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comment by Isherwood
Isherwood  ·  3121 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Microaggressions and the Rise of Victimhood Culture - The Atlantic

I'm thinking more and more about the information economy instead of the social culture because I feel like this kind of article is dictated more by the former.

The pervasive capital of the current information economy is anger. Anger capital has enough power to get people excited, and excited people like, share, and comment on posts. Excited people, whether they are for or against the subject at hand, spread the information like wildfire.

This anger trade is great for spreading information, but it has the negative effect of adding a toxic tinge to the topic. When the same information is brought up in other contexts, say a face to face conversation with a new person, someone who's only ever traded this information in anger won't be able to disassociate the topic from that feeling and could end up finishing an angry conversation that the other person didn't know they started.

I think a lot of these articles are sculpted to produce ire in every instance and as a result, we attach that ire to the conversation at hand. This does help to create a conversation, but that conversation is so negative, that it rarely ever moves us towards reconciliation.

Sorry, this is a bit of a tangent, I've got other things on the mind and this just brought them to the surface.