During a segment on last night’s The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, screenwriter and former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett described the one-eyed-jacks milieu in Washington, D.C. Politicians, he said, “put one face out to the public and, behind the scenes, they’re devious lunatics. They’re headcases…broken, garbage people. They are. They’re terrible, short-sighted, venal, cowardly douchebags. Some of them.”

Which is vaguely analogous to the difference between this or that person’s online rantings and the mild-mannered, comme ci comma ca personality they wear when you see them on the street. Very few, it seems, are the same person in both realms. The usual online tempest vs. a semblance of mature behavior when they’re standing two to three feet away, and the tempestuous stuff is usually closer to the nub of things. I’m mentioning this because a guy some of us know recently blocked me from reading his Twitter posts because…getting into it will only exacerbate but it was next to nothing in the general scheme. I’ll be running into him during Sundance and we’ll probably sort it out, but online temperaments are strange.

And yet, oddly, it’s more comfortable to live in our digital pods. Almost all interaction these days happens digitally while the face-to-face stuff…well, you can’t get away from it entirely. And I would’t want to. But oh, the irony of it.