Any citizen of the social internet knows the feeling: that irritable contentiousness, that desire to get into it that seems almost impossible to resist, even though you know you’ve already squandered too many hours and too much emotional energy on pointless internet disputes. If you use Twitter, you may have noticed that at least half the posts seemed intent on making someone—especially you—mad. In his new book, Outrage Machine, the technology researcher Tobias Rose-Stockwell explains that the underlying architecture of the biggest social media platforms is essentially (although, he argues, unintentionally) designed to get under your skin in just this way. The results, unsurprisingly, have been bad for our sanity, our culture, and our politics.
On this topic, an increasingly popular one as the social media economy convulses in response to Twitter’s Elonification, the preferred tone is either stern jeremiad or, for the well and truly addicted commentator (usually a journalist), a sort of punch-drunk nihilism much like that of someone who declares he’ll never quit smoking even though it’s going to kill him. Rose-Stockwell, by contrast, keeps his cool, pointing out that social media is full of “angry, terrible content” that makes our lives worse, while carefully avoiding any sign of partisanship or panic.
Hot take: if you want to get rid of the outrage, get rid of the stupid.
Decontextualisation might be the fuel of the outrage fire, but it only thrives in an atmosphere full of stupidity.
And by “stupidity” in this case I mean four things:
- Context illiteracy. Inability to retrieve info from available context, or to notice that the context is missing on first place.
- Assumptive behaviour. Failure to distinguish between what one knows, and what one doesn’t know.
- Oversimplification. Resistance against complexity and subtlety.
- Irrelevancy. Lack of focus on what is relevant on a certain matter. Such as obsessing over “who’s saying it” instead of “what is being said”.
Does this remind you guys of any social network out there? It does, for me; all of the corporation-controlled ones are mostly inhabited by users like this. They were tailored for the stupid.
Problem with attacking stupidity is its not necessarily fixable. We do not attack people over things they cannot change, like the color of their skin or their sexual orientation.
How do they change their innate intelligence? We’re not all gifted with the same amount. Can your system apply to someone who takes 5 minutes to learn the definition of even one new word? Someone who needed remedial classes, because the average classes were beyond their ability?
We need a system that allows for them too. So, asking for intelligence is asking too much, so that the execution of the method is easily within everyone’s capabilities. Thus, back to the drawing board.
In large part, the stupidity that I’m talking about is not something innate, a lack of mental ableness. It’s a bunch of shitty habits, related to how we’ve been trained. Traditional social media trained us to engage in those habits, and in the same form I think that healthy social environment should train us to avoid them.
Just like people would look at you and say “eeeew, can you not do that?” if you pick your nose in public, we should be doing the same towards people oversimplifying matters, or ignoring the context.
(The people that you’re talking about - the ones with learning disabilities - are the least concern here. They usually know that they don’t know.)
It always struck me as kinda insane how much microblogging seemed perfectly designed for all four of those phenomena and yet was widely embraced and loved.
Exactly. 280 characters*, replies being seen without the text that they reply to, the mess that you see when you look at a random hashtag… and perhaps not surprisingly those are things that Mastodon addressed. The difference is blatant - explain something poorly in Mastodon and people will either ignore you or say “what do you mean by that?”; do it in Twitter and you’ll see an angry mob waving pitchforks.
*Thankfully Elon Musk is a moron and inadvertently fixed this, by increasing the character limit. If he knew what he was doing he wouldn’t do it.
Yep same thing with all those ads like 90% fail this. They’re designed to drive engagement. Best thing you can do is stop doom scrolling. Failing that, ignoring those obvious attempts to get you to respond.
I would like to ignore it but after seeing internet stupidity manifesting into real world political lunacy, it would be nice to have an option that addresses the root of the problem better than just individualy disengaging.
Responding to manufactured outrage is a mistake, but ignoring it would only work if everyone did that. When does that ever happen? Ultimately, that only preserves your own peace of mind. That is, assuming you won’t be the target of the political nonsense brewing.
The problem is that social media is leaking into the real world.
I suppose the best we could do is more misinformation?
Get the lunatics to believe the election is a week later, or something.
Great topic! Looks like a very fun book to read too. So do the Sapiens books mentioned in the article. Nice.
In this scenario, “Bob” is a hypothetical guy who believes that a woman has cut in front of him in line at the supermarket checkout. He and the woman get into a brief shouting match before she informs Bob that she’d just ducked out of her spot in the line to replace a carton of eggs that turned out to be cracked. He apologizes, and that’s the end of it—except someone recorded the incident on their smartphone, then uploaded only the shouting match, reading all kinds of deplorable motives into it. “The video need only include a hint of cultural asymmetry,” Rose-Stockwell writes:
It may be seen as an angry outburst by a man (Bob) toward a woman (the other shopper). Or a Democrat (Bob) toward a Republican (the lady). Or any heightened reflection of their implied group identity. It can be repackaged as an example of a troubling trend in society. People who feel this way who see the clip now have an opportunity to explain exactly why it’s offensive. They can link it to a larger narrative that may have nothing to do with the actual event itself.
That outrage is often stoked by journalists, who, Rose-Stockwell notes, “are shockingly susceptible to reporting on this kind of thing,” furthering what he calls “trigger chains: cascades of outrage that are divorced from the original event.”
This is so common… And not only with incidents where a part of them can be taken out of context and used to evoke emotional response related to rage.
This was what The Social Dilemma, the Facebook documentary front Netflix was about.
What was well and truly wild is that, despite everyone I know watching the documentary, most still to this day do not wait or attempt to look for the whole picture. The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse is a great example. There are still people to this day who believe he shot black people, for Christ’s sake. Whether you agree with the outcome of the trial or not, to refuse to think you yourself easily fall for propaganda is outrageous.
People watch The Social Dilemma or read this artical and still think it only applies to those whom they disagree with.
Buddha says that you can either attempt to change nature, or come to terms that you will never change nature and must change yourself. Or something, im not a Buddhist.
Stoicism says something similar, although it gets there via a very different route.
