(More) Controversial, Experimental, Personal & (Hopefully) Conversational

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Back when I started blogging in 2010, the Internet felt open, creative, and free. At the time, I was fascinated by — and immersed in — the then-burgeoning worlds of yoga and meditation. I decided to try blogging because I wanted to experiment with writing about them in new ways.

Many others were doing something similar. The “yoga blogosphere” was exploding, offering content ranging from humorous photo essays of florescent marshmallow Peeps “practicing” on little brightly colored yoga mats, to detailed discussions of the anatomy of yoga asana, to complex parsings of Advaita Vedānta, to (and this was my lane) reflections on the sociocultural dynamics surrounding these Indian-rooted practices in contemporary North American societies.

It was a very different world in the early 2010s, when this online ferment was bubbling most vigorously. There was no sense of being surveilled and policed, no apprehension about bumbling across some incomprehensibly dangerous tripwire, no worries about being trolled and attacked. It was only 12 years ago. But it was a much more innocent cultural era.

At least in my yogacentric cyber-niche, interesting, robust, and often remarkably deep conversations were spooling out almost every day. Comment threads on blogs or even Facebook posts regularly grew into long, involved, multifaceted discussions. Hard as it is to imagine now, it was usually perfectly OK to air disagreements, even on topics that people took quite seriously. In fact, doing so pretty reliably produced nuanced and constructive debates. And all that discussion took place out in the open, freely and without fear.

By and large, this short-lived moment in cyberspace was also refreshingly non-commodified. This isn’t to say that it had no linkage to people’s professions and business pursuits: Not surprisingly, many who were putting a lot of time in were yoga teachers, studio owners, or scholars studying similar subjects. I myself started blogging because I wanted to write a book about yoga in America. So my online presence definitely tied into work.

But for me and so many others, marketing was never the center of gravity. Instead, we were learning things we thought were important, both from and with each other. Personally, I learned so much during this brief period of intense online exchange that I completely reconfigured my original book project and then ended up doing several more. But I didn’t change course because I’d figured out a better marketing angle. No, I did so because my perspective on yoga and meditation — and, in the process, consciousness and the body and spirituality and life itself — had evolved in ways that I valued, and continue to value to this day.

It was a remarkable experience. So much so, in fact, that even back in those halcyon days, I always had the feeling it couldn’t last.

Enter the Trolls

And, of course, it didn’t. Before long, a new type of online interlocutor appeared. It wasn’t a lot of people — really, only a handful of individuals. But they were inexhaustibly zealous in their nonstop insistence on the absolute, unquestionable righteousness of their own particular one-note, two-dimensional political ideology.

These people weren’t the least bit interested in good faith discussions and mutual exchange. They weren’t open-minded “seekers” steeped in the then still widely assumed virtues of pluralist liberalism and multiculturalism. No, they were keyboard warriors with a single-minded mission: To take control of any relevant online space and impose what they saw as the “correct” line of thought and communication on it. The goal was to dominate completely and permanently. No serious questioning, let alone dissent were allowed. And they were seemingly able to coordinate their surveil-and-control projects 24/7. This was not a casual endeavor.

At first, this new development left me disoriented and confused. I’d been deeply socialized to believe in the liberal precepts of free speech and civil discourse. Consequently, I initially — and quite mistakenly — assumed that it must be possible to find some way to engage constructively with this new breed of online activist/ entrepreneur. I didn’t want to block anyone, no matter how unreasonable, manipulative, obnoxious, or (soon, this had to change) abusive they might be. It seemed unethical to shut someone out of what had been a wonderfully robust public discussion with a click of a button.

I was also confused by the content of the new political positions being so aggressively promoted. This being the yogasphere around the mid-2010s, the dominant line was a strange mixture of left-wing “social justice” ideology and right-wing Hindu nationalism. Logically, this combo was incoherent. I didn’t get it: Why were people who professed to be so passionately devoted to “social justice” teaming up with those who wanted to quash the Indian left and oppress Muslims?

In the ensuing maelstrom of weaponized accusations of cultural appropriation and the like, it quickly became clear that such questions didn’t matter. Vanishingly few people knew or cared that left-wing cultural vanguardism and right-wing religious nationalism really don’t make sense together. Online, the combination was bluntly effective.

The more I was able to flesh out a sense of who some of the leading activist/trolls were, the more I realized that their professed politics were, at least in many cases, an obvious smokescreen for what was, in fact, simply an ideologically leveraged power grab. Plus, regardless of whether their ideology was cynically or sincerely deployed, their tactics of coordinated surveillance, badgering, bullying, and harassment worked.

Within a few years of the initial appearance of these ideologues and trolls, the yoga blogosphere transformed from an online space bubbling with creative ferment into an oppressive zone of thought policing, smear campaigns, and conformist bandwagon jumping. It was incredible — not to mention, disturbing and dismaying — to see it unfold.

This was particularly true since I wasn’t simply a safely distanced onlooker. Having written a lot about yoga and mindfulness, I was — along with many others — a repeated target of trolling myself. In one of the odder moments in my zigzagging writing career (such as it is, lol), I even earned a mention as a prime yoga troll target in an academic article that one of my fellow trollees, yoga teacher and scholar Theodora Wildcroft, published in the Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religions.

What I saw happening to quite a few other teachers, writers, and scholars, however, was far worse. Unlike me, many suffered harassment that extended well into the “real world,” with determined troll brigades attempting to ruin their livelihoods and even threatening physical harm. I heard about scholars who’d stopping going to India, teachers who’d had their gigs cancelled, people who’d been stalked. While most trolls were simply having their own perverse version of fun online, some were, in fact, deranged enough to be scary.

That said, it’s worth noting that even if no ideologues or trolls had ever appeared, the yoga blogosphere would have inevitably experienced some serious internal rifts. The very openness of the online discussion was bringing more and more previously suppressed stories about unethical, and in some cases criminal abuses of power by prominent leaders in the field into public view. While long overdue and much needed, this development was inevitably divisive and for many people, traumatic. Without the constant trolling, these revelations could have been collectively processed much more constructively. But with it, the line between serious abuse and manufactured slander became dangerously — and, thanks to the trolls, quite deliberately — blurred.

The New Normal

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see how similar dynamics were playing out more broadly, both across the Internet and in society at large. The yoga blogosphere was hardly the only online space to be negatively impacted by the wave of weaponized political ideology and trolling that was steadily gathering momentum during the early 2000s. Until the 2016 election of President Donald Trump and the concurrent eruption of what became known as wokeism, however, it was easier to write off such developments as aberrations from a then presumed “normal,” rather than a lasting sea-change.

The online culture I experienced back in 2010 was still suffused with techno-optimism (the Internet will make us connected, equal, free, and so on) and liberalism (Obama’s “arc of history,” etc.). Looking back, though, it’s obvious that by that time, both paradigms were already well on their way to breaking down.

In 2016, the eruptions of Trumpism and wokeism took me completely by surprise. Today, I see how the shifts I’d experienced in the microcosm of the yoga blogosphere presaged both. The wave of right-wing Hindu nationalism sparked by the 2014 election of Prime Minister Modi in India paralleled the forthcoming wave of Trumpism in the U.S. And the weaponized “social justice” attacks were representative of the snowballing anti-liberalism of the new woke politics.

I’m not sharing this story of my involvement in the yoga blogosphere, though, to analyze these connections. Rather, it’s to help explain why I’ve decided to start putting some of posts here on Liberal Confessions behind a paywall.

Now that this project is launched, I’d like to expand my offerings to include posts on more controversial issues and personal topics, as well as writing that’s more experimental in nature. Given my experience in the yoga blogosphere, I’m painfully aware of how online dynamics can deteriorate, and how awful it is to be trolled. Putting work behind a paywall is one way to make it more likely that it will only be accessed by people who are truly interested, as they’re willing to make some small investment to read it.

Of course, there’s no real correlation between what any writer actually says and what trolls may claim they did. No, if such people want to attack, they’ll deliberately misrepresent and shamelessly lie. (Side note: That’s why it’s always better to access original sources and assess them yourself, rather than relying on what others say about them. Manipulatively misrepresented and/or partial information is endemic; sadly, it’s the new normal, both online and off.) But at least it’s highly unlikely they’ll bother to access work they’d have to pay for — after all, why bother when you can make whatever shit you want up for free?

Seeking Community

For readers who may not be familiar with Substack (the platform you’re reading this on now), it enables both free and paid subscriptions, or a mixture of both. Every post can be configured such that, depending on subscription status, all, some, or none of the content is accessible. This setup offers benefits both to writers and readers, including but not limited to the obvious benefit for writers of being able to generate some income independently.

Whether free or paid, the email subscription model enables writers to develop a more direct relationship with readers, away from the now-toxic sea of the open Internet. But paid subscriptions definitely create a more bounded, quasi-private community. And, they can make it more comfortable for both writers and readers to participate in online discussions. The knowledge that the only other people who can access the content are paid subscribers — who presumably share at least some important interests, commitments, and values — is reassuring, and at least potentially liberating.

Liberal Confessions will continue to offer free public posts, which are available regardless of subscription status. Others will be accessible only to paid subscribers moving forward. Examples of where I’d like to go with the latter include takes on such hot-button issues as trans rights activism and feminism; more personal reflections on post-modern spirituality and ethics; and investigations into interesting “horseshoe” convergences between political thought on the right and the left. At the same time, I’ll be exploring how best to facilitate a more interactive relationship with and among readers.

My early days in the yoga blogosphere showed me just how extraordinarily interesting, creative, and educational online discussion can be. Given how difficult, if not impossible that’s become on the open Internet, I’m hoping it’s possible to regenerate such dynamism in a more private, protected space. If that sounds intriguing, please consider signing up for a paid subscription! (Or, if that feels too financially stressful, email to make an alternative arrangement.) If not, the free subscription option remains.

Finally, if you have feedback or comments you’d prefer to share privately, I’m always happy to receive (non-trolly) emails at any time (carolhorton@substack.com). Writers need readers. And so, please know that if you’ve made it this far, I truly appreciate you! Your time and attention are valuable, and not taken for granted, ever.