Arguing with bots

Someone is wrong on the internet!

A page from my diary (apologies to Mary Oliver)

Hey y’all,

I am still on Twitter, for inexplicable and indefensible reasons. Twitter is a place people go to be mad at people they don’t know, and last week everyone was mad at the novelist Haruki Murakami:

The only problem is that they weren’t really mad at the novelist Haruki Murakami, they were mad at a fake Twitter account run by somebody who was posting out-of-context quotes by novelist Haruki Murakami!

The quote above was taken from an interview with UNIQLO’s LifeWear magazine, who asked him whether running influences his fiction. His answer, in full:

I’m not sure if I can offer proof, but it feels like it does. I also think I would have written different books if running hadn’t been a part of my life. I didn’t start running until I was in my thirties. This was a few years after I closed down my jazz bar and started working fulltime as a writer. Managing a bar is lots of work, which helped me keep the flab at bay, but when I started sitting at a desk I gained weight automatically. That freaked me out, so I started running. Pretty soon, I came to realize that I wouldn’t have the energy I needed unless I ran. As a writer, you can write as much as you want until forty or so, while youth is on your side. But after that, it’s common for people to lose energy, and their writing suffers as a result. Generally speaking. It takes a lot of energy to sit in front of a desk all day and put together sentences. You can’t really make yourself more talented, but you can get physically fit.

Ah, context. (The Twitter account has since been suspended — incredible, considering all the outright Nazis on that platform who haven’t been.)

I am sorry to report that I too got suckered by the account into quote-tweeting:

I can be as lazy as anyone else on the internet, and didn’t bother looking up the original context until just now. The quote came from the same LifeWear interview:

Q15. What makes you avoid all social media?

For the most part, the quality of writing isn’t great. Reading good writing and listening to good music is so important to our lives. Put another way, the best thing to do with bad music and bad writing is ignore it entirely.

Oh, the irony!