In 2013, I spent a year passively retweeting people who tweeted the phrase "Pizza
is gross"
It was an odd experiment, but everyone has a 'thing' online, and for that year,
that was my thing. When I finished, I wrote about it in The National Post.
February 09, 2014
This essay originally appeared in the National Post. Reprinted with permission.
For the last year, I've been engaging in a passive social experiment. I've been retweeting people who don't like pizza; people who say that pizza is gross.
IN A NUTSHELL
I have a column set up on the Twitter app TweetDeck set to show any tweets containing the words "pizza" and "gross." To be fair, most of the tweets that meet these terms don't specifically express a general distaste for pizza. Most either say something to the effect of "that pizza was gross," "I feel gross after eating that pizza," or a more specific disregard for a certain kind of pizza. Most people in this later group dislike Hawaiian pizza (or any pizza with pineapple), Pizza Hut brand pizza and cold pizza. People also don't like pizza rolls. Pizza rolls are gross.
After that, there's a long trail of less common opinions of what doesn't work in pizza. People often call out specific franchises or shops in their area as being gross. People in New York say that pizza in New Jersey is gross. On a larger level, displaced East Coasters in L.A. or San Francisco say that pizza on the West Coast sucks and is gross.
But a lot of people generally don't like pizza as a whole. Any time I go through the column looking for people to retweet, I don't need to go back too far. Usually, within the last couple hours, there's someone who thinks pizza is gross.
Is this a big deal? Absolutely not. But it shows the scope of the Internet in an interesting way. In the English-speaking world, pizza is an apolitically objective good. Everybody likes pizza. It's what you order when a lot of people come over because everyone can probably agree on it. In childhood, pizza days are a reward for group academic performance and pizza parties are a reward for group athletic performance. To the immigrant starting anew in a foreign land, a pizzeria is one of the safest, simplest businesses to start.
Pizza is classless. Pizza is not liberal or conservative. Pizza is an apolitical part of our shared heritage, and almost universally agreed to be a good thing that people like. And yet some people on the Internet don't like pizza, and I expose them.
The Internet is full of bad ideas. Or more accurately, the Internet is full of ideas, and they span the entire range of the exponentiation of their creators' intelligences, varying moods, thoughts and contexts. The amount of content being generated constantly on the Internet is staggering, to the point where, like a million monkeys and their typewriters, if you search for something, you'll find it.
This proliferation of ideas, combined with the ease of searching a digital archive, has also made it easier to find dissenting opinions. This has, in turn, given rise to the odd activity of outrage as an activity. Sanctimony has always been a fun pursuit. It works so well with our own personal anxieties, feeling like better people than others is codified in Western religion. Judgementalism and taking offence at the misdeeds of others has been a part of the human experience long before history started recording it. Today, however, like so many other industries, the economies of outrage have been upended by the explosion of information in the digital age.
We now live in an age where unfettered access to other people's stupidity has made it easier than ever to feel like a good person. People decry smarm like Upworthy as opiatic and patronizing content designed to unchallengingly make people feel like good people, but the other side of the coin is that we also need to lower the bar while raising ourselves up. And so, despite the fact that the resource upon which the outrage economy is built (stupidity and bigotry) is in infinite supply and no longer needs to be refined or processed, the economy is still booming. It would come as no surprise to anyone who has spent some time on the Internet to find that there are entire nations solely devoted to finding things to get angry at, trading and amplifying them, and getting angry at them.
A few days after the death of Nelson Mandela, for example, a briefly popular trend for blogs was to compile racist comments about the man. Similar to my search for "pizza" and "gross," the writers of these pieces (judging by common elements in their curated content) ran a search for "Mandela" and a common racial epithet, then published the results, posted to social media and started counting uniques. As an aside, even under the guise of outrage trolling, how is it not a cynically racist act in itself, to think to run a search for something so offensive with the intention of profit?
While I don't claim to understand racism, I can understand the existence of racism - far better than I can understand the hatred of pizza. It's more baffling, and yet so much less likely to engender outrage. Quite rightly, people aren't as passionate about pizza as they are about racial or gender equality. While pizza may be more popular across social divides, it's not as important as the positive social intangibles we strive for.
The abstraction of retweeting people who don't like pizza, I hope, reminds people that just like racism and sexism and homophobia and all other forms of bigotry, there are also people who don't like pizza. A lot of them. And while they're not nearly as offensive as the bigots, the fact that we now know there are people with such an odd opinion should act as a reminder that the Internet is a weird place, full of bad ideas if you think to look for them.
But you don't have to look for them. You don't have to get outraged at them. You can have an opinion knowing that it's not universal. You can love something or someone knowing that there are strangers who hate you for it, and that love doesn't shrink or shirk. Does the fact that some people don't like pizza make pizza taste any less delicious?
Reprinted courtesy of the National Post
