Smugosphere, outragosphere, ear gout, dead cats and weapons of mass distraction.

If you’re a long-term reader (waves at all three of them) you’ll know about “the smugosphere”. It is

Smugosphere [sməɡ ō sfir]: 1. “the protective fog of (unjustified) self-congratulation and complacency that surrounds any ‘community’ of people claiming to be making the world a better place, but which lacks commonly accepted and utilised measures of success and failure”

Two page bluffer’s guide (old) here. Long old ropey video here. Keyword search on this site here.

One part of the smugosphere (and feeding into the general emotacycle) is the relentless outrage machine, The outragosphere is not just social movement pathology, it is a BSINESS MODEL. A little impressionistic history (once you’re over the hill and picking up speed you’re allowed to do this- first for the 24 hour news cycle (which really kicked in with the late 1980s – esp the Gulf War of 1990-1, and CNN), with the coming of cheaper satellite hook-ups etc. Then social media two decades later, with the coming of smart phones. The ur-moment for this was the January 2009 “Miracle on the Hudson” as Twitter’s breakthrough moment (this long before Space Karen trahsed the joint). The PermaEyeballMuncher feeds itself, but it needs to eat soooo much.

The immediate inspiration for this post? Why, something on Twitter, obvs. I just saw a post of this, from the Onion (about as essential as reading gets – up there with the FT, Private Eye, Morning Star). This video could have been released yesterday, but it was actually 14 years ago.

Anyhoo, about 11 years ago, after a terrible meeting of the Manchester Green Party, I went home and bashed one out. A video I mean. Here it is, on outrage as an anagram of ear gout.

At the moment my “thinking” (random rearranging of prejudices, hunches, blindspots etc) is along these lines

1. The political/economic elites are motivated to and have the capacity to distract us – in Australia the long-serving Prime Minister John Howard (1996-2007) was an expert at getting out of tight corners by doing something outrageous and attention grabbing, akin to walking into the room and throwing a dead cat on the table. Instantly people would stop focussing on his malfeascence and instead switch to “oh my god, why did he do that. Oh my god did you see what he did.” By the time the hubbub has died down, the caravan has moved on.
2. Media elites need to keep our attention. Outrage is an eyeball magnet
3. We don’t draw the parallels between Weapons of Mass Distraction/Outrage and other techniques with psyops enough. Sure, there’s Herman and Chomsky, there’s MediaLens, but to actually use the terms “psyops” and “propaganda” when referring to the de facto systems in the “free world” (insert several pages of ‘ha ha’ here), if you do, you get instant pushback from people too indoctrinated to see it, or else too scared (understandably) to say it.
4. And beyond all this, WE need to feel outrage, to feel anything, to blot out our sense of fear and of wretched powerlessness and (for some of us) complicity in the system that is causing unimaginable/indescribable amounts of pain and horror, that is driving the Sixth Extinction, climate change and the destruction of, well, everything. We might well be taking the only planet in the Universe which we KNOW has life and turn it into Venus. We can do a certain amount of deadening with sex, alcohol, status-seeking,, info-gathering and concept-mongering (cough, cough), but those don’t really touch the sides. Outrage is the drug… And there are peddlers on every corner…

People’s thoughts, responses? Be outraged, it’s the only thing that works…

PS Here’s Charlie Brooker explaining the language of a news piece. This is the kind of media literacy we need