Narrative Warfare: The Reason Ragebait Rules

Friend of the Retreat Rawle Nyanzi addresses the prevalence of outrage-focused stuff online at his blog.

The internet is a tough place to get attention, and many people have tried a variety of approaches. However, in all my years of watching YouTube and reading blog content, I’ve noticed that three types of content get consistent engagement: outrage content, expert content, and brand-focused content.

In short, there is a great deal to be made from complaining about the problem and sweet fuck-all from solving it until you're ready to roll out an alternative. The former is outrage-based content, and Rawle notes that this is so dominant because it's easy and therefore speedy. You get that dopamine hit and maybe slip in an ad for something as a way of amygdala assuaging. The expert content takes a lot more time and work to make, but is evergreen; expert videos tend to reliably get hits many years after the fact, and if those are monetized that means consistent ad revenue.

Where they meet is at the brand.

If you want to know why the focus is on Big Brand, it's because Big Brands often play off the same psychology that enables Technical Monopolies. These effects stack. Spacedock is a good example: focused ONLY on Big Brands and ONLY on Big Media (only film/TV with a side of videogames), with a dominance on Expert content with a side of outrage. Eckhart's Ladder is another example, with an even tighter brand focus with a slightly loser media focus.

This is why FanTube spends so much time complaining about what they cannot solve. It gets them--and especially their audience--that dopamine high, makes them feel like they did something useful (and sometimes, like when Doomcock does a rumor video, it is) and relieves the mental pressure enough to function in their daily lives. Meanwhile, people making actual solutions have to fight for attention because they are not Big Brands, so they're only successful in breaking through if they have sufficient seeming to one to activate that same psychology; you have to roll out meeting that expectation, one way or another, and in practice that means languishing for a while--a long while--before that happens. (There's your explanation for "15 years to an overnight success".)

Now things start to fall into place. This is why Con Inc. is where and what it is; even if there were no active collusion with the Death Cult, there would still be tacit collusion merely due to this psychology playing out, and the result is the same. We even see this with alt-media that we otherwise respect, one way or another, because they too have to play this game to get and retain an audience large enough to derive some or all of one's income.

And that makes it harder for folks offering alternatives to break through. The underground is real.

Which means that reassessing what it's going to take to fork and replacing the pozzed Big Brands is in order. For now, Brian Niemeier's right on neo-patronage via crowdfunding being the way for a lot of us to go until we've got enough to make the next step as folks like Jon del Arroz have. That's why I've done it, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

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