"I am offended"
Once, offence was a private affair. A pointed comment at a dinner table might wound, but it lingered in the background, perhaps aired in a diary or, for the theatrically inclined, an icy missive between friends. The aftermath was measured: introspection, awkward conversation, maybe reconciliation. Now, the most trivial slight ricochets across the digital landscape before the coffee is poured, magnified by likes, hashtags, and digital torches. Offence has become not just communal, but positively industrial.
How Offence Became Productized
In the age where visibility is currency, outrage isn’t merely an emotion—it’s a product line. Social media platforms, whose profit margins rely on attention, have engineered algorithms to amplify emotional response. Outrage, especially when attached to a trending topic, is their most lucrative commodity. The supply chain starts with a stray remark or a post, then passes through gatekeepers who reframe it for mass consumption, often stripping it of intent or nuance. As the layers of reinterpretation pile up, fact and fiction blend until the original incident is shadowed by the spectacle of its aftermath.
Virality's Dark Engine
What wins attention online? Outrage, especially when it’s easy to signal. The performative element is essential: many participants care less about substance than their role as lead actors in the play of moral rectitude. Digital platforms reward the speed of reaction, often punishing nuance or ambivalence. The feedback loop is simple, post, react, pile on, repeat. Offence is repackaged as proof of one’s ethical standing, a badge of virtue or defiance.
Competitive Outrage: The Theatre of Grievance
Politics: Offence is a tactical asset. Parties spar not over policies but over engineered slights, each side racing to claim the mantle of greatest victimhood. Parliamentary chambers morph into arenas for performative outrage rather than substantive debate.
Academia: Universities, historically hotbeds of rigorous debate and resilience, sometimes resemble glasshouses where the faintest off-note becomes a campus-wide crisis. The pursuit of intellectual rigor can be replaced by sanctioning perceived harm, inadvertently nurturing fragility over fortitude.
Pop Culture: Production studios and streaming platforms have discovered that controversy sells. A purposely “provocative” casting or storyline guarantees headline outrage—often primed for a cycle of viral promotion disguised as scandal. Subscriptions soar as audiences rush to witness, dissect, and join the digital chorus.
Outrage Inflation: Losing the Plot
When the term “offensive” is applied to everything, it ceases to mean anything. Grave moral transgressions—racism, violence, corruption—are bracketed alongside disputes over food toppings or sport. This flattening of discourse makes it nearly impossible to separate the trivial from the truly injurious. Activism itself suffers; attention spreads thin, commitment wanes, and solidarity is diluted by the churn of fleeting trends.
Satire or Symptom? The Unoffended Performers
A final twist: those who loudly proclaim not to be offended—parodying what they see as hypersensitivity—often become avatars of reverse outrage. Their stance is just as performative, just as incentivized by the same attention economy. They’re players, not outsiders, in the same marketplace.
Emotions are now data points, measured, tracked, monetized. Offence, once organic, is now crafted and circulated, a staple in the attention economy’s overstocked warehouse. Unless we learn to distinguish genuine moral injury from mass-produced indignation, we risk an ethical bankruptcy, where volume matters more than truth, and the price of every principle becomes negotiable.
Perhaps the solution isn't to avoid outrage altogether, but to ask: Who benefits? Before buying into the next trending grievance, scrutinize its label. Is it authentic, or a blend of cynicism and performance? Only then can the value of our moral investments truly be restored.
