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Why do we assign virtue to the most meaningless things?
Despite my best efforts, I find myself more and more terminally online these days. I don’t think I’m alone. Social media is addictive by design, and it’s great at creating an echo chamber to keep us in a perpetual state of conflict. Anger creates dopamine, which may be why people like me find it so hard to avoid arguing on the internet.
As a veteran of a thousand forum wars, I feel like the tone and subject matter of online discussions are slowly deteriorating into absolute gibberish. I blame social media companies shifting to algorithm-based feeds, showing us less of what we follow and more of what we didn’t ask for. Online discussion served a real purpose when niche forum websites siloed people who came of their own volition to engage with things they enjoyed. Now we’re all swimming with strangers in the general interest sewers of social media.
I’ve recently noticed the increasing banality of what hills people are willing to die on. Politics, pop culture, sports and social issues are always hot button topics, but there’s an ever-growing stream of discourse surrounding and assigning value to the most mundane actions of those around us. People take hard stances on inconsequential bullshit and then harshly judge the character of those who oppose them.
Every day I see lively debates on the “ethics” of owning a truck. I’ve seen hotly contested public spats on whether one should pull forward or reverse into a parking spot. Cooking with butter versus oil is a topic that quickly leads to philosophical rants about the downfall of western civilization. Same goes for discussions on the aesthetic qualities of brutalist architecture.
These discussions recur with some frequency, to the point where they’ve developed talking points. People can recite statistics about how often the average Middle American tows something in his truck, which they use to “debunk the myth” that anyone needs a Ford F150. Once futile attempts at applying logic to preference break down, people start extolling and assigning virtues based on which side of the debate they fall. Critics will say driving a truck makes someone “selfish, wasteful and insecure” while truck owners align themselves with “hard work and rugged individualism”. Eventually, the unspoken political undercurrent swells up, washing the entire debate into the endless sea of the culture war. All this over what vehicle someone drives to work in the morning.
As someone who tangentially works in marketing, I shouldn’t be surprised. Companies spend endless resources trying to segment markets and pitch products as an appeal to people’s values. Social media is such a perfect vehicle for this type of advertising that people who use it are starting to apply a consumer marketing lens to their daily interactions. It’s impossible to glean somebody’s values by watching them back their car into a parking spot at Chick-Fil-A, but someone out there is judging you for doing it.
This opens a discussion about the idea of consumerism as a means to self-identify. Most terminally online brainrot bickering eventually boils down to product preferences. Are you drinking woke beer? Are you buying the bigoted chicken sandwich? In this late-capitalist, 24/7 attention economy hellscape, consumerism colours not just how we view ourselves, but how we view others.
This isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon. Ask a Ford guy in 1977 what he thought about Chevy drivers, and you’d surely hear a similar sentiment expressed in exceptionally colourful language. That mostly reflected brand loyalty, though. Before the internet, a proud F-150 owner probably sported Ford branded clothing and merchandise. It was corny and dumb, but at least it made sense. People today will judge you for drinking Bud Light, but it’s not because they’re avid Modelo fans. It’s because the hive-mind of grifters and engagement farmers told them drinking “woke” beer says something about a person’s moral character.
That’s because clicks are the currency of social media, and the best way to generate them is by playing to people’s outrage. The politicization and eventual commodification of everyday normal human activity is a byproduct of people with no value trying to sell themselves. They don’t have a product or service worth anyone’s time, so instead they peddle cheaply manufactured content to start arguments and drive engagement. The best part, for social media companies, is that many of these “creators” don’t need to be fairly compensated from a monetary point of view. They’re also dopamine addicts, who will gladly accept payment in the form of online attention.
Grifters know how to position products so that people assign values to them, and the marketing firms aren’t far behind. In Canada, a firm called Environics is profiling and pitching to the public based on “social values” segmentation. The idea is that Environics can help clients predict trends by tracking people’s values and behaviour over time. They segment this information into generation-based cohorts, then create numerous consumer profiles based on the trends emerging with each generation.
This approach differs from social value marketing, which is the idea of positioning products based on the value they create on a societal level. With this new approach, products don’t need an actual value proposition, just a reputation for aligning with certain ideas.
Assigning values to valueless products is a sign of the deeply flawed mindset of our hyper-capitalist society. It also feels like a symptom of the constant bombardment from online advertising. People basing their identity on what they purchase has never been healthy. Now it seems like an almost unavoidable byproduct of modern life.