What started as shitposting has turned into a kind of accidental field study.
What started as shitposting has turned into a kind of accidental field study.
By posting across Facebook, Threads, Instagram, and beyond, I’m no longer just talking to the same familiar circle. I’m pulling in responses from people I would never encounter in my day-to-day life in Arlington. And what’s striking is not just disagreement—it’s intensity. I’m hearing arguments, language, and levels of certainty from both the left and the right that I genuinely didn’t know were this widespread or this raw.
Early on, I would delete posts when the reactions got too heated or uncomfortable. There was still a reflex to manage perception, to smooth things over, to retreat. That’s mostly gone now. I leave the posts up. I let people come in hot. I let the reactions stand. Over time, that has made me less fragile, less defensive, and more curious. I’m not doing it because I think I’m above any of it. I’m doing it because repetition changes your tolerance. You stop flinching. You stop cleaning up the evidence.
Facebook lightly monetizing the whole thing also changed my psychology more than I expected. Not because the money matters that much, but because it gives the whole enterprise a weird little mercenary honesty. Fine. I sold out. Fine. The capitalist system is giving me a tiny reward for stirring the pot. That somehow feels less embarrassing than pretending every post is a noble act of conscience. It makes me bolder, not more righteous.
And the strange thing is that people on both sides read me as belonging wholly to the other side. Some Democrats think I have knee pads for Trump. Some people on the right think I’m basically a communist with my head up Mao’s ass. That split is part of the point. I’m not trying to join a camp. I’m testing what happens when you say something vivid, sensory, unpopular, or unstable enough to make people reveal themselves.
That’s the real value of it. I’m hearing voices I never used to hear. I used to think only the right had the real potty mouths, the real edge, the real appetite for calling everyone traitors and degenerates. Now I’ve seen how fast parts of the left collapse into the same kind of single-track moral bullying, except with words like “bootlicker” doing all the heavy lifting. Different dialect, same missionary certainty.
So this isn’t an apology and it isn’t a defense. It’s closer to a thesis: shitposting, especially when cross-platform and lightly monetized, can function as an unintentional social experiment. It exposes submerged voices, tests tribal reflexes, and toughens the poster. I used to delete. Now I observe. That’s the method.
