Nightcrawler, 2014, Dan Gilroy
Responsible leaders on the left and the right have decried rising political violence in the United States following the killing of Charlie Kirk. They have called on Americans of all stripes to back away from incendiary rhetoric and lower our political temperature.
It’s a worthy goal. It’s a moral goal. It is also an increasingly futile goal.
American politics has become a sport that is played out on social media. The calls for restraint are running headfirst into the structural wood chipper that is our online ecosystem.
In our contemporary landscape, the discourses that shape politics are set by influencers who have built their careers and following almost exclusively through producing content for the internet.
Traditional news media and participation in mass politics through civic organizations have become endangered relics of the 20th century.
There are no longer any gatekeepers to what constitutes an acceptable range of opinions. There are now thousands of influencers and their audience, from whom they parasitically milk attention and dollars.
Individuals now engage with politics through an archipelago of fractious voices. Those voices owe their careers, and therefore their livelihoods, to their audiences.1
Social media is, needless to say, an intense Darwinian struggle for the monetization of the broader consumers of political content. The algorithmic backbone of platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok rewards outrage with reach, and reach with revenue.
But there are only so many eyeballs—and therefore dollars—to go around on the internet, and when one influencer is ascendant, others will almost assuredly fall. In a struggle to generate the most revenue, one must further increase the furor, or be left behind like cable news was over a decade ago.
American political outcomes and the financial stakes of these influencers cannot be disentangled.
You merely need to look at what online figures were screaming in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s death. There were hardly any calls for civility. There were plenty of calls for retribution.2
There is no incentive—none—to tone down what one is saying on the internet. If you want to put the brakes on where political trends in American life are going, your reach will plummet and your bank account will dry up.
It is also not enough anymore that one builds a following merely by presenting inflammatory content. The days of being an aggregator that simply presents videos and stories that will generate outrage are long gone.
The structure of social media and podcasts—given their personal relationship between creators and consumers—means you must be an active participant in creating content. Which means in turn furthering tensions. There is, after all, little content to be created if everything is generally going fine.
Much like the character Lou in Nightcrawler3, online personalities have found that actively escalating tensions in American civic life is quite good for their bottom line.
Like an animal in the state of nature, our political influencers have found a new adaptation in their environment that provides a competitive advantage.
If you create a furor, your income will skyrocket. It can be anything. Hell, even Cracker Barrel became a national outrage.
But I think we all know that Cracker Barrel isn’t really where the attention is. The attention comes from having an enemy. That group over there that people can view as an abstract entity onto which you can project any inflammatory allegation you want.
If you can merely gesture that they want to get you? Claim that they are coming for you? Well then, now you have us.
And of course, us is the audience you get to monetize. And if you want to get more money out of us, then you need to continually raise the stakes of what should happen to them. You get your content by constantly reinforcing to us how you’re going to punish them.
But what happens when you call for violence and you actually get that violence? Are you going to just step back from the edge? No. Of course you won’t. You’ve built your career on this.
Trying to keep things from spiraling out of control means your podcast might go down in Apple rankings.
If there are no them to fight, you might see your Patreon dollars dry up. If things really start looking good, you might even need to get a real job.
No. You want more inflammatory rhetoric because more violence means more eyes and more money, and if you’re not willing to do it, the next guy will.
And that next guy is gonna take your audience.
I feel no real reason to cite various individuals or podcasts here. If you’re reading this, I will assume you’re well enough familiar with social media that you can accept this as true.
Again, I will just assume you have a basic grasp of the news here and forgo tons of citations. Otherwise, I really respect the tranquility in which you live life, that you have missed all of this.
He starts the film by merely showing up at scenes of crime to sell the footage to a news station, but by the end of the film orchestrates an entire firefight in a public place for the sake of creating an even more incendiary incident he can film and leverage financially. It’s a good movie. You should watch it. It’s sort of weird that you’re reading this without seeing it, honestly.
The only way out is to log off.