Sometimes it's better not to say anything

I was planning to write a reply to a post I read earlier today. I sat down in front of my computer, started typing, then a bunch of different people sent me messages for a variety of totally unrelated reasons, and I spent half an hour chatting with them. When I finally got back to writing the post, I started at the screen and I was like «what even is the point of writing this?». That is something that happens more and more often, recently. I still believe that dialogue is, by far, the best, and probably only, tool we have to make progress on a multitude of societal issues. At the same time, I’m more and more convinced that dialogue, on the internet, using the public digital spaces we have at our disposal, is almost impossible to have. Some of the reasons why I think this is the case are not worth repeating; I already wrote about them plenty of times over the years on this site. But one reason I think is worth highlighting is that a core ingredient for healthy dialogue is the ability…