Convicted and Burned
Are we capable of stopping the cycle of online outrage? If we were in the middle of moral panic, would we even know it?
by Walter Foley and Heather Shayne Blakeslee
This article originally appeared in RQ Vol. 1 // Issue Two: MONSTERS, Fall 2019. Purchase a copy and subscribe to the magazine here.
In 1487, a massive and debilitating storm hit Constance, Switzerland. The villagers, presumably to tame the storm in their minds, accused two defenseless old women—who were already suspected of dealing in the dark arts—of causing the extreme weather. They were then tortured, and snuffed out of existence.
“The rack was displayed, and the two poor creatures were extended upon it. In reply to various questions from their tormentors, they owned in their agony that they were in the constant habit of meeting the devil; that they had sold their souls to him; and that at their command he had raised the tempest,” wrote the nineteenth century Scottish journalist Charles Mackay in Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. “Upon this insane and blasphemous charge they were condemned to die. In the criminal registers of Constance there stands against the name of each the simple but significant phrase, convicta et combusta.”
It probably doesn’t take a translator to give you the idea that this means “convicted and burned.”
Labeling people “witches” has many cultural parallels to the ancient ritual of “scapegoating,” an Old Testament reference to the practice of casting a community’s sins upon a goat and then either sacrificially killing it or chasing it out of the village and into the wilderness. The most pious within the community would no doubt feel a bit better after this exercise, but clearly whatever troubles originally threatened the enclave still remained after the goat’s excommunication.
No amount of ritual sacrifice can purge all storms, pestilence, or more mundane hurts from a society. But in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, they tried: Untold numbers of people were accused of witchcraft, and an estimated 50,000 were killed during these societal ritual cleansings; if we look at the numbers, the Salem witch trials were merely a coda to the longer and deeper hysteria in Europe.
Between 1692 and 1693, fourteen women and five men in Massachusetts were accused of practicing witchcraft and executed. Americans preferred hanging as their method of dispatching witches; in Europe, most people were burned at the stake. This was preferable, good people argued, because it inflicted the most pain.
While we don’t burn witches anymore, the impulse remains to react to perceived danger, stay within our in-group, and purge heretics. Some of our impulses for scapegoating have veered into the (largely) non-lethal tactic of online shaming. We’ve had help from media companies who have monetized our more base impulses to punish: Outrage is one of the emotions that provides the strong response needed to generate clicks, likes, comments, and shares. To make matters worse, hiding in our phones alone we have an infinitely deep well of outrage-provoking injustice throughout the world—and a corresponding amount of possible witch-burning and scapegoating that will never alleviate those injustices.
“While we don’t burn witches anymore, the impulse remains to react to perceived danger, stay within our in-group, and purge heretics.”
Most media companies, in order to maximize profits, have chosen to focus their energy on this easily generated outrage. Many of us have inadvertently chosen to line their pockets: by sharing politicized content, engaging in call-outs and cancel culture, beating up on outgroups, and staying plugged-in to a constant stream of news and feeds that pepper us with alerts and alarm. Given our history of moral panics in America, which range from the Salem witch trials, up through McCarthyism, and then onto the Satanic Panic of the ’80s, we must also be mindful of the fact that sometimes we don’t know what’s true, but we go along with the crowd anyway for purposes of self-preservation.
Thankfully, we are also prone to collaboration and play. Our natural, primitive impulses toward tribal violence have also been redirected toward the less-deadly outlets of professional sports and video games. Awe also generates strong emotions, but it’s harder to come by in our feeds, aside from the sporadic monster storm or raging fire that reminds us of our own vulnerability. But quiet and uneventful sunrises happen every day if we are present enough to notice them. It’s possible to shift our overall paradigm—from rage to reflection—should we choose to. But we face a formidable gauntlet to get to the other side.
One More Goat, Then Utopia
The strange case of James Damore, a socially awkward Google engineer, illustrates perfectly how complicated issues, rendered down into a slick of rage-inducing memes, can quickly lay to waste the lives of everyday people cast out as scapegoats and leave underlying issues intact—in this case, lower numbers of women in tech and engineering than men—all the while handing advertising money to the media corporations that feed on our outraged psyches.
In July of 2017, program managers at Google requested feedback for discussions about the low numbers of women in tech jobs. One of the people who responded to the call to address the issue was thirty-something senior software engineer James Damore. Among many assertions, he said that the company had major blindspots in its mission to gain 50/50 parity among male and female employees, that instituting quotas wasn’t a fair solution, and that Google was operating within an “ideological echo chamber” that squelched conservative viewpoints. It was sure to raise the ire of anyone not inclined to hear admonishments from a white male engineer about reverse discrimination.
“You’re a misogynist and a terrible human,” a colleague emailed Damore. “I will keep hounding you until one of us is fired. Fuck you.”
Comments about the memo were leaked from an internal message board. “I intend to silence these views,” wrote one manager at Google. “They are violently offensive.”
“Comments about the memo were leaked from an internal message board. ‘I intend to silence these views,’ wrote one manager at Google. ‘They are violently offensive.’”
However, many of the ideas Damore cited are currently the subject of much mainstream research in the social sciences that may give us better data on pipeline problems in STEM and for gender pay gaps. For instance, current research already shows statistically significant differences in what men and women are interested in pursuing1. As straightforward as all of this seemed to Damore, he perhaps didn’t fully comprehend the emotional weight of what he was writing about, including that many frustrated colleagues felt they had been held back in their careers by sexist behavior, decision-making processes, and informal networks to which they couldn’t gain access. He has since admitted that he struggles to express himself well to others—he was diagnosed with autism in his mid-20s—but he did try to clarify where he stood, and added the following to the memo:
“I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem.”
The problem of women in STEM is exceedingly complex, and requires a good deal of nuanced conversation, but nuance was never an option, and the conversation about the memo did not stay internal. Since “solutions journalism” is still in its infancy, the media behaved in the way they are incentivized to behave: by directing angry eyeballs on both sides of the political spectrum toward advertisers. The underlying business model for the category of information we call “the news” is in a sorry state, and outlets have resorted to a handful of dirty tricks, including sensationalized headlines, as they struggle to make a profit within a new economy that nobody quite understands.
“The media behaved in the way they are incentivized to behave: by directing angry eyeballs on both sides of the political spectrum toward advertisers.”
News of the memo ricocheted around the world, seeding the storm clouds of Twitter and the 24-hour news cycle.
On the left, one of the most widely circulated news stories at the time came from Gizmodo, which characterized the memo as an “anti-diversity screed” in its headline and failed to include Damore’s within-text hyperlinks to relevant information. Much of the mainstream news cycle followed suit: Forbes, Time, Huffington Post, ABC News, and Vanity Fair all applied the “anti-diversity” label; CNN claimed that the memo “argued women are not biologically fit for tech roles.”
The sentiments were summed up by a headline from Salon.com that read, “Google Employee’s Viral Anti-Diversity Manifesto Confirms Your Worst Fears About Tech-Bro Culture.”
Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer at The Atlantic, attempted to counter some of the madness: “I cannot remember the last time so many outlets and observers mischaracterized so many aspects of a text everyone possessed.”
Popular conservative outlets retaliated to the left’s media narrative. If the misleading liberal meme was, “Tech bro says girls can’t do math,” the counter meme on the right was, “Google engineer fired by libtards for promoting diversity with logic.”
“If the misleading liberal meme was, “Tech bro says girls can’t do math,” the counter meme on the right was, “Google engineer fired by libtards for promoting diversity with logic.”
The mercenary and sensationalized headlines on the right included: “REVEALED: Google’s Social Justice Warriors Create Wrongthink Blacklists” (Breitbart); “Okay, Google: How Do You Prepare a Country for Totalitarianism?” (The Federalist); “Playing Into Every Female Stereotype, Women at Google Stay Home After Memo for Emotional Reasons” (The Daily Wire); and “PC Corporate Culture Is a Plague That Government Helps Spread” (The Weekly Standard).
In the midst of the maelstrom, the village elders at Google issued their sentence: Damore was fired in August of 2017, a month after writing his memo. It’s worth noting that, cast out of his job at Google, and castigated by left-leaning media, Damore sought shelter with those on the right who were eager to spread his story, but even in these friendly appearances he often looks like a deer in headlights. He also did an extremely ill-considered photoshoot with a far-right-wing photographer who offered him free publicity photos. Right-leaning media outlets continue to use his story for their own purposes.
“Google will likely still need to find ways to better integrate, support, and incentivize women on its teams if it wishes to keep them. We need more peer-reviewed, replicable research on gender gaps in order to best understand what’s happening. Just as importantly, we need more peer-reviewed, replicable research on how emotions and psychology can be manipulated by corporations of all kinds.”
As to one of the actual problems addressed in the memo, we do have some information. In 2016, women earned 18.7 percent of bachelor’s degrees in computer and information services, 12.1 percent of those in “engineering technologies and related fields,” and 20.9 of those in engineering, according to the Department of Education2. That same year, women made up 19.1 percent of Google’s tech employees3. If there is not 50/50 parity among men and women at Google in tech jobs, it is likely not because Google is shutting out qualified women in the hiring process: It is happening before that inflection point. And, like most companies, Google will likely still need to find ways to better integrate, support, and incentivize women on its teams if it wishes to keep them. We need more peer-reviewed, replicable research on gender gaps in order to best understand what’s happening.
Just as importantly, we need more peer-reviewed, replicable research on how emotions and psychology can be manipulated by corporations of all kinds. This includes the media corporations on the left and right, and those social media companies that equally exploit people trapped in ideological filter bubbles that stoke outrage.
Outrage As Profit Center: What (Political) Church Do You Go To?
Many social media users have become small-scale political editors for social media companies. We’re compensated by likes and shares and retweets from our very own niche audiences, which reinforce the idea that we’re on the side of truth. Today alone, you may have made a dozen decisions that any editor or producer would make. This photo, that article, an airing of this opinion—but certainly not that one! We know what our audience fears, what makes them mad, and what will make them laugh.
For most of us, despite amassing followers and friends, our engaged audience is relatively small, but dedicated and consistent. You love them, and they love you. It’s sport to rack up points stirring up your base with a sick burn on Twitter.
This is the same phenomenon that has happened at media companies on a much larger scale. By establishing relatively small—but devoted—audiences, they can afford to insult and denigrate people from outside of their worldview. In fact, the denigration of others is exactly what these companies have discovered to be the most profitable approach to programming.
“For most of us, despite amassing followers and friends, our engaged audience is relatively small, but dedicated and consistent. You love them, and they love you. It’s sport to rack up points stirring up your base with a sick burn on Twitter.”
“In spite of the negative tenor of much of the content, fans feel refreshed by the programs. In many ways, outrage venues serve as political churches,” write Tufts University professors Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj in their book, The Outrage Industry. “The faithful attend, hear their values rearticulated in compelling ways, and leave feeling validated and virtuous for having participated.” In this particular framing of the argument, you, as a producer of content on social media, have also become a priest.
Focusing on a concentrated demographic, advertisers have learned, is often more profitable than tempering one’s message to a broader, more diverse audience. Although Rachel Maddow, for example, doesn’t have the gargantuan viewership of some of her competitors, some advertisers will pay a premium to reach her audience, because it tends to be politically homogeneous and college-educated, with above-average disposable income.
In this arena, viewers are given narratives that fit snugly within their worldview, which are packaged to be as emotionally resonant as possible. Niche issues are often reshaped into scandals, more important news stories are then downplayed or even ignored, and the resulting cultural divides spread outward.
“...[W]e believe outrage to be increasingly divisive in the world of congressional policymaking, as it works to brand collaboration, open-mindedness, and compromise as weak,” Berry and Sobieraj write. “This stigmatization of cooperation has particular gravity because public servants are well aware that key votes will be closely monitored by outrage venues and heralded as tests of ideological purity.”
Senator Joseph McCarthy’s accusations of communism created a conspiratorial atmosphere of fear and misery in the 1950s, with many terrified for the loss of their reputations and livelihoods, and we’ve voluntarily and collectively created the same atmosphere today. When we see sins against our own ideological church, one go-to reaction is to don our priestly garments and pronounce “convicta et combusta” as loudly and as publicly as possible.
“Senator Joseph McCarthy’s accusations of communism created a conspiratorial atmosphere of fear and misery in the 1950s, with many terrified for the loss of their reputations and livelihoods, and we’ve voluntarily and collectively created the same atmosphere today.”
It’s more satisfying in the short-term to “call out,” but even dedicated social justice activists have articulated the idea that, ultimately, it doesn’t change hearts or minds, which presumably is a desired outcome. Loretta Ross is a self-identified black feminist and a hate-crime and incest survivor. She has worked on reproductive justice theory, de-programmed rapists in prisons, and engaged directly with active white supremacists. She suggests we take up the idea of “calling in,” or doing difficult work in person rather than continuing the cycle of call-outs from behind a computer screen. Writing recently in The New York Times, she argued, “We can change this culture. Calling-in is simply a call-out done with love. Some corrections can be made privately. Others will necessarily be public, but done with respect. It is not tone policing, protecting white fragility or covering up abuse. It helps avoid the weaponization of suffering that prevents constructive healing.”
Taming the Monster Within
If you’re among the people actively trying to rein in your “call-out” impulses and spend less time online in order to have conversations in the real world, know that there are factors working against you. Some of them reside in your brain and body. Others have been carefully crafted by corporations to exploit your psychology and biology. Some are cultural and political. Together, these factors are a cocktail that can make the populace punch drunk.
Whatever mental circuitry compels us to identify danger in order to keep us safe is the same mechanism that, under the right circumstances, overshoots. We become convinced to burn witches, slaughter scapegoats, and ruin the lives of so-called communists (or whatever derogatory label the politics of the day calls for).
At one point it was satanists. In the 1980s, a number of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists encouraged mentally troubled patients to search within their subconscious for repressed memories of satanic ritual abuse. This leading-the-witness-style therapy—during a period later dubbed “Satanic Panic”—was eventually shown to be junk science, but the lives of a number of parents, daycare workers, and children were ruined before the practice was condemned. The American Psychological Association surveyed its members during this moral panic and found that 93 percent of the licenced practitioners said they believed the claims of satanic ritual abuse.
At the time, popular media curators—including Oprah Winfrey, Geraldo Rivera, and NBC News’ 20/20—were claiming that tens of thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands) of children were being abducted in the U.S. each year and forced to undergo secret horrors.
During the height of this panic, author Kurt Andersen intuited that even the lowest of the popular media’s estimates—20,000—seemed absurdly high. He recounted in his 2017 book, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, that his own editor at Time wouldn’t let him pursue his hunch. The Denver Post eventually broke the story and was awarded the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service. A decade later, the FBI estimated that the number of children abducted in the U.S. per year was actually closer to 300 (and most of them were not murdered).
It’s tempting to look back at our country’s embarrassing history and somehow conclude that those were long-ago struggles of a superstitious populace and a reckless media that no longer exists.
But in addition to getting swept into believing all kinds of inaccuracies, we may have also begun to act outraged online, even when we are no longer actually outraged.
“Just as a habitual snacker eats without feeling hungry, a habitual online shamer might express outrage without actually feeling outraged,” writes Yale University psychology professor Molly Crockett in her 2017 study, “Moral Outrage in the Digital Age.”
“Just as a habitual snacker eats without feeling hungry, a habitual online shamer might express outrage without actually feeling outraged,” writes Yale University psychology professor Molly Crockett in her 2017 study, “Moral Outrage in the Digital Age.”
When social media executives say they provide neutral platforms, Crockett thinks researchers should take this as an invitation to investigate such claims empirically. She has several testable hypotheses, published in the journal Nature, that might explain the downward spiral of online discourse.
First, “Because [online platforms] compete for our attention to generate advertising revenue, their algorithms promote content that is most likely to be shared, regardless of whether it benefits those who share it—or is even true.” This might explain the phenomenon we call “fake news.”
Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, have studied thousands of the most-shared articles from The New York Times. Their research indicates that the things that resonate the most with us—the elements that cause a story to go viral—are best predicted not by asking whether the articles stir positive or negative emotional states, but by asking whether they stir high-arousal or low-arousal emotional states.
Low-arousal emotions such as sadness (negative) or contentment (positive) don’t tend to galvanize people enough to cause massive waves of social media attention. High-arousal states such as anger, anxiety, or disgust (negative) or excitement, humor, or awe (positive) are the elements that cause people to like, share, subscribe, and comment online (but not necessarily to act in the real world.)
Crockett also wants to test the costs and benefits of expressing outrage, which gets at the issue of “virtue signaling.” Virtue signaling isn’t something invented in the last five years simply to describe online behavior; it’s one of many academic terms now used in the vernacular, and in this case in a derogatory way. But it’s a reference to the fact that within groups, we need other people to think we’re good if we’re to remain trusted and accepted, and so we must be public about what we believe and do. Saying the right thing in private or doing good deeds in the dark doesn’t always give us social capital.
Another of Crockett’s hypotheses: “Digital media may exacerbate the expression of moral outrage by inflating its triggering stimuli, reducing some of its costs, and amplifying many of its personal benefits.” In other words, we can be “slacktivists” who merely say things about individuals in an outgroup that we would never say to a person’s face (which might get us into an actual scrap), all the while boosting our reputation within our in-group. It’s a low-risk, high-reward proposition.
“We can be “slacktivists” who merely say things about individuals in an outgroup that we would never say to a person’s face (which might get us into an actual scrap), all the while boosting our reputation within our in-group. It’s a low-risk, high-reward proposition.”
Finally, Crockett wants to test whether the structure and mechanisms of social media are also doing us in.
“Clickbait headlines are presented alongside highly distinctive visual icons that allow people to express outrage with a tap of the finger,” one of her hypotheses states. “Positive feedback for these responses (likes, shares, and so on) is delivered at unpredictable times—a pattern of reinforcement well known to promote habit formation.” This dynamic has been described as something like a slot machine wherein the best possible payoff is fleeting social capital among people who already think like you.
But professors Berger and Milkman posit that a transcendent experience such as awe, when we are fortunate enough to experience it, can actually override our taste for outrage. An angry tweet, from anyone, about anything, will always feel insignificant in the face of a revelatory idea, or in the presence of the maw of the Grand Canyon.
Less News May Be Good News
“It’s easy to assume that the reason you spend so much time thinking about the news is simply that the news is so crazy right now,” wrote the journalist Oliver Burkeman in an essay for The Guardian in spring of 2019. “Yet the news has often been crazy. What it hasn’t been is ubiquitous: From its earliest beginnings, until a few decades ago, almost by definition, the news was a dispatch from elsewhere, a world you visited briefly before returning to your own.”
This may have also created a culture in which people feel they are morally obligated to stay on top of the news cycle. (If you are in need of comedic relief on this front, simply watch the “Did You Read It?” skit on the series Portlandia.)
An adjacent problem is that the information most people would consider vital (the truly consequential, history-making news of the day, as well as those events, typically local, that we personally have some influence over) is often muddled with unnecessary information (celebrity gossip, the latest quip from a Twitter-obsessed idealogue, and those disturbing daily events over which we have no control).
Online outrage is now crowdsourced across the globe, which means we will never run out of things to look at that make us angry. There are witches to burn, lurking around every corner; scapegoats like Damore at every institution. Anyone with an internet connection has the ability to catalog the people and things that tick them off, and people have a knack for finding and clustering with those who share their opinions and pitchfork preferences.
“People have a knack for finding and clustering with those who share their opinions and pitchfork preferences.”
We all eventually have to choose how much of this neverending well of negative information should command our attention, keeping in mind that an hour dedicated to the latest rage-inducing story (which we often have no power to alleviate) is an hour diverted from the other activities that compose a meaningful life.
Meting out our invaluable resource of time deserves personal reflection.
We each have approximately 112 waking hours per week. After work and chores are finished, we can allot the remaining hours to a number of activities, which might include: learning about wonderful things that have happened recently; learning or developing a skill; calling in instead of calling out; putting our real-life shoulder to the wheel of a just cause; spending time with friends or family; or seeking transcendent experiences by exploring nature or stretching our own minds.
Mackay wrote in 1841 of the European witch trials, “It never suggested itself to the mind of any person engaged in these trials, that if it were indeed a devil who raised up so many new witches to fill the places of those consumed, it was no other than one in their own employ—the devil of persecution. But so it was. The more they burned, the more they found to burn...”
We would do better to attend to the monsters within us that find constant consumption of media so nourishing, and punishment so alluring. Witches, it turns out, are a renewable resource. And the words convicta et combusta never get old.
“Witches, it turns out, are a renewable resource. And the words convicta et combusta never get old.”
1 A compendium of the research that pertains to the claims in the memo can be found online in a living document at Heterodox Academy, a nonprofit co-founded by New York University moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Haidt and his co-author, social psychologist Sean Stevens, conclude in their meta-analysis, “Damore was drawing attention to empirical findings that seem to have been previously unknown or ignored at Google, and which might be helpful to the company as it tries to improve its diversity policies and outcomes.” Damore is clearly influenced by some of Haidt’s own research.
2 The numbers are higher for women’s representation in comparable fields in graduate schools, though the breakdown of categories in available data don’t align precisely. In 2016–17, women earned 23.4 percent of doctoral degrees in engineering and 25.1 percent of doctoral degrees in mathematics and computer science; for master’s degrees, those numbers were 25.4 percent and 33.2 percent. Source: Council of Graduate Schools.
3 Google Diversity Annual Report 2018
This article originally appeared in RQ Vol. 1 // Issue Two: MONSTERS, Fall 2019. Purchase a copy and subscribe to the magazine here.
Heather Shayne Blakeslee is the publisher and editor-in-chief of RQ. She’s served in myriad capacities with arts, social justice, and environmental advocacy enterprises in the last 20 years including as the COO of Red Flag Media and as the editor-in-chief of its sustainability magazine, Grid. She’s a contributing writer to Mindful magazine, an award-winning singer-songwriter who leads the folk-noir band Sweetbriar Rose, and is the founder of Red Pen Arts, a consultancy that offers support to social entrepreneurs and the arts and culture community.
Walter Foley is RQ’s managing editor and works on various projects with Red Pen Arts. He likes to play the drums.
Michael Wohlberg is RQ’s artistic director. In addition, he’s the art director for Decibel magazine and a freelance illustrator known primarily for this work within the heavy metal community. He can be found more often than not in the company of his loyal pup, Henry.