Right now, with millions of people busily shifting their alliance from the online home of of one egotistical, unchecked billionaire to that of the other egotistical, unchecked billionaire, there seems to be hope that the shift will, at least for awhile, throw off the accumulated cruft of trolls and Nazis, allowing some sign of a vaguely remembered golden age to be restored. Good luck with that.
We live in a capitalist society that has spent centuries inventing tools to aid in the concentration of wealth. The end result of that evolution is corporations: money-moving engines which remain, to date, the most efficient form of turning the work of thousands—and the needs of millions—into a fat stack of cash for a very, very few.
Social media plays the same role with attention that a corporation does with money. Since the long-departed site Six Degrees first appeared in 1997, social media has been iterated with the speed that only online activity has made possible. Each one of those generations has resulted in a better machine for taking the interest generated by millions of users and turning it into fame for a handful of “thought leaders” or “influencers” or other labels which have passed as quickly as the sites that spawned them.
And the result is the outrage economy.
Just as late-stage capitalism is engrossed in wiping away every benefit workers gained over centuries of negotiating the relationship between labor and reward, the outrage economy has risen up to guarantee that, no matter the intention, every venture into social media trends toward disaster.
Within the past few decades, big-box stores sucked up the profits that once went to small businesses, while returning lower pay and fewer jobs. Then online retail consumed many of the big-box stores, returning even fewer jobs and even worse pay.
Social media has done the same with both “news,” in terms of news once shared over picket fences or among those waiting for a trim at the barbershop, and News in terms of what was once printed in things called “newspapers” or broadcast in a compact half-hour format at 6 and 10 PM.
Within that news there was always a strong pull toward what was once called “yellow journalism,” also known as juicy gossip, tabloid news, and more recently as clickbait. Reasonable news about reasonable people doing reasonable things has always generated boredom. A good WTF? reaction has always been valuable, whether that was in print, on the screen, or online.
As social media has evolved, it has trended toward a system that rewards those able to gain and hold public attention, with prizes that can range from a satisfying emotional pat on the back to a lucrative contract to continue spreading f-ckery in prime time on Fox News.
And for those who thought that Threads, the newest social media network, was going to offer some kind of break from the awfulness, The Washington Post has news for you.
Meta is done moderating … As it builds out Threads, Meta will probably offer users control over what kind of content they see—including the diciest and most controversial posts—rather than the company making those decisions on its own, Meta Global Affairs President Nick Clegg told The Washington Post. That’s a strategy that Meta has already embraced on Facebook, where the company has increasingly given users more ways to shape what appears in their news feeds.
Meta isn’t going to slow the roll of the outrage economy: It’s going to accelerate it. Which means that things will absolutely become worse.
“A wretched hive of scum and villainy” might not seem like a guarantee in a system designed around the unmoderated hunt for eyeballs, but that’s what it is. It’s almost as certain and mathematically definable as the relationship between entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
In the outrage economy, there are several ways to win the hunt for more gigaseconds of attention. You can be outrageously funny. Outrageously sweet. Outrageously talented. Even outrageously brilliant. All those things will capture at least some of the internet’s limited attention for some brief period. But in an unregulated system, none of them can compete with outrageously vile (link intentionally omitted).
The reason is simple enough: Anyone can do it. To detail some point of history or science takes knowledge. To produce a moment of humor requires both empathy and serendipity. To take some musical instrument and drive it into the human heart takes years of practice and unflagging dedication. But to insult people based on their race, their gender, their sexuality, their religion, their ability, or any of another score of deeply held attributes simply takes setting aside morality for the span of 280 characters.
Anyone can be a troll. It doesn’t take years of training or research: It just takes a willingness to take joy from causing pain. The more pain, the better.
Here’s how it works, in one simple lesson:
Say something nasty. Say something mean. Dip down into the monsters of the id and let them rage. If your rant happens to involve a few misspelled words, historical mistakes, or scientific principles turned on their heads, that only makes it better. Because even people who were willing to overlook racism, misogyny, and bigotry of all kinds will step in to correct your use of a preposition or the date of Bunker Hill. Anytime you get a response that starts with, “Well actually…”—give yourself bonus points.
Other forms of outrage may take work, but to be outrageously stupid or outrageously cruel—and those are often the same thing—can be as simple as taking a crap on the sidewalk.
Just look at the list of the first people who Twitter is paying under its new program to pay “creators.”
“Wow. Elon Musk wasn’t kidding. Content monetization is real,” tweeted an anonymous account called End Wokeness, with 1.4 million followers, accompanied by a screenshot showing earnings of over $10,400. …
“This is a nice turnaround from being banned by Twitter 1.0 for almost 2 years to now being paid to post Thank you @elonmusk,” tweeted far-right influencer Rogan O’Handley, known as DC Draino.
This is a system in which cruelty, intolerance, and a disdain for truth aren’t just tolerated; they’re profitable—both for Twitter and for the most vile of its users.
There are so many ways to work this scheme. Outrageously racist. Outrageously misogynistic. Outrageously bigoted. The outrage economy holds niches for every way in which people can be hurt, and offers up an incentive to find more.
Like a bloody traffic accident, outrage seldom fails to gather attention. In the outrage economy, that attention can be translated into a kind of fame, and even into wealth. And if an outrageous claim draws outraged replies, that only increases the payout.
That’s it. That’s why things get worse. Because outrageously hard takes work, while outrageously evil is simple. The ease with which the outrage economy rewards low-effort hate, vs. the bar it sets for reward for accomplishment, drags social media—and society—inexorably down.
The only thing that can arrest that slide is moderation. That moderation must be done by people who understand the subtleties of meaning, rather than trying to match replies to a set of simplistic rules. But moderation costs money. Good moderation costs a lot of money.
And why should Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk want to moderate in the first place? This is the outrage economy. Bring on the outrage.
