Adventures In The Outrage Industrial Complex

Last week, while enjoying a 2 am stroll in the middle of winter, I was ambushed by two illegal immigrants wearing MAGA hats and gender-non-conforming haircuts.

They threw me to the ground, tied my hands behind my back, and threatened to teach my kids Critical Race Theory.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked as they touched my hair without consent.

“Why are you doing this?” one of them replied, looking around for a spot to tie the noose he happened to be carrying.

“Doing what??!” I asked. “Existing?!”

“No,” he said, “making up this obviously fake story to rile up your readers.”

It wasn’t the answer I was expecting.

“Okay, fine,” I replied, “maybe this exact incident didn’t happen, but there are some crazy people out there. Remember that black kid who shot up his schoolbecause he’d been radicalised into hating other black people? Or the white kid who live-streamed himself killing black shoppers at a supermarket?”

“Sure,” he said, lightly dousing me with gasoline, “But most people aren’t like this, right? Do you even try to contextualise that for your audience? Or do you bombard them with the worst examples of whatever boogeymen they’re scared of?”

“I guess you have a point,” I said, still battling to free myself. “Once you get beyond the Kanye Wests of the world, most people aren’t as bad as we’re led to believe.”

“You said it brother,” he chuckled, flicking a match into the pool of gasoline beneath me. “Even us feminist, Islamist, white supremacist, incels think Kanye is trash.”

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There used to be an ebb and flow to outrage.

And the “ebbs” gave us room to breathe and think and put things in their proper context.

Unfortunately, all that thinking and contextualising was bad for business

Every moment people spent thinking about politics in more nuanced terms than Left vs. Right was a wasted opportunity to monetise their attention, each pause was dead air that grifters could fill with rage-bait and propaganda, every second spent fact-checking left room for audiences to feel some empathy or broaden their horizons or attempt critical thinking. And that’s why it’s vital to…

Hey, did you hear that a Syrian asylum seeker just stabbed six people in Austria?

…excuse me, to keep you constantly distracted.

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when you could go a whole day without reading about some infuriating or horrifying or tragic event on the other side of the world, you might go a week without obsessing about a micro-aggression in another city or rogue asylum seekers in a different country, entire election cycles passed by without a single lie about cat-eating Haitian immigrants. And all of this helped us keep each other in perspective.

But today, there’s barely time to…

Did you hear that the Department of Government Efficiency just stopped $50 million (No! $100 million!) worth of your hard-earned taxes being used to buy condoms for Hamas?!

…sorry about that, there’s barely time to catch your breath before the next dose of outrage hits. Every few minutes there’s a new wave of depressing, polarising, rage-inducing information (most of it pitched to be as depressing, polarising and rage-inducing as possible), until…

Did you know that a black guy is playing an elf in the new Lord of the Rings TV show?! And the next James Bond might be a woman. And Superboy is bisexual now!!!

…until we’re overwhelmed.

There’s no time to think, even for just a few seconds, and realise that $50 million worth of condoms (which the U.S. government would probably procure for around $0.05 per condom), would come to around ONE BILLION CONDOMS for a population of ~2 million people. Or, indeed, that the Gaza in question is in Mozambique, not the Middle East.

There’s no time to wrestle with the fact that the Syrian immigrant whose terrorist attack on innocent civilians is being touted as evidence of Syrian incompatibility with Western culture, was stopped by a Syrian food delivery worker who risked his life to protect those innocent civilians from terrorism.

And there’s certainly no time to reflect on whether the people encouraging you to rage about the skin colour or genitalia of fictional characters are distracting us from issues that meaningfully affect our lives.

Because, before you know it, before you have a chance to wonder if you’re being manipulated, there’ll be something else to…

Oh my God! Have you heard that Google “erased Black History Month, Pride Month, and Holocaust Remembrance Day amid Trump’s DEI crackdown”?

…wait, what was I saying? Oh yeah, there’ll be something else to distract you.

It’s hard to overstate how broken the incentivise structures are on social media, especially in this brave new era of zero fact-checking and hate speech for all.

Everybody who creates content online knows that divisive, all-or-nothing rage bait is more likely to go viral than careful, nuanced analysis.

Everybody knows that firing off dozens of fact-free, ALL-CAPS tweets will grow your audience faster than fact-checking and civility and a rudimentary level of intellectual integrity.

And worst of all, everybody knows how unsustainable this is, but some people are having too much fun (or making too much money) to care.

Social media is making us hate each other. And it’s not because we disagree as fundamentally as we’ve been led to believe, it’s not because we’re overrun with communists and fascists and MAGA hat-wearing transgender lynch mobs, it’s because there’s good money in convincing us that our way of life is doomed unless we’re in attack mode 100% of the time.

I’m not suggesting we should be complacent or apathetic. Whatever your political views, there are serious problems in the world today.

I’m saying that a) we can’t afford to be constantly waylaid by distractions, and b) being constantly and irrevocably furious with each other isn’t going to solve any of those issues.

Because while some people have had their brains irrevocably rotted by tribalism and availability bias, and others have decided to cheer for “their side” no matter what, most people, especially if you can get them away from the internet, are willing to have a conversation.

And when we talk, when we listen, we find that very few people are as bad as we’ve been told.

Except for Kanye West. That guy really is trash.

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