Imagine an Internet Free of Rage Bait and Hate...

Aren't you tired of being angry all the time?

Photo by Егор Камелев on Unsplash

A woman swans about her house, fixing cereal from scratch because her child woke with a craving for corn flakes. A throat tickle propels her to break out the cough drop molds. She dons ball gowns. Her hair is coifed. Her voice is soothing, melodic, lulling us into a zombified state. Men film videos depicting all the vile things they’d do to their girlfriends while they sleep. A mother of thirteen stockpiles her children’s individual refrigerators with enough candy to juice up a kindergarten class while another mother feeds her two-year-old with a stack of half-cooked pancakes drenched in syrup. A teenager laments over a messy room and her housekeeper’s inability to clean it. She can clean it with her other arm—the teenager snarls into the camera—the arm that isn’t broken.

Then the invariable swarm.

The legions come to the comments with their verbal hatchets and saws. Speaking in exclamation points, they are emphatic in their entreaties. Primed to pillage. The illiterate, entitled youth. The women intent on reverting back to a time when they couldn’t vote or hold property or credit cards in their name. The mothers killing their children with sugar, with neglect.

Then, the commenters shift their anger to personal attacks—the mother’s slovenly appearance and labored breathing. Americans are walking diabetics! The mother’s couture and unblemished skin—the unrealistic beauty and parenting standards! The men who deserve to burn—dude, we know where you live! And the rich children who should be laid on the pyre—burn, crybaby, burn!

We are mad at many things. War, the cost of bread, the persistent existence of the Kardashians. Our politicians are duplicitous with their tweets, lies, felony arrest records, and children hidden under beds and in private jets. Everyone is stupid for the beliefs they hold—from either side of the divide to straight down the middle. I haven’t spoken to my former best friend since the 2016 election, and although her mother has tirelessly tried to build a bridge between our opposing views, I will forever be a ridiculous liberal and she, a racist monster.

Repair doesn’t exist when the bridge keeps burning. It’s easier to hate than to mend and love.

We humans are a cruel, indignant race, and our only solace are animal rescue videos. A kitten nursed back to health. A cow galloping in the grass. A rare breed of rhino being bottle-fed. We thank god, we thank Christ, we thank Allah, we thank you, kind soul, for your decency. The comments are a thimble of light in the unrelenting dark. For a brief moment, we are unified in our agreement that humans aren’t entirely a waste until someone trots in with a discerning word, setting off the landmines, the death threats, the pointed remarks on their profile, bio, and pictures.

Do we savor our rage like wrapped sweets? Does it nourish and sustain us? Is anger our default emotional setting? Because it certainly makes us click, watch, read, comment, and revile. Rage bait is a big business and I often wonder if people intentionally provoke the masses because they know rage makes money. Rage goes viral and spurs endless commentary videos and critiques. Rage builds careers and jettisons a wannabe trad-wife spouting the n-word out of TikTok obscurity. Rage is our news cycle. Rage is the way we sometimes inflict our pain on others.

There are profiteers who eagerly incite rage and those who are victims of it. I’ve written banal marketing tutorials that have been met with a string of expletives. I never realized the term ‘ROI’ could evoke a level of emotion that is borderline barbaric. So much anger exists and I wonder if we’ve become inured to its ubiquity. We come to the comments prepared for battle. We assume the worst in people. Everybody is terrible and everybody hurts. Except for puppies—we can all agree that puppies are not terrible. In fact, they are the decidedly cute. We hold steadfast to our belief and then we see videos of a teenager kicking said puppy and we would very much like to pummel the teen. Break all their bones, tear off their limbs. Knock out their Chiclet teeth.

Because we live in a world where it feels as if we are constantly dressing an open wound, do we purposely seek rage out because it allows us, albeit for a brief moment, to feel something, to feel good, to feel superior, to feel our hate is justified? We have so much pain we don’t know where to put it so better to lay it on the feet of others?

I don’t know. These are questions I ask myself on the daily.

What I do know is that hate is exhausting. Hate has made me skeptical and unwilling to love as much, trust as much because I fear being disappointed in others. I fear the hate left on my doorstep. I grow distrustful when the line between satire and rage bait is indistinguishable. I grow skeptical of those who build careers based on making people angry enough to act because possibly they couldn’t have made this money or achieved this level of fame on their talent alone. Or maybe they didn’t trust their talent enough? Maybe they grew tired of the endless hustle and wanted money now, fame now, and rage is an easy playbook.

I’m starved for goodness. So much so that I seek out beauty and kindness because it’s become that rare, shiny, beautiful thing. I follow a random stranger on Instagram because her tagline is: I’m Jenn, and I post something positive every day. And this isn’t about toxic positivity or evading reality, this is about finding any semblance of light in the all-too-comfortable dark. This is about finding patches of real estate on the internet built out of giving us hope that mankind isn’t completely terrible (it’s terrible, of course, but perhaps not has heinous as we’re lead to believe).

It’s about finding the few people who lift us up instead of making us angry all the time. Because there exists so much in this world that should genuinely anger us. I don’t want to diffuse that righteous anger with hate that’s baited by people who seek fame or profit. I imagine a day without the existence of the profiteers. I imagine a day where kindness isn’t shocking.