outrage – Pertinent Observations

In appreciation of Tom Vadakkan

The former Congress spokesperson had said on national TV that ‘a tweet is a very lonely man who needs counselling’. While he might have been misinformed on that count, I do think that social media nowadays overindexes on spreading mental illness.

Let me get the most controversial statement out of the way right upfront – most activism relies on creating anxiety. Yes, I just said it. I must mention that creating anxiety may not be the express intention of the activism. However, it is an inevitable effect.

I had written about this a long time ago, specifically in the context of environmental activism. Basically, things like carbon taxes (and other Pigouian taxes) and other price-based measures of environment regulation mean that things have been priced in by the time an ordinary person comes across it.

“Should I take the plastic cup from the coffee shop?”. Has already been priced in in the price of plastic.

“Can I take shower for another 15 minutes extra today?”. If I’m paying fair price for the water this ceases to be a moral question.

“Is it okay to drive across the city each day by my own car? Wouldn’t it result in extra emissions?”. If the price of the extra emissions has been included in the price of fuel, again don’t need to worry.

On the contrary, you might see that a lot of activism (and left-wing activists are generally against the price mechanism) is about creating guilt. It’s about making you think at every point in time because the price mechanism doesn’t account for it. And it is not just about environmental activism.

Take political correctness for example. A lot of jokes from my childhood (and even from a few years ago) are not kosher any more because they hurt the sentiments of some minority or another. So, while we’ve been conditioned to make these jokes as if they are normal, now there is an extra layer of thought, leading to anxiety.

And activists won’t let you be in peace either. For example, one rational response to things being shit all around us (like it is right now, as covid cases are raging, and bodies have to wait for days together to get cremated) is to just ignore it all, get into our little bubbles and move on. Activists don’t let you do that. It’s not uncommon to see tweets of the nature of “how can you sleep soundly when <some unknown person you wouldn’t normally care about> is dying on the street?”. It’s about creating guilt.

A few days back, I put this tweet (of late, all my blogposts seem to be expansions of random thoughts I would’ve thrown around on twitter):

Outragers are superspreaders of mental illness.

— Karthik S (@karthiks) April 17, 2021

I guess this deserves an explanation. I keep quitting social media, and while I’m on it, I keep unfollowing (and muting, and blocking) people who post too much negative or “outrage-y” stuff. The reason I go on social media is to have some nice discussions, see some ideas and so on. For news, I have my morning bundle of The Times of India, The Business Standard and The Economic Times.

“Why do people outrage so much on social media”, I was wondering aloud to my wife the other day. I wasn’t talking about people giving their opinions on what is wrong or how it should be done (that at least adds SOME value). I was talking about tautologies of the like of “oh, Kumbh Mela is being allowed to go on”. Or “migrants are dying due to the sudden lockdown”. No opinion. No value addition. Just selective amplification of news that people will get from the next morning’s papers anyways.

My wife and I had a long discussion. One of the points that came out of the discussion is that people seek some solidarity on social media. People are anxious, have nobody around them to share their anxieties with, and if they can find like-minded people on social media who share their anxieties and empathise with them, it is rational to rant on social media. The downside, of course, is that you might lose the people who don’t share your anxieties.

One of my links above refers to Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life (another source of anxiety that activism creates – “what will people think of me given that I’m quoting someone they’ve ‘cancelled’?”. It results in self-censorship. And by not expressing your thoughts your mental health becomes worse). I think that was his Rule 11. I want to now bring up his Rule 1 (later on I might bring up his Rule 12. Most of the rest are not worth quoting).

In the first chapter of his book, he talks about anxiety and depression, taking the case of lobsters. The thing about anxiety (I’ve just about gotten off another round of medication for it) is that you get into a situation of heightened defences.

This is a natural reaction. If you are walking in the jungle and hear a lion roar, you better have heightened defences. The problem with chronic anxiety is that you are always in a state of heightened defences. You are always worried that something might go wrong. This means you have less mental and physical energy for more productive stuff. And so it hampers your life.

Being in a state of anxiety means you want to get early information of anything that might go wrong. This makes you an ideal candidate for “24×7 news” – since that sets you up and prepares you well in time for anything that might go wrong. Depending on your persuasion, you either get your news from television, or from social media. Thus, on the margin, mentally ill people are MORE LIKELY to be on social media all the time, and be on it for the sake of news.

Let’s put things together.

Anxious people are more likely to be on social media for news
They are more likely to get triggered by news, and become anxious about it.
They want some release from the anxiety, and that can come by way of empathy from people with similar anxieties. This means they tweet (or post) their anxieties. Sometimes it could just be tweeting tautologies.
At other times it is retweeting activism from people they empathise with. And activism fundamentally causes more anxiety (as explained above)
Thus, anxious people end up spreading their anxieties through social media. And when someone says they don’t care about these anxieties, the privilege card gets brought out.
And so, on the margin, spending more time on social media can make you anxious, by increasing your exposure to tweets that create anxiety.

Unfortunately I’m unable to find the video (it seems to have been removed from YouTube). So I’ll just link to this blogpost by Vadakkan’s then co-panelist Amit Varma.

And how do I plan to deal with all the shit happening around? By following Jordan Peterson’s 12th rule. I spend half an hour in the morning reading newspapers. Given what’s happening around, I feel depressed and worried. And then by the time I have moved to the business newspapers I am feeling better. And then I get on with life. And work. And keeping my family and myself safe. And I only use twitter one day a week.

PS: I learnt while researching this post that Tom Vadakkan is with the BJP now.

Twitter and bang-bang control

People who follow me on twitter must be aware that I’m prone to taking periodic sabbaticals from the platform. The reasons vary. Sometimes it’s addiction. Sometimes it’s the negativity. Sometimes it’s the outrage. Sometimes it’s the surfeit of information.

The period of the sabbaticals also vary. Sometimes it lasts barely a day. Sometimes a week. Sometimes even a few months. However, each time I end a twitter sabbatical, I promise myself that “this time I will use the platform in moderation”. And each time it doesn’t happen.

I go headlong into being addicted, feeding off all the positive and negative feelings that the platform sets off. I get sucked into looking for that one more notification of who has followed me, or who has said something to me.

And so it happens. In control theory they call this “bang bang control“. I’m either taking a sabbatical from Twitter, or spending half my waking hours on the platform. I’ve wondered why this happens, but until today I didn’t have the answer. Now I think I do.

As it happens I’m in the middle of yet another sabbatical. Unlike some of my earlier ones, I didn’t announce the sabbatical to the world. One night I simply logged off. However, it’s not a full sabbatical.

Once a week I log on to check messages and notifications. While I’m at it, I read a few tweets. Last weekend, I read tweets for an hour or so, and put out some tweets in that time as well. Earlier today, this process lasted ten minutes. I got bored.

I mean, some of the tweets were interesting. Some were insightful. I might have even read a tweetstorm or two. I surely clicked on 5-6 links, thus opening new tabs. But ten minutes later, there was nothing to the platform.

Maybe because I’ve tweeted sparingly in the last two weeks, there were no notifications. I’ve completely missed out on all the memes that have dominated twitter for the last one week but haven’t been big enough to make it to the Times of India (my main source for mainstream news).

I’ve possibly forgotten the personas I’ve built up in my head of people who I follow on Twitter but who I don’t know in real life – shorn of these personas their tweets have seemed inane.

Putting it another way, twitter has this massive feedback loop. The more time you spend on it, the more sense it makes. And so you spend even more time on it.

When you spend little time on Twitter, a lot of tweets don’t make sense to you. Shorn of the context, they are simply meaningless. It is usually not possible to convey both meaning and context in 280 characters or less.

And that explains it. The positive feedback loop of the platform. When you use it sparingly, there is little base for the positive feedback to kick in. And so you can get bored. But spend a couple of hours on one day on the platform, and the positive loop starts kicking in.

And then addiction happens.

Scott Alexander, Bryan Caplan and Nitin Pai on fighting crime (feat. Matt Levine)

The basic idea is that coming down hard on a small number of high-profile crimes can have disproportionate effects in terms of curbing crime

It all started with the pseudonymous blogger Scott Alexander, in what seemed like a justification of outrage. Or maybe it started earlier – with a post by Bryan Caplan deploring outrage. Caplan was commenting about the propensity of people to jump on to bandwagons deploring seemingly minor crimes while not caring enough about worse crimes that were not in the public spotlight already. Caplan had then written:

I can understand why people would have strong negative feelings about the greater evil, but not the lesser evil. But I can’t understand why people would have strong negative feelings about the lesser evil, but care little about the greater evil. Or why they would have strong negative feelings about one evil, but yawn in the face of a comparable evil.

Now, while “Alexander”‘s response seems to justify outrage (and I’m no fan of online outrage), he did so with an interesting analogy, on how to curb crime when the police has limited resources. He writes:

[…] the police chief publicly commits that from now on, he’s going to prioritize solving muggings over solving burglaries, even if the burglaries are equally bad or worse. He’ll put an absurd amount of effort into solving even the smallest mugging; this is the hill he’s going to die on.

Suppose you’re a mugger, deciding whether or not to commit the first new mugging in town. If you’re the first guy to violate the no-mugging taboo, every police officer in town is going to be on your case; you’re nearly certain to get caught. You give up and do honest work. Every other mugger in town faces the same choice and makes the same decision. In theory a well-coordinated group of muggers could all start mugging on the same day and break the system, but muggers aren’t really that well-coordinated.

The police chief’s public commitment solves mugging without devoting a single officer’s time to the problem, allowing all officers to concentrate on burglaries. A worst-crime-first enforcement regime has 60 crimes per day and solves 10; a mugging-first regime has 30 crimes per day and solves 10.

And then it is again Caplan’s turn to respond. I’m bad at detecting satire, so I’m not sure if he is being serious (I don’t think he is). But he proposes a “sure fire way to end all crime”:

Step 1: Credibly announce that all levels of government will mercilessly prosecute the firstcrime committed in the nation each day.

Step 2: There is no Step 2.

But then, I’m sure that Nitin Pai is being serious in proposing a similar method to curb the spate of violent crime in India based on WhatsApp forwards. In his piece for the Quint, he writes:

the Home Ministry ought to use its considerable powers to tackle the problem. It’s not hard either. One well-advertised arrest, prosecution and sentencing will deter the cowards that comprise lynch mobs. Three high profile arrests and prosecutions – and see how quickly lynchings stop. The smallest police station in the remotest village can stop lynchings if the local sub-inspector has received clear political messages against it.

Finally, the reason why I figured Caplan’s “solution” is satire is because of this passage from Matt Levine’s excellent Money Stuff newsletter (likely it’s behind a Bloomberg paywall, but it’s free if you subscribe by email). Commenting about high frequency trading, Levine writes:

But the answer in actual U.S. market structure is, come on, there is no such thing as “the same time.” Do you know how many nanoseconds there are every single second? (A billion.) The odds that each of us would hit the “Buy” button at the exact same nanosecond are infinitesimal. So if I put in my order to buy the stock at 10:45:06.543210876 a.m., and you put in yours at 10:45:06.543210987 a.m., then I got there first and I win.

Is this a good answer? It has a simple appeal. It just gets rid of the question “who gets the stock if we put our orders in at the same time?” It replaces an economic question about how to allocate the stock with an empirical question of who got there first.

So the problem with fighting the first crime of the day, or year, or whatever, is that a criminal will know fully well, given a reasonably high enough crime rate, that the probability of his crime being recorded as the first in the year or day or whatever is less than one. And the higher the crime rate, the lower the probability that his crime will be recognised as the first one. And so there is a high chance he can get away with it.

And that is where Nitin’s idea scores. Rather than going after the “first crime”, pick a few crimes arbitrarily and “go after them like hell”. Since in this case most of the people who are forwarding dangerous forwards are “ordinary people”, this will likely shake them up, and we’ll see less of these dangerous forwards.

Cross posted from Pragati Express

9/13: UnPC

I have often cribbed on my blog in recent times that there is too much outrage out there, and there is too heightened a sense of political correctness nowadays. If you were to say something even remotely politically incorrect, the social media hordes will be upon you. This has implications in terms of public policy, in that a lot of people don’t say what they’re going to do, and they act (in terms of voting for Trump, for example) the whole world is surprised.

Anyway, leaving the larger world aside, I sometimes delight in the fact that Pinky and I first made our connection in the realms of political incorrectness. She has told me that when she first stumbled upon this blog (its predecessor, rather) in 2006, there were two posts that she liked.

The first one was a two-liner. I’m reproducing it in its entirety here.

noticed a funny thing at the loo in office today. a number of people tie their janavaaras (sacred thread) around their ears while peeing or crapping!!

The second was about what one looked for in a wife. It has all the ingredients to raise the heckles of politically correct social media hecklers nowadays.

It was a year and a half later that we reconnected (we’d initially connected after I’d written the above two posts). This time, a challenge that Pinky set me resulted in me reaching her blog. This is the post that I landed up at. Again has all the ingredients of generating outrage. Also check the comment that I’ve left there (that was my way of telling Pinky I’d “won” a challenge she’d set for me).

Anyway, a decade has gone by and we’re both older and wiser, so we wouldn’t talk about outright politically incorrect things. Yet, given the way we started off, I guess the sense we got is that nothing is taboo between us, and we can talk about just about anything. And that’s an awesome feeling to have because there is now no reason for us to hide anything from each other.

One thing marriage does to you is that you become each other’s closest confidantes. So if there is something that you think you cannot talk to your partner about, then it automatically means that you either keep that thing to yourself or look elsewhere to talk about it. Either way, it is a problem, and in attempts to cover up, the part of your lives that you don’t share with each other simply grows.

If nothing is taboo, on the other hand, it means that you can talk your way out of every disagreement, discuss about everything, and basically find a graceful solution to any fights. And life this way is so much better than a situation where you have to constantly be wary of offending the person you are closest to!

So in this sense again, I’m damn happy to have found Pinky, whom I can tell just about anything to. She might get occasionally pissed off (in case I’m cribbing about her, or someone else close to her), but we always end up having a conversation. And that makes both of us feel better, and each time we have this kind of a conversation, we come a little bit closer!

One downside of this approach, of course, is that if there are times when I put NED to some conversation, she thinks I’m being evasive, and the fact that I’m not being open ends up bringing friction! But then we know very well how to gracefully resolve fights!

1/13: Leaving home

2/13: Motherhood statements

Getting candid at coffee day

I have a reputation for occasionally saying outrageous things, and things that I shouldn’t be saying. I frequently make people uncomfortable by saying what I say, including what I sometimes write on my blog. I’ve been long wondering, though, if it is more rational to say shocking stuff to people you know well, or to those you don’t.

I remember this party from ages back where I had just been introduced to this couple, and within ten minutes I’d started expounding the inner beauties of the Goalkeeper Theory (which states that it is okay to hit on someone already in a relationship). I remember the female half of that couple visibly shudder and cling on to her boyfriend within minutes of my exposition.

Some people might recommend higher discretion when you are introduced to someone new, since you don’t want to create a bad first impression. The other way of looking at it is that people you are meeting for the first time, at a cafe or a party or something, are also people you are unlikely to ever encounter once again in life. Consequently, the downside of saying something outrageous is limited. On the other hand, there is a chance that they might be genuinely impressed with your fundaes and you might end up in a stronger relationship (at whatever level) than if you never said the outrageous thing.

On the other hand, while you might be comfortable with people you know well, the danger with saying outrageous or uncomfortable things is that there is a lot at stake. You have already invested significantly in the relationship, which gives you the comfort to say what you want. But if the person genuinely gets offended, you’ve lost a friendship or relationship or more!

So from a risk point of view, if you are the types that likes to make “bold” conversation, and potentially outrage or upset the counterparty, do so when you are still building the relationship. After all, it makes sense to invest in high volatility instruments when the downside is limited!

PS: Don’t try this at a job interview.

Bloggers and anti-bloggers

I know this post “dates” me as someone who started blogging back in the peak era of blogging in the mid 2000s. But what the hell!

I think you can consider yourself to have “made it” as a blogger when a post that you write attracts abuse. Sometimes this abuse could be in public, in the comments section of the blog. At other times, the abuse is in private, when someone meets you or calls you, and abuses you for writing what you wrote.

As long as you’ve been reasonable in your blogging (which the early years of this blog’s predecessor cannot exactly claim), abuse on your comments section is more of an indicator of the thin-skinnedness of the abuser, rather than you crossing lines on what you should write about.

At this point in time, it is pertinent to introduce the class of people who I call as “anti-bloggers”. Sometimes they might themselves have a blog, but that is not necessary, what is necessary is that they have a “holier than thou” attitude.

Anti-bloggers are people with especially thin skins who are always on the lookout for something to outrage about, and blogs, which allow people to express themselves freely on a public forum without editorial oversight, are a common whipping boy.

This outrage could come in several forms. The thicker-skinned version of this outrage happens from people who abuse you only if they think you’ve abused them on the blog (good bloggers take care to never mention names in a negative manner, so this is usually a case of “kumbLkai kaLLa heglmuTT nODkonDa” (the pumpkin thief looked at his shoulder; it’s a Kannada proverb meaning something like “every thief has a straw in his beard) ).

The thinner skinned version of anti-bloggers find it even easier to find things to outrage about. Look at the Bangalore post I’d written ten years back. There was no hint that I’d written about anyone at all, but the post received heaps of abuse, from people who manufactured some kind of entity that the post purportedly offended!

The most annoying anti-bloggers are those that abuse you when you simply pen down an observation that is there for all to see. I won’t take specific examples now, but sometimes the simple act of reporting a fact that is evident to everyone can offend people, for its existence on paper (a website, rather) gives it new-found legitimacy!

This last bit can also help explain the annoyance of some sections of the “mainstream media” with “social media” such as blogs/twitter. The worthies in the mainstream media had established certain unwritten rules by which certain facts/events wouldn’t be put down on paper.

The mention of these events in social media (which is unedited) suddenly gave these events/happenings sudden legitimacy, which steered the overall narrative away from where it existed during the mainstream media monopoly, annoying the mainstream media!

One penultimate point – anti-bloggers are the same people who talk about the glories of the days prior to social media (this piece in The Guardian is an especially strong specimen), when people could only read news that was filtered and possibly censored by newspaper editors.

And finally, ever since my credentials as a blogger were established about a decade back, some people have started explicitly mentioning to me when they are saying something “off the record”. And I’ve always respected these conditions!

Twitter and negativity

One of the reasons that sparked my departure from social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter two weeks back was an argument with my wife where she claimed that Twitter had made me too negative, and highly prone to trolling (even in “real life”). Accepting a challenge from her, I offered to go through my tweets over the last few months, and identify those that were negative. I also offered to perform a similar exercise with my blog.

I started off with the intention to go through tweets in the last one year and delete anything that was negative or “troll-y”. I allocated myself an hour to accomplish this, along with a similar exercise for my blog.

I must have spent fifty minutes going through my twitter feed, and didn’t manage to go back more than two months. I was surprised by my own sheer volume of tweeting. What was more surprising was the amazing lack of insight in most of those tweets – there were horrible PJs that I’d cracked just because I could, there were random replies to other people which didn’t add any kind of value, there was outrage about the lack of outrage and some plain banal life stuff (apart from some downright trolly stuff which I deleted).

It made for extremely painful reading, and I could hardly recognise myself from my own tweets. Apart from some personal markers, I would find it hard to recognise most of these tweets as my own if they were to be presented to me a few months later. It was a clear indication that it was time to exit twitter (though since I have a rather kickass username there I’m not deleting my account).

The ten minutes I spent that day going through this blog, however, was a sheer delight. I did end up deleting a couple of outragey posts (both of which were essentially collections of tweets which I’d collated for posterity), but most of my posts were mostly sheer delight! There was some kind of insight in each of my posts, and I’d lie if I were to say that I’m not proud of what I’ve written.

It’s not that I’ve not written shit on this blog (or its predecessor), having written posts as late as 2008 which I’m definitely not proud of. What I’ve noticed, however, is that I’ve evolved over time, and my writing style has been refined, and I think I continue to add significant value to my readers.

Twitter’s constant engagement feature, however, meant that it was hard to evolve there and hard to escape from the cycle of banal and negative tweets. My tweets from this February are unlikely to be qualitatively very different from those 5 years back, and that’s not a positive thing to say.

The thing with Twitter is that its short format encourages a “shoot first ask questions later” kind of thinking. You end up posting shit without thinking through it, and without having to construct a reasonable argument. This encourages outrage, and posting banal stuff. Spending one minute typing out a banal tweet is far lower cost than spending 20 minutes typing out a banal blog post – the latter is unlikely to be written unless there’s some kind of insight in it.

Outrage is one thing, but what’s really got to me with respect to twitter is its sheer ordinariness, and temporality (most tweets lose value a short period of time after they’re posted). It’s insane that it’s taken me so long (and three longish sabbaticals from twitter) to find out!

The problem with Twitter

Starting from the mid-2000s, the dominant method to consume content was to follow individual blogs through RSS Feed readers such as Bloglines or Google Reader. You followed specific blogs, most of which (unlike this one) had content on specific topics.

So when I wanted to learn up on economics, I started following Marginal Revolution and Econlog. When I wanted to follow the global financial crisis, I added Felix Salmon and a couple of other blogs (which I don’t remember now). All I needed to do to read on specific topics was to follow specific people.

And then Google Reader Shared Items happened. Now, you didn’t really need to follow specific blogs, for there was a social network where people would share interesting stuff that they read. Now you could outsource following blogs to friends who became curators. So there was this one friend who would share pretty much every interesting post on Mashable. Another shared every interesting post from this blog called The Frontal Cortex. I didn’t need to follow these blogs. My “curator friends” shared the best pieces with me (and I know people relied on me for Econlog etc.).

Then around the turn of the decade, Twitter replaced Google Reader Shared Items as the primary content discovery platform. A couple of years later, Google would decommission Reader. The thing with Twitter was that the movement from following specific ideas and sites to following “curators” was complete.

While twitter also functions as a “normal” social network, a major function is the sharing of ideas, and so everyone on twitter is essentially a curator, sharing with her followers what she wants them to read. There is also scope for adding comments here, and adding one’s opinion to the content. This adds a sort of richness to the content, and people can filter stuff accordingly, without consuming everything one’s friend has shared.

The downside, however, is that you are forced to consume the opinions and links shared by everyone you follow. There might be someone who I might be following for his curation of technology links, but it might happen that he might also tweet heavily on politics, which I’m hardly interested in. There is an option to turn off retweets (which I’ve used liberally) but even so, there is a lot of “unwanted content” you have to consume from people. And since it is “opinion first” (and link later), you are forced to consume people’s opinion even if you’re just browsing their timeline.

What we need in Twitter is a way to curate people’s opinions on topics. For example, I might be interested in Person A’s opinion on politics but not anything else. Person B might offer good opinions on economics but might be lousy on other things. Person C might be good for technology and sports. And so forth.

Of course, you can’t charge people with classifying their own tweets – that will add too much friction to the process. What you need is an intelligent process or app that can help classify people’s tweets and show you only what you want to know.

I can think of a couple of designs for the app – one could be where you could tell it not to show any more tweets from someone on a particular topic (or block a topic itself). Another is for you to upvote and downvote tweets, so that the app learns your preferences and shows you what you want.

Yet, I’m not confident that such an app will be built. The problem is that twitter has been notorious in terms of cutting off access to its API to apps built on it, or cutting permissions of what apps can see (Facebook is as guilty here). So it’s a massive challenge to get people to actually invest in building twitter apps.

Twitter as it exists currently doesn’t work for me, though. I repeatedly find the problem that there is way too much outrage on my timeline, and despite mercilessly cutting the number of people I follow, I find that it’s a slippery slope and otherwise interesting people continue to tweet about stuff that I don’t want to read about. And so my engagement is dipping.

I don’t need twitter itself to do anything about it. All they should do is to send out credible signals that they’ll not pull the rug under the feet of developers, so that APIs can be developed, which can make the platform a much more pleasant experience for users.

Twitter and Radically Networked Outrage

The concept of Radically Networked Outrage was originally conceived by my Takshashila colleague Pavan Srinath. Having conceived of it, he had promised to blog about it, but it’s been over a month and he’s yet to get down to it. Given this delay, I think I’m justified in stealing this blogpost.

One of the pet themes professed by people at Takshashila, especially Nitin Pai, is the concept of “radically networked societies”. There are too many posts to link to, so I’ll just link to this book chapter that Nitin has written, and to this TEDx talk:

So the whole concept is that societies nowadays are not hierarchical like in the past, but “radically networked”, in that the density of the graph of people in the world has increased significantly with technology. Not only has the density gone up – which means that people are connected to significantly more people than in the past – but technology has enabled people to communicate rapidly.

So you have twitter where you can broadcast your short thoughts. WhatsApp groups enable you to send, and propagate, messages to multiple people at once. This, combined with increased graph density, has resulted in ability for large numbers of people to coordinate and organise, and presents new kinds of governance challenges. For example, it was radically networked societies that resulted in the so-called Arab Spring (which, in hindsight, has mostly led to chaos). Radically networked societies also resulted in the Anna Hazare movement in 2011, which in turn led to the formation of the Aam Aadmi Party, which has taken Delhi by storm.

When societies are so radically networked that they can cause revolutions which can result in the overthrow of governments, they can also such radical networking for lesser causes, such as outraging. When the odd thatha outrages about a certain happening or piece of news, it doesn’t have any impact, and ends up in at best a letter to the editor, and dies a quiet death. If a handful of unconnected thathas outrage about something, it will still not amount to much, and one of their letters to the editor will get published.

However, put together a large number of people densely connected to each other, any outrage in such network will be immediately seen and noticed, and has the potential to go viral. The thing about outrage is positive feedback – when you see someone outraging about a particular topic that you mildly outrage about, you feel encouraged to make your mild outrage public. As the number of people in your network outraging about something increases, the likelihood of you joining in the outrage increases.

So as you can imagine, once there a certain critical mass to outrage about a particular issue, it can go truly viral, until just about everyone is outraging about the topic.

And outrage can have inter-issue positive feedback also. Once you are used to seeing a certain amount of outrage on your twitter timeline, you feel encouraged to make public any marginal outrage about any other issue also. And a number of people getting marginally thus pushed to make their outrage public can result in a further increase in radically network outrage!

We live in a time when societies are radically networked, and outrage is the order of the day. And since outrage causes more outrage, this outrage is unlikely to reduce. It is impossible to say anything remotely controversial on social media nowadays – a pack of outragers will immediately hound you. There are already some victims of such radically networked outrage – like the PR professional Justine Sacco who lost her job after an outraged mob failed to see the humour in her tweet, or scientist James Watson who had to auction his Nobel Prize after outrage about his comments about race had led to speaking assignments dying out, or footballer Ched Evans who is unable to find a club to hire him after doing time for rape. The latest victim of radically networked outrage is Nobel laureate Tim Hunt, who resigned his position as Professor following radically networked outrage about certain remarks he made that were deemed sexist.

And there is no escaping such outrage. In an attempt to escape it, I pruned my Twitter following list a couple of days back, unfollowing people who are highly prone to participate in radically networked outrage. At the end of it, my following list had grown so thin that there was no value for me in Twitter any more. I would just check twitter in the hope of interesting tweets, but come across hardly any tweets.

So today I begin my third sabbatical from Twitter. The first one (January 2014) lasted a month, and the second (August to November 2014) lasted three. I don’t know how long this will last. I’ll be robbed of interesting discussions for sure, but can do without all the negativity prevalent all over my timeline. But I’m sure Radically Networked Outrage will have its way of getting to me again!

In October, during my last sabbatical, I had written about the same topic. And in December, I had written about the “mob courts” of social media.

Twitter, outrage and political correctness

So I continue to be off twitter. The only tweets you see from me are the automated tweets that go out (which i customise a bit) every time I write a blog post, which has been fairly often in the last one month or so.

I gave up on my efforts to curate a twitter feed and get the links to pocket. I simply use the Flipboard app on my iPad, which I log on to once a day to see if there are interesting links. For a few days it worked. I collected lots of nice links. I still collect some nice links.

But then the thing with flipboard is that along with the links you end up seeing the twitter commentary that accompanied the links. And I see a lot of outrage. People don’t seem to have patience for a civil discussion on twitter any more. Everyone takes sides, every little topic is dissected like crazy and it’s almost like people have this pathological need to outrage and twitter is their vehicle for that. If this means that this might decrease their outrage in the rest of the world it’s a good thing, but I’m not sure if that is actually happening – it might even be that the constant outrage on twitter is keeping people’s outrage knives sharp and they are outraging more outside too.

Sometimes I like to crack a joke. More often than not it is likely to be offensive and politically incorrect. There is a friend who says he uses twitter exclusively as an outlet for the jokes that build up within his head -to let off steam in some sort of way. But then the extreme outrage and political correctness that twitter imposes on you means that you can never crack a nice harmless politically incorrect joke – people will descend upon you like a pack of wolves, and you get called names and all such.

And so you hold back. And you become a little less of what you were. And you regress. And then you find that you simply can’t function the way you used to a long time back.

Last night I was going through some of my blog posts from 2008 – I go on these trips sometimes. There will be some trigger that will remind me of a particular blog post, and from there I’ll read 20 other adjacent ones. Looking back at the blog posts, they were profound. They were the products of a clean and unfettered mind, who liked to put things out and who didn’t really mind any adverse reactions.

But over the last six years that mind has been dulled, sullied, bullied, into writing possibly only politically correct stuff, which might be flat and hardly profound. So the last month and a half when I’ve been out of twitter has also been an exercise to reclaim myself from @karthiks. And become back closer to skthewimp.livejournal.com – for that is the mode in which I think I function best!

Anyway.. My current thinking is that my facebook and twitter sabbatical will last until the end of October. Going by my brief intrusions into twitter via flipboard, though, it seems like I might stay away for much longer. But you know where to find me!