Decontextualized outrage storms generate engagement revenue while destroying context and attention.

Evidence

When the alt-right weaponizes context (or lack thereof) in this way, not only is actual context ignored, but the targeted figures’ names can become triggers in themselves. … I can’t help but liken the angry collective tweet storms to watching a flood erode a landscape with no ground-cover plants to slow it down. The natural processes of context and attention are lost. But from the point of view of Twitter’s financial model, the storm is nothing but a bounteous uptick in engagement. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 545

Categorization

• SEED: The ground-cover erosion metaphor for how platform economics rewards context-destruction could anchor an essay on why outrage is profitable erosion.
• XREF: connects to: Outrage fuels the very media systems and politics it claims to oppose. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1692