# "I Have the Honor to Be Your Obedient Servant"

Originally published: 2016-02-03
Canonical URL: /2016/Feb/i-have-the-honor-to-be-your-obedient-servant/

A friend of the blog recently told me that I'm meaner in meatspace (what some prefer to call by the bizarre misnomer "real life") than you would guess from my online persona. I'm not proud to have prompted this observation, but I didn't deny it, either. And yet—insofar as one has any reflectively-endorsed non-nice social impulses (to create incentives for good behavior, or perhaps from an ungentle although-_sadistic_-would-be-far-too-strong-of-a-word æsthetic that appreciates a world in which people don't always get everything they want), it _does_ seem like the correct strategy: in meatspace, you can react to verbal _and nonverbal_ cues _in real time_ and try to smooth things over if you go too far, whereas in the blogosphere, it's possible to _die_ in a harrowing thermonuclear flamewar and not even _know_ until you check your messages the next day. We _must_ use diplomacy where we cannot wield our weapons so precisely.