Comment by hliyan
2 days ago
Important to note that online culture isn't entirely organic, and that tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars of R&D has been spent by ad companies figuring that nothing engages the natural human curiosity like something abnormal, morbid or outrageous.
I think the end outcome of this R&D (whether intentional or not), is the monetization of mental illness: take the small minority of individuals in the real world who suffer from mental health challenges, provide them an online platform in which to behave in morbid ways, amplify that behaviour to drive eyeballs. The more you call out the behaviour, the more you drive the engagement. Share part of the revenue with the creator, and the model is virtually unbeatable. Hence the "some asshole from Twitter".
While some of it is boosting the abnormal behaviors of people suffering from mental illness, I think you’re making a false equivalency. Mental illness is not required to be an asshole. In fact, most Twitter assholes are probably not mentally ill. They lack ethics, they crave attention, they don’t care about the consequences of their actions. They may as well just be a random teenager, an ignorant and inconsiderate adult, etc., with no mental illness but also no scruples. Don’t discount the banality of evil.
In an adult (excluding the random teenager here), a lack of ethics, craving attention, lack of concern about consequences are actual symptoms of underlying mental health issues.
I'd argue a lot of this is rooted in a lack of self esteem, which is halfway to a mental health issue but not quite there (yet). The attention-seeking itself is the mental health issue. But it's kinda splitting hairs, these people are not fully mentally healthy either way.
Thanks for inventing the Torment Nexus.