Yesterday turned into yet another Twitter conflagration about how a post of mine is an uncool thing written by an uncool guy. But, you know, I was right.

The thing is, this isn’t really about David Foster Wallace, although I feel like he’s become this locus for weird shit because writer culture is an ostensibly literary culture full of people who don’t read but feel like they should read Infinite Jest and feel weird that they haven’t. (Seriously, just don’t read it, it’s fine.) It’s really about cruelty as a political tool. The thing I was reacting to was over-the-top mean. But it’s allowed to be cruel because its cruelty is directed against a target seen as deserving, the “litbro.” I don’t know what that is; I doubt anybody really does. What matters is that once sorted into that category, we’re meant to believe that there’s no amount of derision too brutal. The same goes for “neckbeards,” or “fedoras,” or “nice guys,” any number of other groups that we’ve decided are OK to treat as poorly as humanly possible. Because of progressive politics, or social justice, somehow or another. Since people enjoy being cruel in this way, the number of these bizarre categories grows and grows, though the people who devise them never seem to place themselves in any. Then you get to treat more and more people terribly. That’s what the fight was about, that concept, the concept that some people deserve limitless cruelty because politics says so. And it’s about the fact that people don’t want to give up that cruelty because they find ladling out that cruelty too much fun.

What sticks with me about the Justine Sacco situation isn’t the question of whether she deserved attack, or how much. It’s the glee people felt. If you dig around enough, you can find them, tweets where people said about that situation, “I hope this never ends.”

For myself, I think that we should fall out of love with cruelty. Not just because these groups are, by design, so shaggy and vague that they inevitably pull in people who aren’t actually sexist or racist or anything else. Instead they’re just uncool. No one would publicly argue that anyone deserves such treatment just for being uncool, of course, but that thin veneer of politics provides plausible deniability. But also because I’m actually more concern with this behavior when it’s against men who are actually sexist, actually bigoted, actually in the wrong wrong. Because even then, in the long run, the gleeful application of personal cruelty will only corrode and poison our political engagement, turn even good intentions into something sick and ugly. I don’t think it does us any good, in the long run, to be cruel, even to bad people. There are political means that by their nature occlude and undermine political ends, and even if they didn’t, those ends can’t justify intentionally inflicting emotional pain. I think cruelty is one of the master’s tools, and our embrace of it has been a terrible mistake.

Here’s how this is going to go, because it’s how this always goes.

A few of my regular readers will retweet and favorite this. A much larger number of people will make fun of it. Tweeters with names like “Stronk Fartbox” and “420 DadJeans VapeKing,” guys who work in advertising or accounting and for whom Twitter is their secret life, will screen cap parts of it, share it with a lol, and get their typical retweets and favorites. People with mean Twitpics (“That’s kind of my thing, I’m mean on Twitter, it’s like my trademark”) will be mean about it. Twitter will snark and snark and snark. A much smaller number of people will, maybe sheepishly, think that I’m right. Because they’ve noticed the cruelty, too, and it’s left them feeling sad and exhausted. And they’ll quietly agree. A small number of them, maybe 5 or 6, will email me to tell me. More will just nod along and say nothing, which is fine too. But enough people will feel this scratchy feeling on the back of their necks, like all of this endless cruelty long ago stopped fulfilling any political function at all, but became just another example of mocking people with the wrong clothes, the wrong attitude, the wrong friends. And they’ll take that feeling with them as they move forward.

Maybe, in time, that sentiment will grow, and we’ll all have had enough of cruelty.