Relearning How to Talk to Each Other in the Age of Snark

Dec 14, 2025

Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of our 50501 CO newsletter!

In this newsletter, we discuss how social media has impacted our abilities to communicate with each other. In addition, you’ll find information on upcoming activities from the 50501 calendar, actions you can take outside of protesting, and also find out about additional ways to connect with us.

See you on the streets! ✊✊✊

Actions and Activities

(The below list contains details on all actions this week and next week which have been submitted to our 50501 CO calendar; click the link above for more details and the full calendar)

Alamosa

12/20: 12:00 - 2:00pm - Key Lime/Denver Air Connection joint airport protest (San Luis Valley Regional Airport)

Arvada

12/20: 12:00 - 2:00pm - Goodwill To All Protest Party and Collection for Community Table (Grandview/Wadsworth Overpass)
12/21: 11:00am - 12:00pm - Pop Up Rally (Safeway at 80th and Wadsworth in Arvada)

Littleton

12/20: 11:00 - 1:00pm - Protest Against Tyranny (5700 South Broadway)
12/27: 11:00 - 1:00pm - Protest Against Tyranny (5700 South Broadway)

Loveland

12/20: 12:00 - 2:00pm - Hands Off (US 287 from US34/Sprouts to Tesla)
12/27: 12:00 - 2:00pm - Hands Off (US 287 from US34/Sprouts to Tesla)

Superior

12/20: 11:00am - 1:00pm - Weekly Rally in Superior (2 S Marshall Rd)
12/27: 11:00am - 1:00pm - Weekly Rally in Superior (2 S Marshall Rd)

Thornton

12/26: 4:00 - 6:00pm - 4th Friday Intersection protest (112th avenue and Colorado Boulevard)

Relearning How to Talk to Each Other in the Age of Snark

For years now, we’ve been speaking to each other like we’re all trapped in one big comment section. Even before Trump and executive overreach, social media had already rewired the way we talk. It taught us to value speed over thought, reaction over reflection, cleverness over clarity. The whole architecture nudged us toward the sharpest version of ourselves. A little snark got rewarded. A little cruelty traveled faster. Sarcasm became a dialect so many of us learned without meaning to.

And because we’re social creatures, we adapted. We tuned our voices to the room we thought we were in. The room just happened to be Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit—places built less for conversation and more for engagement, which is just a polite word for attention.

After a while, that tone leaked into everything else: texts, group chats, family discussions, political arguments, even how we talk to ourselves. We stopped listening generously. We assumed bad intent early. We braced for mockery even from people close to us. And the scariest part is that most of it didn’t feel like a choice. It felt normal.

Then politics lit a match in the middle of all that tinder.

Social media didn’t cause authoritarianism or destroy our ability to communicate, but it absolutely softened the ground to the former and amplified our worst shortcuts on the latter. It normalized contempt. It made outrage a default. It trained us to dunk, to clap back, to win the room—even if the “room” was a timeline of strangers. It was the perfect rehearsal space for a style of politics that feeds on emotion without context.

The result is a kind of conversational brittleness. People pull back before they speak. They assume disagreement will spiral. They expect to be misunderstood because so much online communication is misunderstanding. We pre-emptively armor up, even when we don’t need to.

And that brittleness comes from more than just bad habits — it comes from a world that has made patience feel outdated and earnestness almost embarrassing. When the default tone is defensive, vulnerability feels risky. But we can’t relearn how to talk to each other without being honest about the environment that shaped us.

Relearning how to talk to each other isn’t a nostalgia project. We’re not going back to 1998. We’re not uninstalling the internet. It’s about reclaiming something we lost slowly: the ability to speak to one another without assuming the worst, without compressing our feelings into quips, without mistaking sharpness for strength.

And strangely, the solution is smaller than the problem.

It starts with ignoring the algorithm. That means slowing down, letting our sentences breathe, asking follow-up questions because we’re actually curious—not because we’re trying to “gotcha” someone. It means getting comfortable saying, “I might be wrong” or “Can you explain that?” It means remembering that tone isn’t a weapon unless we choose to sharpen it.

It helps to practice in tiny spaces: a checkout line, a neighborly wave, a short conversation at work. Places where there’s no scoreboard. Places where nobody’s screenshotting your word choice for clout.

We don’t have to become saints or diplomats. We just have to remember that communication isn’t combat by default. That most people aren’t our adversaries. That vulnerability isn’t weakness. That “I hear you” isn’t the same as agreement.

Social media may have rewarded our worst impulses, and politics may have poured gasoline on the whole thing, but we’re not trapped in that version of ourselves. We can speak differently. We can listen differently. We can pull the sting out of our words and still stay honest. We can talk in ways that build instead of bruise.

The platforms won’t change. But we can. And maybe that’s the first real conversation worth having.

Non-Protest Actions Bingo

The below bingo card contains a list of actions you can take (other than protesting) to help further the cause. If you get a bingo, tag us on social media to let us know!