Shaaaame!

“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” == “Where there’s smoke, there’s blindness.”

Outrage is now a mechanism to drive ad traffic. Like fear used to sell papers, now it’s outrage to deliver page views. The product is you, staking out your position in the middle of the mob, where you can feel safe. But the only way to win is not to play.

Did someone just say something stupid? Now it’s here on your screen, and you have a tiny chance of saying something back to the author. How dare they say something so stupid where you, and others, can go read it. It might reach other people – not the stupid author, not you, not your fellow angry commenters, but some potential other third party that is gullible or equally stupid – and reinforce their stupidity. You must stop it! You have to drown it out in recrimination and mockery or sarcastic politeness! Quick, the chance to strike a blow against some stupid words that are on your screen is passing with every second, as the replies stack up and the crowd grows. Swing your fist before the target is obscured beneath other fists!

Whom do you blame for the stupid thing on your screen? The person you don’t really know, who said it somewhere, at some point, a hundred or a thousand miles away? Or the chain of people who picked it up, and eagerly carried it all the way over to you and stuck it in your face? The chain is mostly anonymous. Hard to grasp. Ephemeral. And some of them are your friends – can you blame them? So much easier to accept their target as a gift and join in with the attack. An amusing and victimless crime — well, except for the victim, naturally, but whatever.

He always, always deserves it – not just the snarky ripostes, but the insults, the crank calls, the petitions for firing and destitution, the fraud and vandalism and trespassing. And hey – you didn’t want it to go that far, you just left a comment, and passed it on. … Which is exactly how and why it came to the attention of the worst actors in the mob.

The only way to win is not to play.

Did you ever stop to think that the person who wrote the stupid thing did not intend you – or anyone – to be the audience? Perhaps you think that doesn’t matter? Should everything said behind closed doors be sanitized for a global audience? That’s an impossible standard. But as long as it’s not you being held to it, it’s a fair one. Let the games begin.

The next time you feel the urge to ‘Like’ or comment under some political screed on Facebook, ask yourself what it will actually accomplish. Ask if the political screed changed your mind. Did it? No. It either made you agree, or disagree and chuck an angry comment beneath it. Either way you’ve just given it another little push, causing this waste of your time to perpetuate further into a waste of someone else’s, and more time on Facebook in general. A little scrap of your life is gone – gone! For nothing! Some electrons moved; that’s it! – and meanwhile, Facebook earned a little money from an advertiser by sticking an ad on the corner of your screen. You have just been rage-baited. You have just been used.

You have just contributed to the using of others, including your friends and family.

Remember the conspiracy theorists on the liberal fringe ten years ago, who liked to scream “wake up, sheeple”? Well there’s no conspiracy required here. Just the extension of marketing tactics into social networking technology. We’re all wide awake; our only failure is in failing to understand that our online activity is now subject to such heavy filtering and interference that our political arguments and virulent “public” shamings are almost entirely self-referential, like yelling “booo, hiss” at the rich oligarch on a movie screen after we’ve wordlessly paid 15 bucks to get inside the theatre. In our enthusiasm for what’s on the screen, we forget that everyone around us is already a customer, viewing something constructed by others to gather an audience: Rage is cathartic. You’ll pay for catharsis, and the net is designed to deliver.

Money talks. And money can also silence.

Where I live, the core of modern liberal culture spent the last 30 years haughtily mocking conservatives for being manipulated by fear of other religions, distrust of foreigners, and blind aggressive patriotism. “My country, right or wrong.” It was a convenient stereotype. Now the same liberals that dealt such mockery in the previous generation are in thrall to armchair political “activism” and abusive online culture wars, happily abandoning common sense and common courtesy for the chance to extoll the superiority of their barely-tested morals. The stereotypes they mocked 30 years ago are even less true today, yet their jeering is louder than ever, because an entire economic system has built up around exploiting their self-righteousness. They vent their rage inside a gigantic circus tent (replete with easy scapegoats and strawmen), constructed to reward them with a feeling of progressive accomplishment, while companies sell tickets at the door. This is the new middle-class pastime. This is the new Sunday Night Football. And it means about as much.

When you’re online hunting for a product, presenting the right search result to you is worth a nice chunk of money. But when you’re online because you’re following a compulsion to “make your voice heard”, that’s a whole lot more time online, during which you can be distracted by anything – because you’re not looking for anything in particular, except validation. An ad thrown at you just as you’re finding that validation is worth a lot to an advertiser. How many times have you finished making your comment, or airing your fetid complaint, or satisfying your righteousness, and sent your eyes wandering around the screen for the next thing to explore, while those happy chemicals are still percolating in your brain?

The product is you, delivered to the ads, with an open mind, ready to celebrate.

Turn off. Tune out. Drop the connection. Go outside. Change the real world. Forget this fake one.

The only way to win is not to play.