Thinking About #3 ... Outrage, Fragility and Gambling
Sharing a number of things I've been thinking about lately. Getting them out of my head. This time is about the social value of Outrage, our perceptions of Fragility and Vice.
This post is part of my “Thinking About Series”. This is a semi-regular post where I get all the thoughts bouncing around my head onto digital paper.
The outrage economy
The recent political mess in the United States and my own observations coming back to LinkedIn is that outrage is (has always been?) the strongest social currency. Posts expressing outrage and encouraging feelings of outrage seem to perform better than anything else - we love outrage, it’s fun. Political discourse is focused on outrage and reactions to outrage. I wonder why we find it so fun and captivating. I’ve played into this trend getting outraged at the outrage:
There is a lot of writing about the fraying of the social fabric, lack of seriousness, and the issues with social media in general. I also wonder how much is due to people feeling sincere problems with their lives, what they see happening to others and the general state of the world.
I dislike many aspects of social media and agree we need to find ways to block children from using it until they are old enough to handle the complexity. Yet the dialogue around the evils of social media is often directed at adults and our rampant consumption of misinformation. I increasingly find myself uncomfortable with this argument as it expresses a serious problem (“outrage”) yet without any real solution.
Everyone on all sides of any issue seem to agree that social media is full of misinformation… Which itself can’t be true.
In a way, it’s positive that we feel outrage so easily at the plight and problems of our social systems and it seems broadly good that outrage triggers such emotions and engagement. It means society isn’t fundamentally broken. We care about how things work and how it impacts people. There is so much content, media and opinion now, we can sort through and choose the outrage that we prefer.
On a macro level, the world is getting dramatically better. Yet on an individual perception level, I think the average person is increasingly frustrated and outraged at the inequality and unfairness of the world (price of groceries!).
Systems that we built are delivering amazing outcomes, our cities run, we have clean water, limitless power, safety and security. We can buy almost anything from almost anywhere for a fraction of what it once cost even 20 years ago. And yet there is a perception (and sometimes a reality) that things are not safe or fair which feeds outrage.
The outrage comes from when those systems fail in bad and damaging ways that ruin people’s lives. It comes from the clear favoritism that is entrenched in classes while we are told to embrace equality. And it comes from the feeling that every political party is gaslighting us to benefit their own preferred slice of perception. The comments in this Marginal Revolution post give a great example of the push-and-pull.
There is also some kind of balance to the outrage. Too much on the wrong topics, it doesn’t click or can fizzle. While too little doesn’t motivate. We saw this play out during the recent American election where some outrage clicked and others just didn’t stick.
It’s a fascinating topic to me. The kinds of topics and depth to which we are outraged about different areas and the amount of traction such outrage garners seems to speak to underlying social trends or concerns across a given team or society. It’s also challenging as the solutions may have nothing to do with the topic of outrage.
If we can step back and watch the outrage ebb and flow, I think we can find better insights into the underlying frustrations people feel and what actions may be needed. The recent elections across the developed world are a sign that democracies broadly still work and that ruling, majority parties who have lost ground to more conservative parties aren’t tapping into the right sources of outrage.
How fragile is our world, our choices?
The post American election hangover is in full swing and while I still try to avoid the mess, it filters through and gets me thinking in all different directions.
I’ve found I keep thinking about how the severity of any change really depends a lot on how fragile we believe the underlying system is. A lot of the arguments for change seem to focus on how “change is positive because the underlying system is resilient”. While those arguing to continue the status quo see the progress as fundamentally fragile and fleeting.
A good example of this is the perceptions around restructuring of a company or even government. Inertia speaks to keeping things broadly the same but moving people around to better optimize or maximize impact. Sometimes it’s creating a new, separate innovation office or team free from typical constraints like many governments have done with GovTech like innovation projects and hackathons.
The willingness to change is strongly linked to the tolerance for failure and perception of fragility. If you think that government services are fragile and you don’t want to risk a death or inconvenience, you won’t change the structure dramatically. This is in some ways an incumbent problem. It is too easy to attack an incumbent for any minor infraction.
Yet, clearly, the opposition parties around the world are arguing from a position of high-tolerance to failure and a belief that the underlying systems are resilient. I see this most obviously in conversation around global warming / climate change. Those in support of more aggressive intervention talk as if the world is on the tipping point to total destruction. While those on the other side argue that the world is pretty much okay but we need to take some actions probably. The reality (like most of these topics) is somewhere in-between.
In any argument the person making the point that we are ‘close-to-disaster’ is at a disadvantage even if they are right because it is too easy to counter-argue that their view is extreme.
After thinking about this, I see it everywhere. In conversations with my wife, friends and colleagues: “are we doing this because we think the underlying systems are too fragile that they cannot support the lack?” Maybe we should start explicitly taking about fragility as part of these discussions rather than making the arguments on principles.
I think we tend to over-estimate the fragility of human society and systems. Tied with the Outrage topic above, there is something very appealing about playing up the fragility of a given system to make a point. Yet like any argument, taken to an extreme it looses credibility and results in bad decisions.
Vice! entertainment, gambling and food
There is a lot of coverage about the prediction markets from the recent elections and the delayed impacts from broad deregulation of online gambling in many places. I recently caught up with an old contact who also observed that all the people they meet in the food industry focused on food-waste and innovation were extra large.
Human societies have often seen certain fundamental desires as vices. Entertainment, gambling, food and all kinds of other things have been controlled throughout history. Yet these remain fundamental motivators to humans. Even social media plays to these same vices. We gamble, entertain ourselves and eat/drink ourselves and eventually die.
Many industries are built to provide these vices and a small number of industries to help us manage these vices. Clearly a vast majority of humans are more interested in the vice than the work required.
And this is where I’ve gotten to thinking about all these things we try to do with ourselves and which we always complain about others. I wonder if we make a mistake assuming that we start at a “Blank Slate”. This is a mistake as
’s book by the same name argues. Instead we should start by thinking that fundamentally, the majority of people want to entertain, gamble and eat ourselves to death.I’ve found this a helpful framework to help me process the strange dynamics of much of social media where people can complain about the terrible social evils of the tools while happily consuming them for hours each day. And our solutions are as reactionary as the past - ban, regulate, constrain.
From that base-line of vice, how do we design a society, apps, systems where people make the best of themselves and others? And to the points above about outrage and fragility, maybe this is simply an ebb and flow of complex human society. We in turns demand more autonomy to kill ourselves faster until we cannot tolerate the damage and flip.
As always, no solutions here. I find the framework does help me process and consider my own actions and those of others.
Conclusions
I’ll continue to explore these and other topics in future “thinking about” posts. Do let me know your additional perspectives and we can continue to explore.