Outrage marketing sucks

Why did I choose this Substack platform?

I was camped in the Kalahari desert in a huge game park. Apart from the two of us, there was not another human being within 200km of us. My mobile phone had not clocked a signal since we left Gaborone. We had cooked dinner on an open fire, and the beauty of the Milky Way stretching across the dark sky was incredible. It was pitch black. 

Many people find darkness frightening. I was watching a video of a Singaporean that decided to travel overland by bus and train to get to Bangkok. The first part of the journey was a bus from Singapore to Penang. And he talked about how frightening it was for him as the bus left the bright lights of the city and drove through the darkness across Malaysia. If you’ve been brought up in a city where there are always lights then to me that makes sense. I grew up in the countryside in the north of England. I think there were four streetlights in the village. Getting around in the dark was normal, it was some of the people that were frightening, not the darkness.

Normally I’m not afraid of the darkness. It’s all a matter of our own inner perceptions. Standing in the darkness outside, with no moon and only starlight, we can see very little then our other senses expand. But if we’re overwhelmed with fear of the darkness then our senses are hyperactive.

And sitting there next to the embers of the campfire - my senses went into hyperactive. I could hear something moving around in the darkness but I couldn’t see what it was.

There was very little wind, but the high dead grass all around the campsite was moving and swishing like there was a stiff breeze. The first thing that popped into my head was that we were being stalked by lions. I grabbed the torch and climbed onto the roof of the car and shone the light into the darkness.

And I could see the tips of pairs of long ears zooming through the grass. We were surrounded by hares who in August in the dry season in southern Africa were chasing each other around in the cover of the long grass in a mating frenzy. I laughed out loud, no longer afraid but relieved.

The power of making darkness visible, so I could see what I could hear.

In the 1960s, Rolls Royce ran an advert in US magazines that said that while driving at 60mph, the loudest noise to be heard in the car is the electric clock. 

Fifty years later, here in Singapore there are a few beautiful new Rolls Royce cars gliding around almost silently through the traffic. And as more and more cars adopt electric technology they become quieter too. I love the silence in the newer cars. I find the noise stressful and I like that I can meditate when I’m a passenger in a quiet car.

The difference that makes a difference in these cars is not noise - it’s the absence of it. 

And in the absence of noise we try to fill it with something else. 

Being with the silence means that all sorts of thoughts intrude, and our mind races with what next, or what are we having for dinner.

When things go quiet our senses go hyperactive - listening for lions like I was in Africa. We are less than 50 generations from when we lived on the plains of Africa when we were prey for lions.

So in a quiet car, we put on music, and if we’re a passenger, we might watch a video or scroll through social media. 

Social media is psychologically designed to feed the hype to our senses to keep them hyperactive, like we’re still being stalked by lions.

This weekend, in my social media feed, my son sent me a picture of some neo-Nazis standing on the steps of the Victorian parliament in Melbourne giving a Nazi salute in provocation to a march against transphobia. 

It wasn't just the Jewish community that the Nazi’s sent to the camps to be exterminated - it was transsexuals, homosexuals, black people, brown people, people with Down-syndrome and Freemasons and their entire families. 

To me this Nazi salute is a ‘death threat’ to all of those communities - which probably includes 10-20% of the community in Melbourne including three of my own sons.

I saw red, and I felt the outrage and anger course through my body as I took this personally. 

My grandfather survived the Battle of Arnhem, and spent years after the war searching for the bodies of his brothers-in-arms who didn’t survive to bring them home to their families. And as the German troops returned defeated from Norway, he joined the search to find the Nazis who had executed his brothers rather than take them prisoner. 

For me, it was not just a ‘death threat’. I felt personally angry that these people desecrated the memory of all the dead men in my Grandfather’s regiment who were executed by Nazis.

Being outraged isn’t a great feeling, and I realised that is exactly what the social media companies want us to feel and then we consume more of their content and their advertising. 

So I had a cup of tea and switched to gratitude when I found out that my son wasn’t actually anywhere near that march in Melbourne. Then I saw that two more of my offspring were in Edinburgh celebrating St Patrick’s Day and eating cake by Loch Lomond. And I felt more gratitude and love.

Social media companies have raked in massive profits by leveraging outraging content and pushing advertising with the content. They have been instrumental in pushing the agendas of all sorts of unsavoury people, and have been very quick to censor people who they don’t like. 

People who are trans, people who talk about edgy subjects such as polyamory or queerness, people who choose to be different are ‘shunned’, yet the people that push hatred and intolerance are welcomed. 

Because the outrage brings in advertising dollars.

I’ve switched to SubStack because I simply don’t want my content to be repurposed to support the aims of folk who like provoking outrage, like those neo-Nazi scumbags making death threats in Melbourne. I will very likely pay for advertising in the future on social media but I’ll also be careful to target without provoking outrage.

So I’d like to thank each and everyone of you for joining the free section of my ‘Making Darkness Visible’ SubStack. 

This platform doesn’t operate like the social media platforms, and the only cashflow comes from the fees that they collect from subscribers. Which is why I’m here.

I encourage you to take a look around and consider making a paid subscription to anyone on this platform, including me, as it won’t just support the folk who create the content - it will also support the platform. 

And if you’ve got something to say then there’s a chat feature now which is only available to subscribers.