The year of outrage 2014: Everything you were angry about on social media this year.
The Year of Outrage Slate tracked what everyone was outraged about every day in 2014. Explore by clicking the tiles below, and then scroll down to read about how outrage has taken over our lives.
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2014: The Year of Outrage

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2014: The Year of Outrage

Arts, entertainment, and more.
Dec. 17 2014 11:48 PM

The Year of Outrage

From righteous fury to faux indignation, everything we got mad about in 2014—and how outrage has taken over our lives.

Following the news in 2014 is a bit like flying a kite in flat country during tornado season. Every so often, a whirlwind of outrage touches down, sowing destruction and chaos before disappearing into the sky.

These conditions are hardly new. Over the past decade or so, outrage has become the default mode for politicians, pundits, critics and, with the rise of social media, the rest of us. When something outrageous happens—when a posh London block installs anti-homeless spikes, or when Khloé Kardashian wears a Native American headdress, or, for that matter, when we read the horrifying details in the Senate’s torture report—it’s easy to anticipate the cycle that follows: anger, sarcasm, recrimination, piling on; defenses and counterattacks; anger at the anger, disdain for the outraged; sometimes, an apology … and on to the next. Twitter and Facebook make it easier than ever to participate from home. And the same cycle occurs regardless of the gravity of the offense, which can make each outrage feel forgettable, replaceable. The bottomlessness of our rage has a numbing effect.

Julia Turner
The Outrage Project
Choire Sicha
The Life Cycle of Outrage
Katy Waldman
What “Outrage” Means
Amanda Hess
Identity Outrage in 2014
Willa Paskin
The Cultural Outrage Audit
Jamelle Bouie
The Year in Liberal Outrage
Betsy Woodruff
The Year in Conservative Outrage
Jordan Weissmann
My Viral Outrage Hit
Andrew Goldman
How Outrage Changed My Life
Paul Ford
Outrage and the Endless Thanksgiving
Dan Kois
Righteous Outrage

This desensitization makes it tough to clock exactly how modern outrage functions. Is it as awful as it sometimes feels? More useful than it might seem? Should we be rending our garments about our constant rending of garments? Or should we embrace the new responsiveness of the social and hypersensitive Web?

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And so—in an effort to answer these and other questions—we resolved to keep track of what people got outraged about every day of 2014. Since January, a phalanx of editors, writers, and interns has been scanning the horizons for funnels of fury. They used a Google doc and a bot that reminded us about the project any time someone used the word outrage on IM. The rage-a-day calendar above contains the fruits of their labor: a comprehensive listing of what was outrageous and whom it outraged, for every single day of the year.

The results, we think, are illuminating. People were upset about TV stars and wheelchairs and lattes and racism and war. Some days, people were upset about Slate. (Other days, we caught the outrage current and rode it a ways ourselves, as Jordan Weissmann details below.) Though it can be jarring to see something as nation-shaking as Ferguson alongside something as trifling as the cover of a magazine, it’s fascinating to look at how our collective responses skipped from the serious to the picayune without much modulation in pitch. So please explore the calendar above. Vote on which outrages still outrage you, and which you can’t believe anyone ever cared about. And read the thoughtful essays below, each of which examines some aspect of outrage culture, and explore the way it shapes our world.

— Julia Turner

1 The Life Cycle of Outrage

By Choire Sicha

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Lena Dunham’s memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, arrived Sept. 30 to mostly pleasant, if often tepid, reviews in all the places that can still afford to publish book reviews. But a month after publication, a writer at the National Review finally took a read. The writer, Kevin D. Williamson, discovered a passage in which Dunham recalled at 7 curiously looking into her younger sister’s vagina. His critique was pretty righteously brutal, and headlined “Pathetic Privilege,” but the story, tweeted only 119 times, didn’t really hit. It was an aggregation of that piece, with a more straightforward headline and some juicy excerpts, that did the trick: “Lena Dunham Describes Sexually Abusing Her Little Sister,” wrote Bradford Thomas on a website called Ben Shapiro’s Truth Revolt. That piece is at, as of this writing, 2,936 tweets and counting.

Lena Dunham

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo of Lena Dunham by Michael Buckner/Getty Images for SXSW.

These twin vines, both accusing Dunham of sexual abuse, took some time to flower. They were published on the same Wednesday, and it wasn’t until Saturday that Dunham went into a self-described “rage spiral” on Twitter. It was also Saturday when Dunham’s lawyers got a pretty stern letter out, claiming defamation and “false light” (malicious embarrassment, essentially). Truth Revolt doubled down and refused to apologize, to much dismay, although they were quite right on First Amendment grounds.

On Monday, Dunham announced she was canceling her book tour events in Belgium and Germany. And also, a Tumblr emerged, or, as Bustle put it, “Lena Dunham Abuse Allegations Spur Awesome Tumblr Where Women Chronicle Early Sexual Experimentation.” By Tuesday, Dunham had issued an “exclusive statement” to Time (Time?), apologizing to those that’d been triggered or upset by her joking about molesting her sister.

This was a strange case where an outrage was begun by two publications, but it then spun freely off to feed itself on social media. Feminists divided against feminists. People—including Dunham’s own sister—were told they were child abuse apologists. But that energy needed to be quickly recaptured by publications—seized from Facebook and Twitter and monetized. Tuesday was the day that everyone got into the act for real. Jezebel gave Dunham an exceedingly well-argued pass on the topic. Gawker called in a therapist specializing in child abuse. Here at Slate, a parenting writer talked to the director of the Sex and Gender Lab at Cornell.

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On Wednesday, a full week in, Hollywood Life assessed Dunham’s apology: “We’re sure that Lena meant well, but this entire situation might be a little too controversial for our taste. So we’ll let you guys decide. … Share your thoughts in the comments below!” By Thursday, USA Today chimed in with their own set of therapists.

You might think the cycle of outrage had been completed by now. For some, the war is never over. On Dec. 13, Dunham tweeted birthday wishes to Taylor Swift: “I’m not the only girl you inspire but I am the only one you share nightgowns with.” Two minutes later, @Al_B_Damned replied: “You do realize that @taylorswift13 is not a toddler, right? Take your kiddie porn fantasies elsewhere.”

There was something for literally everyone in the Lena Dunham Molests Her Sister outrage story. If you hated millennials, here was one gone amok. If you despised successful people who never needed a leg up in the world, perfect! Think feminists are disgusting? Here’s the most disgusting one! Still others saw the awful machinations of the right-wing vilification and shame machine at work.

Our Internet media is by turns and domain names objective and deeply partisan, expert and amateur, wide-scale and intimate. As the Internet packages John Oliver videos and hard-won print media stories alike, it also packages outrage specific to each site’s audience. If you are a member of a faction of some sort—and many, maybe most, of us are!—part of your duty is to be outraged by the trotted out offenses. Many of these things are, it turns out, actually outrageous.

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And so you are in your bed watching The O'Reilly Factor, or you are on your subway reading your liberal New York Times, or you are, most likely of all, cruising through your Facebook flow. Then the item of outrage comes across your eyeballs.

We used to yell at the TV but it couldn’t hear us. Finally someone can. So you turn to all the people next to you, all the friends and followers, and you are typing and then you are hitting send, post, tweet, submit.

You have spoken. (Or so you think. Actually, you have published.) Maybe you were guided by fury. Maybe even as you cried out your emotion was moving on to Ferguson or Dogs Welcoming Soldiers Home. Maybe you were exhausted and ironic. Maybe you were playing to the cheap seats, broadcasting a simulacrum of a human response because you, without realizing it, have become a strange magazine of one, a media brand of yourself. Whichever, there are many hearts or stars or likes bestowed. There are LOLs.

You are speaking, first, into the echo chamber of your friends. But not everyone is in your silo. And so then some stranger is mad at you; then some friend is noticeably silent. You are blocked or you are yelled at. Spiraling conversations come from realms unexpected and unwanted. You are embarrassed, or you are angrier, defensive or passive-aggressive, or laughing at them all. It is a rush of emotion that stretches long but is only an instant. Then, with a slithery zip, the moment is sealed shut.

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That cycle is replicating itself now all around you in spheres you cannot even see—sometimes identically, sometimes in the reverse. (“So glad Lena Dunham stood up to those bullies!” “How dare that molester show her face!”) It’s rippling over and over throughout this huge grab bag of plastic bubble wrap sheets that we each think of as our private digital home.

This kind of thing could take up your whole day. If you weren’t careful, our life of outrage might have eaten your entire year.

2 “Outrage” Is Not “Rage”

By Katy Waldman

We think we know what we mean by outrage. It is one molecular component of the air we breathe on social media, swirling around alongside irony and manic enthusiasm. It comes in so many flavors! Conservative outrage. Feminist outrage. Entertainment outrage. Every club has its own vexillology of outrage.

President Obama

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo of President Obama by Michael Reynolds/Getty Images.

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And yet it’s hard to pin down exactly what outrage means—what makes it different from garden-variety pique or the simmering thirst for vengeance. Why is your blustery old uncle “outraged” by Obama saluting Marines while holding a latte, but the private incandescence of Achilles in his tent is just “rage”? Outrage, the subjective experience of being furious at something that crosses a perceived line. Outrage, the shocked or indignant reaction, spontaneous or calculated. Outrage, the pickup, amplification, and acceleration of that expression on social and traditional media. Outraged: one answer to the question of how to be in 2014.

Or is it how to seem? This common meaning for outrage actually grows out of a vagary of folk etymology. The word comes from an Old French noun that meant “crime” or “damage”; it fused outré (“beyond”) with a noun suffix, -age. An outrage was thus an act that went outside the bounds of what was permitted. It had a moral coloring. The word rage, which hails from rabies, the Latin term for madness or fury, cropped up separately. But we modified the meaning of outrage after it first appeared in English around 1300, over time entwining it with the aurally similar rage. (Ever wondered why we have no inrage to complement outrage? Because the linguistic bloodlines are unrelated.) By 1769, outrage had started to suggest a kind of ethical fury, one subtly directed out, and especially the visible state of being scandalized. Even now, it implies external manifestations of anger, fist-clenching gestures rather than inner fire.

Which may explain why we both like and distrust it. Sometimes, outrage can be a useful social performance, as when activists collaborated on the viciously effective Cosby rape meme. It can pull you into moral synchronicity like a virtuous flash mob. And as a word, it retains its noble, righteous flavor: Some lines should remain uncrossed. But outrage can also feel showy and false, as when people who probably don’t care about Delta tweeting a photo of a giraffe to represent Ghana, even though there are no giraffes in Ghana, pretend to care for the benefit of Twitter. And because the word originally connoted breaking rules and violating norms, an outraged person risks casting herself as a prissy schoolmarm scolding glamorous revolutionaries, not a passionate person animated by heroic anger.

So, ironically, a term created to identify excess and extravagance (what lies beyond the pale) has combusted into a movement that is itself full of theatrical hand-waving, as well as sober determination. The vector of outrage—the way its rage radiates out—almost evokes a model where you throw a stone in a pond, and the ripples lose intensity as they travel. Signing onto Twitter can sometimes feel like an endless exercise in parsing whose outrage is legitimate and whose is opportunistic or fake. Whose outrage should we be outraged about? Whose ripples should we amplify? Whose should we ignore?

 

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Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker

 

3 The Rigid Conventions of Identity Outrage

By Amanda Hess

In February, Spike Lee appeared at a Black History Month lecture at the Pratt Institute, where he delivered a raucous, seven-minute tirade against New York City gentrifiers. At one point, Lee called out the white residents who dial 911 on the city’s established local musicians: “There were brothers playing motherfuckin’ African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years,” Lee said, “and now they can’t do it anymore because the new inhabitants say the drums are loud.”

Lee’s comments were fuel for Internet outrage, and freelance writer Rania Khalek spied a discarded piece of online kindling that could help fan the flames—a tweet published a month earlier by what appeared to be a privileged, white NYC gentrifier, whining about the drums.

Khalek gleefully pasted Spike Lee’s and Anna Holmes’ comments together, adding: “I couldn't resist!”

The mashup, which was retweeted 190 times, ultimately made its way back to the source. “I was referencing white hipsters in my predominantly white yuppie Bklyn neighborhood,” explained the tweeter, Anna Holmes, who is black. “But to clarify, is your point that I am a typical ‘white gentrifier’?”

“I don't know whether you're white or what,” Khalek shot back. A follower of Khalek’s piled on: “forever publicly shamed on Twitter LOL ... #whitetears.” When Holmes clarified that hers would more accurately be described as “black tears,” he replied: “my bad but still forever memed.”

Social media allows people who have been boxed out of journalistic, academic, and political spaces to speak out about their lived experiences (#ICantBreathe) and call on the elites to address their own unexamined entitlements (#MaleTears). The meme-ing of identity can be leveraged to crowdsource examples of social injustice, but it can also be used to cast aside nuances in the pursuit of an agenda. With a few assumptions and a quick Photoshop job, even a black woman complaining about a white dude on the bongos can be framed as an emblem of white entitlement. It might not be true, but it’s forever memed.

Throughout history, “race has taken geography, language, and vague impressions as its basis,” Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in the Atlantic last year. “Race does not need biology. Race only requires some good guys with big guns looking for a reason.” A privileged few have traditionally hoarded the tools for delineating these basic demographic identities, which then direct the courses of our lives. As Coates notes, “It is quite common for whites to point out that Barack Obama isn't really ‘black’ but ‘half-white.’ One wonders if they would say this if Barack Obama were a notorious drug-lord.”

140613_OUTRAGE_ChelseaClintonNBC

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo of Chelsea Clinton by Larry Busacca/Getty Images for Glamour.

But in the online era, it’s no longer necessary to be a gatekeeper with a gun to draw those lines. There’s a lot to love about this. Hashtags like #NotYourAsianSidekick serve as informal focus groups for discussing racist structures, no institutional backing required. Photo projects like #IfTheyGunnedMeDown stream into stunning media critiques. And turning “white men” into Internet shorthand for “ignorant blowhards” gives America’s most overrepresented identity a taste of his own othering. Disrupting the rigid structures of language and standards of argumentation enforced by the elites is part of the point. As New Inquiry editor Ayesha Siddiqi said of social media in an interview with the Guardian this month: “Work that’s meant to liberate all people cannot be presented in a language available to very few.”

The structures of racism, sexism, and homophobia are too powerful and ubiquitous to topple in a single blow, so online activists grab hold of millions of little examples and start chipping away. Take the case of Strange Fruit PR, an Austin, Texas–based firm owned by two white women that was publicly shamed on Twitter this month after Texas activist Julie Gillis noticed that the firm had stupidly borrowed its name from a Billie Holiday song about lynching—a screw-up too outrageous not to catch fire. Gillis boosted the signal to her Twitter followers, and the Internet did its work: Within days, Strange Fruit had apologized and rebranded as Perennial Public Relations. That is a very minor victory, but it works as an object lesson—the PR ladies were exhibiting the kind of white obliviousness that surely stretches far beyond themselves.

Other small incidents, however, prove an awkward fit for big structural critiques. Gender-aware observers raged this year over the fact that Taylor Swift’s album and Patricia Lockwood’s book of poetry were almost exclusively reviewed by male critics in mainstream publications. It packs an ironic punch to note that the worth of America’s most promising female artists is still being assessed by male gatekeepers, but it’s also an oddly glancing blow; female critics should be assigned to review U2 and Thomas Sayers Ellis, too, not just other women. And ironically, Collapse Board’s gripe about the dearth of female reviewers assigned to Swift’s 1989 made its point by totally ignoring prominent reviews from Molly Lambert at Grantland and Lindsay Zoladz at New Yorkin order to prove that women aren’t heard, it suppressed their voices.

Some viral shamings are removed so far from their contexts that they end up undermining their own ideological goals. In June, a picture of an all-male CEO panel at a global women’s conference incited widespread head-desking: The image plugged easily into the narrative of entitled corporate bros, mansplaining feminism to women. But the broader context of the image was less damning: The conference was dominated by female speakers, who had invited just a few powerful men to the stage to hold themselves, and other male business leaders, accountable for recruiting and promoting women—an arguably heartening image, all things considered. (The seductiveness of the worldview-reinforcing meme is not, of course, just a progressive thing—playing for the other team this summer, Fox News bought a Twitter hashtag hoax that suggested that feminists want to end Father’s Day.)

These outrage incidents often play out like a game of ideological Mad Libs: Start with a broad worldview, pick an example, and add umbrage. Sometimes, the fervor to fill in the blanks ends up producing a truly unreadable document. In June, the New Republic took Chelsea Clinton’s astronomical $600,000 NBC salary and shoved it awkwardly into a feminist argument about equal pay for male and female journalists: “Her impressive paycheck, deserved or not, is a step toward balancing the scale,” Amy Weiss-Meyer wrote. It was one of those cringe-inducing feminist statements that ignore all other odious affiliations (wealth, nepotism) in the interest of gender solidarity. And Weiss-Meyer reinforced the point by including tweets from exclusively male journalists outraged at the figure—and ignoring all the female journalists who felt the same way.

Another popular strategy used to demonstrate the broad reality that certain demographic groups receive disparate media coverage and social protection: Pick a representative from each demo and place them side by side to reveal the contradictions. When Lena Dunham was accused by right-wing outlets of sexually molesting her sister, Grace, the writer and activist Mikki Kendall argued that Dunham’s racial and gender privilege had attracted her some unearned feminist sympathy. “If Lena Dunham was a man or a WOC I wonder how many folks would be handwaving these stories? Because I can just about guess,” Kendall tweeted, before contrasting the feminist treatment of Dunham with that of R. Kelly. “The gap between the attitudes that let R. Kelly prosper & the ones that excuse Dunham is incredibly thin,” she tweeted. “Nonexistent to be honest.” But there is more separating Kelly and Dunham than just race and gender—in both civil and criminal suits, Kelly has been accused of raping dozens of underage girls and producing child pornography from at least one encounter; Dunham has been accused, online, of touching her sister’s vagina, when she was 7. There is a compelling argument to be made about how black men are criminalized while white women are absolved; this isn’t it.

Sometimes, even a hypothetical construction will do:

Well, you can’t argue with fiction.

The sheer volume of online discourse means that pointed examples rarely need to be literally invented to support a worldview. Any opinion, no matter how odious, has likely already been tweeted by someone, somewhere. With a targeted search, I can find an online adversary willing to publicly proclaim any number of offensive ideas, like that Eric Garner “died of gluttony and sloth” (I’m horrified!) or that Beyoncé is an “old slut” (sexist and ageist!) or Emma Watson a “biased bigoted bitch” (who can write a quick blog post?) If the tweeter in question is unfortunate enough to work for a recognizable company, she won’t be working there for long.

But it can be difficult to judge whether an offensive tweet represents a serious undercurrent of thought worth examining, or just the pathetic ramblings of a random moron. And there’s a real danger in pinning a big idea on the wrong 140 characters. As Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig wrote in an incisive Jacobin essay on the unraveling of Rolling Stone’s UVA rape story, “The strength of leftist critique is that it concerns itself with the broad, the historical, the powerful, the structural,” but when journalists tie those arguments on one outrageous anecdote, the broader message lives or dies on the credibility of just one example.

It’s great that critiques of the status quo informed by race, gender, and sexuality have found a prominent platform in the digital age, both on social media and in the traditional publications that often mine online networks for grist. (I’d personally like to thank this development for paying my rent.) But this new subindustry of identity-based outrage has created its own rigid conventions, and thinkers who don’t play by the rules will themselves be made the target of outrage. (When Michelle Goldberg laid out the phenomenon in The Nation in January, she was deemed a racist transmisogynist.) In this environment, any argument alleging sexism or racism is seen as irrefutable, particularly if it’s lodged by a member of the aggrieved class. Challenging the argument itself is tantamount to denying that racism or sexism exist, or worse, rejecting the lived experience of a marginalized demographic.

The unfortunate result of that dynamic is that a new media order that should be teeming with more vibrant viewpoints than ever is at risk of calcifying into a staid landscape, where original thought is muffled by the wet blanket of political correctness. "There’s a funny, recurring instinct on the Internet now that if you don’t agree with something someone’s written, that it’s not fair or relevant and that it shouldn’t exist,” Jezebel editor Emma Carmichael said recently on the Longform Podcast. “Online feminism has more and more rules lately.” After editing out all of the statements that could be perceived, no matter how crudely, as biased or insensitive, “There are only so many things you can say.“ Even Suey Park, the creator of #CancelColbert who has drummed up Twitter outrage and caught her own backlash many times over, appears to be questioning the social media status quo. “I myself have mistaken pile-ons for justice when oftentimes there was a small miscommunication. I would assume the worse of everyone,” she tweeted this month. “But twitter can give you tunnel vision. It’s fickle, fast-moving, and full of miscommunication and fabrications. It can be self-destructive.”

 

4 The Cultural Outrage Audit

By Willa Paskin

HBO’s True Detective was one of the year’s quintessential TV shows. It had the memes, the themes, the inside jokes. The show that popularized the Yellow King and insisted that, whatever it means, time is a flat circle, was also the apotheosis of the McConaissance and Reddit sleuthing. It contained the latest iteration of the indefatigable antihero, the supremely hubristic showrunner, and the unsatisfying ending. Also, it had a woman problem.

Leslie Jones on Weekend Update

Photo illustration by Slate. Screenshot of Leslie Jones on SNL from NBC.

But what show doesn’t? Identity politics has become an increasingly powerful lens for critiquing television (and podcasts, and pop music, and movies), and in 2014 it wasn’t just True Detective that found itself under the microscope. Fargo had a woman problem, unless it really didn’t. The Emmys definitely had a woman problem. Game of Thrones had a problematic rape episode. Louie kinda did too. Aaron Sorkin is an idiot about rape. Tyrant definitely had a rape problem—and maybe also a race one. Girls has been trying to fix its race problem. Saturday Night Live has been trying even harder. Looking, a show all about gay men, still had a lack of gay sex problem. And all the while, various motivated viewers lobbied True Detective to get a black or female or trans detective on board for Season 2. (It didn’t work.)

Julia Turner
The Outrage Project
Choire Sicha
The Life Cycle of Outrage
Katy Waldman
What “Outrage” Means
Amanda Hess
Identity Outrage in 2014
Willa Paskin
The Cultural Outrage Audit
Jamelle Bouie
The Year in Liberal Outrage
Betsy Woodruff
The Year in Conservative Outrage
Jordan Weissmann
My Viral Outrage Hit
Andrew Goldman
How Outrage Changed My Life
Paul Ford
Outrage and the Endless Thanksgiving
Dan Kois
Righteous Outrage

Auditing cultural products for their treatment—or lack of treatment—of marginalized groups of people can seem like an antiseptic way of consuming culture, more head than heart. Instead of taking in a story in its totality, a viewer (or tweeter) breaks it down into its component, offending parts. Though frustrating at times, I think reading shows this way comes from a passionate aggravation with the status quo, not some starchy desire to treat cultural products like controversies-in-waiting. The Golden Age of television, which changed much about TV, most especially its overall quality, has, generally speaking, been characterized by shows about ethically challenged white, male antiheroes. The best versions of these shows—Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Deadwood, etc.— had rich female characters who were often despised by members of the audience for “getting in the way” of their morally reprehensible husbands anyway. The lesser, copy-cat versions of these shows dispensed with such characterization almost altogether, and cast women as corpses, as prostitutes, as cardboard cutouts. The Wire, ever the exception to the rule, was one of the few great dramas with a racially diverse cast. If you watch enough TV, where so much of the most serious stuff is solely concerned with the experience of white straight men, it’s not dispassion that motivates you to see “problems” everywhere—it’s outrage.​ These series made their lily-white, macho beds, and deserve to be called out for lying in them.

And yet sometimes, especially when you aren’t aghast yourself, all this outrage can feel like a reductive way to consume art. Isn’t it more pleasurable to watch Fargo without seeing it as yet another noxious antihero tale? Isn’t it easier to enjoy True Detective if you’re not convinced it’s uninterested in the female experience?

All of the outrage about representation on television has been—or is starting to be—effective. The people who create and make television are still predominantly white and male, but at least executives and show creators know they are going to be asked what they are doing to change that, about the casually racist jokes in their sitcoms, about the makeup of their writers’ room. On-screen diversity has been embraced by ABC, which has essentially tasked Shonda Rhimes with saving the network, relying on the ratings success of her Thursday night lineup—Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and new hit How to Get Away With Murder—to buoy the channel and to anchor a multicultural lineup that also includes one of the season’s few other hit shows, Black-ish. (Rhimes was also at the center of a related outrage, one of the fall’s biggest, when the New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley described her as an “angry black woman.”) Netflix’s flagship series may be the antiheroic House of Cards, but its most-watched show is Orange Is the New Black, about the most diverse group of female characters ever assembled. And it’s Orange, more than House of Cards, that Amazon imitated with its buzzy Transparent, a groundbreaking show about, among other things, the transgender experience.

Even when the outrage gets cacophonous, and maybe a little tiresome, even when you find it completely wrongheaded and misguided, it’s a stubborn, insistent reminder of the very diversity these television shows often elide. Outrage has forced TV providers to think not only about who they put on screen and behind the camera, but who is off screen, on the couch—women and people of color and of different sexual and gender orientations who might like to see, on occasion, themselves.

5 The Sadness of Liberal Outrage

By Jamelle Bouie

For a few days in March, liberal Twitter—or at least, its left-most wing—was consumed in a campaign to “#cancelcolbert,” meaning Stephen Colbert, the liberal satirist and Comedy Central host. The offense was a tweet, sent from the official Colbert Report Twitter account: “I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.”

Stephen Colbert

Photo illustration by Slate. Screenshot of Stephen Colbert from Comedy Central.

On its own, the tweet read like an offensive display of anti-Asian racism. But there was a context to the message. On his show, Colbert had mocked Washington football team owner Dan Snyder’s plan to address criticism of his team’s name by founding an organization to uplift “original Americans.” As part of this, he made a callback to an earlier gag, where his character was caught making racist jokes about Asians. To atone for this, said Colbert, he would create the “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.”

The context didn’t matter to the Internet outrage machine, which was swift. Led by Suey Park, a 23-year-old freelance writer and activist who had made a name with the “NotYourAsianSidekick” hashtag, thousands of users tweeted with #cancelcolbert. Park’s argument was that, by encouraging the audience to laugh at a racist joke, Colbert was all but negating any anti-racist message carried by the performance. And apparently a lot of progressives agreed.

It’s easy to see the problem with the “Ching-Chong” bit. Not only was Colbert walking a fine line by using racism to critique racism, but he also relied on a double standard: The odds that Colbert would have made this joke with anti-black slurs are close to zero, but there’s still something socially acceptable about anti-Asian slurs, whether they are part of an anti-racist critique or not.

Colbert never apologized for the tweet or the joke, but the outrage storm was loud enough to prompt a response. “I just pray that no one tweets about the time I said that Rosa Parks was overrated, Hitler had some good ideas, or ran a cartoon during Black History Month showing President Obama teaming up with the Ku Klux Klan because, man, that sounds pretty bad out of context,” he said on his show.

What’s striking about this episode—why it still stands out, nine months later—is how emblematic it is of how outrage has operated on the left this past year, at least on social media. The objects of liberal outrage are occasionally on the right (MSNBC specializes in directing dismay and scorn at conservatives). But the greatest vitriol online is saved for those on the left. Sometimes, as with Bill Maher’s comments about Muslims, this stuff is genuinely objectionable. But more often the left-on-left outrages are about the kind of language and “privilege” policing we see with the Colbert affair. And more often than not, there are no concrete wins. Nothing changes—but the outrage leaders can rest assured that they’ve exacted some kind of social price from those who make the mistake of talking in the wrong way. Sure, Stephen Colbert will keep making the same kind of jokes, but at least everyone knows that some people find them unacceptable.

All of this raises a question: If nothing comes from the outrage, what was the point?

It feels good to express disgust, of course, and when that comes with social affirmation—favorites, retweets, followers, blog posts—there’s an incentive to show more anger. But I think there’s more to it than that. In a world where prejudice and privilege still rule the day, it’s cathartic for a lot of lefties—even straight white dudes—to show outrage, even if it leads to nothing in particular. By raging against something like Colbert’s joke, you can voice your anger at the status quo, which, in the past year especially, seems to have frozen in place. And with a simple retweet, you can signify just what camp you’re in. In a sense, for the social-media left, cultural outrage is a substitute for politics.

You may not be able to move the Democratic Party toward a more populist agenda or stop the Republican takeover of state governments across the country or protect abortion rights or even make media more inclusive. But you can punish social transgressions and in doing so, affirm the values that are missing from so much of the digital and analog worlds. The problem, unfortunately, is that this doesn’t give you a material win. It doesn’t ameliorate any actual injustice. And it might, in the end, harm efforts to make change. If outrage stands in for activism, if we’re focused on the moral temperature of Internet individuals, then we’re distracted from the collective action—and collective institution building—that makes real reform possible.

6 The Success of Conservative Outrage

By Betsy Woodruff

No one felt the wrath of conservative outrage this year quite like Melissa Harris-Perry. On Dec. 29, 2013, the host and a panel of guests spent about a minute joking about the fact that Mitt Romney’s adopted grandson is black. The backlash was mammoth. Sarah Palin and Scott Brown leapt into the fray, Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle questioned why Harris-Perry wasn’t fired, and Jeffrey Lord opined at the American Spectator that the incident showed how liberals are the real racists because they are “using race to control. Anything. Everything.” Conservative Twitter was irate, and commentator Michelle Malkin tweeted that Harris-Perry and other “MSNBC racists who mock adopted babies” ought to “lean forward...into a pit of hellfire.” Conservative ire was so great that Glenn Beck told people to back off. (Seriously!) Harris-Perry gave a tearful apology on Jan. 4, 2014, and it still stands as the year’s great right-wing pile-on victory.

Melissa Harris-Perry

Photo illustration by Slate. Still of Melissa Harris-Perry courtesy of Lord Rothschild/YouTube.

The anti-Harris-Perry mob is fascinating because it exemplifies a shift in conservative activism, and because it suggests that shift is permanent. Conservative outrage is starting to look a lot like liberal outrage.

Conservatives, by disposition, ought to be outrage-averse. Kate Fox’s joke about British protests—“A truly English protest march would see us all chanting: 'What do we want? GRADUAL CHANGE! When do we want it? IN DUE COURSE!”—could once have been leveled at conservatives with equal fairness. Conservatism, as understood by Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and William F. Buckley, is the opposite of radicalism. It eschewed the mob impulse, the scalp-hunting instinct, and the bellowing ire that’s come to be business as usual in some quarters of the right.

What changed? The Tea Party. Consultant John Feehery argued at the Daily Caller that Tea Partiers’ instincts are radical, rather than conservative. And at the New York Times, David Brooks argued that Tea Partiers, with their anti-establishment energy and eagerness for combat, had more in common with hippies than conservatives.

Feehery and Brooks’ concern makes more sense when you remember that Tea Party leaders and activists had a complicated love-hate relationship with Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky, himself a target of Fox News outrage. Many Tea Partiers—including former FreedomWorks head Dick Armey—deliberately use Alinsky’s organizing tactics to fight against his ideological heirs, as chronicled by Kenneth Vogel in Politico. In a Wall Street Journal obituary for Andrew Breitbart, James Taranto argued that the antagonistic conservative activist and commentator was Alinsky’s true heir. And there are at least three books endeavoring to teach conservative activists the Alinsky way, with delightfully similar titles: Rules for Conservative Radicals, Rules for Conservatives, and Rules for Radical Conservatives. You get the point.

Of course, outrage on the right isn’t new. Radio talkers, Fox News hosts, and social conservative activists like Phyllis Schlafly have long looked to channel conservative ire into social and political change. The difference now is that social media makes it much easier to see causal links between what people like Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, and Kimberly Guilfoyle say and what their listeners and viewers do about it. And just as perpetually outraged Fox News inspired perpetually outraged MSNBC, the PC policing from the left has gained a little traction on the right. 

Brooks and Feehery seem to doubt conservatives can use the devil’s tools to do the Lord’s business. Breitbart’s fans are in the opposite camp. Conservatives successfully used Alinsky’s tactics against Harris-Perry. And that suggests that in the battle between Brooks and the late Breitbart for what conservatism looks like and how it operates, Breitbart’s camp is winning.

Here’s how Harris-Perry got Alinskied:

For starters, Harris-Perry’s detractors attacked her for violating her own rules, using Rule No. 4 in Alinsky’s book. Harris-Perry’s show puts significant focus on the state of race relations in the U.S. and the importance of being racially sensitive. The average Tea Party tweeter, to put it lightly, does not share those concerns. Harris-Perry had broken her own rule, and conservatives knew it, so they pounced.

Conservatives also leveled maximal ridicule at Harris-Perry (Rule No. 5) and kept going after her and going after her and going after her (Rule No. 8). From Fox News to Twitchy, there was a spirited, days-long, full-frontal assault on the host and her panelists. It made news and it worked. And it’s important to note that Perry’s critics weren’t all grass-roots Tea Party activists. Conservatives from across the ideological spectrum joined in, including Fox hosts and radio talkers. In other words, the Harris-Perry criticism wasn’t a Tea Party thing; it was a conservative thing.

To be fair, Harris-Perry still might have apologized without a Twitchy nuclear meltdown. But regardless, conservatives targeting Harris-Perry got what they wanted: The host’s minute of toddler-bashing got widespread attention from mainstream media outlets, and she made a contrite apology. Conservatives have been criticizing media liberals for decades, often with disappointing results. This time, situated in a larger culture where social media outrage gets people fired with surprising frequency, was different.

The Tea Party activism that exploded in the early years of Obama’s presidency has largely died down. But while the tricorn hats and Gadsden flags of 2010 may be mostly gone, the strategic shift is here to stay. Conservatives know how to channel their outrage into wins—even if those wins are entirely symbolic. They’ve eaten from Alinsky’s Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and, David Brooks be damned, they aren’t going back.

 

7 My Viral Outrage Hit

By Jordan Weissmann

I didn’t have to think long or hard before deciding to help ruin Ben Edelman’s month. On a recent Tuesday, Boston.com published a now infamous email chain in which the Harvard Business School professor raged at a local Chinese restaurant that had overcharged him a mere $4 on a takeout order. Edelman accused Sichuan Garden’s owners of violating a consumer protection law, complained to local authorities, and told a reporter he was considering additional legal action. The story had been popping up on my Twitter feed for much of the afternoon. And of course, it came packaged with a perfect villain: a pompous Harvard professor (and lawyer to boot!) who saw nothing wrong with waging holy war against a mom-and-pop business over a tiny mistake (they’d raised their prices by $1 but forgot to update the online menu he’d ordered from).

Harvard Law School

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo of Harvard Law School by Darren McCollester/Getty Images.

I sent a note to my editor: “This seems like obvious traffic if we want it.” He responded: “Bwaha. Sure.” So I took a moment out of my day to write a short, very sarcastic post. It was a gimme, the blogging equivalent of a 3-inch putt.

Predictably, my squib blew up, just like the Boston.com piece. So did similar posts from Gawker, New York, and lots of other sites. By Wednesday morning, half the world seemed to loathe Edelman. Sichuan Garden was getting supportive notes from as far away as Australia. Eventually, the Harvard prof broke down and apologized on his personal blog.

This is how the cycle of viral outrage goes. A clicky, infuriating story breaks. A few writers like me glom on. And suddenly, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people find themselves reading about a random academic’s crime against common courtesy. Or maybe about a semi-literate, one-paragraph essay that helped a college athlete get an A minus in his class. Or about a billionaire who compared progressives to Nazis. I didn’t become a journalist to peddle indignation on Facebook. But it sells—the page views don’t lie. And while Slate may be running an entire special package dissecting the ways our perpetual umbrage colors and sometimes poisons discourse, we play a role in it.

It’s something I feel ambivalent about as a writer. Instant, social media–fueled outrage can be a force for good. It can punish a wretched billionaire like former Clippers owner Donald Sterling. It can help drive a convicted domestic abuser out of his job as a CEO. And, of course, it generates traffic. Of the top 10 most read stories I’ve written since joining Slate, at least five of them could be characterized as outrage bait.

The common defense of outrage-for-traffic is that viral hits help finance other less outraged, more important journalism on our site and others. That’s largely true, at least at places that do the important stuff. Speaking personally, the traffic I’ve reaped thanks to Comcast’s customer service call from hell has given me leeway to write about less tantalizing subjects like college accreditation. Thanks to Ben Edelman, I’ve had some breathing room to work on a piece about the year of Thomas Piketty. (It’s coming, I promise.)

But there are significant downsides. The impulse to jump on the outrage cycle, especially in the early moments when getting your reactive post up on your site as fast as possible counts, makes it very tempting to post first and ask questions later. Attempting to harness viral outrage also has a way of obliterating nuance (Facebook is basically the arch nemesis of even-handedness). And that’s where most of my discomfort lies.

Let’s come back to Edelman. Before he was known as the jerk who tried to rain down terror on a Chinese joint, he was known as a young academic prodigy and important advocate for online consumers. His mentor, Nobel-prize winning economist Alvin Roth, has called him the “sheriff” of the Internet. He even filed a formal complaint with the government that forced American Airlines to stop bilking passengers on faux tax charges. The bulldog personality that spurs him to wrestle with mega-corporations is probably part of what turned him into the scourge of Boston-area Asian restaurants (he once pulled a similar stunt with a sushi joint). Unlike Joshua Gans, I don’t think that excuses his behavior—people should be able to turn off their aggression when it’s inappropriate—but if I hadn’t been rushing to get a post up fast, I might have at least read up on the guy I was attacking and leavened it with that point.

Or take my second, widely read story on Edelman (because when you have a hit, you milk it). The punch line of this whole story was that, after all his own outrage, the professor may have been wrong about the consumer protection law he cited in his ticked off emails, which Georgetown University law professor Adam Levitin explained in a blog post. I picked up that point in my own quickie article, which I ended with a block quote from Levitin, who wondered whether Edelman, a J.D. and member of the Massachusetts bar, might have committed a professional ethics violation. It seemed fair game, coming as it did from a Georgetown professor.

Turns out, that might have been a bit unfair. Yesterday, I spoke with Nancy Moore, a legal ethics expert at Boston University about Edelman’s behavior. The incident was “unfortunate,” she told me (and compared it to “road rage”), but explained that the man didn’t obviously do anything that violated his responsibilities as a lawyer. Had I made that call before publishing, I probably wouldn’t have included that final quote.

Fundamentally, I think I, and the Internet at large, treated Edelman fairly—far more so than he treated Sichuan Garden. The professor very politely declined to be interviewed for this piece, saying he wanted more time to think about what had happened before making any more public statements. But my guess is that, aside from marring his Google results, this brush with notoriety won’t do much damage to his life or livelihood. Unlike, say, a public relations flack who can’t help but tweet an AIDS joke about a trip to Africa, Edelman’s lack of decorum probably doesn’t say anything about his fitness to be a business school professor. He may be untenured, but he has powerful friends in academia, like Roth, to stick up for him. And I doubt his $800-per-hour corporate consulting business is going anywhere.

The point remains, though: Outrage bait is tempting for writers like me because of the numbers on that most read bar. I try to indulge in it responsibly. But, just like the people I pillory, I’m not always perfect.

8 How Outrage Changed My Life

By Andrew Goldman

A few days before Christmas last year, I felt a familiar nausea as I watched Twitter explode. A public relations rep named Justine Sacco had tweeted a bad joke about AIDS in Africa just before boarding a 12-hour flight from London to South Africa. Writer Sam Biddle noticed the tweet, and posted it on Valleywag. Soon, #whendoesjustineland was trending, and, with Sacco up in the air and unaware of the attention, the pile-on began in earnest. As I watched smart people I knew on Twitter enjoying the fun, it seemed to me that thousands of people who’d never been particularly concerned about the African AIDS epidemic, who weren’t personally wounded in any way by Sacco’s tweet, were wishing that something truly terrible would happen to a person who’d had a joke fall flat. I couldn’t help but think about that old Life magazine photo of a beaming kid about to polish off a bleeding fox with a bat, surrounded by an approving crowd of seemingly nice, normal Midwestern adults. In a few hours, Justine would turn on her phone in Capetown to realize that her life as she knew it was over. I attempted in vain to reach out to her via her LinkedIn account. I was concerned she might try to hurt herself. I had an inkling of how she was going to feel.

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Photo illustration by Slate

Before I joined it, and before it ruined my life, I hated Twitter. It struck me as a baldly narcissistic waste of time. Those considered masters of the form would lean back and craft their version of Noel Coward wit, feigning bemused detachment while we all knew that they were actually furiously tap dancing for fame and recognition in the form of followers, retweets, and favorites. It seemed so desperate to me. But in 2011, after I got the most high profile gig of my life—doing the weekly Q&A in the New York Times Magazine—I decided that I would now need to become a “brand” unless I wanted to be pastured after my 40th birthday like so many aging media types before me. As soon as I joined, I became addicted. I rationalized away my previous hatred, because, like pretty much everyone else I know who makes a living with a byline, I’m a desperate narcissist too. And I was lonely after working alone in a room for the last 20 years. In becoming one of those Twitter assholes, I found a community.

I wasn’t good at it. I was an asshole, but a politically inept one: When then Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton—a pal from when we both worked at Tina Brown’s Talkreviewed Masa, the sushi place that costs $450 a head, I tweeted that his multiple visits might well be the reason the Times was in financial ruin. Sifton, my boss told me, was really pissed. I apologized, but I suspect we’re no longer pals. And for this, Brand Goldman never topped 2,000 followers. I enjoyed joining in on one outrage-fueled pig pile, on Esquire writer Chris Jones, after he’d been condescending and self-important in responding to a critic and aspiring writer. In tweeting scorn at Jones, I wasn’t bringing anything new to the table, or encouraging constructive dialogue. I was piling on for sport, without for a second exploring the reasons for the intensity of my outrage. If I’m honest about it, is it possible I might resent the guy for being objectively far more successful at the same job I do, or that try as I might, I will likely never in my career equal his great 2010 Roger Ebert profile? Yes, now that I think about it, it’s entirely possible.

Julia Turner
The Outrage Project
Choire Sicha
The Life Cycle of Outrage
Katy Waldman
What “Outrage” Means
Amanda Hess
Identity Outrage in 2014
Willa Paskin
The Cultural Outrage Audit
Jamelle Bouie
The Year in Liberal Outrage
Betsy Woodruff
The Year in Conservative Outrage
Jordan Weissmann
My Viral Outrage Hit
Andrew Goldman
How Outrage Changed My Life
Paul Ford
Outrage and the Endless Thanksgiving
Dan Kois
Righteous Outrage

Unfortunately, none of this introspection occurred to me until I myself had been ground into hamburger by an angry Twitter mob. I’m generally hypercritical of my own work and I’m embarrassed by a lot of stuff I’ve written. But nothing makes me prouder than the column that I did for 2½ years at the Times Magazine. It was a part-time contract, but I treated it like a full-time job. I was an obsessive researcher, reading everything I could get my hands on, often making calls to experts to report out questions to ask. Not every subject enjoyed the experience—Chris Dodd and Arianna Huffington were vocally unhappy afterward to magazine higher ups—but I think the vast majority of readers enjoyed my interview style, and my editors, who would occasionally tell me to “draw some blood” with subjects like Huffington, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, couldn’t have been happier.

On the page, I might have come off as an “equal opportunity asshole”—as my editors and I had named my interviewing persona—but the interviews themselves were rarely confrontational. I just asked fact-based questions that interested me, and never judged questions as good or bad by how comfortable they would make the subjects. I asked Washington football team’s owner Dan Snyder how he felt about many of his team’s fans praying for his death. I asked Beltway fixer Lanny Davis about the period during which he’d lure Washington heavies to his house for drinks and then try to sell them Amway. And when I interviewed frequent Comedy Central roaster Whitney Cummings, I asked her if there was any truth to the joke that other roasters like Kathy Griffin and Greg Giraldo made about her, that she’d slept her way onto the roast dais. I thought I’d likely get a feminist answer from Cummings—that comedy was an inherently sexist field, and that the only material that other comedians could come up with about an attractive female comic was the lazy, retrograde suggestion that she must have slept her way to success. Instead, Cummings replied, “If sleeping with people worked, I’d be doing it. Do you know an example of anyone who’s ever slept with a producer or whatever that has gotten them anywhere?”

I was quickly called out for the question on Twitter by novelist Jennifer Weiner:

I didn’t know much about Weiner, except that she’d written a best-selling novel called Good in Bed, and was apparently a person who devoted a lot of time to Twitter, with more than 15,000 tweets and an impressive fan base to match—nearly 100,000 followers at the time. Weiner’s tweet kicked off a small Twitter storm. I responded in DMs to specific critiques from The New Yorker’s TV critic Emily Nussbaum without snark—she had good points, I admitted in an exchange. But then the vile stuff started. By then, I’d learned to ignore the usual trolls that had taken to regularly attacking me, but what some notable women felt comfortable saying surprised me. A Random House novelist named Amy MacKinnon suggested that my question was somehow indicative of me having a small penis.

And an otherwise funny Twitter comedian named Julieanne Smolinski tweeted that she felt bad for Andrew Goldman’s mother for having to have sex with his father to make Andrew Goldman. I wasn’t hurt, just astounded that a stranger who didn’t like a question I’d asked in a magazine column would publicly drag my naked parents into this, so, as a return volley, I emailed Smolinski a link to my mother’s obituary, not yet a year old. (She apologized and deleted the tweet. “I am not normally a gigantic asshole,” she emailed back.) But neither Weiner, nor anybody else who’d had their outrage meters tripped by my column bothered to pipe up and gently suggest to their followers that denigrating my penis size or my parents wasn’t the best response from a community reacting to what they saw as sexism. Still, the uproar was instructive. Though they wouldn’t allow me to address the issue online, and the column hadn’t bothered any of the many women at the Times who’d read it before going to press, we all agreed to try to be more sensitive to gender issues.

Several months later, Weiner re-emerged, and I screwed up in a way that forever changed my life. I’d interviewed Tippi Hedren, who was the subject of the HBO film The Girl, about her relationship with Alfred Hitchcock. I previewed the film, and read Spellbound by Beauty, the biography upon which it was based. “From now on, I want you to make yourself sexually available to me at all times, whatever I want you to do, whenever I want you to do it,” Toby Jones’ Hitchcock tells Sienna Miller’s Hedren in the movie. Hitchcock, in both film and book, promises that unless Hedren submits to his sexual advances, he will destroy her acting career, which she now says was exactly what he did after she rebuffed him. “Did you ever consider it?” I asked Hedren, about sleeping with Hitchcock. “I have a strong Lutheran background, and my parents instilled in me strong morals,” she replied. “This was something I could never have done.”

The morning it came out, Weiner tweeted:

I’d spent days prepping for the Hedren interview. The result was fascinating, and it was fair, and I was proud of it. Yet Weiner felt comfortable shitting all over it without, it seemed to me, even reading it carefully.

On 91 North, en route to Massachusetts to visit my sister with our two toddler sons in the back seat either screaming or singing—who can remember, the whole weekend’s a horrific blur—I read my wife the response I’d gleefully crafted with my thumbs. “@Jenniferweiner Sensing pattern. Little Freud in me thinks you would have liked at least to have had opportunity to sleep way to top.” “Don’t,” my wife said. But I already had. I’d lobbed at Weiner a burn intended to hurt her as much as her tweet had hurt me. That was how it worked, right?

In light of what happened after, this is the moment I’ve thought about every day since, the thing that my mind always goes to when I can’t sleep and I need to take inventory of the great mistakes and regrets of my life. How, as a father of two, could I have been so selfish and shortsighted to risk a steady paycheck? It’s been 801 days now and, whenever I see 3 a.m., it’s still there, hanging on to the No. 1 blackest spot in my soul.

Nussbaum was one of the first to note what I’d done, and, though she said she had no issue with the Hedren interview, quite rightly schooled me via Twitter that responding to an accusation of sexism with something inherently sexist—“douchebaggery,” she called it—could go a long way toward proving Weiner’s point.* While apple picking with my family, I flailed through nausea on Twitter for an agonizing hour trying to dig myself out. The tweet was not intended to be serious, I was simply responding to “bullshit” with “bullshit,” I tweeted. A swelling barrage of hundreds on Twitter telling me the various ways I could go fuck myself began. That day’s absolute low came hours later when a former girlfriend of several years who is a feminist writer chimed in on Twitter to call my tweet “atrocious.” She was right of course, but the idea that a friend had chosen to publicly call me out on social media rather than picking up the phone, signaled the kind of mess I’d found myself in. I had become a cause, an issue, something that required every prominent feminist to stand up against and be counted on Twitter. At that point, I tweeted a full, unqualified apology to Weiner, and disabled my Twitter account.

If I haven’t said it clearly enough by now, I’m sorry for the tweet I sent to Weiner. Really. It wasn’t acceptable. It was clearly sexist. It was worthy of derision. And it was also part of an outrage ecosystem that I’ve only begun to understand in the 2½ years since, where the impulse to set aside nuance in order to say something hurtful—the impulse that compelled me to send out that tweet, even as my wife said “don’t”—is inextricably linked to the reaction it got. Shooting off my mouth was as much a part of my “brand” as policing for offenses is part of Weiner’s.

Two days after my apology, Margaret Sullivan, the Times’ new public editor, who, it seems, monitors Twitter outrage like a police scanner, published a column online titled, “A Twitter Outburst and Another Chance for Andrew Goldman,” which began with a question that didn’t correct the fundamental misreading that Weiner had had of my column. “Is it ever acceptable for a journalist to ask a successful woman if she has slept her way to the top?” she asked. She wrote I’d “asked Ms. Hedren if she had ever been tempted to help her career along by having sex with directors”—failing to note that it was actually one specific director I’d asked about, and the plot of an entire film hinged upon an actual, literal, sexual proposition and threat tendered by Hitchcock. Though she never bothered calling me for comment (she did talk to Weiner), Sullivan suggested I should have been fired, given the question, the tweet, and my status as, what she called, “a highly replaceable freelancer,” a term of derision which could describe nearly every New York Times Magazine writer. She failed to mention Weiner’s role as a prodigious fight picker, but did link approvingly to a nutty conspiracy theory–based rant, called “Does Andrew Goldman, New York Times Misogynist, Owe His Career to a Harvey Weinstein Headlock,” by infamous troll Edward Champion, who earlier this year was suspended from Twitter for threatening a female author.

From my depressive exile, I waited for the reasonable people of Twitter to point all of this out, to call the fouls. But to the contrary, feminist Twitter and its allies cheered my public bludgeoning.

Though I wouldn’t actually leave the paper for another year, Sullivan’s column pretty much did me in at the Times. Jill Abramson, the new executive editor, was internally a vocal fan of Sullivan’s piece I was told, and insisted on a one month unpaid suspension for me. The following year, after a long period in which I’d done everything I could to rehabilitate myself, keep my nose clean, and do great work, the Times fired me, six months into my third one-year contract for doing my column exactly as I had always been encouraged to do it. The week it went down, I happened to be midproduction directing a short film I’d written, starring Paul Henry, a talk show host from New Zealand whose story had a special resonance with me; the clip of his career imploding on live morning television had gone viral internationally. I switched directions on the film project and turned it into something more autobiographical, which now goes deeply into my experience at the paper and as an early recipient of social media outrage. It’s called The Desk, and, once it screens at a festival, will ensure that my byline will never again appear in the New York Times.

It’s hard not to sound like I’m angling for sympathy, so I’ll spare you the gories on the depths of where the mind goes after being declared an enemy of women when you feel confident that you’ve spent your entire life respecting them. I’ll leave it at this: I am less now than I was before. I am older in the worst way. I’m scared to embrace the quality that made my column great—my mouthiness. I’ve yet to fully recover, professionally or personally.

Weiner never seemed to understand what this episode had wrought in my life. After I apologized to her personally, we exchanged a few emails. I was surprised when she expressed that she felt that she and I had been equivalently wounded by what happened, that having had my reputation and career permanently marred was comparable to being insulted on Twitter. In one of the many interviews she gave about the matter, she said that we were “kind of friends,” and less than two weeks before the Times fired me, she asked if she might pass along my contact information to a writer who was profiling her for Marie Claire. I politely, very delicately, declined, only to have her revisit her beefs with me three months later in an article she wrote for the Wire. “The editor asked me to include it, but that’s no excuse,” she emailed after. “I’m really sorry.”

*Correction, Dec. 18, 2014: This essay originally misstated that Emily Nussbaum was the first to note a tweet Andrew Goldman sent to Jennifer Weiner. She was one of the first. 

9 Outrage and the Endless Thanksgiving

By Paul Ford

Emotions online are not so much passed from person to person as from community to community. When you tweet, you kind of tweet to the world—but unless you’re the president of the United States or Kim Kardashian, the world isn’t paying much attention. Your friends and followers are, though. Maybe they all work in marketing; maybe they’re conservative. Maybe they’re all New York Rangers fans. Of course no one is exclusively part of one community online. We all belong to many overlapping cohorts. Your little brother might love the Red Wings. Your uncle might vote Democrat. The Internet is made up of thousands, maybe millions of these overlapping communities and affinity groups of varying sizes.

Here’s how it works: You post a video of an instance of police brutality on Facebook, and your friends might write “shocking and terrible.” Then a few days later up trundles your uncle, who writes “It’s important to see both sides.” Suddenly that video has leapt the chasm from your community to his. (Though it’s not as clear-cut as that, cause he’s in one of your communities, the one marked: “relatives.”) Now his friend jumps on and writes, “I’m grateful for the police who watch over us.” And so forth.

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Photo illustration by Slate. Photo of pro–Eric Garner protester by Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images.

You’ve seen it up close, I’m sure. There's really not much more to Internet outrage, whatever its form, than that. Sometimes there are trolls, of course; sometimes there are people spoiling for a fight. But an awful lot of the time someone shares something relevant to them—whether on Twitter or Facebook or mass email or group text—and then someone else responds, and it spreads ever outward, bouncing from community to community, affinity group to affinity group, gathering steam. God help you if, like me, you have multiple people on your timeline with opinions about Israel.

These differences of opinion have always been there, of course. They’re just more immediate now. Back in the days before the Internet it would have been incredibly unusual for someone to drive over to their ex-Marine uncle’s place, pop in a videotape, and say “please watch this video of police brutality.” Cultural gaps and chasms that previously we never crossed we now cross by default, all the time.

What this means is that every single day of our lives from now until we die is going to be like Thanksgiving. Maybe Thanksgiving is fun for you, a wonderful time of togetherness. Maybe it’s an excruciating afternoon of physical and emotional torture. In either case, proximity makes emotions more intense. Everyone—family, girlfriends, soon-to-be-ex-husbands, co-workers, childhood friends—are seated around that table, eating that turkey. Except for your vegetarian cousin. What the hell is up with her? Can’t she just pretend for grandma’s sake? You know what would be hilarious? To show her a bunch of pictures of meat, with funny captions. Except whoops, it turns out she came prepared with videos of animals being brutally slaughtered. And the fight spreads out around the table during the salad course, but is quickly forgotten once the turkey comes out and your brother brings up Benghazi. Thanksgiving is ruined.

Online anger is hardly new, and plain old anger is even older. There are many LiveJournal posts and mailing list archives where you can see bad, long fights over gender identity, religion, politics, and women’s rights. In the early days of social media there were cat memes and videos of monkeys being gross. Most people were young, and looking to hook up. Back then, in the late 2000s, the main complaints against Facebook and Twitter, and Web communities in general, were that they were trivial, and silly. But now, The New Yorker online is publishing about how Facebook makes us unhappy.

Anger can be righteous and outrage is as valid an emotion as any other. The problem isn’t that people are angry. The problem is that we are at an impasse. When you look at the charts that track how people connect online—such as those in this Pew Foundation report—you’ll often find one cluster on the left all tightly bound, one cluster on the right, and some lines of communication in the middle. The reality is that when you post that police brutality video, no one is really considering it—we’re all just using it as yet another worldview-enforcing piece of fodder. Has anyone ever been convinced of anything on Facebook? And yet we all keep engaging. For all the drama, excitement, and money of social media, culture changes very slowly.

So what will happen? I've watched tiny groups of friends drift away from Facebook and Twitter to other networks, to private rooms on services like Slack or chats on WhatsApp (owned, of course, by Facebook). And my guess is that more people will eventually retreat, because who has the time? People have jobs and kids. When I’m online now, I’m polite and circumspect. I wouldn’t blog for fun any more; it’s too much work to say anything when everyone is staring at you tapping their feet, waiting for you to screw up. Anger is a natural side effect of jamming all of us together in one place, plus there are ads to be served and agendas to be pursued. So I think retreat makes sense; I think as new, smaller spaces emerge people will take the communities that they’ve built on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere and reconstruct them away from the larger fray. And when that happens, we’ll be giving something up. When your cohort shrinks it means that you will once again lose track of that racist uncle. Some opportunities will fade.

But ask yourself: When the 2016 presidential campaign kicks into gear, where do you want to be? Exposed to the world, susceptible to anyone who wants to @reply, buffeted by pictures of fetuses and flags? Or down in the basement, sequestered in a fun chatroom with your pals, riding out the tornado?

10 Righteous Outrage

By Dan Kois

Who Wants to Remember Bill Cosby’s Multiple Sex-Assault Accusations?” asked the headline of a Gawker post early this year. In it, Tom Scocca pointed out that most news consumers have known since 2005 that multiple accusations of rape had been made against Cosby; that’s the year Matt Lauer interviewed an alleged victim, on camera, using her own name, in the wake of a lawsuit by a second alleged victim against Cosby. The next year, People profiled a third alleged victim.

Bill Cosby

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo of Bill Cosby by Gerardo Mora/Getty Images.

So why, Scocca asked, did those accusations fade away? “Basically,” he concluded, “nobody wanted to live in a world where Bill Cosby was a sexual predator. It was too much to handle.”

It turns out 2014 was the year we were finally ready to handle it. Ten months after Scocca’s post, Bill Cosby’s career is over. NBC scuttled a planned sitcom; Netflix abandoned a Cosby stand-up special for the comedian’s 77th birthday; Cosby started cancelling shows. Appearances remain on his schedule for 2015, though it’s hard to imagine them taking place. Twenty-five different women have now accused Cosby of assaults stretching all the way back to 1965.

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What made 2014 different? There are certain things you can point to: We live in a time of greater awareness about sexual assault, in which women’s accounts are less likely to be dismissed out of hand than in 1965 or even 2005. Cosby’s profile was raised again, with the NBC pilot, his Smithsonian show, and a new biography all exposing him to greater scrutiny in 2014. But first and foremost, I think, is the robust culture of outrage in which we now live.

Because every step in Cosby’s downfall this year has been accompanied by a storm of social media attention. People yelled at @billcosby on Twitter and argued about him on Facebook. They shared Hannibal Buress’ viral bit in October. They hijacked an ill-thought-out Cosby meme in November. The outrage built and built, and each new tweet or post or status update encouraged media organizations—who, in 2014, run in part on the heat and energy of Internet anger—to report more, write more, and feed the story. And so the machinery of outrage ground Bill Cosby up—at first slowly, then all at once.

The ever-smoldering brush fire of outrage will sometimes catch on something that is truly worthy of our collective fury, and this righteous outrage can be a force for good. Helping to track the year in outrage for this project means I’ve cataloged plenty of occasions when some nontroversy blew up far out of proportion to its actual importance. But it’s worth noting the flip side: In an age when everyone is looking for something to get mad about, it’s much more difficult for truly bad actors to escape our attention.

But then what? The outrage economy is terrific at shaming people, at forcing them to apologize, at getting them fired. But people still do terrible things; brands still tweet; inequality persists. Outrage is not revolution; it’s not even justice, really. (It seems unlikely Bill Cosby will ever see a trial.) It can be deeply satisfying to throw your own little match on the blaze of an outrage. It can be deeply enjoyable to watch the fire spread. But then someone’s got to sweep up the ashes in the morning.