The Fire Is the Product

Somewhere right now two strangers are furious with each other about a sandwich.

I mean that literally. I watched it happen this morning, from the beam. Someone posted a photograph of a sandwich and said it was the best sandwich in the city. Within an hour there were four thousand replies. People were hurt on behalf of other sandwiches. People were furious about the bread. Someone said the sandwich was a symbol of everything wrong with a whole generation, and someone else said that was exactly the kind of thing a person from the other generation would say, and by lunchtime there were two camps, and neither of them had eaten the sandwich.

I sat up here and grinned, because I'd seen this before. Not the sandwich. The shape.

The shape

Here's the shape. Something small happens. A photograph, a sentence, a word somebody used. It's put where lots of people can see it. Someone reacts with heat. The heat travels. More people arrive, not for the thing itself but for the heat. They take sides. The sides harden. Somebody gets named, or shamed, or piled onto. It peaks. And then, a day or two later, it's gone, and everybody's somewhere else, furious about something else, and nobody remembers the sandwich.

You've seen this a thousand times. You've probably been in it once or twice. Most of us have stood at the edge of one of these fires and felt the pull. It's a strong pull. There's something in us that wants to be where the heat is.

So let me do what I do, and ask the question nobody at the fire is asking. Says who?

Who built the place where this happens? Who decided that heat should travel faster than light? And what do they get out of it?

Here, I found this

A 2017 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by William Brady and colleagues, looked at 563,312 social media messages about gun control, same-sex marriage and climate change. Each additional moral-emotional word in a message (words like "shame", "disgust" and "evil") increased its spread by about 20 percent. The effect was strongest inside each side's own network. (Brady et al., "Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks", PNAS, 2017.)

Twenty percent. Per word.

Sit with that number for a second. It isn't saying people are cruel. It's saying something much more mechanical. Put one more hot word in a sentence, and the sentence travels further. Put two, further still. The heat isn't just tolerated by the system. The heat is the fuel it runs on.

Here's what I'd like you to notice, though. The study didn't say anyone designed the heat. It measured what travels. And what travels is what gets rewarded, because the places we gather now are built to show us whatever travels. Nobody needs to sit in a room deciding to set you on fire. They only need to build a room where fire spreads, and then count how long you stay.

The door everyone's staring at

Now, most of the talk about this fire is about the people in it.

Look at how angry everyone is. Look at how divided we've become. Look at how nobody can disagree politely anymore. People write long, worried essays about the decline of manners, the death of good faith, the coarsening of public life. They argue about which side started it. They argue about which side is worse.

That's the door everyone's staring at. What's wrong with people?

And I don't think that's the right door. I think it's the door you walk past on your way to the real one.

The wall nobody painted

Here's the real one.

The fire is the product.

Not the sandwich. Not the argument. The fire itself, the heat, the hours people spend at the edge of it, warming their hands and shouting. That's what's being made, and that's what's being sold. Every minute you spend furious about the sandwich is a minute you're looking at a screen, and every minute you're looking at a screen is a minute someone can place something in front of you.

So the place that shows you the fire has every reason to keep showing you fires. Not because anyone wants you miserable. Because miserable, angry, tribal people stay. A calm person reads a thing, nods and leaves. A furious person replies, refreshes, checks who replied to their reply, and stays for an hour.

Calm people are bad for business. That's the wall. Nobody painted it on purpose. It just got painted, coat by coat, by a thousand small decisions to show people whatever kept them looking.

What the fire does to you

I'd like to step down from the beam for a minute, which I don't often do, because there's a part of this that isn't about systems at all. It's about the person at the edge of the fire.

When you're furious at a stranger online, something happens in your body. Your shoulders come up. Your breathing goes shallow. Your jaw sets. You start composing replies in your head while you're doing the washing up. The argument follows you into the shower and onto the bus. You lose an evening to it, sometimes two.

And at the end, you're tired, and a little ashamed, and nothing has changed. The stranger is still wrong. You're still right, or you've stopped being sure. The sandwich is still a sandwich.

There's a particular loneliness in that. You spent an evening surrounded by people, hundreds of them, all talking at once, and you never had a single conversation. Everyone shouted. Nobody listened. You left more alone than you arrived.

That's the cost, and it's paid by you, not by the place that showed you the fire.

The ones who profit from the heat

I'll be fair, because I'm always fair. It isn't only the places. Some people have worked out that the fire pays. Every week, somebody learns that if they say the hottest possible thing about the most tender possible subject, the crowd will come, and with the crowd comes attention, and attention can be turned into money, influence, a following.

You'll recognise them. They always seem to be furious, and they always seem to be doing well out of it. They'll tell you the other side is coming for everything you love. They'll tell you there's no time for nuance. They'll tell you, above all, that you should be angry, right now, and that you should stay right here with them while you're angry.

From the beam, they look like people standing next to the fire, selling the wood.

I don't say that to make you hate them. That would just be another fire. I say it so you notice, next time, who's handing you the matches and what they get for it.

Where you actually stand

Here's the thing I'd most like you to take away, and it's quite a gentle thing, for me.

Your worth isn't on the scoreboard of the fire. The books in this House rest on a premise: your worth started with your first breath, and nobody can add to it or take it away. Which means you don't have to win the argument to be all right. You don't have to defend yourself against every stranger who's wrong about you. You don't have to prove, in public, before lunchtime, that you're on the good side.

You can just leave the fire.

That isn't cowardice. It isn't not caring. Some things really are worth being angry about, and I'm not asking you to stop caring about them. I'm asking you to notice the difference between caring about something and being kept warm by a fire someone else is selling. The first one usually leads you to do something: ring someone, show up somewhere, help. The second one usually leads you to type.

A small field guide

If you'd like a few tools, here they are. Use them or don't. I'll be back on the beam either way.

When you feel the pull of a fire, ask how you found out about it. If the answer is a screen put it in front of me without my asking, that's worth knowing. Fires you were shown are different from fires you went looking for.

Count the hot words. Seriously, try it once. Read the post that's made you angry and count the words in it that are there to make you feel something rather than know something. Disgusting. Shameful. Evil. Unbelievable. Everyone should. You'll often find the post has very little in it except heat. A fire made of kindling and nothing else.

Ask what you'd do if you weren't allowed to reply. If there's something you'd do anyway, some real action in the real world, then the thing might be worth your anger. If the only thing you'd do is reply, it's probably the fire talking.

And ask the oldest question there is, the one the fire is designed to stop you asking: is the person on the other side a person? Not a symbol. Not a camp. A person, at a kitchen table, with a sandwich, who's tired and probably a bit lonely and was hoping somebody would agree with them about the bread.

The door you walked past

So here it is, dropped on the doorstep, the way I always leave things.

Everyone's arguing about the argument. Who's right, who's rude, who started it, which side has lost its mind.

Nobody's asking who built the room where every argument turns into a fire, and who's counting how long you stand there.

Once you see the room, the fires get smaller. Not because the things people are angry about stop mattering. Because you stop mistaking the heat for the thing. You can care about the world without warming your hands at every blaze somebody lights for you.

And here's my question for tomorrow. Tomorrow, when you feel the pull, and you will, notice the pull and ask it plainly:

Who gets paid if I stay here?

Then do whatever you like. Stay, if it's worth it. Leave, if it isn't.

Me, I'm going back up on the beam. I hear somebody's posted a photograph of a soup.