By Joana Karoshi | Staff Writer
At the beginning of the month, rapper Doechii caused a stir online when she posted a thread expressing her dissatisfaction with cats. She might as well have killed one because for over a week the discourse spiraled into outrage, as if disliking cats were a moral failing rather than a personal preference.
A few days later, the internet forgot about her and turned to a new, more worthy opponent: Timothée Chalamet.
Chalamet told Matthew McConaughey, “I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive.’”
Comment after comment, thread after thread, reel after reel, every news outlet and social media post revolved around this “disgraceful” remark. It’s almost as if we’ve forgotten that we have our own jobs, families and lives to manage. There is endless rage and anger at a comment that had no real consequence.
This week, the new rage topic is singer Chappell Roan.
She has a long history of being confrontational with paparazzi and allegedly sent a bodyguard to confront an 11-year-old girl — an incident she later denied any involvement in, but one that still spiraled into another wave of online outrage.
The internet algorithm doesn’t work unless fueled by rage. Every week, there’s always a new, bothersome comment or action by a celebrity — trivial or big — that ultimately doesn’t matter.
And we, again and again, fall for it.
The Independent revealed much of the online criticism of Roan wasn’t even entirely human. According to a report shared with the outlet by AI-driven behavioral intelligence platform Gudea, bots generated a large portion of the outrage.
This reveals something interesting about society: we’ve harnessed much of our pent-up anger, and the internet gives us an outlet.
Watching or participating in outrage releases dopamine, making us feel as if justice is being served and that we’re on the right side of history.
But being stuck in this parasocial state has consequences. It dulls our critical thinking and makes it harder to spot fake news, misrepresented facts or manufactured outrage. The rush of moral superiority becomes more addictive than actually paying attention to what is happening in the world.
This isn’t a call to stop criticizing celebrities, but rather a call to engage more intelligently with what we see online.
Stop feeding your brain cheap satisfaction and engaging in worthless online discourse that only results in hate and no real change. The world will not end just because a rapper dislikes cats, and if you are really offended by Chalamet’s comments, support your local opera and ballet.
Ultimately, the algorithm does not care about being right; it only cares that you’re still scrolling. We are being farmed for our indignation, harvested by bots and code that thrive on our elevated heart rates.
So the next time the timeline erupts over a pop star’s attitude or an actor’s ignorance, take a breath. Log off. The most radical thing you can do in an economy of rage is to simply not care.
