Opinion: Internet outrage culture bastardizes the art of being a hater

The Thinker finds himself in an unfavorable new crowd. Art by Adrian Axtell.

When one ventures into the digital realm, they are putting themselves in danger of hearing the opinions of trolls, undisclosed advertisers, AI bots, Matt Walsh and children. No one’s safe. Not on YouTube, not on Twitter, and heaven help you if you have the misfortune of downloading YikYak. To indulge in a little hyperbole, everyone is acting stupid. People are ill-informed, angry and loud, and they couldn’t be prouder of it. They want to be heard, despite the fact that they don’t have anything to say. People have disregarded intellectual curiosity in favor of inflammatory grandstanding, and in doing so, they’ve abandoned the art of being a true hater. 

Social media corporations have done nothing to curb the prevalence of misinformation and rage-baiting. In fact, they’ve actively encouraged it. 

A recent study, published by the The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that Twitter’s algorithm promotes posts that were divisive, emotional and from accounts the user was likely to disagree with. These practices keep people on the app for longer and encourage them to make content of their own. 

"Enragement equals engagement, equals more ads, equals more shareholder value," NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway said. It doesn’t matter that this culture of outrage can have real consequences on people’s physical and mental well-being. Harm is irrelevant when profit is on the line. 

As a result, people feel compelled to share their opinions constantly, without researching or looking inward first. There are great rewards to those who have the most provocative or inflammatory take, and these same rewards are not reaped in equal amounts by thoughtful criticism. Nuance takes effort, nuance takes time. And so, nuance becomes passé, and cruelty becomes du jour. Through the prevalence of this manufactured internet culture, the art of being a hater, a critic, is drowned out and diluted. 

Growing up, many children are chided to think before they speak. This tenet has been disregarded in the digital age, when people do not have to reckon with the impact of their words on those around them. Often, internet users are protected by anonymity. They do not have to grapple with the personhood of those on the other side of the screen. To this effect, they lose sight of their own personhood, if only for a moment. It’s easy to dehumanize our enemies, but to succumb to blind anger robs us of our humanity, too. 

In addition to incentivizing outrage and cruelty, our media landscape encourages thoughtlessness. People are lulled into a mind-numbing doomscroll, where all they can do is take in content and gobble up the slop they are served. People are equally encouraged to watch content passively and speak about it actively. It is as if people are consuming this slop without chewing, then spitting it back up without caring whom it lands on. 

People are no longer placing value on critical thinking. They’re just placing value on being critical. 

One of the most infuriating parts of this new style of communication is the people who frame this drivel as social commentary. This is the juxtaposition at the heart of our media ecosystem: people are simultaneously rewarded for being ignorant and for framing themselves as if they are not. Helena Riley, @freshhel on the social platform X, said it best: “I understand [that] a very popular personality to perform rn is like ‘glamorous philosopher’ but some of you are stupid.” 

If you don’t read critically or reckon with the content you consume, you won’t have anything interesting to say, and no amount of buzzwords and pseudo-intellectual posturing is going to save you from that fact. If you are an ill-informed hater — if you picked up your pitchfork before you even knew what the mob was for — you’re not morally virtuous. You’re not an intellectual. You’re just a bandwagoner. You might be on the right side of history in a particular moment, but with no true moral framework, you will just as easily end up against those who least deserve your ire. 

To remedy this culture of worthless criticism and poor-quality hating, we must rediscover the beauty of critique. But is it foolhardy to gatekeep being a hater, an experience as human as grief and joy? 

There were probably critics as soon as there were creators, people appraising cave paintings and remarking to themselves, “What a crude glorification of the hunting lifestyle. This totally plays into the hunter-gatherer industrial complex.” However, to be a good hater, one must first be a lover. You must have a love of an artist, a craft, a movement. Or the critique will ring hollow.

To be a good hater, you must fundamentally be an optimist. You must believe things can be improved, or there is no reason to critique them as they are. If doom and gloom is the only option, why resist? Why not accept your dismal reality? A hater stands up against this passivity and says, “I am upset. I will not accept this reality. I don’t like it.” This act, acknowledging the darkness of the present, is the first step towards imagining a brighter future. That is why, at its best, hating is a simultaneously cynical and hopeful act. 

When we lose this hope, this curiosity that is at the true heart of critique, we fall victim to stupid nonsense. I believe stupid nonsense is an inalienable human right, as important to our survival as food and water. That being said, I want us to be a little more honest about our stupid nonsense, rather than dressing it up in a costume of intellectualism. We hear it. We speak it. We perpetuate it. And that is why we must all be more thoughtful, more informed, in our commentary, before all this stupid nonsense makes language meaningless.

I hope someday I can live in a world that is thoughtful and empathetic enough that I can receive all criticisms with open arms. I hope someday I can dance with my hater brethren in a golden field, as we gleefully complain about the scratchiness of grass and the overbearing nature of sunshine. I hope someday I can read the comments of my peers with confidence, knowing that they will broaden my perspective and my understanding, rather than prompting me to write a judgemental screed on the nature of commentary.