Conversations with People Who Hate Me

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.