One evening, about an hour before sunset, my sister and I were driving home from our cousin's wedding in Memphis when we got a flat on the interstate. We pulled off on the nearest exit, put our hazard lights on, and waited for our parents to come help.

Less than five minutes later, a huge pickup truck with a 'Don't Tread On Me' front plate stopped right behind us. Out stepped a hardy young white man in dusty working boots and a shirt with a Blue Lives Matter flag nestled inside a Punisher logo. If you've spent any time on the internet, you already know exactly who you think he is.

He immediately got to work changing my sister's tire to the spare, refused payment, and pointed us in the right direction. When my sister offered him a handshake as a thank you, he hesitated and stared at her hand for a beat too long before giving her a brief shake and saying, 'Hurry on, now. You girls don't want to be around here when it gets dark,' and driving away. I still think about that moment. Because he was, in the same five minutes, genuinely helpful and a quiet warning. A person and a signal. Both things, at the same time, unresolved.

The algorithm doesn't know what to do with him. It needs him to be a character — the caricature, the villain, the redemption arc. It needs the story to end somewhere clean. But it didn't. It just ended with us back on the road, and me sitting with something I couldn't quite name.

I recently rejoined algorithmically driven social media platforms after years offline. I’m not very active on any particular app, but I wanted to grab my desired handles before Mina, Unfiltered blows up (#manifesting). Even though it’s only been a week since I’ve been back online, I’m already deeply disturbed by what I’ve seen.

People have gotten mean, y’all. I mean, real mean. Meaner than they were on Twitter in 2016, and that’s saying something. And sadly, I get it.

Within 30 minutes of my rejoining, I’d been fed rage bait ranging from political hot takes to terrible music opinions — all designed to increase engagement and ad revenue while decreasing our well-being and fracturing community ties. And it’s working.

A couple of months ago, I met a young woman who clearly spends a lot of time online in algorithmically driven spaces. I can always tell who is chronically online these days. There’s a sense of underlying combativeness combined with black-and-white thinking and preemptive over-explaining that marks someone who has been jumped on Twitter or Tumblr one too many times.

We often talk about social media’s detrimental side effects on the individual: anxiety, low self-esteem, poor body image, and loneliness. Rarely do we discuss how social media makes it difficult to build community offline.

People are messy, complex, and often contradictory. When we approach people offline as the enemy because they’re on the wrong side of the algorithm, we are preemptively building a wall between our hearts. And we can not afford to do that right now — not when there are multiple genocides, an active war, and an attack on the poor happening globally. These events, though seemingly connected, are all being carried out by the same small group of bad-faith actors who have a vested interest in keeping us divided and hopeless.

The truth is, no one (except me) has correct opinions all the time. We have to learn to build, to teach, and to grow with people who hold harmful opinions even as they unpack them. We have to challenge our own harmful opinions. We have to do the work of being messy, complex, and brave in public. Our futures depend on it.

I wish this essay had a clean resolution and actionable next steps, but I don’t have anything to say that hasn’t been suggested before. All I know is this: I want to live in a world where everyone — even people I actively dislike — can thrive and find belonging. And we can only do that when we stop seeing each other as caricatures and start seeing each other as the fully-realized humans we are.

If I had one suggestion to give today, it would be this: put down your reading device, go outside, and have a good-faith conversation with someone — anyone — offline. Then log back in and tell me about it. 😉

Thank you for reading Mina, Unfiltered. I’m so glad to have you here.

Yours in community,
Mina

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