IRL Anatomy of an Internet Argument
I’m checking out at Staples, an old woman skips the line.
🗂️ “Hey lady, you gotta wait back there!” says the checkout man.
👵 “I was here first!” says the lady.
🗂️ The man knows this is not the case - he points to me and says “the line starts there, just so you know for next time”.
👵 “Stop harassing me. I want to file a complaint. I did nothing wrong. Just do your work”
🗂️ A deep sigh. The man deals with this all the time. It is emotionally draining, but he powers through.
The story above is from the checkout man’s point of view.
Now here is the woman’s POV.
A woman goes to the checkout counter, there is no one there. She waits patiently but no one seems to notice her.
She walks over to the print counter, asks:
“is there anyone that can help me over there please?”
In that moment, (1) 🗂️ checkout man appears (2) I enter the line.
She thanks the print center girl and walks over directly back to her original spot.
The man gives her a kind of dirty / disappointed in humanity look that makes her feel terrible, and she defends herself.
🛑 ⚠️ Now, here is the version where I intervene.
But first, I’d like to explain how I visualize this. When Joshua Hutt and I gave our talk at Love Symposium Nov 2025, he demoed this interface that could take a twitter argument and visualize its “trajectory”. To see how it starts off “angry” and how each subsequent reply either nudges it towards or away from the calm/insightful corner. The game I play is to make the smallest intervention that can “pull the plane up” away from the crashing trajectory.
This is the visual I had in my head at the checkout line.
👵 I could see the woman getting visibly more frustrated, I could feel her emotional distress.
🗂️ I could see the man asserting his boundaries and trying to keep order in the store, knowing that if he allowed this, the other customers would be upset at him, and he would be in hot water
♾️ I could see both of these loops fueling each other, getting worse with each interaction
So I stepped in and said:
“She’s right! She was here first, before me”
👵 “Thank you!” said the lady. I could feel her relief at the validation of her side.
🗂️ “Oh!” said the man. I could feel him dropping the burden of having to uphold the rules, and feeling a little sheepish as he re-contextualizes his interaction with the lady.
I continued, directed at the woman:
“Yeah you know I was trying to figure out where the line started, and then I saw you, but I wasn’t sure which counter was open so I waited and blah blah blah”
She diffused her remaining tension, saying that yes that was it! She was also just confused, she’s happy to wait in line she just didn’t know where it was or which counter was open.
Anatomy of an Internet Argument is not about internet arguments.
It is about empirically finding & testing optimal conflict resolution1.
The Staples story I recounted today is true, but you were not there, and have no way to verify it, or test an alternative path if I had failed. When we analyze internet arguments, the full history of the conflict is available, from the moment two people first began interacting, and anyone can try intervening.
This is the only special thing about the “internet” part. You don’t “read” about Anatomy of an Internet Argument, it’s meant to be a praxis. The book I’m writing is meant as a very short DIY manual/toolkit, it’s meant to pull you into a community of people who can see your conflicts, watch your intervention & tell you what you did wrong, and show you how it can be done better.
How often is a conflict the result of a very simple miscommunication like this?
Neither 👵 nor 🗂️ did anything wrong. They conflicted because they had insufficient information about the other.
Those who resist the grand vision I have for AoIA tell me, “you’re being naive. You think better communication is going to solve all conflict. You don’t understand how the world works”.
But all I’m asking for is: before you fight that guy, or that woman, can you check if they’re on your side? All we need to do is rule out friendly fire.
The good guys are stuck losing because they lack discernment2. They can’t tell who’s on their side, so they either fight their allies, or allow people to take advantage of them.
IRL Anatomy of an Internet Argument cases have been the most exciting thing for me recently. There is another case I would like to document where customers were angry at a coffee shop for not listening to their feedback, but the coffee shop wasn’t even aware of their feedback (and the people weren’t aware of this!)
They imagined it to be an evil corporation who didn’t care, but they did care. The proof was that once I used this protocol to check what they know & don’t know, they performed the action / fixed the thing that customers had been complaining about.
Some people didn’t believe it even after this happened & the issue was fixed - they saw the coffee shop as saving face only because there was extra attention on it. But, I think even in that case - it’s fine. If more people learn to use this protocol that can surface the root cause of the problem, that will allow us to focus our efforts & pressure on what needs pressure to change, without hurting or punishing good people.
Thanks for reading! You might enjoy reading case #4 which shows a successful resolution between Michael Ashcroft and Guy, for a similar kind of innocent miscommunication:
You might also enjoy “Why not dot com” where I articulate my vision for what happens when everyone is using this protocol, and can surface what they find to the “people above them” until it gains enough visibility to get resolved:
This is what I understand Ann Pierce’s & Matthew Fisher’s work to be about. I am grateful to them for inviting me to Love Symposium last year, and hope to collaborate with them more in the future.
See also “Good Guys Defend Their Territory” by Aleks Jakulin which had some good discussion/rebuttals recently from patcon and Kat_The_Vat.
You should check if there are medical clowns in your area. They have a whole praxis of drawing attention to themselves in order to defuse situations.
One time, when I was clowning jn an ER, a woman with her mother (patient) exclaimed to us "you wouldn't be laughing if you were wanting for so long!"
"oh, you're waiting for a doctor?"
"yes!"
"oh! what's his name well get him! and breath the shit out of him! "
"..."
"you don't know his name?!"
in which hilarity ensued. but the point is thst ou can hyper address things in a way that defuses things. and I think you'll enjoy hearing stories like this.
How do you determine if the parties are indeed acting in good faith? My assumption/observation is that the vast majority of online arguments do not consist of 2 people that are arguing in good faith