It starts out sounding like a gripe against human psychology, but suddenly one realizes that it is actually a symptom of a much bigger problem: the algorithmic amplification of the worst of us.

Look, I’ve been posting online for well over twenty five years.  Back in the early 2000s I was a prolific writer of personal missives. My blog was even given a little prize, having been nominated for and selected as among the top personal blogs of the year by some rando Canadian group who was doing that sort of thing. It was mostly a gimmick, sure, but I like to think back and suppose that once, long ago, there was a genuine appetite for wholesome content. People sat down and wrote, shared, and commented with genuine humanity, went online from the heart with both positive and negative results, and communicated: and not just to sell supplements and VPN subscriptions.

Blogging as a medium has waned over the years, of course. The written word, some suppose, is not entirely dead. But we are visual beings. We like shiny objects that hold our attention with minimal effort. Reading takes work. Flicking through endless feeds of ten second entrancing reels bites down hard into the primal brain and won’t let go. I am pretty active on social media myself. I post particularly frequently on photo sharing sites and select feeds, trying to build modest followings and interacting as much as I am able. But I genuinely don’t care for dominant formats that are championed by apps like TikTok and Instagram.

If you catch me turning the camera to my face and recording horizontal video rants, you know something has gone horribly wrong.

So I keep writing. Quietly. Toiling in obscurity. Penning longer form content that I one hundred percent understand is not the kind of viewership and what the professionals would call engagement. It is my wheelhouse. It is my passion.

But I do get curious from time to time about if my obscuirty is just me and the things I write about, or if it is the format and tone.

So. I ran a little experiment.

See, I got a little bit political. I posted a half dozen hot takes on some controversial Canadian political topics, a domain of which there are endless opportunities for dropping truth bombs, stoking fires, enabling angry rants and doing poke-the-bear posting. International relations. Canadian unity. Constitutional rights. Health care management. You name it, I dipped a toe and wrote something that was unavoidably political… and I posted it.

To say I couldn’t keep up with the response was an understatement. Thousands of interactions. Tens of thousands of views per hour. People following me. People liking post. People resharing and quoting. People screaming at me in all capital letters and threatening to hunt me down. It was raw unfiltered insanity.

I usually post art, photography and carefully crafted prose via writing projects like the one you are reading… and no one seems to care (perhaps, insert that previous griping comment here, huh?) but topics that induce rage, anger, and combative quips spiral out of control at a level orders of magnitude beyond what I could process, and it fires up the algorithms to their max. 

Result? Insert diagnosis of a culture that craves conflict and rage versus art and introspection here.

Our psychology cannot be let off the hook for nurturing our rage, but the amplification by algorithms is not helping.