We're living in an outrage machine

Tanith Lee = anti-outrage.

Ronnie James Dio once sang that you’re living in a time machine. Today we’re all living in an outrage machine. I don’t like it … yet here I am, in the machine, expressing my outrage. 

Outrage sells, and consumes.

I am old enough to have worked in a pre-internet era. As a newspaper reporter I conducted interviews with a hand-held notebook. Typed the stories into a computer disconnected from the internet. Formatted the stories into columns, printed them out. Then with Xacto knife and wax created pages that were shot with a camera and eventually printed.

And there was your newspaper. I even delivered them for extra cash. 

Yes I’m a dinosaur.

As quickly and efficiently as we worked this process took time. A breaking story would need at least 12 hours to make it into the next edition. Newspapers and nighttime television were our primary mechanism for consuming the news. There was a sane rhythm to it, a chance to consume and discuss. Or ignore it altogether.

Then, like today, stories provoked outrage. But the way to express it was to vent to your significant other, or your friends over a beer at the bar. Then you went back to the real world.

That model is long dead. Newsprint and ink were replaced by cable news, which in turn has been replaced by ubiquitous, permanently connected devices, fueled by algorithms which serve up outrage 24-7.

We read outrageous things, post angry comments, people shout back and attempt to “own” each other.

Balanced reporting that took some modicum of measured thought has been replaced by polarized information.

There are advantages to screens and 24-7 news cycles and social media. Speed of reporting and dissemination. More perspectives. But it comes with a cost. 

Algorithms manipulate our emotions by showing us viral posts of outrage and angry comments. These clicks drive ad revenue. And so we’re being fed a lot of outrage. Overfed.

There’s too much of everything. Endless scrolling is not only possible, it’s incredibly easy to fill hours. 

Yes, there are corners of sanity online, good people doing good work. But the algorithm doesn’t prioritize these. It takes work to find them.

Somehow we need to break the cycle and take back our attention. Focus on the things that matter. And stop walking around staring at our machines, distracted. And outraged.

Do you feel this? I do. And yet I find myself doom scrolling, time and again. Beat myself up over it and promise to do better next time.

One way to break the cycle is through sustained, offline reading. I’m currently reading Tanith Lee’s The Empress of Dreams and it’s conjured a wonderful spell in my mind of somewhere else. A place of danger and dark fable and the weird and unexpected, happily somewhere else than online hell.

Your thoughts (and outrage) are welcome as always.

Sign of the Southern Cross, Black Sabbath

Don't live for pleasure

Make life your treasure

Fade away

Martin Eden (1909), Jack London

A great voyage of the soul...

Jack London is a great writer, full stop. Upon reading Martin Eden (1909) I declare he now resides firmly in my top 10 favorite authors. A list still in progress and subject to change but probably looks something like this (not in any order):

1. JRR Tolkien

2. Robert E. Howard

3. Jack London

4. TH White

5. Stephen King

6. Ray Bradbury

7. Bernard Cornwell

8. Poul Anderson

9. Karl Edward Wagner

10. HP Lovecraft

Reading London is akin to receiving an electric shock. The intensity with which he writes is almost unrivaled. In fact, there’s really only one author I’ve encountered who writes with the same poetic, romantic verve, great splashes of color and blood and rage and wild passion: Robert E. Howard.

I didn’t necessarily think Martin Eden would deliver the same visceral experiences as The Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf, or The Star Rover, but as it turns out, it did. These are mostly contained in the heart and mind of the titular protagonist, though there are some all-time savage fistfights. But even with no swordplay or sorcery, I literally aloud mouthed, “god damn” after reading various lines and passages--probably at least a dozen times.

Why read Martin Eden if you a sword-and-sorcery fan, or a fan of REH? 

Howard was directly influenced by London, in all ways. 

If you want to know how Robert E. Howard felt, read Martin Eden.

If you want to know how Howard wrote, read Martin Eden.

How Howard struggled with life, with relationships, with his disappointment for the world--it’s all here, in this book. Martin Eden is almost as vital to understanding Howard as his personal correspondence, or One Who Walked Alone. IMO.

How can I make such a wild declaration? Martin Eden was the chief influence on Howard’s own autobiographical novel, Post Oaks and Sand Roughs. It likely influenced Howard’s life choices and how he viewed himself, too. REH scholar Will Oliver does a nice job tracing these influences in his essay “Robert E. Howard and Jack London’s Martin Eden: Analyzing the influence of Martin Eden on Howard and his Semi-Autobiography” (The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies, Vol. 11, Issue 1, June 2020). Which I sought out and read after finishing the book.

Martin Eden is a writer, a frustrated romantic, a boxer. He worked long hours in soulless jobs while wanting to do something else. The book is a story of romance colliding with commerce. Just as Howard was foiled by the whims of magazine publishers and the late payments of Weird Tales, so too is Martin Eden consumed with these struggles, living on the edge of poverty and needing to work back-breaking jobs that left him too tired to write. Yet he pressed on, because he refused to let passion and truth succumb to conformity and mindless work.

But it’s a brutal struggle, and a tragedy, just as Howard’s life was.

Martin Eden is many other things besides. A critique of early 20th capitalism, its long and inhumane working conditions. A critique of class, the cultural elites who look with scorn upon the working-class men and women who actually make the world go round. It’s a critique of the weakness of people, who are fickle and disloyal and petty. 

Eden’s great love, Ruth, abandons him when he needs her most. When he finally meets with success the world comes crawling back but Martin sees through the grift and shallowness. He’s like Conan, a barbarian at odds with corrupt civilization. A rough and uncultured sailor, Eden desperately wants to be civilized, and spends the whole book in this pursuit. He makes, it, but at the expense of his soul. When he finally learns of its cultured ways, “the gilt, the craft, and the lie,” it breaks his heart. 

“I’m no more than a barbarian getting my first impression of civilization,” he observes.

I won’t it spoil any further, just to add if not already apparent: Martin Eden=Recommended.