Thank you @netgalley, @atriabooks and @dylanmarron for my gifted ARC!

CWPWHM was one of those books that really made me stop and think. Following Dylan’s journey from when he got the negative comments and hate messages to him actually talking to his trolls. He did what we all want to do but sometimes can’t do: confronted them.

Dylan decided to start a podcast. And that podcast was having people who sent himself, and other people, hate messages. They would engage in a conversation and challenge each other. And while, at least in my mind, I had envisioned an all out drag out verbal assault…it wasn’t. Each party talked about the messages and what about the original message that made them react that way. And most of the conversations came out really well. There was one that didn’t pan out all that well but round two with the guy showed a vast difference.

This one also made me pause and reflect on something I read in my most recent English course. We, sometimes unknowingly, create an echo chamber. We surround ourselves with only like minded people and don’t ever want to have those hard conversations with people who don’t agree with us. But what exactly is that accomplishing? All it does is reinforce our beliefs, right wrong or indifferent. Which can be dangerous. But to change that, you have to come out of your comfort zone. And for a lot of people, that’s asking a lot. And that’s okay!! But I think that’s why I did like this one so much. Because Dylan came out of his comfort zone.

Highly recommend this one!

I am glad that I read Conversations with People Who Hate Me. I had never heard of Dylan Marron's podcast, but I was intrigued by the premise. Marron does an excellent job of explaining his concept of having people speak with their detractors in an effort to facilitate mutual understanding. I learned some lessons that I will carry with me. Although some of the descriptions were too detailed for me, I encourage everyone to read this interesting book.

This book was very easy to read and helped me reflect on the role social media has in my own life. It deals with negative comments on social media, and then the author speaks to those people afterwards. It was very insightful and a must-read for anyone putting themselves out there on social media.

This was a DNF for me. The introduction said it was based on a Podcast, I bet the podcast or audio version would be good, but the book wasn't a good fit for me.

That said, what I read was well written and may be interesting to someone else.

This is a book for all people on social media going through it with these internet trolls and also flipping the script and having in-depth conversations with them. This author did his thing with that alone. I loved his bravery, and actually wanting to know why social media drives us to do the things that we do on the internet. It was insightful, and something I will recommend for my own social media friends to read.

This book was phenomenal. Thought-provoking and timely, Marron's book reflects on what it means to build bridges in a time where differences seem increasingly insurmountable.

Conversations with People Who Hate Me follows the story of the creation of the same-titled podcast in which Marron holds a discussion with people who left him public hate messages. It isn't necessary to have listened to any podcast episodes to understand this, although I certainly will be checking them out now. I did listen to his TED Talk and recommend it - it's only 10 minutes long and provides a good jumping off point to reference for the rest of this book.

There's a lot to digest and discuss here - this would make for an excellent book club choice, and I'll probably be trying to get other people to read it so that I can talk about it with them. There are some really interesting implications about how social media has helped create polarization and echo chambers. Marron does reflect on the fact that the very act of having conversations with people who hate him is a privilege, and that empathy does not equal endorsement. But I think there's something to be said for finding ways to try and have productive discussions with people who have disparate views - not that it's easy, but there's value to be had in learning how to have civil discourse. (With, of course, the important caveat that this kind of discussion can only happen in safety, and that it's a form of emotional labor that not everyone is equipped to handle all the time.)

There's a chapter in the book in which the author discusses how hard it was for him to write this, which I was surprised by - you can't tell by the way that it was written. The style and tone are super readable even as they make you think. I have tons of highlights here that I'm looking forward to rereading and thinking about. I'll definitely look to purchase a hard copy of this. Again, I think this is the kind of book that absolutely sparks conversation - just as the title promises.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

Source 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.

I was a frequent listener of Dylan's Podcast of the same name, so I was very excited to see that a book was coming out of the experience of making the podcast and behind some of the conversations that I remember so well.

I really enjoyed the background look at the impetus of the Podcast, behind the episodes, and into some of the conversations that didn't happen. I think if a reader hadn't heard the podcast before this is going to make them interested in the other episodes, but I do think having the knowledge ahead of time did make it a bit easier to understand what was going on.

I really like Dylan's way of communicating and I think that continues through this book and will make you think about the conversations that you have with the people in your life that you agree and disagree with.

Y’all know I read about 92% romance, 5% thrillers, and 2% nonfiction so Conversations with People Who Hate Me is something that would normally have never been on my radar. But I found it to be an interesting read.

I was not aware of Dylan Marron prior to reading (I’m an old millennial that doesn’t stay up to date on the internet) but I found CwPWHM to be thought-provoking. So many people on the internet use it to say anything without any repercussions: what happens if you spoke to them and tried to have a calm discussion?

CwPWHM promotes empathy and calm discussion, but it does come across a little like virtue signaling. Regardless, it was well written and gave me a lot to consider. I think it’s worth reading and it especially makes you think about how you plan to interact in the future.

I don’t usually read self-help books. But with a title like this, who could turn away?

And it didn’t disappoint. It’s conversational, helpful, and easy to read in snippets. I found practical advice that is helpful. I am glad I read this.

Such a good book for a book club - lots to discuss about the internet and how it brings people together and further divides - we can all relate to letting our anger get the best of us and saying things under the anonymity of a computer screen and a screen name. The author engaged with folks that wrote mean and hateful things to him and started a discussion. It was inspiring and, at times, uplifting. Thanks to Atria for the advanced copy.

This book was so refreshing. In a world that is wrought with strife and division, it's amazing to hear from voices about nuance and humanity, and Marron does just that with his humility in getting to know the people behind their screens. This is timely and important, and I'll definitely recommend it to friends. It would also make for great book club discussion. Thank you, Netgalley for the ARC!

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.Highly recommended reading this one. It’s an eye opener.

𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘬 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘵𝘰 𝘕𝘦𝘵𝘨𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘺 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘙𝘊 𝘪𝘯 𝘦𝘹𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘯 𝘩𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸

This was an interesting book that was deeper than I expected it to be based on the cover. The author details twelve lessons that they learned when dealing with online anonymous bullies. It was thought provoking and the lessons were applicable to my daily life. I enjoyed reading this!

3.5 stars
"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.

Dylan Marron had a podcast and made money having opinions. The more people who watched and commented on his podcase the more money he made. He was driven to get viewers and likes but in order to do that he had to jump on the topic of the moment and create controversy or content. While doing this he would get comments from people who disagreed with him - sometimes fervently and in a derogatory manner. He put all these negative comments in a "Hate Folder" then thought he should do something with his hate mail besides label it and ignore it. Because he got a rush from "one-upping" people he disagreed with he did a bit of research into his "haters" and used some of that info to shame and criticize them. He also learned that all "haters" were not equal; some of them were providing him with constructive criticism, some had basic differences in opinions and policy, and others were more extreme including death threats, yet they all ended up in the same "Hate Folder."

Marron ended up trying to create an understanding between people who sent him negative comments. He then moved on to creating conversations and understanding between others who had negative - hurtful comments on line including between a woman who was a victim of sexual assault and a man who didn't believe her, and then between that man and a woman who commented to him that he should be eaten by a pack of wild dogs. In this book he details some of the conversations and the change that resulted in him, and possibly in the others as well.

In the last part of the book he details that in spite of how easy it was for him to have the conversations, how much more difficult it was to write the book because of fear of on line haters, detractors, and cancel culture. He is introspective about his concerns from people who will criticize the attempt to be civil and understanding from those on the other side of his opinions as well as those who would typically be aligned with his opinions. He has heard that the criticisms that there can't be "good people on both sides" and any attempt to give the "other" an inch is to give them permission. He counters with empathy and understanding is not the same as agreement.

I work as a mediator and teach conflict resolution and try to help the people I train, teach, and supervise, understand what Marron ultimately understood and explained in his book, that people are human, we don't always act our best in any given moment, especially when we feel disrespected, but, when given the opportunity to explain ourselves, be heard, and to listen, we can do better.

Alright so here comes the unpopular opinion. I did not really like this book, so parts were funny but most of it was controversial. This book happens to be more of a dark humor sense. With that being said, Thank you Netgalley for allowing me a Kindle ebook version in response to an hinest review. I give this 3.5 stars.

This was supposed to be read as a podcast type book, however I didnt feel that in the slightest. The writing wasn't my favorite when expecting a podcast set up. Dylon as a diverse main character was Excellent. Using his negative feedback from viewers as a comedy skit, Different. Bringing a political aspect into comedy, Not my favorite.

Unfortunately, I just feel like the writing wasn't properly done. and I am never one for making fun of religion or political views in comedy skits. The one thing I found to be very smart and intriguing was taking the negative feedback and turning it into a skit, however I do not agree with sharing screenshots of said peoples conversations without their approval. I feel like that was some sort of broken law. However, I didn't hate it. I am a sucker for a comedian so some parts I found to be very enjoyable. I feel tho, this book is more for those who enjoy that "dark humor" aspect. There will as I said be talk about religion, political views....but, there also was talk about profile stalking, stalking, homophobia, and many other things that may be a trigger to a select few.

READ AT YOUR OWN RISK!!! I hope you are to find this more enjoyable then I did.

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.

This is an extremely well-written, thoughtful, and reflective book that tackles the Hate pervading the internet in the form of nasty ad hominem attacks on anyone who has had the guts to post an opinion. Dylan collected many such disturbing posts in his Hate Folder, and then proceeded to create podcasts where he talked to (some of) these people in an attempt to find common ground for conversation.

He takes us through the process, starting from his own gleeful participation in the internet’s “holy trinity of cynicism, apathy, and dismissal” as he plays the shame game himself, through to his own hurt and betrayal as his posts / podcasts incurred various incarnations of “die you *#)()(#@*,” attacks, and finally to actual recorded conversations with those of his detractors that were willing to engage (and were clearly not dangerous or severely unbalanced).

He promotes empathy and conversation as an antidote to Shame — one of the big weapons in the snarky attacks on … everything. Lucid writing, good reflection on his own role, no rants, clear thinking, and a willingness to shut up and listen. For me his messages were not necessarily new but were refreshing and his experiences were enlightening (I spend a lot of time on the internet but very little engaging with anonymous strangers — a few months of the vitriol on NextDoor during the early days of Covid cured me of that habit). My only disappointment was that while he did a great job remaining open and listening to those who had called him names and (obviously) held very different views, there was never a point at which I thought he was listening to their actual views with an open mind. He lowered the anger thermostat and was able to see these strangers as human — and get them to see him that way too — but he remained firmly entrenched in his own view of the world as ever. To me, real conversation MUST include people being open to the idea that the other person may have good, rational reasons for having the opinion that they do and learning from that.

Still, this was an easy and engaging read and did get me thinking. I would love to see more conversation, discussion, empathy, and open mindedness on the internet. When did it become cool to be jaded, nasty, and cynical? When did hope and optimism become naive and stupid? Maybe we’ll learn that in book two. :-)

Some good quotes:
“In the politically fractured climate of 2016, I saw the term <snowflake> used mostly by conservatives against people like me, which is to say politically correct internet users who vocally advocated for social justice. It was a way to mock those of us who talked about things like feelings and respect and safe spaces and pronoun and trigger warnings.”

“And what I had perceived as ‘hate’ was often discontent expressed hyperbolically.”

“Just as I have found that conversation is the antidote to both the game of the internet and the sport of debate, I also see it as the most potent antidote to shame.”

“Without the ability to keep up with the latest shame army, I am more able to take stock of what I actually think rather than defaulting to the opinion factory of social media.’

“Was seeing my conservative guests as human some sort of ideological treason?”

“In trading nuance for easy coins, complexity for simplicity, was I the social justice advocate I thought I was, or was I simply playing one online?”

“..I was a brown, Mohawked, pearl-earring-wearing gay guy whose tank top revealed an upper body that clearly screamed, ‘Chosen last for dodgeball!’”

“Was it because apathy, snark, and sarcasm were more in-keeping with the onslaught of bad news that dominated our news cycle? Did public expressions of joy undercut the severity of the unfolding sociopolitical mess? Whatever the reason, I had to figure out how to maintain my success on a platform that would shun me for daring to express my true self.”

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.