One aspect of social media that surprised almost everyone at first was the popularity of outrage. Users seemed to like being outraged. We're so used to this idea now that we take it for granted, but really it's pretty strange. Being outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn't expect people to seek it out. But they do. And above all, they want to share it. I happened to be running a forum from 2007 to 2014, so I can actually quantify how much they want to share it: our users were about three times more likely to upvote something if it outraged them.
Were people actually outraged less frequently before social media? "Viral" outrage was limited to spreading through in-person interactions, but there was still mass media designed to generate outrage.
It was less frequent and was normally more personal. You might be outraged by something you or someone you knew directly experienced. Occasionally something outrageous would make it into the local paper or news and everyone in your area could be mad about that together, and once every few generations youd have something like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 that made the whole country lose their minds. Celebrity gossip rags were the closest thing to the modern grind of everyone reacting to the latest crazy thing the stupidest person Washington said today, and those wernt taken very seriously by most people.
Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. [1
This doesn't seem correct from everything else I've seen on Lemmy about musk enforcing selective censorship. I'm also skeptical that the left can sway twitter back by purchasing subscriptions as he notes in his comment -- that seems idealistic but not realistic based on musks behaviors.
A lot of what's said in the essay makes sense, to me at least, but I don't think it's finding the appropriate balance: there are plenty of things that are objectively bad and that do deserve action and response, things that in the past before these movements would just get ignored (and honestly maybe the movements didn't actually stop anything, maybe they just made groups feel better), but this article doesn't bring things back to such a conclusion, it gives me the impression that pushing back against such inherently bad behavior can be seen as just people being prigs or zealots, and that's not correct. Society needs balance, and it likely does need a bit of shame that the prigs feed on to be that mechanism to bring balance, it's just that the real issue is we've become too polarized and too extreme (which actually still does seem like nature finds a way to balance, just with another and opposite extreme...).
I prefer "performative wokeness" to casual racism everywhere. Like, fake it til you make it. But it’s hard to do more when large swathes of the country are dead set on reinforcing discriminatory institutions.
