Cooper Lund

@cooperlund.online

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The Wild West Begins Where Your Body Ends

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We should also be skeptical of the things that try to make us stay mad. Alex Kirshner had a great piece in Slate this week, talking about Platner in the context of social media platforms. It makes great observations about information bubbles and how they have clearly affected the judgment of national pundits about Platner, but there’s something a bit deeper there about how platforms operate. There’s a whole industry of conservative outrage on the Internet, and it thrives because content that makes you angry is incentivized by platforms like Facebook and X, The Everything app because it creates engagement. Kirshner notes that these were also the dynamics behind Spencer Pratt’s failed campaign for mayor, and it’s no surprise that Pratt has pivoted to being Zohran’s biggest critic, he’s a failed reality TV star and he’s been swimming in the attention economy for longer than I’ve been an adult. He’s going to go where the current takes him, and right now the easiest current to ride is conservative ragebait. That current, the incentives created by the algorithm, creates a platform where the dominant emotion is anger, and that’s something you can feel radiating off the people who still use it regularly.
Anger is seductive, it’s a drug that convinces you of your righteousness, and like any drug it can be a liar. It’s a loss of control, a dose of thunder, a temporary madness. This isn’t to say that it has no purpose, we live in times where there are real things to get mad about and it can be a potent motivating force, but it’s something that you need to be suspicious of because it’s so easy to manipulate. It removes the red flags you should be noticing from your field of vision. I look at the Platner campaign and I see a lot of people who were presented with a choice between someone with a long list of red flags and the kind of establishment-backed Democrat they were already mad at and decided that the red flags from Platner, the Nazi tattoo and the history of troubling Reddit posts, could be ignored because they were mad. That’s how anger can lie to you — it blinds you to the truth because you’re convinced of your righteousness. When you combine that with the charisma of a successful politician, and Platner was almost certainly a charismatic politician, that’s a toxic combination.