What are you doing young man?
Are you so earnest, so given up to literature, science, art, amours?These ostensible realities, politics, points?
Your ambition or business whatever it may be?
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, "Starting From Paumanok" 8
In 2020, I confronted a man about a tense, and personal issue. In spite of the twitterfinger violence of this conversation, he let me speak. In 2023, I included my public presence in Bluesky, and found another man I wanted to learn from. Without ever engaging, I found he had already blocked me. Ironically, the second man likely mistook me for the first man. Both contributors to the New York Times Opinion, Matthew R. Walther and Jamile Bouie are examples of the kinds of polarization the US faces as we move into an authoritarian inflection point.
Matthew R. Walther (MRW) is a traditionalist Catholic who views the entire liberal democratic project as a failed experiment. His work critiques modernity from a “pre-liberal” theological framework, arguing for a return to Catholic social teaching that predates his country.
Jamelle Bouie is a progressive historian who sees American democracy as a noble but radically incomplete project, fundamentally marred by hierarchies segmented by race, class, and gender. His analysis is grounded in the belief that the nation's “egalitarian” ideals have been consistently thwarted by structural barriers like the Constitution itself, which he calls a "decidedly un-democratic document".
I discovered the conflict between these two men when I realized Bouie had blocked me. After NYSE:TWTR went private, many people migrated away. They looked for better, safer online spaces. In an act of love for community, many folks leveraged the blocklist features on Bluesky. They mapped usernames from Twitter to the new network. If you blocked MRW on Twitter, you might have blocked me on Bluesky.
In every sense, this is a conflict of my own making. I picked the handle `@matthewwalther.bsky.social` when I joined Bluesky. It’s my name. It’s also the same handle MRW has used on other platforms.
Bouie was a new voice to me. Some friends and colleagues engage with his work. I was curious to learn from his perspective. But I found a wall. We had never interacted. The block was not personal. It was automated. Systemic.
You could read and analyze these authors for yourself. You would find they are worlds apart. But guys like Matthew Walther do not matter. What matters are the sides they represent, and how the chasm between them tends to grow. Both men are deeply Christian. In spite of their differences, both men are neighbors in our American project.
This is the core of it: We can't fix these men or bridge every idea. We have to look to our neighbors. We need to start local. At the moment it's needed the most, we find our ability to listen and learn blocked.
Because these two figures operate in such different moral universes, there is often no bridge between them. The result necessitates the creation of the absurd words "cold civil war." A conflict waged with the kinds of arguments and arms you find at a Charlie Kirk event. It’s the people who show up that get caught in the crossfire. I found myself blocked by a man I’d hoped to learn from simply because of a shared name.
But this is not my first rodeo with ideological opposition. When I engaged directly with MRW, the outcome was different.
In early 2020, MRW wrote about his family's loss and the painful decision they faced when a pregnancy was terminated to save his wife's life. He was conflicted. He struggled to reconcile the outcome with his sincere, earnest beliefs against abortion. I responded to him on Twitter. I told him that as a man, he should not be speaking on women's rights and health issues. My critique was about hitting him over the head with his own long history of doing just that, while he was now directly benefiting from the very rights he sought to dismantle.
The conversation was combative. I participated in that twitterfinger violence, and so did his followers. They were quick to judge my sin. One participant wished a particular brand of historical Catholic violence on me. I dismissed other people's entire position. Adjacency made it easy. Yet, in the middle of that fire, something unexpected happened. We were speaking to each other. He continued publicly reflecting on his feelings. He acknowledged his privilege. And despite the disruption, MRW never blocked me. I do not like his politics, but in that exchange, I found parts of him I genuinely respect.
I’m lucky the message was received. It was certainly not because I had acted neighborly, and done the work to materialize how the existence of the option for his family has added value. MRW did that work. Our liberation from the structures holding us back are contingent on our ability to produce that kind of effort. I had to realize that the style of this aggression was a comfortable lie, not a necessary weapon.
Sorry about that, Rachel.
People in privileged positions need to start engaging better. Including me. What I'm asking for is a tall order, but I'm not about to shirk the work. My own privilege will be examined. Examining privilege sometimes means disassembling things you thought kept you safe. I will start with the faith of the culture I thought I could ignore.
I have nothing against blocklists. I am not a naive person, or a newcomer to the internet. I know how abuse and brigading online works. I am not asking for vulnerable people to weaken their very real need for safeguards. But I am asking to challenge our theory of vulnerability against our real privilege. I am asking that we evaluate whether or not our leaders are using their privileges to artificially maintain an out-group. Will that really keep anyone safe? What kind of opportunities are we missing from that choice?
I have watched the news since I was very little. The adults in my life had, and expressed their perspectives. I'm 36, and in my small time as I have worked to stay engaged, I've watched our culture change. Entering as a 90s kid, through 9/11, several failed economies, a global pandemic, and the creeping authoritarianism we face today. As my education continued, I did not feel empowered to do much. This is a feature of the right-wing, conservative Christian culture I come from. The same culture is on the rise today. I have made sincere efforts throughout my life to explore and understand it. I was taught allegiance to a collapsing system. I was taught nostalgia for a world that never existed.
Most importantly, this culture teaches us to distance ourselves from the problems and solutions that might make this country better; that these ideas have nothing to do with you. That common sense has been "broken" in exchange for pacifying the "feelings" of my neighbors. This stance ignores decades of the pursuit of the same policy and primes people for intuitive positions that wind up being harmful. These comfortable lies take a lot of different forms, but a rule of thumb is that it gives us a position, or something to do, while removing our need to consider our place in a culture. "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." "Too big to fail." "Spend more money on police, and crime will fall." "Build the wall." "America: Love it or leave it." The lies that Christian Nationalism tells us lack the material value that comes from effort and empathy. Backed by theology like “spiritual warfare”, “the prosperity gospel”, and so many others: there is no limit to the comforting lies we tell ourselves in that block decades of building.
But I found my way out. I came by way of education.
It was a long process. It was listening to my teachers. It was not only studying what was taught, but striving for more. It was listening to my neighbors and sitting with what they said. I learned to weave this practice of life-long learning into my professional work. Over the last five years, I have spent more time listening, studying, and sitting with the shifts in our culture. That feeling of disempowerment is gone. The weaknesses in our collapsing system are clear. Our culture of selfishness blocks progress. Instead of looking to build a sense of presence in their community, people buy walls.
Some of the conditions that delivered my self-actualization were made possible by people other than me. My parents, who are Christians and right-wing. My teachers, who are demonized by Christian Nationalism. And to others, like Fatima, a contract writer I hired at work. Fatima is a Muslim woman living in Lahore. We were discussing her family's plans for Eid Mubarak when she, with a simple question, put me in my place. She asked what my plans were for Easter. Initially, I pushed back. I was not a Christian. The plans my wife and I had on that day were not centered on Easter. Why would she assume I was doing anything for the holiday? Like what I had done, she colored in the details she did not know with what she did. She knew, even if I was not an ingrained participant, that the residual parts of the culture in this country generally maintained some level of observance. She was right.
Fatima was not the first person to point out the contour and shape of this culture. But it was the first time I was able to see what I need to do with it. In my effort to exit a culture that did not work for me, I deleted the tools I needed to understand the part of my country that is regressing on its values. I had neglected a key part of the social code I was trying to debug. This is motivating changes like the direction of this website, and also how I choose to engage with my community. My work, like this post, is for others that feel the same. It is open to critique. The pen is still moving. As long as one of us is still alive, the story is still being written.
What is the marginal cost of producing one single commit that could move our social code forward?
How do we use the un-deleted tools to fill chasms in our culture? Is there anything useful we could build from the mar in our culture? Even if we built a well fit-for-purpose, how would these two meet there?
MRW is a far cry from the Christian Nationalists who disturb Seattle neighborhoods and cosplay as "spiritual warfare” influencers on summer weekends. Bouie is not some leader of the mythical antifa, whose real “members” roleplay intimidation-in-bloc at these events. The gap-to-bridge in the chasm is clearly wider than the local extrema these men position themselves at.
Lately, people with a lot of agency in the political sphere have spoken on the need to engage with our neighbors. To finally live our values and build the kind of resilient culture that can resist rising fascism. People on the right will tell you attending church is necessary to not only build what is missing externally, but to build what is missing in the individual. This comes with the price tag of accepting someone else’s perspective on «your problem», and eventually, tithing.
Folks on the left might tell you the answer is reading leftist theory. Operating as though reading the thoughts of men who have nothing to do with our culture, or engaging with contemporary thought leaders will uniformly tell us something about ourselves; open the doors to self-awareness, self-actualization and re-wire the thought patterns that keep us helpless.
The cruel irony is that it is the selfishness in our own culture that has made each of these group’s ideas fail. Churches which claim to be “Jew-loving”, or “race-mixing” routinely capitulate to a gospel that favors ammo over love. Over-read political influencers devolve into anger, in-fighting, and yes – blocklists. As church attendance declines and political losses mount, leadership in both of these groups are left confused why their strategies are not effective.
The rub is that neither of these groups know how to engage with their neighbors in a meaningful way. In spite of all our theory, or pastoral training, regular people have completely forgotten how to talk to one another on that level. What replaced it is this thought-leader style influencership, to which we engage with, or completely ignore. Bribed by metrics and analytics, we have convinced ourselves that participation with these kinds of leaders will scale our impact. But whether the chat is cookin’, or the pastor preaching fire, the only thing to have materialized is hot air.
Both of these groups have something the other does not. Both are laboring under the assumption that what the other has is somehow a corrupting influence in our neighborhoods. What is missing from both is the kind of leadership that knows how to walk with both, and help materialize the value in the perceived negative. Not through viral reels, and top-comments, but by effort, and patience. The kinds of leadership that can see a chasm, and see what actually fills it. It’s the kind of understanding Fatima was able to provide for me, and bridge the misconceptions of our cultures.
That’s how my summer at Gas Works Park this year. When Christian Nationalists came to cosplay at the end of August, Seattle showed up to protect the vulnerable people that the Nationalists believe are being coddled against their “anti-social behavior,” and to confront the real anti-social behavior these individuals had performed in the second half of the year. I had a lot of productive and educational conversations that day. The most effective was with Sheryl. She spoke in circles around a handful of hot-button policy issues in the area, like homelessness, and the need for comprehensive medical care for addiction. She wished the U.S. treated homosexuality like “a mental disorder”, as they had in some other country.
Against the rhythm of the half-protest half-worship concert breaking down, I had many opportunities to center these comfortable lies to the things she was speaking towards. She did not know that the U.S Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders even existed. What of the process it took to understand and remove them? She did not understand how anti-homeless policy compounds recidivism in the justice system. She wore police department branded sunglasses. Egregiously, after 50-years of adulthood, she did not see how War-on-Drugs era policy continues in her own backyard.
Towards the end, one protestor on a bullhorn renewed their effort chanting “Jesus says to love your neighbor.” The natural opportunity I was looking for had finally come. I asked her: "Do these protestors look loved by this church? Did the church do something that honored them as neighbors today?" She had just listened to the same sermon a local pastor delivered on stage as I had. Protestor, queer, and unhoused behavior was “anti-social.” Yet, Sheryl landed on "no". After that, her ideas did not have much leverage in the conversation.
I believe what made this conversation so successful was not entirely because of me. The comfortable lies we are confronting are the cognitive dissonance blockers that are blocking fully assimilated U.S. persons aligned with right wing culture. The disruptive energy of the immediacy of the protestors is effective to this dissonance. What is hardening towards the lessons they can learn from their heightened senses is the stillness of a neighbor acting in good faith. Someone in that position can walk their neighbor around these ideas, and expose the trappings of our assumptions. The presence of both is crucial. This fundamental difference to protesting’s online analogues underscore why I was not responsible for the effort MRW made.
My desire is to get to a place where we can disagree on policy from more informed and realistic perspectives. While we continue to blindly operate from different theories of knowledge, moral foundations, or maps of reality, we will remain blocked on meaningful policy progress. Until we buck our culture of selfishness, we will continue to talk in circles.
This is why this blog has to change. It can no longer be just a simple tech blog or an online resume. The most critical problems we face are human. They are about communication, empathy, and the willingness to engage with different "maps of reality."
Moving forward, you can expect this space to reflect that new mission. I'll be attempting more intersectional discussions about my work, current events, and my own journey. I'll still discuss technology, but perhaps more frequently in relation to the social and policy issues it impacts. My more purely technical journaling will now live in my dotfiles reference repository, which is now a readable feature of this site.
This is not a call to empathize with the oppressors. This is not a call to tolerate the abuses from political tension.
The goal is to participate in the project of building a better neighborhood. A better country. And that starts with the willingness to be a neighbor and listen. That is what I am asking. Even when it's hard.
Especially when it's hard.