I woke up this morning at around 6am as I do most days to the prodding of a consistent and annoying bladder. After begrudgingly making my way to the bathroom and back into the warmth of my bed I engaged in the same debate I always do: should I try to savor the time I have left before my alarm and fall back to sleep, or should I start moving? The answer, which is usually foolish, is that I would always prefer to try getting just another hour or two of sleep, but of course I had to check my phone to see if I had missed any headlines or disasters or a combination of the two. I felt, for a moment, a very familiar whisper of dread as I pressed my thumbprint to the tempered glass, because the truth is that every time I connect to the Internet I feel like I’m putting myself at risk of seeing The Worst Thing Ever™ or being made privy to a total stranger’s darkest secrets. It is difficult to write about a culture from within it, because culture is innate; culture is ordinary… but I’m going to try my best.
This week I’ve decided to get back into some “Complicated Feelings” and wanted to tackle something that has been on my mind for quite some time. Bear with me as this might get a bit messy and longwinded, and before I get started I want to say this: If you find yourself beginning to feel the pointed heat of an angry thought while reading this, or while reading anything in the next week, I encourage you to examine what exactly is making you feel that way, evaluate if your anger is worth the energy it takes, and take a deep breath before doing anything else. Without any further preamble, here is “Complicated Feelings: Outrage Culture”.
Shame and norms are evolutionarily important aspects of society with respect to building trust and social cohesion. Shame is fairly inherent to humanness and, when processed thoughtfully, can be a means of self-improvement or self examination. But the world is messy and complicated and, in practice, we don’t seem to process anything in a particularly thoughtful way. The advancements of technology, social media, journalism, and the economy of the Internet have created a culture of outrage that is under-discussed in its relation to our current political climate, and over-discussed as it relates to "sensitivity". Let’s dive in.
The dollar is king, and controversy can be staggeringly profitable. No outlet understands this better than Fox News – a network that for legal reasons presents itself as entertainment rather than news. A 24-hour outrage machine that so frequently and forcefully repeats its messaging and has served as the blueprint for talking heads like Alex Jones, whose conspiracy-addled ranting included calling the Sandy Hook shooting a hoax, and leading to “one father [saying that] conspiracy theorists urinated on his 7-year-old son’s grave and threatened to dig up the coffin.”
It’s everywhere. Headlines are written to elicit intense emotional reactions which are then more likely to get more clicks, more shares, more revenue, to the detriment of everyone. This is not just Fox News. For all of the right wing’s complaining about the “liberal media”, the fact remains that journalistic practices designed to stoke outrage and maximize profit got Donald Trump elected the first time and helped create the political landscape that led to his second presidency and the dismantling of our civic institutions. This all ties in with trolling and rage bait, and the famous Twitter adage of “Oh, you like pancakes? You must hate waffles!” When we willfully misrepresent situations online we perpetuate outrage culture and contribute to its effects on civil society.
Neither end of the political spectrum is immune to this outrage culture, though clearly the far right has achieved more through it. When I think about how outrage culture has infiltrated left-leaning communities both in person and online, I reflect on the tendency to think about “accountability” as the ability to respond to “gotchas” when true accountability requires the time to engage with our actions and understand how they impact the people around us. Many of us want our heroes to meet fictitious standards, and the vehement pursuit of moral high ground does nothing to actually advance the causes we care about. Digging up decade-old tweets and demanding explanations can be done tactfully, but not when every single internet user is frothing at the mouth to call someone out and have a moment of virality.
The key distinction between constructive and destructive outrage is that constructive outrage is directed at oppressive systems of power. The hard-earned successes #MeToo movement and the swift cultural backlash to it illustrates both of these directions – a movement built on outrage at gender-based violence that successfully took down powerful abusers very quickly had its own language twisted and used against itself, not always intentionally. I think that, as with any growing movement, a lot of caring people got more involved than they needed to be and began aggressively policing behavior that didn’t need to be policed, confusing personal discomfort for systemic abuse. This leads to hyperbolic rhetoric that discredits any points we would hope to make. To be clear: people should be reprimanded for bad behavior but, unless they commit truly awful acts, I don’t see any reason for the backlash to misdeeds to bear the full force of constant online harassment.
What this all boils down to in my mind is this: we’re deeply social creatures who invented pocket-sized dopamine machines rife with vitriol and extremism pipelines and proceeded to financially and algorithmically incentivize content full of misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric. Naturally the online ecosystem has gotten so flooded with outrage-inducing content that bad actors can now dismiss actual outrage at destructive policies and hate speech as sensitivity, victimhood mentality, or “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. A news cycle that moves as rapidly as it currently does produces no tangible resistance, and this is by design.
Generative AI is fueling this and will continue to do so, which I discussed previously in “Complicated Feelings: Generative AI and Technofascism”. There’s a mind-boggling amount of content online that is AI slop with the sole purpose of generating outrage and doing so successfully. It’s all over Facebook and Twitter, and any time someone chimes in to say “this image isn’t real”, a barrage of users who are remarkably certain of themselves insist that the image might not be real but it sheds light on a real thing.
But it doesn’t. You’ve invented a situation, fabricated evidence, and driven yourself into a rage about it, and you’re making it everyone else’s problem.
I want to talk specifically about the many ways in which outrage culture has been weaponized against its ultimate targets: immigrants, trans people, and Black people. How many articles have been written about protecting women’s sports from trans athletes? Who wrote these articles, and how much money has it made them? And how many times has this outrage been directed at athletes who are not trans? (At least 3 that I can think of off the top of my head: Imane Khelif, Caster Semenya, and Lin Yu-Ting; the point being that transphobia directly ties into misogyny and homophobia) Thinly veiled dehumanization of trans people is an industry. It has launched careers on Fox News, is being used in Congress to build political profiles and as a fundraising tactic, and is the go-to comedy routine for has-beens who aren’t funny enough to come up with actually good material. I just imagine it must be awfully tiring to be so angry all the time, but I don’t think the people creating the outrage are actually angry, they just see a money-making opportunity,
All of this outrage has led to a brutal year for these communities, leading to instances including but not limited to:
The defamation of the immigrant community of Springfield, Illinois
The torture and murder of Sam Nordquist
The murder of Tahiry Broom
The murder of Nex Benedict
The suicide of Jocelynn Rojo Carranza due to bullying
I really want to give each of these people and communities the attention they deserve, to eulogize each of them properly, and there are certainly people I have forgotten that deserve to be mourned (see Complicated Feelings: Eulogy and Euphoria) but it is simply too much. What I find myself struggling with the most, beyond the tragedy of these lives cut short, is the immediate and insistent auditing of their worth online. The internet needs a perfect victim to express any sympathy at all, and even then it always comes with questions like “what did they do to provoke this” or sweeping statements like “he was being a public nuisance” and the thinly-veiled implication that the punishment for addiction or a public mental health crisis should be death. Everyone seems to be preemptively outraged and disgusted and we’re all too busy policing each other or writing call-out Twitter threads to direct our outrage at the people and institutions who are profiting off of it.
So where do we go from here? In truth I have no idea, I’m just a twenty-something with a Substack and, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, and there is a lot, I still foolishly believe that the world is filled, for the most part, with decent people who are just trying their best. Those people need to remember to use their anger strategically. In the immortal words of Maya Angelou, “You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You catch it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.”
Until next time.
J.K.
Hello everyone. Thanking you for subscribing – I’m very touched to have the beginning of a small readership and I hope you’ll stick around.
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Excellent piece.