on the semantics of being a hater (the extended version)

Hating as acts of self importance, practicing critical empathy.

when someone tells me they hate something, my first instinct is to believe them. Overtime I’ve accepted that my anger is not a product of hatred, and so I don’t need to say that I hate something, because hatred is tiresome. I’m realising, however, that hatred is quite easy for a lot of people.

as one would imagine, nihilism breeds apathy. In the meaningless, we become creatures of habit, and the most long lasting habit that’s taken over the internet is ‘Hateritis’— a common and collective desire to dislike something or someone. TikTok is mostly where the lighter-hearted elements of this trend lives, but Instagram comment sections makes one wonder if ‘Hateritis’ has made people too comfortable in literally harassing others.

Hating is something I also partake in. I would say more lightheartedly than most people on the internet and it’s fascinating to me because of how different the responses are app by app. On Instagram, you have men telling women that all they want is the attention of a man, whilst also threatening to harm them in the same sentence. On Twitter, it’s think-piece galore, threads and threads of opinions on the most minuscule of things. On TikTok, the comments are not as heinous, but still it’s own brand of negativity. In a sense, there’s not much difference in response, but the rise of Hateritis has created so many echo chambers that it’s hard to see much media literacy in most comment sections.

This isn’t a diatribe about being nicer to the beautiful and famous, but would it be so horrible if we conceptualized these women as full people? If we didn’t build them up before allowing them to reach an unacceptable precipice of glamour, at which point we should all bow our heads and go back in search of the “real” writers who are perpetually suffering and uncool? Can women artists not consciously embody some sort of beauty and myth that is a contribution to their work instead of a denigration of it? - The Implicit Dehumanization of the "It-Girl" Words From Eliza

It’s an interesting point that Eliza makes, and I agree, these formidable creatures we’ve mythologised have teeth and bones that will eventually rot like the rest of us. The thing that’s interesting however, is that most people enjoy conceptualising others. It’s part and parcel of an internet age; no one is deemed real and when they are, it becomes a problem. With disliking or hating someone on the internet, the dehumanisation becomes sinister. 

the thing about echo chambers.

In a paper by the Texas State University on expressivism and critical empathy, the first line considers that ‘The common rap against expressivism is that it is solipsistic, endeavouring to give clear expression to a personal voice speaking an individual truth.”

The internet is entirely individualistic, looking mostly to it’s own personal spaces to inform the rest of the world. Like the paper stated, self expression gets a bad rep because we’re in a time of healing, of shared growth despite living in system that actively urges you to root only for yourself to survive.

But self importance and self expression need to be identified as two entities: one that prefers itself and its own opinion, and one that shares it’s own opinion without the need to be correct.

Hating on the internet has exposed the two sides in many… disturbing ways. I don’t like talking about creeps and losers because some of you need your phone confiscated and your house searched.

Where self importance becomes a problem is—like aforementioned—in comment sections. Some will watch a video and insert their preferences because you made apple butter? You fucking bitch, I hate apples.

Desire and attitude is the cornerstone of capitalism. As a strategy babe, I enjoy pinpointing said desires and attitudes in order to direct someone to what matches those two things, usually to spend money on, or participate in, something.

Some people see their desires and attitudes as foundational to the rest of the world. If a person of self importances hates something it’s because they believe that on a certain level, that thing should be disliked by most; be it an emotional, logical, or insubstantial to the problem they have.

On the other side of this heady coin are the objectivists, who are similar to the apathetic but with less of a nihilistic approach. Russian-American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand coined the term, as she said, "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

Whilst dealing with absolutes, Objectivists are still on the spectrum of self importance, believing in their own absolutes instead of the potential of two truths. We’re born and then we live and then we die, but the expectations of purpose are a subjective matter, so they reject it.

The thing about self importance in both cases is that neither work for the sake of critical empathy. expressivists lead with the core desires and attitudes they believe everyone should share, and objectivists care only for their desires and attitudes.

So where does hateritis, both the concept and the practice sit? How do we participate critically when the time calls for it?

What I love most about the internet is that there is no shortage of opinion. You might get some atrocious takes, and some applaud worthy ones. Most of the time we have the situation where both takes have levels of truth to it—as do most things but we’ll revisit that—and we’re all battling it out in the comments, some with dignity, and some with the shame of a thousand discord mods.

But hating can be deeply cathartic. To me, and probably a good amount of people, excessive positivity is only making the plight of our current society worse. Things like hope core and core core have more balance in recognising suffering and finding solace regardless. I recently saw a video of a girl saying that she wanted to make a book club, exclusively about bad books. I hate-read sometimes, so the idea was intriguing to me, Not because I wanted to be mean to an author but because critique is necessary when it counts.

Unfortunately the internet we have now is prone to judging and merging things to the extreme instead of, I guess, separating the art from the artist. I think hating IRL is more productive, because the internet doesn’t make space for the issues that need unpacking. What I think needs to happen culturally, is that we shouldn’t use hating on something as verbal harassment, but instead use it for the good of simply sharing opinion, sharing thoughts, and sharing space.