Against the Rage Machine
Right and left, tech corporations beg you to say your piece for the sake of content-generation, free publicity, hype, and ad sales. America’s speech is so free, it pays—just not you.
We’re familiar with the engines of the rage machine: “click bait” in publications, fearmongering in official political statements, the “scandalous” in mainstream performance, the “problematic” in academia and art. These are fury genres, inexhaustible genres, genres that will always drum up attention. It is understood that a reader’s emotional investment in any of these will produce a “contribution,” which circulates the subject of conversation and keeps it, and its platform, relevant and therefore alive. Under these conditions, caring becomes a liability. We pity the suckers who fall for the rager of the week, those mad-for-a-day people who can’t see how much the latest outburst is “news” but not news.
.. To be in a constant state of rage, by contrast, is only the other side of piety and pseudoscience, the kind of belief that forms a quick chorus and cannot be disproved. Scroll down your Facebook feed and see if you don’t find one ditto after another. So many people with “good” or “bad politics,” delivered with conviction to rage or applause; so little doubt, error, falsifiability—surely the criteria by which anything true, or democratic, could ever be found.