Dylan Marron “Conversations with people who hate me”
Relentlessly insulted and denigrated by some of his readers, writer and actor Dylan Marron decided to reach out to them and ask why they had attacked him. Several of them agreed to talk with him by phone, and to let Marron record it. The result is a podcast called Conversations with People who Hate Me, with dozens of episodes, and a book of the same name with a subtitle: 12 Things I Learned from Talking to Internet Strangers.
Marron’s counterspeech is unusual in several ways: he conducted extended one-on-one conversations, and he practices what he calls “radical empathy” - offering compassion and a new opportunity to speak. He also moderated conversations between other influencers and members of their own audiences who had lashed out at them. Marron wanted to learn why people attacked him and other strangers online, and whether conversation - which he describes as a dance, an “antidote to both the game of the internet and the sport of debate,” and a way of humanizing everyone who takes part in it - could discourage vitriol.
In his conversations, rather than just giving the authors of hateful comments a platform, Marron questions them, causing many guests to explore their own motivations and better understand the impact of their speech. Marron’s model of counterspeech allows for an intimate exchange between speaker and counterspeaker, while still inviting a large audience to learn from it.
Marron has summarized his counterspeech mantra as “Empathy is not endorsement.” “Empathizing with someone who, for example, believes that being gay is a sin doesn't mean that I'm suddenly going to drop everything, pack my bags and grab my one-way ticket to hell, right?” Marron says in a 2018 TED Talk. “It just means that I'm acknowledging the humanity of someone who was raised to think very differently from me.”
Before starting the podcast, Marron, who moved with his family to New York from his birthplace of Caracas, Venezuela at age five, had already achieved a public following from his online television work. His signature was to illustrate injustice - with humor. For example, to protest the dearth of U.S. film roles for nonwhite actors, Marron excerpted every line spoken by such actors in well-known feature films and edited them into montages he called Every Single Word. They lasted only a few seconds, were hilarious, and drew millions of viewers. “Wrap it in laughter and the medicine goes down easier,” he said.
He used that method in taking on a fierce public controversy in the United States over trans peoples’ identities and lifestyles, after North Carolina passed a law in 2016, banning trans people from using toilets corresponding to their gender identities. The law’s proponents said it would prevent men from pretending to be trans women to sneak into bathrooms and assault women and girls - a frightening, vivid claim for which there is no evidence at all. “What am I going to do about it?” Marron said he asked himself. “Hateful legislation depended on fear, and fear grew from the unknown. I wanted to reverse that.”
So he set up a studio in a toilet and conducted interviews for a droll series he called Sitting in Bathrooms with Trans People. He asked his guests questions about their trans identity, and also “the mundane” like their favorite snacks and boring pastimes. The series went viral.
Marron’s videos brought him frequent online abuse, much of it homophobic: people called him “faggot” or “dumb-fag”; they posted beneath his videos on Facebook that they wanted to assault him, or that he should drink bleach. Sometimes Marron would take a screenshot and add it to a “HATE FOLDER” he’d made on his laptop.
He also began to look up the people whose words filled that folder. One of them, a young man named Josh, had written a long comment to Marron beginning, “Youre a moron. Youre the reason this country is dividing itself.”
In his frequent online posts about himself, Josh posed with a birthday cake, felt alone on a Friday night, and loved a Pixar movie - that Marron also loved. He contacted Josh and asked if he would be willing to talk on the phone. Then Marron asked for permission to record the call.
That led him to contact more people who had left him messages like, “you should be put on an island to die.” Those conversations, in which some people apologize, some don’t, and all explain themselves in some way, became podcast episodes. After interviewing several of his own online attackers, Marron began mediating conversations between other people who had received online hate, and those who sent it. Always he seeks to understand why, by practicing what he calls radical empathy.
Marron’s 2022 book recounts his experiences making the podcast and the lessons he has learned from it. Like the books of other counterspeakers like Megan Phelps Roper and Hasnain Kazim, it is both a justification for counterspeaking and a manual for how to do it.
