There were a lot of problematic things this week, as always, but the most problematic were likely Tina Fey's racist new show and Gabe Bergado's mansplaining racism to Tina Fey in the Daily Beast. For more, make sure to check out the Everything's A Problem! tumblr.
There are some on the Internet who believe that "outrage culture"—that is, writing that disrupts the dominant narrative and shows all the ways in which modernity is problematic—is a bad thing. These people tend to be white men who feel threatened that voices other than their own are gaining prominence.
One such man is David Auerbach, who had the temerity to say that writing produced by marginalized voices—which he sneeringly refers to as "outrage clickbait"—has no place in the Internet of the future. Here's Auerbach:
There will be less ranting about why Thor shouldn’t be a woman, why Patton Oswalt is a horrible human being, why Sheryl Sandberg isn’t a feminist, and why you should never upload naked photos of yourself to the Web. The tweetstorms will not abate—but they will cease to be overamplified by opportunists with blogging quotas.
We’ll say goodbye to this model because it will no longer be good business. The culprit? The declining effectiveness of traditional Internet advertising, for starters, and the increasingly cozy relationship, spatial and otherwise, between digital advertising and digital journalism, which will slowly but inevitably leave less room for viral outrage.
Needless to say, voicing this opinion is extremely problematic:
Shorter Slate: Outrage clickbait is dying b/c brands find it too human to adapt into "native" ads to trick readers http://t.co/kJrhLsnjaG
— Elias Isquith (@eliasisquith) March 12, 2015
Opinions (especially feminist ones?) will be replaced entirely by advertising, white men rejoice http://t.co/WC6inOYhez
— Molly Knefel (@mollyknefel) March 12, 2015
Preach it, sister. It is remarkably troubling that news orgs would value things like making money over amplifying the speech of the oppressed. Fortunately we still have socially responsible outlets like Fusion and Salon and Mic to do the work that putative allies such as Slate believe is beneath them.
I give the transgression of believing that outrage culture is boring, passé, and unprofitable four problematics.
