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I’m crossing my fingers the hate machine will fizzle itself out. People have to get bored with outrage eventually, right?

• ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  I thought this a while ago, but there are some people whose entire online identity revolves around sharing and propagating outrage. Which is to say I think that even if the things people get outraged about were to reduce, I think that people would in turn get outraged about smaller things.
  • krapp 8y ago
    >Which is to say I think that even if the things people get outraged about were to reduce, I think that people would in turn get outraged about smaller things. I think the cases for which that's true don't tend to correlate with the sort of content we're discussing. I don't think "outrage culture" is the reason people object to Alex Jones, as an example.
    • merpnderp 8y ago
      But crazy people like Alex Jones have always been around (not that I think he's crazy, only evilly making a mint of money taking advantage of the crazy and gullible). Outrage culture on the other hand is a fairly new phenomena associated with social media, and thrives due to socially reinforcing group building feigned outrage. If people who didn't like Alex Jones, simply ignored him, he'd sink back into the shadows and have a tiny fraction of his audience. But he's a handy foil for the outrage culture to get their outrage on.
      • krapp 8y ago
        >If people who didn't like Alex Jones, simply ignored him, he'd sink back into the shadows and have a tiny fraction of his audience. He wouldn't necessarily, because the people who don't like him aren't the ones making him popular. And his message has real-world consequences which sometimes can't be simply ignored. Harassing the victims of mass shootings is going to become a thing now because he's convinced people that all of them are staged and the victims are crisis actors. >But he's a handy foil for the outrage culture to get their outrage on. We may simply be disagreeing on what constitutes outrage culture. To me, it's outrage for its own sake, outrage as identity politics and virtue signaling ... and there is certainly a lot of that on social media. But people also have legitimate and understandable reasons to be outraged at Alex Jones and people like him, which to me makes it no longer outrage culture, but just outrage.
        • merpnderp 8y ago
          "...because the people who don't like him aren't the ones making him popular." He claims he's received over 5 million new subscriptions to his paid service since he was kicked off multiple social media sites. And even if he's lying about that, the Streisand effect is real. "But people also have legitimate and understandable reasons..." This is a guy who says lizard people from Mars are deeply involved in the ongoings of our politics. Being outraged that a (pretend) crazy person says something crazy seems like an incredibly useless and unproductive emotional response.
          • krapp 8y ago
            Someone with an assault rifle showed up at a pizzeria because Alex Jones pushed Pizzagate. Sandy Hook victims are being harassed because Alex Jones convinced people they were just actors. He believes Jews did 9/11 and are secretly false-flagging the alt-right and white supremacist movements. If the only people he demonized were "lizard people from Mars," then yes, it would be silly to take him seriously, because there aren't any actual lizard people from Mars who could be victimized by that, but that isn't the case.
    • pjc50 8y ago
      Alex Jones is outrage culture, surely? His entire shtick was manufactured outrage about the government, "leftists" etc.
      • krapp 8y ago
        His outrage may have been manufactured, but his listeners and detractors take him seriously, so I don't believe the reaction to his content counts as outrage culture.
        • root_axis 8y ago
          Are you suggesting that the left doesn't take their outrage seriously?
          • krapp 8y ago
            I... never even mentioned "the left." Or the right.
            • root_axis 8y ago
              No, you did not explicitly mention it, but since you're stating that right-wing rhetoric (alex jones) "doesn't count" as outrage culture since the fans and critics take him seriously, there seems to be an unspoken implication that "actual" outrage culture (most often attributed to the left) does not similarly fall under the category of being taken seriously. I didn't want to make assumptions though so I asked.
              • krapp 8y ago
                I'm stating that the reaction to Alex Jones is what doesn't count as outrage culture, specifically because people take him seriously. You could find the same phenomena at work on the other side of the spectrum but I'm lazy and CBA to equivocate. But my thesis is literally that once people take it seriously, it no longer becomes outrage culture, which is a politically neutral statement. Notwithstanding the implicit politically biased undertones which make "unspoken implications" difficult to avoid.
  • fipple 8y ago
    Isn’t that what’s already happened? We went from civil rights movements for blacks (>10%) to gays (<5%) to transgender (<1%).
    • pjc50 8y ago
      Just because - in fact especially because - someone is in the numerical minority doesn't make it right to abuse them.
      • fipple 8y ago
        Sure, but it limits the amount of impact your movement can have. If you save black Jewish vegan disabled lesbians from oppression that’s admirable but ultimately only affects 10 people.