Thread by @HeyChelseaTroy

Okay you know what I'm coming back to Calendly.

I don't want to talk about Calendly. I want to talk about the way people treated each other in that discussion.

This is gonna start out kinda draggy, and then I promise we'll get to some...skills that could use some work.

1. I already said this but I'm saying it again. This is not a thread about Calendly. Do not get in here and start yelling at me, each other, or God about Calendly.

Because there is basically one appropriate perspective on Calendly and it is "This is a tool with a use case."

The conversation was not "Folks have different experiences with the use case. Why? What can we learn from that?"

The conversation was somehow very quickly a lot of adults I know who have built their whole, like, brand on having empathy, being absolute shitheads to each other.

I think @polotek is probably right that this happened because The Post That Started It All itself read kinda shitheaddy.

But again, we're not talking about lemmings or children. We're talking about adults who are semi-famous on the internet for being empathetic people.

I don't care WHAT the original post said, y'all are better than that. We HAVE to be better than that.

I watched people with executive positions, and thousands of followers, post tiny brain memes about the people they didn't agree with.

Y'all got employees. Y'all got CHARGES. What are the chances you implicated one of your charges in that meme?

So like I said twice now, this isn't about Calendly. This is about how you disagree with people.

There's a good rule of thumb to keep in mind when it comes to some of the words we use while disagreeing.

"I don't get blahblahblah" is a vulnerable, brave thing to say when talking about a a concept like gradient descent or error productions.

"I don't get blahblahblah" is an asshole thing to say when talking about a thing MANY people are ACTIVELY trying to explain to you.

People seem to understand this when it's THEM in the group doing the explaining.

A LOT of the people I saw slinging this were, it's gotta be said, in marginalized groups, so KNOW y'all get the concept of "it sucks to explain your experience and then they're like I Don't Get It"

But I watched people DOUBLE DOWN

"I truly, honestly, GENUINELY from the BOTTOM OF MY HEART DO NOT UNDERSTAND why ANYONE would EVER want/not want to use Calendly, and I HAVE TRIED"

Gurl you have not, I've seen 19 crystal clear explanations zing by since I started my percolator

And I get it. I understand that defensiveness is a thing. I know that.

It is a thing I expect People Who Are Semi-Famous on the Internet for Empathy to have some ability to deal with before they muzzle sweep their own charges with their memey takes

So, that's the first thing. Consider how you're using "I don't get X" and consider whether you're coopting the language of vulnerable bravery to be an asshole to people who are actively trying to help you get it.

The second thing, which I am DEF gonna get in trouble for: this idea that Calendly is an accessibility need and therefore not only is IT unassailable, but also the arguments and behaviors anyone who is DEFENDING IT are unassailable

The thing about accessibility needs, folks, is there are lots of reasons people might have 'em, from disability to neurodiversity to, straightup, family obligations.

And sometimes they're mutually exclusive.

An example I hear a lot is the movie watching example: deaf folks need captions. Some neurodivergent folks find captions prohibitively distracting.

Neither party is, in fact, The Boneheadest Possible Version of Evil Incarnate!

So with Calendly specifically, people brought up conflicting accessibility needs.

The most common one I saw was 'I need Calendly because ADHD.'

OK. So what Calendly does, you see, is it assumes 100% commitment to a specific time/place of multiple parties with no conversation.

It doesn't take TOO much thought to figure out how THAT could be an accessibility impediment.

Someone's got dependents & something might happen.
Someone's mental health shifts from day to day.
Someone's got a maybe-appointment in the malebolge that is American health insurance.

So maybe it takes a conversation to figure out how to plan. That's not an ableist act against people with ADHD.

And I get it. Marginalized people are tired of having to argue for their right to accommodation and/or existence.

Reaming each other over mutually exclusive needs instead of approaching the conversation with curiosity and creativity makes that problem worse, not better.

This is, fundamentally, why we don't like Cop Shit, right?

Cop Shit is "Who do we punish over this? Who do we remove from the conversation?"

What we want is "How do we include everybody, especially folks who are historically excluded, in the conversation?"

Success with that requires slowing down.

It requires devaluing witty zingers and the Internet Points they earn.

It requires shouldering the inconvenience of genuinely trying on another perspective, and accepting the possibility that we could be wrong.

And to be honest, if one finds oneself creating a meme designed to denigrate other people, that's probably a really really good sign that we're in the completely wrong endzone on how we're responding to the discourse.