Outrage fuels the very media systems and politics it claims to oppose.

Evidence

Outrage is not merely impotent, it is actively counterproductive, feeding the very enemy we claim to want to defeat. That’s because, firstly, outrage is part of the very currency of what Jodi Dean calls communicative capitalism, which depends not on content but on the sheer circulation of messages. Even when the Mail was vilified for its headline, such vilification only becomes the libidinal juice of the Mail’s communicative capitalism (there will be more messages, more posts, more tweets; we will read even if we don’t “want” to; we will read because we’re not supposed to). Secondly, since there is an infinite supply of things to be outraged about, the tendency towards outrage indefinitely locks us up in a series of reactive battles, fought on the enemy’s territory and on its terms. … Thirdly, outrage reflects a fundamental political misunderstanding, both of our opponents and of the war that they are waging. Such outrage, as Wendy Brown puts it in her crucial essay “Moralism as Anti-Politics”, “implicitly figures the state (and other mainstream institutions) as if it did not have specific political and economic investments, as if it were not the codification of various dominant social powers, but was, rather, a momentarily misguided parent who forgot her promise to treat all her children the same way.” — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1692

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense three-part causal dissection of why outrage is counterproductive as political praxis, resisting one-sentence summary and worth sitting with.
• SEED: The anatomy of outrage in the attention economy is an essay angle: how moral indignation has become the raw material of the very platforms that defeat the left.
• XREF: connects to: Users co-create the outrage storm they complain about. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 228; Decontextualized outrage storms generate engagement revenue while destroying context and attention. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 545; Emotionally charged content spreads better, so platforms optimize for outrage — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 487 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Users co-create the outrage storm they complain about. #exemplifies (0.95) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 228
• Critics are implicated in the systems they condemn #exemplifies (0.92)
• Decontextualized outrage storms generate engagement revenue while destroying context and attention. #expands (0.85) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 545
• Emotionally charged content spreads better, so platforms optimize for outrage #corroborates (0.80) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 487