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Conversations with People Who Hate Me: 12 Things I Learned from Talking to Internet Strangers
From the host of the award-winning, critically acclaimed podcast Conversations with People Who Hate Me comes a thought-provoking, witty, and inspirational exploration of difficult conversations and how to navigate them.
Dylan Marron’s work has racked up millions of views and worldwide support. From his acclaimed Every Single Word video series highlighting the lack of diversity in Hollywood to his web series Sitting in Bathrooms with Trans People, Marron has explored some of today’s biggest social issues--yet according to some strangers on the internet, Marron is a “moron,” a “beta male,” and a “talentless hack.” Rather than running from this online vitriol, Marron began a social experiment in which he invited his detractors to chat with him on the phone—and those conversations revealed surprising and fascinating insights.
Now, Marron retraces his journey through a project that connects adversarial strangers in a time of unprecedented division. After years of production and dozens of phone calls, he shares what he’s learned about having difficult conversations and how having them can help close the ever-growing distance between us. Charmingly candid and refreshingly hopeful, Conversations with People Who Hate Me will serve as both a guide to anyone partaking in difficult conversations and a permission slip for those who dare to believe that connection is possible.
Dylan Marron’s work has racked up millions of views and worldwide support. From his acclaimed Every Single Word video series highlighting the lack of diversity in Hollywood to his web series Sitting in Bathrooms with Trans People, Marron has explored some of today’s biggest social issues--yet according to some strangers on the internet, Marron is a “moron,” a “beta male,” and a “talentless hack.” Rather than running from this online vitriol, Marron began a social experiment in which he invited his detractors to chat with him on the phone—and those conversations revealed surprising and fascinating insights.
Now, Marron retraces his journey through a project that connects adversarial strangers in a time of unprecedented division. After years of production and dozens of phone calls, he shares what he’s learned about having difficult conversations and how having them can help close the ever-growing distance between us. Charmingly candid and refreshingly hopeful, Conversations with People Who Hate Me will serve as both a guide to anyone partaking in difficult conversations and a permission slip for those who dare to believe that connection is possible.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published March 29, 2022
122 people are currently reading
8928 people want to read
About the author
Dylan Marron
3 books64 followersDylan Marron is the host and creator of the critically acclaimed podcast Conversations with People Who Hate Me, a social experiment that connects adversarial internet strangers through phone calls. He recently joined the writing staff of the Emmy-winning hit television series Ted Lasso.
Dylan is also the voice of Carlos on the international podcast sensation Welcome to Night Vale, an alum of the New York Neo-Futurists theater company, and the creator of Every Single Word, a video series that edits down popular films to feature only the words spoken by people of color.
As a writer and correspondent at Seriously.TV, Dylan created, hosted, and produced Sitting in Bathrooms with Trans People, Shutting Down Bullsh*t, and the Unboxing series. Conversations with People Who Hate Me was selected as a Podcast Pick by USA Today and the Guardian, named “the timeliest podcast” by Fast Company, won a Webby Award, and was the subject of Dylan’s 2018 TED Talk, “Empathy Is Not Endorsement.”
He lives in Brooklyn, with his husband, Todd.
Dylan is also the voice of Carlos on the international podcast sensation Welcome to Night Vale, an alum of the New York Neo-Futurists theater company, and the creator of Every Single Word, a video series that edits down popular films to feature only the words spoken by people of color.
As a writer and correspondent at Seriously.TV, Dylan created, hosted, and produced Sitting in Bathrooms with Trans People, Shutting Down Bullsh*t, and the Unboxing series. Conversations with People Who Hate Me was selected as a Podcast Pick by USA Today and the Guardian, named “the timeliest podcast” by Fast Company, won a Webby Award, and was the subject of Dylan’s 2018 TED Talk, “Empathy Is Not Endorsement.”
He lives in Brooklyn, with his husband, Todd.
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March 10, 2022Source of book: NetGalley (thank you)
Relevant disclaimers: none
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.
And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.
**Trigger warnings for this review, references to hate speech and sexual assault**
I… honestly have no idea how to rate this book for NetGalley purposes. I think I maybe hated it? Which had nothing to do with the book and everything to do with me. I honestly kind of wish I hadn’t read it, or I’d had the guts to stop reading it when I realised it was (unintentionally and non-maliciously) taking me to a bad place. I’m even wondering if I should be reviewing it because I don’t know how to separate evaluation of the book as … as, well, a book, from my reaction to it. But I guess I’ll give it my best shot and we can figure out if I’m too compromised after.
So. Conversations with People Who Hate Me: 12 Things I Learned from Talking to Internet Strangers is written by the guy who played Carlos from Welcome to Nightvale, and takes its inspiration from a podcast he did—and which I listened to a little bit—called Conversations With People Who Hate Me. The podcast is a series of, I guess the best word is conversations, with a carefully selected cross-section of people who had previously sent Dylan Marron hate messages down the years. And the book explores the context that led him to create the podcast in the first place, the process of creating of it and, as the title suggests, what conclusions he reached as a consequence of both. The final chapter gently unravels the process of writing the book itself, as Marron has to overcome the overwhelming self-consciousness that I believe all liberal-learning, marginalised writers face when they approach the task of putting down words: what happens if I get cancelled for what I’ve said here. Although I do kinda wish somebody had told me before that I was allowed to just wrap up a book I’ve written by worrying about the public reaction to it. Might have saved me a lot of anxiety.
Look, I’m being uncharitable. This is a well-written, well-structured, undeniably unusual piece of work. I appreciated the artistry of it as a text: the engaging style, the careful way Marron guides us on a journey with him, the effortless way he blends anecdotes and personal reflection with reflections on other texts and pieces of research. There’s some obvious-if-you’ve-thought-about-it-for-more-than-two-seconds but still illuminating considerations of the way social media keeps us isolated, not in the usual “online bad, meat good” sense that this debate tends to get reduced to, but how profit for the organisations that create platforms in this space is driven not from communication but controversary. And I’m sure there are readers who aren’t me who will find the book genuinely inspiring, thought-provoking, and hopeful.
There you go. Four or five stars, thumbs up, good job, grab this if it sounds like the sort of thing you’re interested in. That probably sounds dismissive but is not intended to be. The book is sure to speak to some people, probably many people, and you may very well be one of them.
I, however, am not one of them. And, to be completely truthful about it, I can’t tell if that’s down to pure defensiveness because I don’t want to talk to, or really think about, people who hate me. To give Marron due credit, he goes out of his way to make his book non-shamey about this: he mostly roots his analogies and applications to small issues of everyday life (like his neighbours who weren’t putting out the recycling properly) and he acknowledges very explicitly the potentially overwhelming emotional labour that is engaging with hate (although let’s be clear hate is a complex term in this context: people who are dicks to you, especially on the internet, especially if you’re some variety of public figure, however small in my case, probably necessarily don’t *hate* you in a personal way and shouldn’t necessarily be conflated by people who send literal death threats to marginalised people). Although, I can’t lie, that just made me feel worse, because I am more privileged than Marron and a lot more privileged than many of the people who opted out of his conversations-with-haters project. So, y’know, maybe I’m just some kind of wilting violet who can’t cope with the reality of a job in the public eye: albeit in very minor job as a bare speck in said eye.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I am beyond fortunate. I can literally remember the separate occasions on which someone has told me I deserve to be raped, which is not the case for … most women of any sort of profile operating in internet spaces. Err, I mean because they get too many to keep count. I think I’ve only had … one or two actual stalkers. I have an assistant who keeps the file of the people who have contacted me in threatening or worrying-seeming manner, which allows me to keep a certain distance from the reality that this is something that is happening to me. And while living through multiple public shamings has emotional costs, they’ve never been big enough or I’ve never been important enough for them to impact my life in any significant practical way—which, again, is not the case for people less protected by privilege than I am.
All of which is why I felt uncomfortable with the book and uncomfortable with my discomfort. Because I can’t tell if I just happen to have rational disagreements about how we exist in a polarised world than some guy who wrote a book about how he personally exists in a polarised world, or I’m looking for excuses because he made me feel bad about me. Because here’s the thing, I can recognise that the “people who hate me” (again asterisks around the term—Marron himself doesn’t quite manage to come to peace with it in the chapter where he discusses naming the podcast) are human. Because a lot of them are on social media, I can—if I want—find out quite a lot of humanising information about them: the things that upset them, the name of their cat, how they feel about their mother, whatever. But I think for me, for my well-being, I need there to be clear blue water between acknowledging their humanity, which I’m happy to do, and letting them preoccupy my thoughts and take up my time, which I’m not. And I find myself wondering what a conversation (which Marron believes to be a form of activism) actually achieve here, even pre-supposing any of these people would be willing to talk to me in the first place?
Because, honestly, I think that it comes down to for me: having conversations with “people who hate you” is good for one thing, and one alone. Which is creating buzz-generating podcasts. I don’t think it would, for example, help the space I kind of exist on the margins of become a more inclusive, less hostile, less hateful. The one thing I have learned over a decade of existing here is that emotional safety is best ensured by maintaining careful spheres of absence. Not through a willingness to converse.
Basically, the points of contention I have with Marron’s ideas come down are these:
One: he calls his “conversations with people who hate me” a social experiment. I think too much reality TV has made me incredibly resistant on principle to anything labelled an experiment, social or otherwise. Because experiments, you know, have rules. And something isn’t an experiment if you manipulate the outcome: which is not to say that I think Marron should not have vetted the people he interviewed (his safety is, of course, the most relevant factor here) but his project is a social experiment in the way Love is Blind is a social experiment. Which is to say, good TV and not very much else.
Two: he comes back a lot to the idea that “hurt people hurt people” – which was the manifesto that got him through the shitty treatment he received while putting himself through university working catering jobs. I mean, I’ve been there, I’ve done that myself – as in, I have worked shitty jobs where I was treated shittily. And, once again, we’re faced with my potential failures of empathy because while I believe it is important to remember people are complex, nuanced and damaged in ways we aren’t privy to, the fact is some people are just dicks. And people who make an on-going habit of treating wait staff poorly are just dicks. Especially because there are plenty of people in the world who are complex, nuanced and damaged in ways we aren’t privy to, who may also have oppositional political views to us, who do NOT treat wait staff poorly. Like, the problem here is not that wait staff need to cultivate in themselves radical empathy to survive the ill-treatment they receive from customers, it is for there to be broader cultural shifts in the way we perceive its appropriate to treat wait staff. And I know the latter feels unchangeably vast whereas the former is something one person can do on their own without the backing of either the government or the capitalist infrastructure upon which all these dynamics are built, but it’s still making the person with the least power do the most emotional work. Which is already happening physically and professionally because they’re currently waiting fucking tables.
The other thing I particularly dislike about the “hurt people hurt people” mantra is that it’s … um. Wrong? Because, while, yes, cycles of abuse are a thing, anyone who has ever been involved in any sort of work related to abuse survivors will tell you that, in actual fact, hurt people get hurt. It’s a godawful thing to talk about, but if you have been abused, you are more likely to be abused in the future. And maxims like “hurt people hurt people” entering the public discourse are actually genuinely harmful to abuse survivors because they, once again, centre abusers in narratives of abuse, over the people directly harmed by that abuse.
Three: For Marron, the success of Conversations with People Who Hate Me are two people with opposing views, one of whom might have called the other a slur on the internet and suggested he kill himself, being able to put aside the need to debate or score rhetorical points off each other and find spaces of mutual empathy. And, y’know, that’s all great. I’m sure it felt really nice. But, like, you can do that that with pretty much anyone, as long they’re not so actively hateful they’re trying to legit murder you. And even though Marron makes the point that empathy is not the endorsement, it still brings you perilously close to this Trumpian “good people on both sides” space where you’re exchanging heart-warming anecdotes about your childhood with someone who fundamentally doesn’t believe you have the right to exist. And, obviously, you’re not going to solve someone believing you fundamentally don’t have the right to exist by arguing with them. But I kind of personally feel social interaction has hit its natural limit when one of you is so-so on the whether the other person should be alive and happy and have access to the same civil rights as everyone else. At that point, it doesn’t matter if your mum bought you the same kind of biscuit when you were eight, y’know?
Four: I think what a lot of this comes down to for me is kind of … okay. You know there’s an episode of The Simpsons where Homer accidentally makes friends with a guy called John who turns out to be gay. When Marge tells him this friend (who I think is voiced by John Walters?) is gay, Homer freaks out and is only reconciled with John after John saves him from being torn apart by berserk reindeer (it’s The Simpsons, don’t ask). Anyway, after John and Homer are reconciled, John says: “I won your respect, and all I had to do was save your life. Now, if every gay man could just do the same, you'd be set.” And I kind of feel that’s where Conversations With People Who Hate Me ultimately leads us: possibly you can make a single bigot (sorry, nuanced, complex, more damaged than we are privy to human being) empathise with a single marginalised person (or, in the case of one painful to read about example in the book, one single sexual abuse survivor) but only at the cost of the emotional equivalent of “and all I had to do was save your life.” Several times Marron notes how the people he talked to were happy to have talked to him because normally expressing views hostile to the lives and safety of particular marginalised groups got them shouted at by members of that marginalised group. Okay, I have phrased that unfairly. The thing is I’m not disputing that this was positive for Marron and positive for the people he spoke to but, from a certain perspective, isn’t Marron just essentially establishing himself as “one of the good ones” at the cost of absolutely everybody else who doesn’t want to practice radical empathy towards the very people who are making their lives worse in the world they live in?
And now I’m legitimately scared that I’m going to become the one who tried to cancel Carlos from Nightvale. I do not want to cancel, nor do I want anyone to cancel, Carlos from Nightvale. He seems like a nice person and we have several life experiences in common, although I would definitely not want to be his neighbour because then he’d apparently send me passive-aggressive notes about my recycling that I would be required to respond positively to in order to provide an illustrative example for his book.
What this all comes down is: Conversations with People Who Hate Me: 12 Things I Learned from Talking to Internet Strangers is a good book, in abstract terms of bookness, and I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of people who get a lot of it (I mean, just look at the pull quotes). I just think, for me, I think there is a problem in the world where being treated shittily on a mass scale feels like such an unsolvable, unchanging problem that we are sometimes forced to turn being treated shittily into a virtue. This is the whole principle that underlying the book—a principle that, to give Marron credit, he interrogates articulately and engagingly from several directions. It’s just not a principle I personally connect with and which made me curl up in the foetal position under my desk. Which is not, by the way, an invitation to empathy. It’s just my reaction.
Relevant disclaimers: none
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.
And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.
**Trigger warnings for this review, references to hate speech and sexual assault**
I… honestly have no idea how to rate this book for NetGalley purposes. I think I maybe hated it? Which had nothing to do with the book and everything to do with me. I honestly kind of wish I hadn’t read it, or I’d had the guts to stop reading it when I realised it was (unintentionally and non-maliciously) taking me to a bad place. I’m even wondering if I should be reviewing it because I don’t know how to separate evaluation of the book as … as, well, a book, from my reaction to it. But I guess I’ll give it my best shot and we can figure out if I’m too compromised after.
So. Conversations with People Who Hate Me: 12 Things I Learned from Talking to Internet Strangers is written by the guy who played Carlos from Welcome to Nightvale, and takes its inspiration from a podcast he did—and which I listened to a little bit—called Conversations With People Who Hate Me. The podcast is a series of, I guess the best word is conversations, with a carefully selected cross-section of people who had previously sent Dylan Marron hate messages down the years. And the book explores the context that led him to create the podcast in the first place, the process of creating of it and, as the title suggests, what conclusions he reached as a consequence of both. The final chapter gently unravels the process of writing the book itself, as Marron has to overcome the overwhelming self-consciousness that I believe all liberal-learning, marginalised writers face when they approach the task of putting down words: what happens if I get cancelled for what I’ve said here. Although I do kinda wish somebody had told me before that I was allowed to just wrap up a book I’ve written by worrying about the public reaction to it. Might have saved me a lot of anxiety.
Look, I’m being uncharitable. This is a well-written, well-structured, undeniably unusual piece of work. I appreciated the artistry of it as a text: the engaging style, the careful way Marron guides us on a journey with him, the effortless way he blends anecdotes and personal reflection with reflections on other texts and pieces of research. There’s some obvious-if-you’ve-thought-about-it-for-more-than-two-seconds but still illuminating considerations of the way social media keeps us isolated, not in the usual “online bad, meat good” sense that this debate tends to get reduced to, but how profit for the organisations that create platforms in this space is driven not from communication but controversary. And I’m sure there are readers who aren’t me who will find the book genuinely inspiring, thought-provoking, and hopeful.
There you go. Four or five stars, thumbs up, good job, grab this if it sounds like the sort of thing you’re interested in. That probably sounds dismissive but is not intended to be. The book is sure to speak to some people, probably many people, and you may very well be one of them.
I, however, am not one of them. And, to be completely truthful about it, I can’t tell if that’s down to pure defensiveness because I don’t want to talk to, or really think about, people who hate me. To give Marron due credit, he goes out of his way to make his book non-shamey about this: he mostly roots his analogies and applications to small issues of everyday life (like his neighbours who weren’t putting out the recycling properly) and he acknowledges very explicitly the potentially overwhelming emotional labour that is engaging with hate (although let’s be clear hate is a complex term in this context: people who are dicks to you, especially on the internet, especially if you’re some variety of public figure, however small in my case, probably necessarily don’t *hate* you in a personal way and shouldn’t necessarily be conflated by people who send literal death threats to marginalised people). Although, I can’t lie, that just made me feel worse, because I am more privileged than Marron and a lot more privileged than many of the people who opted out of his conversations-with-haters project. So, y’know, maybe I’m just some kind of wilting violet who can’t cope with the reality of a job in the public eye: albeit in very minor job as a bare speck in said eye.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I am beyond fortunate. I can literally remember the separate occasions on which someone has told me I deserve to be raped, which is not the case for … most women of any sort of profile operating in internet spaces. Err, I mean because they get too many to keep count. I think I’ve only had … one or two actual stalkers. I have an assistant who keeps the file of the people who have contacted me in threatening or worrying-seeming manner, which allows me to keep a certain distance from the reality that this is something that is happening to me. And while living through multiple public shamings has emotional costs, they’ve never been big enough or I’ve never been important enough for them to impact my life in any significant practical way—which, again, is not the case for people less protected by privilege than I am.
All of which is why I felt uncomfortable with the book and uncomfortable with my discomfort. Because I can’t tell if I just happen to have rational disagreements about how we exist in a polarised world than some guy who wrote a book about how he personally exists in a polarised world, or I’m looking for excuses because he made me feel bad about me. Because here’s the thing, I can recognise that the “people who hate me” (again asterisks around the term—Marron himself doesn’t quite manage to come to peace with it in the chapter where he discusses naming the podcast) are human. Because a lot of them are on social media, I can—if I want—find out quite a lot of humanising information about them: the things that upset them, the name of their cat, how they feel about their mother, whatever. But I think for me, for my well-being, I need there to be clear blue water between acknowledging their humanity, which I’m happy to do, and letting them preoccupy my thoughts and take up my time, which I’m not. And I find myself wondering what a conversation (which Marron believes to be a form of activism) actually achieve here, even pre-supposing any of these people would be willing to talk to me in the first place?
Because, honestly, I think that it comes down to for me: having conversations with “people who hate you” is good for one thing, and one alone. Which is creating buzz-generating podcasts. I don’t think it would, for example, help the space I kind of exist on the margins of become a more inclusive, less hostile, less hateful. The one thing I have learned over a decade of existing here is that emotional safety is best ensured by maintaining careful spheres of absence. Not through a willingness to converse.
Basically, the points of contention I have with Marron’s ideas come down are these:
One: he calls his “conversations with people who hate me” a social experiment. I think too much reality TV has made me incredibly resistant on principle to anything labelled an experiment, social or otherwise. Because experiments, you know, have rules. And something isn’t an experiment if you manipulate the outcome: which is not to say that I think Marron should not have vetted the people he interviewed (his safety is, of course, the most relevant factor here) but his project is a social experiment in the way Love is Blind is a social experiment. Which is to say, good TV and not very much else.
Two: he comes back a lot to the idea that “hurt people hurt people” – which was the manifesto that got him through the shitty treatment he received while putting himself through university working catering jobs. I mean, I’ve been there, I’ve done that myself – as in, I have worked shitty jobs where I was treated shittily. And, once again, we’re faced with my potential failures of empathy because while I believe it is important to remember people are complex, nuanced and damaged in ways we aren’t privy to, the fact is some people are just dicks. And people who make an on-going habit of treating wait staff poorly are just dicks. Especially because there are plenty of people in the world who are complex, nuanced and damaged in ways we aren’t privy to, who may also have oppositional political views to us, who do NOT treat wait staff poorly. Like, the problem here is not that wait staff need to cultivate in themselves radical empathy to survive the ill-treatment they receive from customers, it is for there to be broader cultural shifts in the way we perceive its appropriate to treat wait staff. And I know the latter feels unchangeably vast whereas the former is something one person can do on their own without the backing of either the government or the capitalist infrastructure upon which all these dynamics are built, but it’s still making the person with the least power do the most emotional work. Which is already happening physically and professionally because they’re currently waiting fucking tables.
The other thing I particularly dislike about the “hurt people hurt people” mantra is that it’s … um. Wrong? Because, while, yes, cycles of abuse are a thing, anyone who has ever been involved in any sort of work related to abuse survivors will tell you that, in actual fact, hurt people get hurt. It’s a godawful thing to talk about, but if you have been abused, you are more likely to be abused in the future. And maxims like “hurt people hurt people” entering the public discourse are actually genuinely harmful to abuse survivors because they, once again, centre abusers in narratives of abuse, over the people directly harmed by that abuse.
Three: For Marron, the success of Conversations with People Who Hate Me are two people with opposing views, one of whom might have called the other a slur on the internet and suggested he kill himself, being able to put aside the need to debate or score rhetorical points off each other and find spaces of mutual empathy. And, y’know, that’s all great. I’m sure it felt really nice. But, like, you can do that that with pretty much anyone, as long they’re not so actively hateful they’re trying to legit murder you. And even though Marron makes the point that empathy is not the endorsement, it still brings you perilously close to this Trumpian “good people on both sides” space where you’re exchanging heart-warming anecdotes about your childhood with someone who fundamentally doesn’t believe you have the right to exist. And, obviously, you’re not going to solve someone believing you fundamentally don’t have the right to exist by arguing with them. But I kind of personally feel social interaction has hit its natural limit when one of you is so-so on the whether the other person should be alive and happy and have access to the same civil rights as everyone else. At that point, it doesn’t matter if your mum bought you the same kind of biscuit when you were eight, y’know?
Four: I think what a lot of this comes down to for me is kind of … okay. You know there’s an episode of The Simpsons where Homer accidentally makes friends with a guy called John who turns out to be gay. When Marge tells him this friend (who I think is voiced by John Walters?) is gay, Homer freaks out and is only reconciled with John after John saves him from being torn apart by berserk reindeer (it’s The Simpsons, don’t ask). Anyway, after John and Homer are reconciled, John says: “I won your respect, and all I had to do was save your life. Now, if every gay man could just do the same, you'd be set.” And I kind of feel that’s where Conversations With People Who Hate Me ultimately leads us: possibly you can make a single bigot (sorry, nuanced, complex, more damaged than we are privy to human being) empathise with a single marginalised person (or, in the case of one painful to read about example in the book, one single sexual abuse survivor) but only at the cost of the emotional equivalent of “and all I had to do was save your life.” Several times Marron notes how the people he talked to were happy to have talked to him because normally expressing views hostile to the lives and safety of particular marginalised groups got them shouted at by members of that marginalised group. Okay, I have phrased that unfairly. The thing is I’m not disputing that this was positive for Marron and positive for the people he spoke to but, from a certain perspective, isn’t Marron just essentially establishing himself as “one of the good ones” at the cost of absolutely everybody else who doesn’t want to practice radical empathy towards the very people who are making their lives worse in the world they live in?
And now I’m legitimately scared that I’m going to become the one who tried to cancel Carlos from Nightvale. I do not want to cancel, nor do I want anyone to cancel, Carlos from Nightvale. He seems like a nice person and we have several life experiences in common, although I would definitely not want to be his neighbour because then he’d apparently send me passive-aggressive notes about my recycling that I would be required to respond positively to in order to provide an illustrative example for his book.
What this all comes down is: Conversations with People Who Hate Me: 12 Things I Learned from Talking to Internet Strangers is a good book, in abstract terms of bookness, and I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of people who get a lot of it (I mean, just look at the pull quotes). I just think, for me, I think there is a problem in the world where being treated shittily on a mass scale feels like such an unsolvable, unchanging problem that we are sometimes forced to turn being treated shittily into a virtue. This is the whole principle that underlying the book—a principle that, to give Marron credit, he interrogates articulately and engagingly from several directions. It’s just not a principle I personally connect with and which made me curl up in the foetal position under my desk. Which is not, by the way, an invitation to empathy. It’s just my reaction.
March 30, 2022
3.5 stars
Thank you Atria Books for this ARC! ♥︎
"Hate" is a strong word and as a society, we tend to use it widely for a differing severity of conversing. When in actuality, the definition of "hate" is the intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury or extreme dislike or disgust. (Merriam Webster)
As far as the internet goes, not every disagreeing or even threatening comment is derived from hate. Yes, there is a broad range and many can be, but an expanse usually derives from frustration, confusion, misunderstanding, or simply a bad day. Marron takes a chance by diving deep into his HATE FOLDER,—a digitized folder filled with screenshots of comments left from his "haters" or rather disagreers, to find those of which he can engage in a conversational piece delving into many deemed political topics.
This book is refreshing in a way. It's a beautiful work that makes you think about things in ways you never thought you could think about things. A fact that we are all human behind the screens of the ever-so-popular social media. Empathy is a big factor among the many, and just having a conversation rather than deflecting within debates, can do more justice than speaking out to those already agreeing on your part.
Thank you Atria Books for this ARC! ♥︎
"Hate" is a strong word and as a society, we tend to use it widely for a differing severity of conversing. When in actuality, the definition of "hate" is the intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury or extreme dislike or disgust. (Merriam Webster)
As far as the internet goes, not every disagreeing or even threatening comment is derived from hate. Yes, there is a broad range and many can be, but an expanse usually derives from frustration, confusion, misunderstanding, or simply a bad day. Marron takes a chance by diving deep into his HATE FOLDER,—a digitized folder filled with screenshots of comments left from his "haters" or rather disagreers, to find those of which he can engage in a conversational piece delving into many deemed political topics.
This book is refreshing in a way. It's a beautiful work that makes you think about things in ways you never thought you could think about things. A fact that we are all human behind the screens of the ever-so-popular social media. Empathy is a big factor among the many, and just having a conversation rather than deflecting within debates, can do more justice than speaking out to those already agreeing on your part.
Read
March 28, 2022Dylan Marron seems to have invented his way into being a popular podcaster. (I don't listen to podcasts, so I'm guessing here.) In a way his thought experiment here is a little like the internet and social evolution at large: our world culture is trying to renegotiate the social contract to include online interaction.
It's clear that he's not trained in psychology or social history, but he makes no claims to be. He lays out the history of his podcast, specifically the story behind his engaging with haters. He began by puncturing conservative hate-screeds with humor. He keeps track of the hate mail he gets, and one day he found that a hater actually had a life besides hating.
He mentioned the non-hating posts the person put on Facebook, then realized when he got an angry, hurt response that he'd basically outed someone without asking. That evolved to inviting haters to dialogue with him, and how he endeavored to meet them halfway--to negotiate a genuine conversation, even if no one's mind is changed.
That's the part of the book that interested me. I wish there was more effort like that out there. It's scary, how polarized our society is getting. Many of us know, and have in our families, people whose political stance is very different. How do we get along? Also, what are haters like when they aren't hating? Most aren't little Hitlers or Jeffry Dahmers.
The book was funny, rueful, reaching for empathy and compassion, and a breath of fresh air after listening to the hate vomit of politicians gleefully reproduced on the air by journalists always looking for more tooth and claw.
Copy provided by NetGalley
It's clear that he's not trained in psychology or social history, but he makes no claims to be. He lays out the history of his podcast, specifically the story behind his engaging with haters. He began by puncturing conservative hate-screeds with humor. He keeps track of the hate mail he gets, and one day he found that a hater actually had a life besides hating.
He mentioned the non-hating posts the person put on Facebook, then realized when he got an angry, hurt response that he'd basically outed someone without asking. That evolved to inviting haters to dialogue with him, and how he endeavored to meet them halfway--to negotiate a genuine conversation, even if no one's mind is changed.
That's the part of the book that interested me. I wish there was more effort like that out there. It's scary, how polarized our society is getting. Many of us know, and have in our families, people whose political stance is very different. How do we get along? Also, what are haters like when they aren't hating? Most aren't little Hitlers or Jeffry Dahmers.
The book was funny, rueful, reaching for empathy and compassion, and a breath of fresh air after listening to the hate vomit of politicians gleefully reproduced on the air by journalists always looking for more tooth and claw.
Copy provided by NetGalley
January 14, 2022
I picked up this book because I thought the premise sounded entertaining. A nonfiction book about a guy tracking down the real people behind online hate comments and having a conversation with them about what made them write those words? Seemed funny.
What I didn't expect was how deeply touching and emotional this book would be. It's divided into chapters based on different lessons the author learned from this project. As the book goes on, the tone shifts from light and humorous into a deeper conversation about empathy, shame culture, and human connection. I found myself tearing up a bit reading the transcripts of some of the conversations.
I was worried that the book would go in the direction of "there are good people on all sides" and diminishing the real harm caused by online bullying, but it didn't come across like that at all. There is discussion about the difference between empathy and endorsement and also a breakdown of the best ways to bring about meaningful change through conversation.
I was also impressed by the author's own self-reflection throughout the book. Rather than simply bringing up hateful comments that came from The Bad Guys, he also mentions comments that he has received that called him out for problematic behavior and how he has learned from them.
This is a book I'll be thinking about for a good while and I'm excited to recommend it to everyone I know when it comes out later this year. Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC to review honestly.
What I didn't expect was how deeply touching and emotional this book would be. It's divided into chapters based on different lessons the author learned from this project. As the book goes on, the tone shifts from light and humorous into a deeper conversation about empathy, shame culture, and human connection. I found myself tearing up a bit reading the transcripts of some of the conversations.
I was worried that the book would go in the direction of "there are good people on all sides" and diminishing the real harm caused by online bullying, but it didn't come across like that at all. There is discussion about the difference between empathy and endorsement and also a breakdown of the best ways to bring about meaningful change through conversation.
I was also impressed by the author's own self-reflection throughout the book. Rather than simply bringing up hateful comments that came from The Bad Guys, he also mentions comments that he has received that called him out for problematic behavior and how he has learned from them.
This is a book I'll be thinking about for a good while and I'm excited to recommend it to everyone I know when it comes out later this year. Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC to review honestly.
January 19, 2022
People who say they "hate you" online usually have f*cking problems. They don't know you, so you can deduce that their problems run deeper than you know.
Dylan Marron is the bravest of us all, interfacing with those who regular people deem the scourage of the internet: the trolls.
Flipping the camera around in these interactions, he shares some extremely profound moments that he's experienced in conversation with a variety of hateful, but maybe not hate-filled, commenters and it's an interesting read.
Opening up his platform for civilian and public figures alike to talk to their combatants, there were some moments that I felt like... Dylan, how can you not see how bad this is for XYZperson!??? However, just as I was thinking about how crazy some of these situations became, he’d come through with some heavy reflections, which I appreciated. Even if, at times, the damage had already been done.
This book is worth the read, I'm sure that it has an immense impact on those who have been involved in these scenarios. I have been misinterpreted on message boards, and elsewhere, so some of these vignettes rang personal, but there's something here for everyone to learn from in some small way.
Thanks to Netgalley for allowing me to read this book in exchange for an honest review. Check out Conversations with People Who Hate Me when it drops on March 29, 2022!
Dylan Marron is the bravest of us all, interfacing with those who regular people deem the scourage of the internet: the trolls.
Flipping the camera around in these interactions, he shares some extremely profound moments that he's experienced in conversation with a variety of hateful, but maybe not hate-filled, commenters and it's an interesting read.
Opening up his platform for civilian and public figures alike to talk to their combatants, there were some moments that I felt like... Dylan, how can you not see how bad this is for XYZperson!??? However, just as I was thinking about how crazy some of these situations became, he’d come through with some heavy reflections, which I appreciated. Even if, at times, the damage had already been done.
This book is worth the read, I'm sure that it has an immense impact on those who have been involved in these scenarios. I have been misinterpreted on message boards, and elsewhere, so some of these vignettes rang personal, but there's something here for everyone to learn from in some small way.
Thanks to Netgalley for allowing me to read this book in exchange for an honest review. Check out Conversations with People Who Hate Me when it drops on March 29, 2022!
February 6, 2025
I picked this book up after loving Dylan Marron's podcast The Redemption of Jar Jar Binks, a 6 episode miniseries that I find myself thinking about all the time. Unfortunately, I do think having listened to that already dented my experience of this book, because I already knew a chunk of the story from the podcast which made listening to the book feel a bit repetitive. However! I still finished and overall enjoyed Conversations with People Who Hate Me, which is about Marron's podcast of the same name, in which he called up folks who had left hateful comments on his youtube videos or facebook and just had a conversation with them. What prompted them to leave a hateful comment? What kind of values impacted how they saw the world? Might they change their mind if they had more evidence? Did they ever expect Dylan Marron to actually see their comment? (The answer to this last was almost always "no.") This is an interesting political moment to think about this project of deliberate, compassionate connection, and Marron is thoughtful about the privilege that allowed him the emotional bandwidth to pursue it.
August 1, 2022
I've been listening to the podcast Conversations With People Who Hate Me since the first episode was released in 2017, and I'm a huge fan. Dylan Marron started the podcast as a way of processing some of the horrible messages that people sent him online (and people can be unbelievably horrible), but despite the title, the project isn't about hate. It's about asking questions and showing empathy and understanding that "there's a human on the other side of the screen" (the podcast's tagline). Some of the episodes have left me completely heartbroken while others have renewed my faith in humanity, but each one is thought-provoking in it's own way. I can see why Dylan Marron might not be for everyone, but he has given me so much new perspective about people's behavior on the internet. And if I'm really honest, he gave me courage to post more content online since he makes some of the internet hate seem less scary and more manageable.
Naturally, I was super excited when he announced his book, and I'm happy to report it was everything I hoped it to be. However, I'm on the fence about highly recommending this book to someone who has not listened to the podcast (but that problem is easily fixed if you just go download the first season and start listening 🙂). I got quite a thrill from learning the backstories to my favorite podcast episodes, some of which I'm still thinking about years later (particularly the "You Are a Liar" episode from Season 2 - I'm still processing that one four years later). There's also dialogue from podcast episodes written out in the book. It's hard for me to imagine what it would be like to just experience this dialogue by reading it on a page, because all of the wonderful conversational nuances (pauses, sighs, changes in tone, etc.) I heard on the podcast episodes were running through my head as I was reading (makes me wonder if the audiobook includes audio from the original episodes).
However, there is a lot more to the book than just stories about the podcast. In one chapter, Marron shares how his fear of public shaming caused delays in his book-writing process, which I found to be really helpful perspective as someone who writes online book reviews. Also, Marron's anecdotes about his early work and what led him to start the podcast were fascinating (and took me down some really enjoyable rabbit holes of watching his earlier videos at Seriously.TV!). And even though I'm not sure how the sections about the podcast will resonate with non-listeners, there are still a lot of really poignant takeaways from these chapters regarding common traps of tough conversations, and I think Marron does a really great job of building upon these concepts throughout the book.
One of the things that often comes up with Marron's guests is that they are really surprised that others actually read what they wrote on the internet, and they didn't expect their target to ever see their message. So, Dylan Marron, since there's a chance you might read this one day, here's my message to you: thank you so much for the work that you do, and I'm so glad you pushed through the fear of the shame armies to get this book out and share it with the world! For everyone else, I think this book is worth a read, and I hope you get as much out of it as I did. But if not, please keep your online comments constructive and remember that there's a human on the other side of the screen!
Naturally, I was super excited when he announced his book, and I'm happy to report it was everything I hoped it to be. However, I'm on the fence about highly recommending this book to someone who has not listened to the podcast (but that problem is easily fixed if you just go download the first season and start listening 🙂). I got quite a thrill from learning the backstories to my favorite podcast episodes, some of which I'm still thinking about years later (particularly the "You Are a Liar" episode from Season 2 - I'm still processing that one four years later). There's also dialogue from podcast episodes written out in the book. It's hard for me to imagine what it would be like to just experience this dialogue by reading it on a page, because all of the wonderful conversational nuances (pauses, sighs, changes in tone, etc.) I heard on the podcast episodes were running through my head as I was reading (makes me wonder if the audiobook includes audio from the original episodes).
However, there is a lot more to the book than just stories about the podcast. In one chapter, Marron shares how his fear of public shaming caused delays in his book-writing process, which I found to be really helpful perspective as someone who writes online book reviews. Also, Marron's anecdotes about his early work and what led him to start the podcast were fascinating (and took me down some really enjoyable rabbit holes of watching his earlier videos at Seriously.TV!). And even though I'm not sure how the sections about the podcast will resonate with non-listeners, there are still a lot of really poignant takeaways from these chapters regarding common traps of tough conversations, and I think Marron does a really great job of building upon these concepts throughout the book.
One of the things that often comes up with Marron's guests is that they are really surprised that others actually read what they wrote on the internet, and they didn't expect their target to ever see their message. So, Dylan Marron, since there's a chance you might read this one day, here's my message to you: thank you so much for the work that you do, and I'm so glad you pushed through the fear of the shame armies to get this book out and share it with the world! For everyone else, I think this book is worth a read, and I hope you get as much out of it as I did. But if not, please keep your online comments constructive and remember that there's a human on the other side of the screen!
February 27, 2022
This demonstrates how easy it is to be a hater from behind your computer screen, but being able to communicate with this specific individual is an entirely different matter. This book makes you think a lot. I highly recommend you read this book.
𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘬 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘵𝘰 𝘕𝘦𝘵𝘨𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘺 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘙𝘊 𝘪𝘯 𝘦𝘹𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘯 𝘩𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸
𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘬 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘵𝘰 𝘕𝘦𝘵𝘨𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘺 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘙𝘊 𝘪𝘯 𝘦𝘹𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘯 𝘩𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸
February 12, 2022
Conversations With People Who Hate Me: 12 Things I Learned from Talking to Internet Strangers is one of those books I’m going to be yelling about for a long time to come. It is thoughtful and thought-provoking.
As a liberal leaning very online person, I have been aware of Dylan Marron for several years and have heard his TED Talk about receiving hate online. In his book, he takes us through first how he got online and why he was creating the content he was creating, and then the process of how he moved from making snarky videos to talking to the people who sent him negative comments. Along the way, he thinks about how he is engaging with the world and how he has framed his detractors as The Other. He considers the words “hate” and “troll” and grapples with whether he feels comfortable using them.
My guests are more than what they have said about me, so how can I see them, these three-dimensional humans, as “trolls”? They don’t live under a bridge. Their entire lives are not built around tormenting the villagers. On the contrary, they are fellow villagers.”
Empathy for The Other has come up in conversation a lot since the 2016 election and again in different ways since the politicization of the pandemic. Marron’s struggles around empathy and it’s appropriateness gave me a lot to think about. He reflects on what his mother said when he was growing up, “hurt people hurt people” and the way he has used that as a coping mechanism when faced with bad behavior from others. That coping mechanism, imagining a sympathetic backstory for people who were unpleasant to him, gave him the foundation for initiating his podcast, but was it the right thing to do? Is he right to assume that the people who sent him nasty messages act from a place of pain? Does bonding over shared hurts help heal a fractured world? Is he being complicit in oppression? He values the individual connections he forms in his conversations, while also disagreeing with and seeing the harm in many of their beliefs. His dilemma around this project stymied his efforts to write this book. I appreciated that he questioned himself on everything.
Dylan Marron holds himself accountable in a variety of ways, some of which made me a little uncomfortable with myself. Argument is one of my love languages, but I know that argument isn’t a good way to build bridges with the vast majority of humans (the couple of other people in the world who also thrive on argument are either related to me or are one of my best friends). Intellectually I understand this, but the process and conversations that Marron explores are helping me reframe my own thinking about about how I advocate my own strongly held beliefs.
Conversations With People Who Hate Me is wonderfully nuanced. None of the issues that Marron tackles are simple. Communication is hard. Remembering that the people who disagree with us are human too is hard. Especially when that disagreement is over our safety and dignity.
Some people are going to be disappointed that there is not a bullet list of 12 lessons that Dylan Marron learned that we can then apply like a pattern to our own lives. But that would be missing the point.
CW: the hateful messages that Marron and others received online include death threats, homophobia, and misogyny. Discussions of bullying and sexual assault
I received this as an advance reader copy from Atria Books via NetGalley. My opinions are my own.
As a liberal leaning very online person, I have been aware of Dylan Marron for several years and have heard his TED Talk about receiving hate online. In his book, he takes us through first how he got online and why he was creating the content he was creating, and then the process of how he moved from making snarky videos to talking to the people who sent him negative comments. Along the way, he thinks about how he is engaging with the world and how he has framed his detractors as The Other. He considers the words “hate” and “troll” and grapples with whether he feels comfortable using them.
My guests are more than what they have said about me, so how can I see them, these three-dimensional humans, as “trolls”? They don’t live under a bridge. Their entire lives are not built around tormenting the villagers. On the contrary, they are fellow villagers.”
Empathy for The Other has come up in conversation a lot since the 2016 election and again in different ways since the politicization of the pandemic. Marron’s struggles around empathy and it’s appropriateness gave me a lot to think about. He reflects on what his mother said when he was growing up, “hurt people hurt people” and the way he has used that as a coping mechanism when faced with bad behavior from others. That coping mechanism, imagining a sympathetic backstory for people who were unpleasant to him, gave him the foundation for initiating his podcast, but was it the right thing to do? Is he right to assume that the people who sent him nasty messages act from a place of pain? Does bonding over shared hurts help heal a fractured world? Is he being complicit in oppression? He values the individual connections he forms in his conversations, while also disagreeing with and seeing the harm in many of their beliefs. His dilemma around this project stymied his efforts to write this book. I appreciated that he questioned himself on everything.
Dylan Marron holds himself accountable in a variety of ways, some of which made me a little uncomfortable with myself. Argument is one of my love languages, but I know that argument isn’t a good way to build bridges with the vast majority of humans (the couple of other people in the world who also thrive on argument are either related to me or are one of my best friends). Intellectually I understand this, but the process and conversations that Marron explores are helping me reframe my own thinking about about how I advocate my own strongly held beliefs.
Conversations With People Who Hate Me is wonderfully nuanced. None of the issues that Marron tackles are simple. Communication is hard. Remembering that the people who disagree with us are human too is hard. Especially when that disagreement is over our safety and dignity.
Some people are going to be disappointed that there is not a bullet list of 12 lessons that Dylan Marron learned that we can then apply like a pattern to our own lives. But that would be missing the point.
CW: the hateful messages that Marron and others received online include death threats, homophobia, and misogyny. Discussions of bullying and sexual assault
I received this as an advance reader copy from Atria Books via NetGalley. My opinions are my own.
March 22, 2022
This is a hard one for me to rate, and I think it is going to be a worthwhile and impactful text for a lot of people. Unfortunately, I did not happen to be one of them. I have followed Dylan's work for a while, not fanatically, but I've seen him at PodCon and listened to some episodes in the first season of his podcast, and I have found his writing and thinking compelling and insightful. So I was interested to jump into this.
The book is really about the genesis, development, and execution of his podcast, with a bit of background on his own life and journey to being a content creator for context. I would honestly classify it as more of a memoir than anything. I think if I had been more aware of that focus going into it, I might not have been so disappointed.
I really appreciate his exploration of connection and community and empathy. All of these are incredibly difficult and challenging things to foster and maintain but are so essential to our humanity. And so I loved the interrogation of how social media, for its benefits, has flattened our perceptions of others and kind of impacted our capacity for empathy.
What I find a bit ironic, then, is that his conclusion from his experiment of choosing to talk to his haters is itself a bit simplistic and lacking complexity. Even though he seems to have the awareness to say not everyone will have the capacity or emotional bandwidth to have conversations with people who hate them, he still makes some sweeping generalizations, about forgiveness, about seeing people who treat us like shit as full, nuanced humans. And maybe that's what's needed in a book like this, prevarication doesn't necessarily make for very good writing. But that's what I felt from it. After all, there is a huge chasm between "shaming" people who hate you and deciding to engage them in "conversation," and he seems to treat it like a binary.
Where things really flipped for me, and I started to feel actively angry about this "social experiment" was when Dylan started acting as a "moderator" for other people to have conversations with people who hate them. Although they definitely consented, otherwise I'm sure they wouldn't have done the podcast, I still find it a bit exploitative to mine their paint for contnet. He even acknowledges that it felt icky that he was doing this at one point, and then just...conitnues to do it? And perhaps it's because I'm just starting to confront my own trauma in this moment and I'm feeling rather raw, and I know that Dylan is writing the book so potentially this is uncharitable, but for somebody working with trauma survivors, he was remarkably focused on his own goals and revelations. He tells us about a conversation he moderated between a rape survivor and someone who didn't believe her assault happened, and Dylan even reflects afterwards that his focus was off, in making the latter feel like he wasn't being shamed. But his takeaway from this doesn't seem to be, "Wow, I might've really retraumatized that survivor in subjecting her to this interrogation." Instead, he's focused on HIS experiment, and how he's disappointed and feeling dissatisfaction from not getting a cathartic moment where it seems like people really connect.
Overall, I'm just disappointed with the self indulgence and lack of introspection I felt here, and I don't think almost any of that is Dylan Marron's fault, but I won't be stocking this one in my mini-store.
The book is really about the genesis, development, and execution of his podcast, with a bit of background on his own life and journey to being a content creator for context. I would honestly classify it as more of a memoir than anything. I think if I had been more aware of that focus going into it, I might not have been so disappointed.
I really appreciate his exploration of connection and community and empathy. All of these are incredibly difficult and challenging things to foster and maintain but are so essential to our humanity. And so I loved the interrogation of how social media, for its benefits, has flattened our perceptions of others and kind of impacted our capacity for empathy.
What I find a bit ironic, then, is that his conclusion from his experiment of choosing to talk to his haters is itself a bit simplistic and lacking complexity. Even though he seems to have the awareness to say not everyone will have the capacity or emotional bandwidth to have conversations with people who hate them, he still makes some sweeping generalizations, about forgiveness, about seeing people who treat us like shit as full, nuanced humans. And maybe that's what's needed in a book like this, prevarication doesn't necessarily make for very good writing. But that's what I felt from it. After all, there is a huge chasm between "shaming" people who hate you and deciding to engage them in "conversation," and he seems to treat it like a binary.
Where things really flipped for me, and I started to feel actively angry about this "social experiment" was when Dylan started acting as a "moderator" for other people to have conversations with people who hate them. Although they definitely consented, otherwise I'm sure they wouldn't have done the podcast, I still find it a bit exploitative to mine their paint for contnet. He even acknowledges that it felt icky that he was doing this at one point, and then just...conitnues to do it? And perhaps it's because I'm just starting to confront my own trauma in this moment and I'm feeling rather raw, and I know that Dylan is writing the book so potentially this is uncharitable, but for somebody working with trauma survivors, he was remarkably focused on his own goals and revelations. He tells us about a conversation he moderated between a rape survivor and someone who didn't believe her assault happened, and Dylan even reflects afterwards that his focus was off, in making the latter feel like he wasn't being shamed. But his takeaway from this doesn't seem to be, "Wow, I might've really retraumatized that survivor in subjecting her to this interrogation." Instead, he's focused on HIS experiment, and how he's disappointed and feeling dissatisfaction from not getting a cathartic moment where it seems like people really connect.
Overall, I'm just disappointed with the self indulgence and lack of introspection I felt here, and I don't think almost any of that is Dylan Marron's fault, but I won't be stocking this one in my mini-store.
August 21, 2022
I was not really sure what this was going to be about as I had not heard of Dylan Marron or his work, and I was absolutely blown away by this book and what Marron has done. I know that it is apparently easier to sit behind a computer and type hateful comments to someone you don’t know rather than have in person conversations about differences. The saying is all so true, ‘hurt people hurt people’, and when Dylan started clapping back at conservatives via video he received a lot of positive feedback online, but with it came the hate. It bothered him so much that he began looking up some of the people that messaged him and actually found some similarities despite their obvious differences and through various unforeseen events that you’ll have to read about in here, he began a series where he had conversations with these individuals. What he found was that most often there was something in that person’s history that caused them to lash out and he was mostly successful in bridging the gap and helping them and others to see where he was coming from but also understanding where they were coming from as well. He started bringing others on to have conversations with people that had hurt them, sometimes it was successful, sometimes not but in all situations everyone walked away learning something.
This is such a great book, and I really got a lot out of it. It is an emotional read, I was tearing up with a couple of the conversations, they are genuine and thought-provoking, and I cannot recommend this one enough. I wish we could all get back to having adult conversations, and this book shows that if done the right way it is possible. The audio is great, I highly recommend listening to it this way if you can.
Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for the digital copy to review.
This is such a great book, and I really got a lot out of it. It is an emotional read, I was tearing up with a couple of the conversations, they are genuine and thought-provoking, and I cannot recommend this one enough. I wish we could all get back to having adult conversations, and this book shows that if done the right way it is possible. The audio is great, I highly recommend listening to it this way if you can.
Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for the digital copy to review.
June 14, 2022
This was so, so good.
And now I have a new podcast to catch up on.
And now I have a new podcast to catch up on.
February 11, 2022
ARC provided by NetGalley, thank you.
I have so much love for this book that I feel compelled to include a heart emoji. ❤️ There. Conversations with People Who Hate Me looks at hate, particularly online, and finds an antidote to it in conversation. Simple, but powerful.
The author, Dylan Marron, received (probably still receives?) a fair amount of negative messages and hate in response to the videos, podcasts and other content he creates. Out of that came a social experiment, one in which the author has conversations with some of the people who left those messages. At a fundamental level, we probably understand that conversation is humanizing, that it’s easy to say a mean thing on the internet and harder to say it to a person’s face and even harder to say it to a person you feel some connection with. Understanding something and doing it and doing it well are three different things. That’s why this book is important.
Toward the end of the book, the author writes about the potential shame or hate he might receive in response to this book. “What will I say to the teenager who replies with a 'this ain’t it chief' on an Instagram post about my book’s release date? How will I handle being the main character when someone finds a sentence that I should have written differently? How long will it take to get over an ideologically-aligned stranger responding to my book’s presale link with the meme 'you decided to write this book, here’s why you shouldn’t have'”
So I’ll say: This IS it. Your sentences are delightful. You decided to write this book, and here’s why I’m so glad you did.
In twelve easy-to-binge-read chapters, this book illustrates how a single, hateful message can turn into a healthy, productive, moving conversation. It demonstrates the power conversation has to change a person’s heart. We see that conversation has a critical ingredient—empathy—and can turn into something else—the everything storm, debate, interrogation—if we aren’t careful. The author writes, “Conversation, I have come to believe, is activism.”
Not that everything is magically fixed after a single conversation. “Radical change does not happen in the course of a single phone call. It does not happen because a conversation ends on a happy note. It happens because someone is willing to listen, someone is able to reach them, and a bridge was created for them to meet.”
Near the beginning, this touches on the topic of earnestness and sincerity on the internet. As in, it tends to attract swarms of negativity. For me, this is one of the most awful things about how people have come to use the internet. It hasn’t always been this way. The internet was created to connect people—not to divide them.
The author frequently poses the question, “What are you going to do about it?” The question assumes action. I know what the author did: social experiment, conversations, podcasts, wrote a book. But me? Uh, hate on the internet tends to produce one result: FLIGHT FLIGHT FLIGHT. There is nothing doing in that. The best I’ve been able to come up with is, at the very least, to try not to make somebody else’s life worse. It’s not particularly active, but it’s something?
There’s also a good discussion around empathy here. “Hurt people do, in fact, hurt people. Or, more accurately, hurt people hurt the people that they can get away with hurting.” Anyone who’s ever worked a job in the service industry or one involving talking to people who need help with something will understand this well. It’s a crucial ingredient in a good conversation. The book goes into another side of empathy I had never considered. “Empathy across the divide is a luxury item that not everyone can afford.”
We look too at the well-intentioned, hate-spreaders dubbed shame armies who gather and attack in the name of [insert cause here]. “In their righteous quest to tear down problematic systems it seemed as if these infantries were only interested in taking down individual people instead. They went after the transgressor as if they were the system itself.” We know how effective this is at changing a person’s mind, right?
Finally, can I say there is some major Quaker resonance in this? The author briefly mentions having attended a Quaker school and touches lightly on particular elements that have influenced the way he approaches conversation, but he doesn’t explicitly make any statements of faith, so I’m not assuming anything about his influence or belief system. That being said, this book is incredibly well-aligned with Quaker belief and practice and I think Quakers and similarly minded individuals would enjoy it. The very premise of seeing something valuable in another person and having a respectful conversation and sometimes feeling united in spirit at the end can easily be translated into Quaker terminology.
This book gave me a lot to consider, and I’m glad I’ve read it. Highly recommend.
I have so much love for this book that I feel compelled to include a heart emoji. ❤️ There. Conversations with People Who Hate Me looks at hate, particularly online, and finds an antidote to it in conversation. Simple, but powerful.
The author, Dylan Marron, received (probably still receives?) a fair amount of negative messages and hate in response to the videos, podcasts and other content he creates. Out of that came a social experiment, one in which the author has conversations with some of the people who left those messages. At a fundamental level, we probably understand that conversation is humanizing, that it’s easy to say a mean thing on the internet and harder to say it to a person’s face and even harder to say it to a person you feel some connection with. Understanding something and doing it and doing it well are three different things. That’s why this book is important.
Toward the end of the book, the author writes about the potential shame or hate he might receive in response to this book. “What will I say to the teenager who replies with a 'this ain’t it chief' on an Instagram post about my book’s release date? How will I handle being the main character when someone finds a sentence that I should have written differently? How long will it take to get over an ideologically-aligned stranger responding to my book’s presale link with the meme 'you decided to write this book, here’s why you shouldn’t have'”
So I’ll say: This IS it. Your sentences are delightful. You decided to write this book, and here’s why I’m so glad you did.
In twelve easy-to-binge-read chapters, this book illustrates how a single, hateful message can turn into a healthy, productive, moving conversation. It demonstrates the power conversation has to change a person’s heart. We see that conversation has a critical ingredient—empathy—and can turn into something else—the everything storm, debate, interrogation—if we aren’t careful. The author writes, “Conversation, I have come to believe, is activism.”
Not that everything is magically fixed after a single conversation. “Radical change does not happen in the course of a single phone call. It does not happen because a conversation ends on a happy note. It happens because someone is willing to listen, someone is able to reach them, and a bridge was created for them to meet.”
Near the beginning, this touches on the topic of earnestness and sincerity on the internet. As in, it tends to attract swarms of negativity. For me, this is one of the most awful things about how people have come to use the internet. It hasn’t always been this way. The internet was created to connect people—not to divide them.
The author frequently poses the question, “What are you going to do about it?” The question assumes action. I know what the author did: social experiment, conversations, podcasts, wrote a book. But me? Uh, hate on the internet tends to produce one result: FLIGHT FLIGHT FLIGHT. There is nothing doing in that. The best I’ve been able to come up with is, at the very least, to try not to make somebody else’s life worse. It’s not particularly active, but it’s something?
There’s also a good discussion around empathy here. “Hurt people do, in fact, hurt people. Or, more accurately, hurt people hurt the people that they can get away with hurting.” Anyone who’s ever worked a job in the service industry or one involving talking to people who need help with something will understand this well. It’s a crucial ingredient in a good conversation. The book goes into another side of empathy I had never considered. “Empathy across the divide is a luxury item that not everyone can afford.”
We look too at the well-intentioned, hate-spreaders dubbed shame armies who gather and attack in the name of [insert cause here]. “In their righteous quest to tear down problematic systems it seemed as if these infantries were only interested in taking down individual people instead. They went after the transgressor as if they were the system itself.” We know how effective this is at changing a person’s mind, right?
Finally, can I say there is some major Quaker resonance in this? The author briefly mentions having attended a Quaker school and touches lightly on particular elements that have influenced the way he approaches conversation, but he doesn’t explicitly make any statements of faith, so I’m not assuming anything about his influence or belief system. That being said, this book is incredibly well-aligned with Quaker belief and practice and I think Quakers and similarly minded individuals would enjoy it. The very premise of seeing something valuable in another person and having a respectful conversation and sometimes feeling united in spirit at the end can easily be translated into Quaker terminology.
This book gave me a lot to consider, and I’m glad I’ve read it. Highly recommend.
April 14, 2022
There’s something for just about everyone to take away from this book and Dylan Marron’s experiences, regardless of your political stance and even if you aren’t familiar with him or his podcast. It’s a quick and easy, yet thought-provoking, read.
I think I’d like to write a longer review for this one, hopefully to come soon.
I think I’d like to write a longer review for this one, hopefully to come soon.
August 10, 2022
Full disclosure, I've never heard his podcast or any of his other video/audio projects. I know him as Carlos, Cecil's boyfriend in the amazingly funny, charming, surreal fictional radio show Welcome to Night Vale, which I've seen on tour twice. And then, a few years later, I was lucky enough to see the theater group the Neo-Futurists he's part of perform in London, though sans him.
Since then he's been on my radar, and well this podcast was pretty hard to miss with a title like that after all. Basically, he has conversations with people who have left crass comments on his videos or other work, ranging from wishing he'd die, to jibes about his voice.
Why would one want to do that, you wonder? Well, me too, and that's why I read the book where he recounts the birth of this particular project, where it took him, and what he learned about conversation versus debate, and the discovery that a by-product of having a conversation is empathy. Even for those you disagree with.
Honest, self-reflecting, funny, and highly useful.
Since then he's been on my radar, and well this podcast was pretty hard to miss with a title like that after all. Basically, he has conversations with people who have left crass comments on his videos or other work, ranging from wishing he'd die, to jibes about his voice.
Why would one want to do that, you wonder? Well, me too, and that's why I read the book where he recounts the birth of this particular project, where it took him, and what he learned about conversation versus debate, and the discovery that a by-product of having a conversation is empathy. Even for those you disagree with.
Honest, self-reflecting, funny, and highly useful.
January 22, 2022
This was a fun read. I was somewhat aware of Marron's work before reading this, and really found him to be very funny and eloquent. His voice is honest and sincere, and I really enjoyed the writing style as well.
4.5 rounded up to a 5. (Goodreads get on Storygraph's level, you should be embarrassed, really.)
Thank you to NetGalley and Atriabooks for the opportunity to read and review an advance copy of this.
4.5 rounded up to a 5. (Goodreads get on Storygraph's level, you should be embarrassed, really.)
Thank you to NetGalley and Atriabooks for the opportunity to read and review an advance copy of this.
April 9, 2022
It was ok. I was hoping to learn more about the people he spoke to but the book was really just about the author. Kinda self indulgent in that “very online millennial” way.
April 2, 2022
** I won a copy of this book through a Goodreads giveaway
Empathy is not endorsement.
I am strongly considering making a sign with this and putting it in my classroom, because it is so applicable to the way I try to teach.
As a civics teacher, I often struggle with how to address certain issues, especially in the environment in which I teach. Teaching sixteen-year-olds about political issues and the government is going to mean that I'm constantly around bad takes and bad information. I am going to give bad takes. I try to teach both right and left from the view of those sides, so to an extent, as neutrally as possible. I teach teenagers, who are known for poor emotional regulation, projection, and just being jerks. I, too, was a teenager who was both cyberbullied and cyberbully. I still often suck as a person-- being around constant negativity and whining is draining, and even though I've built up much more of a tolerance, I still get hurt by things students say and do, and sometimes I respond in ways that aren't appropriate or respectful.
In this book, Marron repeats Archbishop Tutu's saying "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." and talks about how much he struggles with this quote. Is he, by engaging people who may espouse hate in one way or another, choosing the side of the oppressor? I struggle with this a lot, too. If I'm trying to teach in a way that doesn't favor one side or another, am I lifting up an oppressive voice? Am I implicitly saying that I think this side is okay?
I've come to the conclusion that ultimately, by teaching both sides of an issue, students can better craft their views. Once you know what the opposing side believes, you can better address that side and stand a chance of changing it. My ultimate goal is that if a kid leaves my room believing in someone else's humanity a little more, I've done my job. I think this is ultimately where Marron falls by the end of this book-- ultimately, believing in each other's humanity is important.
I think a lot of students come into my class with the mindset of debate. Takedowns, owns... this is what is modeled in media and by adults they like and respect. They always ask if "we're going to debate today". Marron talks about this phenomenon too, with people talking about his "debate show" or framing his discussions as "taking down his trolls." I like how he frames conversation as a dance, as opposed to the sport of debate. He gives a good example of how, in trying to formulate "comebacks" in a discussion, he ended up just getting swamped and not actually paying attention to what his discussion partner was trying to say. This is when the "Everything Storm" appears, which I think is a good metaphor for the powerlessness and helplessness we sometimes feel when we're online and see ALL of the problems and ALL of the takes and ALL of the hate and can't figure out how to do anything meaningful with it.
I appreciate how Marron goes into "hurt people hurt people" because, while he acknowledges it isn't always true, I think it is more than not. I think it is especially true in my job. When I first got my job, it was after the former teacher had left suddenly. I had nothing to do with this situation, but I fielded so much emotional baggage from parents and students who felt hurt by various entities. There were even students who used Twitter to mock my appearance, my teaching, my personality, and virtually everything about me. I cognitively knew at the time that most of this was projection-- these students were hurt, and it wasn't personal. It didn't matter what I did-- I could have been a veteran teacher instead of a 23-year-old three months out of college-- but the hurt was going to be projected, because, as Marron says "hurt people hurt people".
I think the "Makeover Illusion" chapter is also very important. He talks to Jonathan, a person who responded negatively to Emma, a survivor of sexual assault. After Marron's conversation between Jonathan and Emma, many people responded negatively to how Jonathan still refused to believe Emma's story. Marron revisits this with a conversation between Jonathan and K, a person who had responded negatively online to Jonathan. In this chapter, we see Jonathan has changed his mind, at least somewhat. He's revisited the previous conversation with Emma (according to him, five or six times) and he's more inclined to believe her. He's reflected and ultimately, in part, gotten better. I find this especially important in our culture, because it's rare that we immediately understand an issue and can see it from multiple sides. One of the Bible stories I consider crucial for my walk as a Christian is in Genesis 32 when Jacob "wrestles with God." We have to really consider an idea and wrestle with it before we can understand it and before it can change us. This is just as true in secular areas, as Marron illustrates here.
Finally, I believe at the end, Marron accepts that people will disagree with him on his approach. His approach or some things he says may not age well. He may be wrong sometimes. He writes that a lot of these fears kept him from writing his book for so long, but that ultimately he decided it was worth it. I think this is a big lesson for us all-- it's important to try to change the problems we can change, and when we're wrong, we need to accept constructive criticism, apologize, and do better. I know I've had to apologize to students and colleagues many times, and I'm sure I will many times more. Sometimes there are conversations I let go on too long in class. Sometimes I respond poorly. Sometimes I fail. But ultimately, we have to try and we have to be willing to grow.
Is this book the most groundbreaking work ever written? No. Did I gain a lot from it? Clearly, seeing as how this review is half review/half autobiographical rant. I hope to put some of the practices and lessons Marron talks about here into my conversations both with students and with others in the future.
Empathy is not endorsement.
I am strongly considering making a sign with this and putting it in my classroom, because it is so applicable to the way I try to teach.
As a civics teacher, I often struggle with how to address certain issues, especially in the environment in which I teach. Teaching sixteen-year-olds about political issues and the government is going to mean that I'm constantly around bad takes and bad information. I am going to give bad takes. I try to teach both right and left from the view of those sides, so to an extent, as neutrally as possible. I teach teenagers, who are known for poor emotional regulation, projection, and just being jerks. I, too, was a teenager who was both cyberbullied and cyberbully. I still often suck as a person-- being around constant negativity and whining is draining, and even though I've built up much more of a tolerance, I still get hurt by things students say and do, and sometimes I respond in ways that aren't appropriate or respectful.
In this book, Marron repeats Archbishop Tutu's saying "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." and talks about how much he struggles with this quote. Is he, by engaging people who may espouse hate in one way or another, choosing the side of the oppressor? I struggle with this a lot, too. If I'm trying to teach in a way that doesn't favor one side or another, am I lifting up an oppressive voice? Am I implicitly saying that I think this side is okay?
I've come to the conclusion that ultimately, by teaching both sides of an issue, students can better craft their views. Once you know what the opposing side believes, you can better address that side and stand a chance of changing it. My ultimate goal is that if a kid leaves my room believing in someone else's humanity a little more, I've done my job. I think this is ultimately where Marron falls by the end of this book-- ultimately, believing in each other's humanity is important.
I think a lot of students come into my class with the mindset of debate. Takedowns, owns... this is what is modeled in media and by adults they like and respect. They always ask if "we're going to debate today". Marron talks about this phenomenon too, with people talking about his "debate show" or framing his discussions as "taking down his trolls." I like how he frames conversation as a dance, as opposed to the sport of debate. He gives a good example of how, in trying to formulate "comebacks" in a discussion, he ended up just getting swamped and not actually paying attention to what his discussion partner was trying to say. This is when the "Everything Storm" appears, which I think is a good metaphor for the powerlessness and helplessness we sometimes feel when we're online and see ALL of the problems and ALL of the takes and ALL of the hate and can't figure out how to do anything meaningful with it.
I appreciate how Marron goes into "hurt people hurt people" because, while he acknowledges it isn't always true, I think it is more than not. I think it is especially true in my job. When I first got my job, it was after the former teacher had left suddenly. I had nothing to do with this situation, but I fielded so much emotional baggage from parents and students who felt hurt by various entities. There were even students who used Twitter to mock my appearance, my teaching, my personality, and virtually everything about me. I cognitively knew at the time that most of this was projection-- these students were hurt, and it wasn't personal. It didn't matter what I did-- I could have been a veteran teacher instead of a 23-year-old three months out of college-- but the hurt was going to be projected, because, as Marron says "hurt people hurt people".
I think the "Makeover Illusion" chapter is also very important. He talks to Jonathan, a person who responded negatively to Emma, a survivor of sexual assault. After Marron's conversation between Jonathan and Emma, many people responded negatively to how Jonathan still refused to believe Emma's story. Marron revisits this with a conversation between Jonathan and K, a person who had responded negatively online to Jonathan. In this chapter, we see Jonathan has changed his mind, at least somewhat. He's revisited the previous conversation with Emma (according to him, five or six times) and he's more inclined to believe her. He's reflected and ultimately, in part, gotten better. I find this especially important in our culture, because it's rare that we immediately understand an issue and can see it from multiple sides. One of the Bible stories I consider crucial for my walk as a Christian is in Genesis 32 when Jacob "wrestles with God." We have to really consider an idea and wrestle with it before we can understand it and before it can change us. This is just as true in secular areas, as Marron illustrates here.
Finally, I believe at the end, Marron accepts that people will disagree with him on his approach. His approach or some things he says may not age well. He may be wrong sometimes. He writes that a lot of these fears kept him from writing his book for so long, but that ultimately he decided it was worth it. I think this is a big lesson for us all-- it's important to try to change the problems we can change, and when we're wrong, we need to accept constructive criticism, apologize, and do better. I know I've had to apologize to students and colleagues many times, and I'm sure I will many times more. Sometimes there are conversations I let go on too long in class. Sometimes I respond poorly. Sometimes I fail. But ultimately, we have to try and we have to be willing to grow.
Is this book the most groundbreaking work ever written? No. Did I gain a lot from it? Clearly, seeing as how this review is half review/half autobiographical rant. I hope to put some of the practices and lessons Marron talks about here into my conversations both with students and with others in the future.
June 28, 2022
I wish I could be as gracious as Dylan Marron - I will certainly be mindful of the power of conversation (without interrogation!). I really related to his struggle to finish this book in the fear that what he wrote might not stand up to later ideas-but I appreciate his willingness to allow us to watch his thoughts evolve (even if I think he could have shortened that piece of the book)
So much to ponder:
choice overload - too many choices has a detrimental effect on motivation and happiness
"'this is not who we are!'" - "this permits us to delay confronting the scariest truth of all: that dangerous ideologies and violent behaviors grown in humans. Which means, horrifyingly, that they can grow in us, too."
stop using the word trolls - it dehumanizes and falsely suggests that only inhuman monsters would behave that way
Hurt people hurt people - brought Marron to "Empathy is not endorsement."(my favorite thing to remember when I engage with people who have different viewpoints than me)
So much to ponder:
choice overload - too many choices has a detrimental effect on motivation and happiness
"'this is not who we are!'" - "this permits us to delay confronting the scariest truth of all: that dangerous ideologies and violent behaviors grown in humans. Which means, horrifyingly, that they can grow in us, too."
stop using the word trolls - it dehumanizes and falsely suggests that only inhuman monsters would behave that way
Hurt people hurt people - brought Marron to "Empathy is not endorsement."(my favorite thing to remember when I engage with people who have different viewpoints than me)
April 4, 2022
An interesting take on how strangers can think and how to take what they say. It was extra interesting adding in the social experiment aspect of it.
I received an ecopy of this book through Netgalley; however, my opinions are my own.
I received an ecopy of this book through Netgalley; however, my opinions are my own.
August 3, 2023
I’d been meaning to check out the podcast that inspired this for the longest time and never got around to it but I really enjoyed this book! It’s very earnest and very empathetic in a way that feels really rare these days. Gave me a lot to think about on how the internet has changed how we engage with strangers and how at the end of the day we’re all just some guy.
August 4, 2023
I checked this out from the library thinking that it would give helpful insights. I’ve never heard of this author before I saw the title of this book that grabbed my attention. I wanted to read about an experience where an author confronted their haters, as per the synopsis. But I didn’t connect with this story, and I think it’s because I’m not a gay white man.
April 17, 2022
I thought this was a really insightful read. I've never listened to any of this guy's work, I just saw someone I follow on Twitter suggest it and it sounded interesting.
I was raised republican and Catholic, and there were some things that fell away immediately once I started thinking about them (being against gay marriage, for one) but there were other things that took a lot longer to understand on my journey to becoming a leftist atheist. I don't even want to go into what things in particular because, like this book lays out, sometimes just not adhering strictly to the social consciousness of your peers can result in shaming. I needed a hand, a conversation, to help me along my path in understanding, and I did get that. It helped me in a way being along that path would not have.
Most of my extended family are Republican. It's hard to reconcile all the fond, loving, memories I have of them with the hateful rhetoric that is espoused from Republican lawmakers every day - how on earth can they endorse that? I really like the idea of radical empathy, although it is incredibly difficult to practice.
I think with covid, things are a little different, a lot worse. Those opinions play out on large scale, and people have died. So many avoidable deaths. And while politics have always had fatalities (especially in how they are enacted on marginalized and especially BIPOC communities,) it has never been quite so tangible.
Am I going to go out and have candid conversations with my family and childhood friends whose politics I now abhor? Idk, maybe. But I'm still not going to bring my unvaccinated (by necessity) baby around my unvaccinated (by choice) family. I guess it's good that we have video chat.
I was raised republican and Catholic, and there were some things that fell away immediately once I started thinking about them (being against gay marriage, for one) but there were other things that took a lot longer to understand on my journey to becoming a leftist atheist. I don't even want to go into what things in particular because, like this book lays out, sometimes just not adhering strictly to the social consciousness of your peers can result in shaming. I needed a hand, a conversation, to help me along my path in understanding, and I did get that. It helped me in a way being along that path would not have.
Most of my extended family are Republican. It's hard to reconcile all the fond, loving, memories I have of them with the hateful rhetoric that is espoused from Republican lawmakers every day - how on earth can they endorse that? I really like the idea of radical empathy, although it is incredibly difficult to practice.
I think with covid, things are a little different, a lot worse. Those opinions play out on large scale, and people have died. So many avoidable deaths. And while politics have always had fatalities (especially in how they are enacted on marginalized and especially BIPOC communities,) it has never been quite so tangible.
Am I going to go out and have candid conversations with my family and childhood friends whose politics I now abhor? Idk, maybe. But I'm still not going to bring my unvaccinated (by necessity) baby around my unvaccinated (by choice) family. I guess it's good that we have video chat.
November 23, 2021
My phone's photo album is currently dominated by screenshots of pages from this book: there was so much here I wanted to save to re-engage with later! As I read, I itched to have a hard copy and a pencil in my hand - there was so much it was sparking for me, so many questions and reactions and !!!!s.
Given the above, it should go without saying that this book is a powerful thought-starter. I was fascinated by Marron's evolution - from conceiving of online debate as a game you win or lose, to starting to cope with virtual hate slung his way by imagining touchingly human narratives about his 'trolls', to questioning whether 'trolls' is maybe not the right term at all, to wondering whether he's been going about things the wrong way. I particularly loved this summation: "My videos alone were never going to sufficiently evangelize progressive ideas ... Was I simply enjoying the reverberations of virality in my own little echo chamber, thinking that. was slaying Goliath when I was simply cosplaying battle reenactments with my fellow self-identified Davids?" (Yes, this book is also, at times, laugh-out-loud funny.)
From there, the real excitement begins: he starts to engage - civilly, curiously, sans any persuasive agenda - with individuals he plucks from his 'HATE FOLDER' (which, spoiler alert, he rethinks the name of down the line) and invites to connect. These stories - wow - I was on the edge of my seat. And this isn't Chicken Soup for the Soul; not all of them go well - in fact, some of them go really badly, and not just for him but for other folks he invites into the conversations once he decides to take more of a mediator role. (One, in particular, was a punch to the gut.) Through it all, Marron keeps questioning his own assumptions, acknowledging his mistakes, and trying to do better.
My favorite part, if I had to choose: his careful consideration about whether engaging and empathizing with people who believe things that are deeply harmful is implicitly validating or endorsing those beliefs. I've been wrestling with this myself, and it's often prevented me from engaging in conversations that, maybe, could have been worthwhile. I loved his analogy: people are the trees, ideologies are the forest, and it's crucial to not lose sight of either.
I would recommend this book to anyone who senses that polarization is a race to the bottom, but isn't quite sure what to do about it. I will be thinking about this book for a very long time.
Given the above, it should go without saying that this book is a powerful thought-starter. I was fascinated by Marron's evolution - from conceiving of online debate as a game you win or lose, to starting to cope with virtual hate slung his way by imagining touchingly human narratives about his 'trolls', to questioning whether 'trolls' is maybe not the right term at all, to wondering whether he's been going about things the wrong way. I particularly loved this summation: "My videos alone were never going to sufficiently evangelize progressive ideas ... Was I simply enjoying the reverberations of virality in my own little echo chamber, thinking that. was slaying Goliath when I was simply cosplaying battle reenactments with my fellow self-identified Davids?" (Yes, this book is also, at times, laugh-out-loud funny.)
From there, the real excitement begins: he starts to engage - civilly, curiously, sans any persuasive agenda - with individuals he plucks from his 'HATE FOLDER' (which, spoiler alert, he rethinks the name of down the line) and invites to connect. These stories - wow - I was on the edge of my seat. And this isn't Chicken Soup for the Soul; not all of them go well - in fact, some of them go really badly, and not just for him but for other folks he invites into the conversations once he decides to take more of a mediator role. (One, in particular, was a punch to the gut.) Through it all, Marron keeps questioning his own assumptions, acknowledging his mistakes, and trying to do better.
My favorite part, if I had to choose: his careful consideration about whether engaging and empathizing with people who believe things that are deeply harmful is implicitly validating or endorsing those beliefs. I've been wrestling with this myself, and it's often prevented me from engaging in conversations that, maybe, could have been worthwhile. I loved his analogy: people are the trees, ideologies are the forest, and it's crucial to not lose sight of either.
I would recommend this book to anyone who senses that polarization is a race to the bottom, but isn't quite sure what to do about it. I will be thinking about this book for a very long time.
August 9, 2022
interesting, 3 stars cause i thought his writing was annoying at times and he said the same thing a lot but it has good lessons about empathy especially for people you disagree with... it's a good lesson for me as a librarian
January 8, 2022
I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Marron's is the first book I've read that directly faces the new and novel challenge of being the recipient of hate and death threats en masse in comments sections across the internet. He sets out to humanize his detractors through direct conversation using compassion and empathy. His numerous missteps along the way allow him to introspect and attempt to remedy his own potentially inflammatory behavior.
Through this experiment, Marron came to some thought-provoking conclusions about the nature of the internet and how it can breed disagreement in its current form as an algorithmic echochamber that distorts scale and import. He noticed that he contributed to the echochamber himself through his initial attempt at advocacy by taking on an aggressive persona and reacting to trending topics in an effort to score 'internet points'.
Marron himself is not a sociologist, psychologist, or scholar, but he does spend his life on the internet and is a potentially polarizing personality at baseline. I am very impressed by his willingness to see err in himself and openness to try to really understand his detractors by speaking to them directly. He concludes that in debate there are winners and losers, but in conversation there is vulnerability and empathy that allows for all parties to grow and understand one another.
Marron's is the first book I've read that directly faces the new and novel challenge of being the recipient of hate and death threats en masse in comments sections across the internet. He sets out to humanize his detractors through direct conversation using compassion and empathy. His numerous missteps along the way allow him to introspect and attempt to remedy his own potentially inflammatory behavior.
Through this experiment, Marron came to some thought-provoking conclusions about the nature of the internet and how it can breed disagreement in its current form as an algorithmic echochamber that distorts scale and import. He noticed that he contributed to the echochamber himself through his initial attempt at advocacy by taking on an aggressive persona and reacting to trending topics in an effort to score 'internet points'.
Marron himself is not a sociologist, psychologist, or scholar, but he does spend his life on the internet and is a potentially polarizing personality at baseline. I am very impressed by his willingness to see err in himself and openness to try to really understand his detractors by speaking to them directly. He concludes that in debate there are winners and losers, but in conversation there is vulnerability and empathy that allows for all parties to grow and understand one another.
July 11, 2022
We need this book in this time. Very fun listen.
April 24, 2023
One of the best books I've read. I had to pause and journal so many times as Dylan explored many topics that I've thought about but never been able to create complete ideas about. It was an incredible reminder to have difficult but compassionate conversations with people you disagree with and I feel more equipped to do that with the perspectives in this book.
June 9, 2023
Thanks to Lisa for this recommendation ❤️ Heavy at times, but well worth the read. I learned a lot about internet subculture, and especially appreciated some of Marron's closing thoughts around cancel culture, as well as his honesty about experiencing writer's block.
May 9, 2022
I went into this book thinking about the pointlessness of trying to talk to people with views that oppose my own. I'm unfamiliar with Dylan's popular podcast, but I did see his TED talk a little while back and I thought that he might help me understand how to talk to people outside of my "tribe" in a helpful and productive way. I learned a lot about empathy, the value of conversation rather than debate, and the bravery involved in finding an alternative to joining in with an internet hate mob in order to maintain your place in a group of people with similar values as you. I still have a lot to unpack after reading this, but I already see myself having better conversations with people in the future. I'm so glad he wrote this book.
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