The Outrage Factory
Rage as the Ultra-Processed Mind Food
Outrage is the ultra-processed food of digital commerce now, extruded rather than considered, an amalgam of substances not found in nature combined in an artificial way to override our natural appetites and spur us on to consume more, to create more, to spread it like wildfire in dry grass.
Bad things happened to a number of women in the last few weeks.
This is not unusual. If I don’t detail the specific atrocities, this will be an evergreen article, as relevant this week as it will be three months from now or as it would have been three years ago.
Except some years ago, it wouldn’t have been used as fuel to drive engagement. People would not have been cynically crafting little bonfires of outrage to spread, like live coals, among the other posts. The ones I noticed this week and last, the small floating fire starters, were on LinkedIn.
Some of the sentiments expressed are genuine, and the people who write them are trying to raise awareness or call out injustice. Social media can be positive. And I am not the boss of content, the arbiter of what should or should not appear in those places. I, myself have earnestly turned to various public platforms, including this one, with a sense of outrage or frustration or to outline something I believe is wrong or stupid or destructive. I am doing that right now, I understand that.
Outrage, rage, frustration, the calling to account, all have a place in the public square. Anger can be helpful fuel to change politics, shift opinions, demand action. Angry people can change systems. Outrage before social media was a force to be reckoned with, often unpalatable to others, but sustaining, like a kind of emotional hardtack. Hardtack is a dry baked good, light on flavor, but heavy on durability, that sustained many a sailor or soldier on a long journey.
Outrage now is the ultra-processed food of digital commerce, extruded rather than considered, an amalgam of substances not found in nature combined in an artificial way to override our natural appetites and spur us on to consume more, to create more, to spread like wildfire.
Like actual ultra-processed foods, the machine of outrage will hurt your heart, damage your brain, shorten your life and take you away from the things that are actually important – your children, your community, your garden, your health, your art, your joys.
I got this idea reading a fusillade of posts on LinkedIn from (mostly white) women repeating stories about terrible violence towards women. Some of them responded with their own experiences with violence or sexual harassment. I was okay with all of that. But some of the posts started to feel manufactured, like catching a violent meme wave. The posts that denigrated men for not performing outrage to these women’s specifications felt ultra-processed to me as well.
Yes, some men obediently posted agreement that men should not do terrible things to women, apparently demonstrating by this statement of the blindingly obvious that they were the good guys, the ones who can perform allyship, which felt like a personal brand building reflex.
Some white woman on LinkedIn who works in corporate America who thinks she’s burnishing her personal brand by stating that it is bad when women are sexually harassed, murdered by their partners, or gang raped, is not providing new information. And chastising people for how they comment or don’t, shaming them for how effectively they perform umbrage isn’t helping.
How to do better
Here's how to do better. I follow some wonderful influencers on social media, women who dive into the specifics of how to take political action, who inform more effectively and comprehensively than the mainstream media about issues that matter to me, like reproductive health care4, gun control, the care economy, parental leave. They inform and activate, and I appreciate them for that.
On LinkedIn, I also follow women who are writers, scholars, activists, who post meaningful thought leadership about how to work more intentionally, how to build more equitable workplaces, and I appreciate the content they provide. It’s not hardtack, its bread, fresh from the oven, sustaining.
Those are not the people I’m calling out.
I commented on one of the slew of articles. I said that I had lost jobs when I called out sexual harassment. And if we want to help women, especially women in advertising, which was the subject of that particular post, we should organize to provide substantive legal support so women who have been discriminated against can have access to legal representation, like I did. I paid for it. Others can’t afford that.
We should have a fund to help other women who get fired for calling out a hostile work environment like I did, who might not have the savings I could turn to when I got fired. Write posts that direct women to these resources or build them if they don’t exist. Show us the influencers who are organizing around providing financial support to women who are the victims of violence, who are working for legal protection. Post links to non-profits where we can donate. Tell us which electeds to call to effect political change. Use the outrage as fuel for action, not your personal digital engagement.
And if you can’t provide a bridge to action, be quiet. LinkedIn is nominally about career networking. If you try to increase your engagement on that platform by condemning something as terrible as murder or rape, and then shaming people who don’t respond in the way you specify, you are kicking a campfire, so embers rise into the air of what we already know is a tinder dry powder key. If that’s who you are, that tells me everything I need to know about your personal brand, and you as a person. And it is not a good look.