Outrage Porn As A Cheap Luxury

Technology brings billionaire-tier-insecurity to the masses

Not too long ago, automobiles existed only as weird toys for the rich - today they are commonplace. In much the same way, it used to be a luxury to be surrounded by people who constantly affirmed your superiority, but today everyone gets to have that experience thanks to social media. 

Social media constantly affirms our superiority in many ways - it shows you that your worldview is baked into the fabric of reality in an obvious way, that all right-thinking people agree with you, that everyone who disagrees with you is stupid or evil or both. Even when it agitates you it affirms you - when the social media algorithm presents you with images of atrocities or with clips of your enemies doing and saying evil things, even when you feel disgusted and angry you get to feel better than these terrible things and the terrible people who cause them. 

I think of it as ‘outrage porn’, delivering affirmation-through-outrage in the same frictionless way that porn-as-we-know-it delivers affirmation-through-erotic-stimulation. In porn-as-we-know-it your desires get to be realized and reflected back to you without any risk at all of anything going wrong, zero risk of disappointment or heartbreak for anyone involved, nothing but wish fulfillment as far as the eye can see. I don’t think porn is wrong in and of itself, just as there’s nothing wrong with outrage in and of itself either - I do think it’s risky, though, to have effortless gratification be the gravitational pull of our digital world, especially when that effortless gratification is self-obscuring behind a veil of anger and outrage. 

If you consume enough outrage porn then everything turns into outrage porn, including the absence of outrage. A non-outraged person becomes cause for outrage - their comfort and joy can only be there because they live in willful ignorance of the outrageous things, or because they somehow profit from the outrageous things. A moment of joy in your own life becomes an outrageous distraction from the outrage. The world affirms your exhilarating superiority to the world, everywhere you look. 

The key to this phenomenon, I think, lies in the word itself - outrage is pointed at a target external to you, at the thing you are absolutely sure is somehow at fault for all of the misery you feel and perceive. Outrage keeps you safe from the inrage, from the self-hatred that creeps in at the edges, from the burning terror that would come from seeing yourself as somehow responsible for your own suffering. 

Outrage, as such, is tremendously disempowering. It can feel empowering, moving one to be extremely antagonistic and confrontational, while also hiding the power that can only come from taking responsibility for improving your own life. I think this phenomenon explains a lot of the pan-activist mission creep seen in the left - Planned Parenthood is expected to also have the right opinions about conflict in the Middle East, the Sierra Club is expected to also have the right opinions about trans rights. It wouldn’t work if any organization had limited and attainable goals, since that would risk success, and success would take away the outrage that keeps activists energized and safe. 

This isn’t to condemn activism, nor to say that the world is somehow perfect, nor to say that there is nothing that can be done to improve the world. What I’m worried about here isn’t about facts, but about a disposition, a phenomenon that feels and sounds empowering but that turns out to be the opposite. 

Taking responsibility for one’s own life - for the story you tell about yourself, for how you show up in your relationships big and small - involves moving through the shame that comes from seeing yourself as responsible for your own suffering. To reclaim your power you have to see how you actually had power in your life all along, including where you really thought you didn’t, and to deal with the feelings that come with that realization. To claim your power you have to be humble enough to accept that you destroyed yourself for nothing. 

After that, and only after that, can we really begin to build a better world together.