Outrage can make opponents distribution partners

A story can spread because people agree with it. It can also spread because people cannot resist announcing how wrong it is. Scott Alexander’s 2014 essay follows that second mechanism through publicity campaigns and social-media arguments.

A reblog that condemns a post still carries the post to a new audience. Members of the opposing community respond, producing another round of exposure. Both groups experience themselves as resisting the other, while jointly maintaining the same circulation system.

Alexander uses a biological metaphor to describe this process. It is a provocative explanatory essay, not a demonstrated universal law of activism or a reliable adjudication of every controversial example it discusses.

Its strongest observation concerns selection. The stories that dominate attention may be the ones that divide audiences most efficiently, rather than those that best represent a problem. Condemnation can therefore increase visibility without increasing understanding or helping the people involved.