6 easy steps for being awful on the Internet

Charity and nuance are boring. Let's lean into the cringe.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but from October 2016 to circa October 2018, I was doing not so great in my mind and spirit, re: all the things.

The “Disaster Girl” meme sold as an NFT in 2021 for $500,000. Image: Dave Roth.

The 2016 election was ugly and disorienting, and white evangelical support for Trump (which I recently wrote about) made me sad. Then it made me angry. For me, anger is preferable to sadness, because anger feels empowering. Where grief so often drags down and isolates, anger riles up and unifies around a common problem. It gave me something to do.

As it turns out, other people were angry too, and it felt good to be angry together on the Internet. Also, crucially, I was a free agent, having left my full-time job in October 2016, and no longer had to speak for the organization where I worked. I could say what I thought, and sometimes when I did, other people responded — m…