Big Mad
The outrage economy is ruining everything.
Every summer, along with an actual vacation, I take a writing vacation. Straying from the hyper-focused essays that you, dear reader, have come to expect, I get out and explore new territory, see the sights, venture beyond my comfort zone. That’s today’s essay. I hope you enjoy it. And if you don’t, I hope you’ll share your outrage loudly, far and wide.
Do you have any favorite memes? I have a long list, and near the top is this man, in a star-spangled bandana, standing near a protest, offering his own counter protest, holding a crudely made cardboard sign that hilariously undermines his point. It reads, in an act of sublime irony, “Get a brain, morans.”
The joke, of course, is that he spelled “morons” wrong. Inadvertently providing a delectable laugh.
He’s just a meme, sure, but also emblematic of something I find meaningfully problematic in modern life: the fact that being a dummy yourself is immaterial when shouting at strangers about what dummies they are.
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I recently had an experience on social media in which I found myself defending the causes of fairness, truth and justice, if not the entirety of the American way. It was about something rather inconsequential, but I didn’t like seeing the spread of half-truths (and potentially deliberate lies) when I knew the opposite to be true. So I dipped a toe in and experienced what’s known in some circles as “a shitstorm of idiocy.” It was so complete as to have ruined my afternoon and a considerable chunk of my faith in humanity.
The whole process taught me something about the situation we’re in [he said while gesturing broadly at everything].
The cause of my righteous indignation was a rumor about a client.1 I happened to have just enough inside information to know it was grossly inaccurate, borderline slanderous, the kind of thing that can damage a reputation. So I pushed back, gently, only to find myself piled on by a flood of intellectually dishonest vitriol that I’m sure felt gratifying to the emotionally stunted malcontents who spewed it.2 Before I knew it, I felt like the lone voice of sanity in a virtual public square that was actively discouraging it.
Sawalich’s axiom: access to a microphone is more powerful than knowledge, expertise or experience. In other words, it’s better to be loud than right.
I know, I know, don’t feed the trolls. That’s the modern version of the famous Twain misattribution, “Never argue with an idiot, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.” I got to witness that firsthand, as I found myself straining to avoid penning inelegant comebacks along the lines of “Nu uh!” and “So’s your mother!”
The only tool that proved remotely effective against the loudly outraged was the calling of bluffs. (I think I won. They backtracked and deleted their loudest, wrongest comments.) What bothered me wasn’t that they were wrong, but that they seemed to be powered by some sort of mass hysteria. They’d share these rumors even though their own personal experience contradicted them. How do you counter that level of intellectual dishonesty? It’s a cousin to the “leopards ate my face” thing. Not “I didn’t believe it would happen to me,” so much as, “I refuse to believe the thing that happened to me, and instead will gossip about what others say they heard.”
It must say somewhere in the terms of service that “factual accuracy” is discouraged on social media. What matters is engagement. You’ve heard of rage bait? It’s effective, even though it is based on a lie.
Even more than engagement, what really seems to matter online is virtue signalling. That terminology is often used to discredit things as empty gestures that are actually quite useful in a healthy society. Signifying one is an ally, for instance, or that one’s business offers a safe space for members of marginalized communities. These are signals of virtue, yes, but they are real and meaningful. What I’m talking about, the issue I experienced, was a type of virtue signalling that is empty and hollow. Like ensuring there are no plastic straws on your private jet.
The thing about such hollow signalling is it can be damaging. Telling a lie in support of the truth is still lying. Let’s stick to the facts, shall we?
When it comes to the attention economy, any audience is valuable. And what pulls more supporters to your corner than righteous indignation? It cultivates the outrage that powers the algorithms that attract the attention that is monetized at every turn. It seems to me it might be at the core of most things that are wrong with life in the 21st century. Now that I’ve had a tiny little experience on the receiving end of a small sliver of that outrage, I realize just how awful it is.
We don’t operate in an attention economy. It’s an outrage economy, full stop.
Outrage has been a tool of politicians for centuries. Those who willfully cultivate outrage don’t care about us, or our well-being. They’re serving a system that only wants more outrage, more eyeballs, more revenue. If you’re not paying, you’re the product being sold. And when you’re mad about it, your selling price goes through the roof.
So if there’s a moral to my story perhaps it’s this: pay attention to how you are being manipulated when you engage online. The easiest answer, of course, is not to engage at all. But for those of us trying to do anything — sell books, build a brand, cultivate an audience — engagement is necessary because all of the other methods no longer exist. Nothing reliably works, it seems, except for social media. It’s up to us to put up our respective guards and ensure, before we get out the torches and pitchforks, that we aren’t being manipulated in an effort to sell deodorant.
There certainly are plenty of things worthy of our outrage, but plenty more that seem like it at first glance then don’t withstand scrutiny. Which means we have to be discerning. When we get big mad, we can’t turn into a meme, some idiot, actively disproving his own point, shouting at the world, loud and proud, “Get a brain, morans.”
No, not a substantial one to whom I am beholden. They’ll pay me a bit more than two grand this year. I’ll sell my soul, sure, but it’s gonna take much more cash than that.
Which is to say, I get it. It must be gratifying to shout about perceived injustice without respect to factual accuracy. I now understand why hearsay is not admissible in court.
Folks can hold a fundamental belief: it isn't necessarily from a clear reason. Sooner or later they will ascribe to a reason or cause. I meet that with factual information. Then the ping-pong starts.
Generally there is a counter challenge. Some may feel it is my part to disprove their challenge.
My response is "you made the claim, you back it up". Then I ask for their source of information.
Silence is the usual response.
It always helps to have a strong fund of information.
Sadly, anger is a powerful attractant. The algos know this.