why we're all getting meaner and meaner online
Yes, being a professional asshole is now a viable career option. Which is awful news for online discourse.
According to the writers at Slate, there’s a new approach to politics on the left called Dark Woke, based on rebuking the notion that when the right goes low, the left goes high. For example, instead of stern statements condemning the inflammatory rhetoric of Randy Fine, the congressman from Florida trying to audition as a Rumble streamer, there was a flood of angry jokes about hunting him with harpoons.
Why? Fine, you see, is a man one could describe as in shape because a sphere also counts as a shape. People don’t come to see him as much as they fall into his gravity well. When lobbyists are done meeting with him, they don’t leave, they try to achieve escape velocity. If you put a cup of water on the floor, you’ll know he’s coming from half a mile away. You get the idea.
This is presented as a grave violation of the liberal code. Fatphobia was never to be used as a tool of criticism under any circumstances, no matter the target until these new Dark Woke disciples finally decided that MAGA was fair game. Which is all nice and well except for one small problem with the whole idea.
Despite the wildly outsized voices publications like, well, believe it or not, Slate, and its counterparts in The Atlantic, NYT, and Salon gave the people who demanded that any criticism of right wing politics is phobia, insult, and shaming free, this was never an actual rule. Conservatives love to insult liberals, and 99.99% of liberals will insult them right back without a second thought.
Although, for a more nuanced picture, according to recent research, the right uses an insult in its rhetoric nearly three times as often as the left, as anyone who ever had to deal with typical MAGA questions like “I just wanted to ask all my soycuck beta libtard Marxist commie groomer Demon-rats, when did you start hating America?” which are by now like the black mold of social media.
why flame wars never die anymore
All of this is old news, far older than Trump lowering his bulk down a golden escalator to issue a rallying cry to the nation’s deplorables, grifters, scammers, and the spiritual heirs of AM radio shock jocks. Dark Woke is a term coined solely to try and get a new hashtag trending on X, where all too many mainstream journalists still hang out to get attention and views because ultimately, this is what it’s all about for them.
Likewise, Meta’s social platforms which claim a third of the planet’s internet users, is banking on discord and outrage as its primary business model. Hate farming is a big source of engagement and traffic for wannabe influencers, engagement that can be easily monetized. Our politicians have turned into trolls and edgelords for attention, and this is actually keeping social platforms from even trying to draw a line on how heated they’re comfortable getting the angry discourse get.
In short, as Louis Theroux told journalists over at Wired as part of the press junket for his new Manosphere documentary — which we’ll absolutely talk about, don’t worry for even a second that we won’t — it’s that by encouraging and monetizing the worst of human nature, it’s become highly profitable to be a dick on the internet.
And I mean, sure, we can sit here and talk about how posts sent to random people we don’t know, will almost certainly never meet, and aren’t seeing face to face, lower our inhibitions. We can mention how the nature of lashing out for an audience drives us to escalate instead of looking like we backed down from a fight. We can even debate the nature of human good and evil if we really wanted.
However, we can also note that we only have so much tolerance for this, and that we may post angry and aggressive things on the web, but usually, we’re not out there on a mission to hate on people for the sake of hating on them. It takes a certain, rare kind of person to do this. A person we would call a performative dickhead. A person who is making public, performative hate a career and fills our timelines with rage because it’s very lucrative for them to keep doing it.
we’re on our worst, most profitable behavior
This is the draw for fans of the Manosphere, redpillers, MAGA influencers, and more or less the headliners of the streaming platform Kick. They want to see that intrusive thought win every time and live vicariously through people who want to nihilistically burn everything down because, well, they’re often teenagers drowning in hormones and in the throes of rebellious nihilism. We’ve all been there. We just haven’t had the ability to pay people to live out those rebellious fantasies for us.
In the past, there were limits to how mean, angry, or obnoxious we could get. Social consequences, for one, were a powerful motivator. If no one wanted to be your friend or hire you for a job, worried about your temper and soft skills, you tended to simmer down pretty quickly. Overwhelmingly negative feedback also served as a check. We are social animals after all, we do crave approval and irritating people while refusing even the pretense of impulse control is a good way to lose it.
Today, we’re rewarding antisocial behavior to the tune of six figures per month for the most obnoxious and least hinged. We algorithmically ensconce them into curated and self-selecting communities in which their bad behavior is cheered on. They see pretty much only approval, status, and money coming their way for, well, being a dick on the internet. Why would they stop?
And why wouldn’t they keep on riling us up, force feeding us hatred, and prodding us until we lash out right back when every incentive they have loudly screams at them to do it? Especially when we are no longer living, breathing people to them, but content to exploit, monetize, and them mock for making them rich and famous…