trolling’ were not. The ten generating the most abuse were eight women and two men. Those two men – the only ones on the list – were both black.45
Paul Ford has watched this rise for 20 years, and enjoyed semi-regular death threats himself for the past 15.
And one day, he decided to provoke it. Stir the hornet’s nest.
‘Someone asked me to write a piece for Elle magazine,’ he says. ‘And I just decided to piss everyone off. I don’t know what came over me. I wrote a piece I knew would enrage everyone.’
Paul is the father of twins – a boy and a girl. In his article on the gender pay gap – the difference between men’s income and women’s income – he declared he had found a way forward. He intended to save money for his daughter. But not for his son. His son would be fine. It was his daughter he needed to give money to.
‘This was custom-made for a shit show,’ he says. ‘I was invited on to national TV shows, but I took one look at the [initial] comments section, and it would say things like “your wife is a whore who should die” and I decided not to go on TV. It pissed off the left and the right. On the left, because I was using my class to protect my children. On the right, I was favouring a daughter over a son.’
This, for Paul, was a sort of internet swansong.
‘It was me saying “I’m done with you.” It’s easy to tweak the mob. They’re right there waiting for it. They’re hungry. They want to get angry.’
And the mob can get angry about anything.
Not long ago, the Oxford Mail ran a perfectly ordinary story with the headline:
CHARITY SPRAYS NICETIES ON TOWPATH TO ENCOURAGE RIVERSIDE POLITENESS
Apparently, people weren’t being as polite to each other as they could, and for some reason this was particularly prevalent near water.
The Canal & River Trust (CRT) – the charity that takes care of nearly 2,000 miles of waterways in England and Wales – initiated a new scheme designed to encourage civility.
They decided to try and encourage good behaviour at a particular lock on the Oxford Canal by deeming it a ‘polite zone’.
There are no real losers here. The reader thinks about their own behaviour or the behaviour of others, and the CRT – even if the scheme is completely ineffective – get a little exposure and perhaps some thanks for a pretty thankless task.
So polite, non-permanent messages of encouragement were sprayed on the towpath saying things like ‘Smile and say hi as you go by!’ and ‘This is a hat-tipping zone!’
They celebrated. They handed out free cups of tea to passers-by. They even employed a ‘canal laureate’ and asked him to write a poem about being nicer to each other, and he came up with positive and hopeful lines like:
Let others too enjoy its use – be like the duck, and not the goose!
It was all perfectly lovely. And a completely innocuous story. The whole scheme probably cost about 28 quid. There was really very little to get angry about. Even if you’re completely ambivalent about what happens near one lock in a regional canal you live nowhere near, you would still file this story in the ‘positive’ box and think better of the Canal & River Trust. Some of you might even donate to a charity you’d never thought about before.
So I made a bet with myself about what I’d read in the comments that readers left underneath.
I really loved the first one.
Far better would be interlocking sheet steel piles and stabilised canal banks.
I love this because you just know it began with a sigh. I love it because of all the meaning that is loaded and hidden. You can hear the commenter rustling the paper and muttering it to himself as a weary aside, and then going to all the trouble of registering on the site, confirming his details, assigning a login, verifying his registration, going back to the news story, writing his comment as if it’s a casual aside, then sitting back, safe in the knowledge that now everyone knows he knows something about canal banks. Now everyone knows he knows what interlocking sheet steel piles are. And if he doesn’t explain what interlocking sheet steel piles are, that means he just assumes that everybody knows what interlocking sheet steel piles are, and they don’t, so he is better.
But his comment continues.
This patronising gesture may seem ‘nice’, but it is largely unnecessary here as folk are already polite and considerate for the most part. But we are mostly not naive, nor hoodwinked by such insulting tokenism from the CRT.
What’s interesting about this to me is the ability to claim you are nice, while purposefully not being particularly nice. And that it’s possible to claim others are committing the crime of patronising you, while at the same time patronising them. It’s taking the higher ground, it’s saying ‘I should be in charge’, it’s asking ‘Why wasn’t I consulted?’
The very next comment pays particular attention to the canal laureate himself, a well-meaning young man named Luke Kennard, recently named as one of the winners of the Poet Book Society’s ‘Next Generation Poets’ prize, and who I expect gave his time and work to the charity for free.
That ‘poem’ is worse than a bad greeting card. I hope they don’t pay much to the canal laureate.
Again, I don’t think it’s a full-time job, and it’s not like you see many poets swanning around on the canals of Oxfordshire in a two-storey yacht.
It goes on:
Rude people are not likely to heed this primary-school approach and may even become worse out of defiance.
I’ll stop you there. At no time in history has being given a free cup of tea as you walk by a canal brought about a feeling of moral indignation and defiance in anyone. No one has ever been given a free cup of tea by someone and been so outraged by this primary-school approach that they have immediately decided to become actively ruder and push that person in the canal. All that happens is you think ‘that was nice’ and continue on your way.
They haven’t finished.
Nice people don’t need the advice, so this looks like a stunt to get free PR in the paper.
Well, of course it’s a stunt to get in the paper. Canals just existing has never been enough to get into the paper on its own. But once again, it’s fascinating to see someone behaving in a negative way while also taking great care to assert their own niceness.
The comments go on and on. There are jokes about how the Canal & River Trust may have communist sympathies. Someone attempts to hijack the conversation and steer it towards Oxford Council’s ‘secret war against the people of the waterways’. Someone calls the whole project ‘a reasonably harmless gesture’ but still ‘beyond insensitive’ for reasons I’m still trying to figure out.
And a final poster rails against the use of the slogan ‘Smile and say hi as you go by!’ written on concrete in temporary spray.
This is basically appalling vandalism to the towpath; you’d hope the charity that has ended up responsible for the canals and their rich heritage would have a modicum of respect for them and not pull patronising stunts like this, but no.
They finish with a flourish.
What a pointless and offensive project.
Pointless. Offensive. Appalling. Insulting. Patronising. Unnecessary. Insensitive. Something that might actually make people worse than they already are.
I’m talking about the comments here, not the scheme.
It’s all so abrasive. Calling the CRT a charity that has ‘ended up’ responsible for the canals rather than a charity who took on responsibility for the canals – as if there are just general groups of aimless charities sitting around under bridges waiting for someone to assign them a cause for which they ‘end up’ responsible.
This is the kind of low-level, patronising, passive-aggressive rudeness that clogs up our internet, fills our eyes and drains our hearts.
Every word of it is designed not to berate others so much as to make the poster feel better about themselves.
Whole communities continue to evolve online whose sole purpose is to leave comments like this, and either agree wholeheartedly with one another (to feel better about themselves) or nit-pick tiny holes in each other’s arguments (to feel better about themselves).
What a fucking pointless waste of time.
And it is everywhere. All the time. A constant barrage of rudeness. In the strangest, most innocent corners of the web.
Here are five completely innocuous stories taken from the Mail Online – one of the world’s most popular websites and active online communities – below which I have included five real and completely typical comments in full.
The cutest brace face ever! Adorable golden retriever puppy who has to wear BRACES becomes instant online hit
Would have been better off putting it down.
Jolly hockey sticks! Countess of Wessex laughs at her best efforts as she joins the England team on the pitch
Sad shallow woman meaningless life
Suki Waterhouse opts for biker chic in shearing jacket and leather boots as she attends Coach’s Paris Fashion Week party
she is an idiot
Comedian Jamie Kennedy reveals he has been dealing with secret heart problem for 35 years
Promoting something is he.
Wife confronts ‘cheating husband’ after he tries to ‘hook up with her BEST FRIEND’
Typically manipulative women taking advantage of a man’s friendly behaviour.
Now granted, that last one was me.
And guess what – 57 people liked it! And 108 didn’t. I just wanted to see what it would feel like. I couldn’t go so far as to actually insult anyone personally. I wanted to. I just couldn’t. So I just insulted all women instead.
But here’s the strange thing. As wrong as it was, and as playful as I was being, there was a certain sense of satisfaction I gleaned from those little green upticks, as well as those little red downticks, as I told myself it was an experiment.
I was joining the pack. I was taking my place in a community. No one said I had to get out; they saw that I was joining in and they let me. I was on their wavelength.
That is dangerous.
But even as I joined them, I couldn’t help but wonder: who’s doing it? Who, when writing ‘sad shallow woman meaningless life’ on an internet message board under a story about the Countess of Wessex playing hockey, cannot see that perhaps they might in fact be writing about someone closer to home?
We have this idea that everyone’s opinion is worth the same, and while that looks great on paper, it is not, of course, true.
Someone who asserts climate change is happening has the backing of 97 per cent of the world’s top climatologists. Someone who claims it is not has their mate Barry who says it snowed when he was on holiday–so how can it be?
Some opinions are worth more than others. Opinions based on fact, or knowledge, or experience are worth infinitely more than opinions tossed out off-the-cuff online or after four pints of Stella.
But when it comes to how rudely that opinion is put forward, the person writing it is bulletproof: this is my opinion and that’s the end of it. Only Being Honest.
And this is not just true of the amateur keyboard warriors who comment online. As long-established newspapers close and fold around us by the dozen, and the world stretches further online, journalists and professional commentaters have been forced to face an unpleasant truth: they’re only worth the clicks they muster. Attract an audience, attract the advertisers, keep your job. Pieces saying how nice rainbows are or that the Education Secretary was wearing lovely shoes as she attended a meeting at Downing Street are nothing compared to clickbait screaming WHY RAINBOWS ARE A PIECE OF SHIT or full-scale shoe-based attacks on a woman with bigger things on her mind.
What’s really sad is that we all know this, yet to cope we pretend it isn’t true. That we would read an article about rainbows or nice shoes, when in reality nothing interests us less. And every now and again, to convince ourselves we are not part of this New Rudeness, we ask why.
When the rude writer Giles Coren was challenged on a piece he wrote labelling the outpouring of grief over David Bowie’s death insane, some people felt moved to ask him why he felt the need to always be so condemnatory.
You could sense the sad shrug of his weakened shoulders as he replied, ‘well, you don’t have to write 1,200 words about something in the news every week. Not condemning things is a luxury I don’t have.’
Once commenters sought to provoke thought; now they’re forced to troll for reactions. And what provokes more knee-jerk, bankable reactions than rudeness?
And through rudeness, I found myself joining them.
I surprised myself when I came home from the Hotdog Incident by joining TripAdvisor and writing my review.
I surprised myself mainly because of my motivations, and how impure they were.
I was not writing this review to help other people. I wasn’t trying to warn them off the diner or suggest places they might have a better time.
‘No,’ says Paul Ford. ‘You wanted revenge.’
I did. I wanted revenge.
And revenge is an interesting side effect of rudeness.
Ordinarily, what civilised human beings desire is justice. If someone kills our dog, we want justice. We don’t want to kill that person’s dog. If someone burgles our house, our first thought isn’t to try and burgle them back.
But if someone is rude to us, it’s not justice we immediately think of. We want to shove their rudeness straight back in their stupid rude face. We want to show strength. Fight. We want them to feel the way they made us feel.
‘In that moment, with that hotdog,’ says Paul, ‘you needed to exercise and demonstrate your status. With your review, you were saying, “I am a person who is worthy of respect, and whoever served me this hotdog didn’t respect and understand that, and you need to be warned, dear reader, lest you walk into this trap in which your own status is not respected!”’
That is it. That is exactly what I was doing.
‘Look, we can’t help it,’ he says. ‘We’re very status driven as human beings, and you felt that that was fragile at that moment, and that your position in life was meaningless.’
I did! I did feel my position in life was meaningless!
‘There are people who just get screamed at all day. A lot of them work in the service industry and their status is low. And they are reminded of it all the time. And they don’t have the ability to say “stop it”. But it’s very tricky … see, you and I can go back to the zones where people respect us. That’s the rest of your life. But that doesn’t transfer to the restaurant, and it doesn’t transfer to the guy on the street who yells at me as I go by on my bicycle. I feel like it should. “I’m a big deal!” I wanna yell back. “I have a good salary!”’
We have a need to be respected, and when we are treated rudely – especially by a stranger – we have a need to punish them. Ordinarily, this doesn’t happen in the moment. We’re confused or we can’t think of the perfect comeback until we’re halfway down the street.
According to the Wallace Report, this is how Brits reacted the last time someone was unexpectedly rude to them:
Fourteen billion years since the Big Bang, and the best coping strategy we’ve come up with is pretending it didn’t happen or giving a ‘look’.
It is only after our looks have faded that our thoughts turn to revenge.
It doesn’t matter what our status is. When a mere blogger wanted to Have His Say and loudly complained that he felt he’d been rudely kept waiting at a press launch for a new Tesla car, the unimaginably wealthy owner of the company, Elon Musk, felt that in itself was rude. So he personally intervened to have the blogger’s order for an $80,000 Tesla Model X cancelled. Revenge! And what’s fascinating is, we don’t think ‘what a tit’ or ‘how ridiculous’. We think … well, fair enough.
Revenge is everywhere, rearing its head every day on every high street. A 2011 study showed that when an employee found a customer’s behaviour rude, they themselves began to engage in behaviour that would directly sabotage that person’s experience.46
It’s the cashier who packs your eggs at the bottom of your shopping bag; the barman who doesn’t quite fill your pint; the waitress who sprays your table while you’re still sitting at it; the postman who weeks after you pissed him off still ignores the ‘Do Not Bend’ on the envelope; the billionaire who cancels your car order.
Revenge is natural. To not want it is weird and it has ever been thus.
In fact, in 2014 archaeologists discovered what are believed to be the only two written examples of the ancient British Celtic language. They were pretty much just slagging someone off. They were discovered along with 128 other ‘Curse Stones’ found at the Roman Baths in Bath, like the one that said:
Docimedis has lost two gloves and asks that the thief responsible should lose their minds and eyes.
… which I suppose is fair enough, if they were really nice gloves.
Revenge figures highly in the Wallace Report, precisely because it is such a fundamental human urge.
Of those polled, 47 per cent of men and over 50 per cent of women have wanted to take revenge on people who were rude to them.
If you’re rude to two people, chances are one of them is now plotting to get you.
In Britain, Newcastle is our most vengeful city: 22 per cent of people have not just wanted to take revenge, but have actually done it. That’s one in four people who, offended by another’s rudeness, have taken that extra step and meted out a punishment.
The scary thing is that we really do believe that revenge is a dish best served cold. We wait. We plan. We relish. And afterwards, we are secretly proud. We also have the ultimate get-out: they were rude to me.
But here’s the thing. If you walked into a pub and said, ‘You know that guy I plumb bathrooms with? I decided to eat his lunch, and then I hid all his equipment’, people would think you had lost your mind. But that is a real answer in the Wallace Report.
In fact, try and imagine any one of these sentences without putting before it the phrase ‘Someone was rude to me so …’, and you’d think they were crazy.
I gave obscene gestures from my car.
I changed their Netflix password.
I turned all of their possessions upside down.
I let a dog lick a sausage I was serving to them.
I rubbed my bag of chips all over their windscreen.
I pointed out their flawed appearance in great detail.
I gobbed on their back.
Grassed them up.
Reported them for their untaxed and uninsured vehicle.
Sabotaged them.
I ignored them when they were looking for help.
I sent him some offensive letters.
I set them up to fail.
Humiliated them.
I smashed something they liked.
I destroyed their stuff.
I slashed their tyres.
Keyed their car.
I smacked them in the mouth.
I punched them in the face.
That got dark pretty quickly.
Any one of these things is completely unacceptable in normal life. Some of them are criminal. In my survey of 2,000 people, 270 were only too pleased to tell me all about what they felt was an extremely justified response. From shouting at someone (8), to ignoring them (7), to getting someone sacked (2), to sleeping with someone’s partner out of revenge for a perceived slight (1).
These are also things which, if done anonymously or even in plain view, can affect other people’s lives very deeply. I mean, someone had to change their Netflix password back.
But this is a deep pot of unattractive emotion we’re stirring. Most of these acts of rudeness-revenge are done from the shadows, the results of which aren’t seen or witnessed, but just imagined and enjoyed. Within each of them is a deep, sad feeling of powerlessness.
I wrote my online revenge-review precisely because I felt powerless. I had no immediate way of getting my own back or turning to sabotage, and so I joined the sad ranks in the place the powerless go to find respect.
And I didn’t care. As far as I knew, I would never darken her door again, nor ever meet her again.
Talking of which … remember the guy who wrote me the terrible tweet? The one all in capitals?
Remember how I said I memorised his face?
Remember what he said he’d do to me … if ever he met me?
Well, guess what happened next.