It is sad that the effectiveness of legitimate outrage is lost in a society saturated with recreational and manufactured outrage.
What Outrage Is For
Outrage is a social alarm system. It signals that something has violated the norms, boundaries, or sense of justice that a community holds in common. When functioning properly, outrage mobilizes attention and action toward genuine problems. It’s the emotional infrastructure of accountability.
This is why outrage has historically been central to social movements. The civil rights movement channeled outrage at segregation. Labor movements channeled outrage at exploitative conditions. The mechanism is straightforward: widespread outrage signals that a threshold has been crossed, that something is intolerable, and that collective action is warranted.
But alarm systems fail in predictable ways. An alarm that never sounds fails to warn. An alarm that sounds constantly teaches people to ignore it.
We are living through the second failure mode.
Recreational Outrage
Some outrage is consumed for pleasure. This sounds paradoxical—outrage is uncomfortable—but the discomfort comes packaged with satisfactions that make it appealing.
Outrage provides a sense of moral clarity in a confusing world. It offers the pleasure of feeling righteous. It creates in-group solidarity: being outraged together at the same target is a bonding experience. And it’s stimulating in the way that all strong emotions are stimulating. For many people, a feed full of outrage is more engaging than one full of neutral information.
This creates demand. People seek out content that provokes outrage, and they engage with it more intensely than other content. They share it. They discuss it. The platforms that mediate our information environment are optimized to surface engaging content, so they surface outrage-inducing content. The result is a feedback loop: outrage gets attention, attention signals value, and the system produces more outrage.
Recreational outrage doesn’t require the thing being reacted to to be serious. A poorly-worded tweet, an awkward advertisement, a celebrity’s tone-deaf comment—these become occasions for collective outrage not because they matter but because the outrage itself is the product being consumed.
Manufactured Outrage
Other outrage is produced strategically. Political operatives, media organizations, and online influencers have learned that outrage drives engagement, and engagement is convertible into attention, money, and power.
The playbook is simple: find or create something that will provoke your audience, frame it in the most inflammatory way possible, and distribute it through channels optimized for virality. The content doesn’t need to be representative or important. It just needs to trigger the outrage response.
This is why so much political media focuses on the most extreme statements from the opposing side. A random person with twelve followers says something offensive, and it becomes national news—not because it matters, but because it reliably generates outrage in the target audience. The same dynamic plays out across the political spectrum: each side curates the worst examples from the other side and presents them as representative.
Manufactured outrage is also deployed defensively. If you want to immunize your audience against a legitimate criticism, you can pre-emptively generate outrage about something else. Flood the zone. Keep the alarm ringing so constantly that no individual alarm seems significant.
The Consequences
When outrage becomes recreational and manufactured, several things break down.
Signal degradation: The connection between outrage and genuine wrongdoing weakens. People become outraged at trivial things and fail to become outraged at serious ones. The signal no longer carries information about severity.
Audience exhaustion: Constant exposure to outrage is depleting. People develop protective numbness. They stop paying attention, not because they don’t care, but because they can’t sustain the emotional intensity. This exhaustion is rational—it’s a defense mechanism—but it means legitimate alarms get ignored along with false ones.
Cynicism: As people recognize that outrage is often manufactured or performed, they become skeptical of all outrage. “This is just people trying to manipulate me” becomes the default assumption. Even when confronted with something genuinely outrageous, the first instinct is to question the framing rather than engage with the substance.
Strategic disadvantage for legitimate grievances: Anyone with a genuine complaint now faces a problem their predecessors didn’t have. The channel they would naturally use—moral outrage—has been degraded. They must either shout louder (contributing to the noise), find alternative channels (which may not exist), or accept that their message will be lost in the flood.
The Beneficiaries
It’s worth asking who benefits from this situation.
The obvious beneficiaries are those who profit from engagement: platforms, media companies, influencers, and political operatives who have learned to monetize outrage.
But there’s a less obvious beneficiary: anyone who prefers the status quo. If outrage is the historical mechanism for mobilizing collective action against injustice, then degrading outrage is a way of disabling that mechanism. A society that can’t distinguish legitimate from illegitimate outrage is a society that struggles to coordinate around genuine grievances.
This may not be intentional—the outrage economy emerged from incentives, not conspiracy—but the effect is the same. The alarm system that would warn of real problems has been compromised.
What Now?
I don’t have a solution. The dynamics that created this situation are deeply embedded in our information environment, our economic incentives, and our psychology.
But I suspect any path forward begins with noticing the loss. Recognizing that something valuable has been degraded. Understanding the mechanism well enough to see it operating in real time—including on ourselves.
When you feel outrage, it’s worth asking: Is this signal or noise? Is this something that genuinely matters, or am I being played? And when you see others outraged, the question isn’t just whether they’re right, but whether the outrage itself is serving the function it’s supposed to serve.
The alarm still works, sometimes. But we have to learn to hear it again.