The Blight of Like-Seeking and Compromise of Effective Rhetoric
BREAKING NEWS! Moose writes a plea to re-capture political ground by discouraging bait-posting.
We cannot remain on this course in social media.
We suffer a messaging problem. Our culture when applied to social media algorithms rewards the same establishment narratives that undermined the campaigns of the Democratic Party. Yet we continue to engage in unproductive content that warps our perception of our political reality. We do the same thing we accuse the right of doing, enforce social heirarchies when promoting content at the expense of motivating meaningful change. I'm really hoping to help fix this and would like my message to spread.
Who am I to make this claim? A moose, I say. Originally the first plushie I could find to launch my anonymous social media presence, it's now an integral part of my online persona and a strangely fitting representation of my real-life self. The unserious nature of shaking a stuffed animal at a camera while talking about complex social issues is something I hoped would challenge the viewer to forego clout-seeking and focus on the message. I blew up with a TikTok series I titled #richcode, identifying how the culture of wealth impacts and ultimately harms people outside its circles without their explicit knowledge of the fact. For a brief moment, people seemed to validate my concept - thousands resonated with the message despite my image and many of those asked for more.
But that attention soon faded and quickly I began to struggle gaining legitimacy. So I looked back on my original posts and looked for trends, and looked at other successful content in my niche (TikTok seems to lock creators into a niche and rarely promotes their works outside it). I saw the issues…
Grievance is king in sociopolitical content. The users want content that validates their feelings about a subject. My richcode posts spoke to this discomfort many people felt in life that they could not identify or articulate.
People don't know how to apply abstract ideas to their lives. Ultimately the information I provided was fluff to them. I cannot provide advice on every situation and the leap needed to turn my content into practical action is one only a viewer could develop for their own situation. I need a wider range of examples to bridge the gap from content to utility.
They want faces… What can I say? I think it's an instinctive thing, but it clearly works. Some of the left-aligned people I take issue with shove their faces right up to their phones and start with “BREAKING NEWS!” before describing what is, at most, some inconsequential footnote to current events. There also is an impression that appearing real and legitimate on the internet requires putting your name and face out for all to see. That's a consequence of richcode, btw. But surely being anonymous was a damper in getting my message out there.
People need to be met where they're at. Dozens of posts elaborate on my ideas, but I never shook the impression that there was a secret glossary and phrasebook that could be used to decrypt their enigma machine.
Clearly my ideas are not accomplishing any of the above. Accordingly they're getting lost in a sea of others who enforce an internet culture of the same features my content lacks. And how could these messages, requiring users to leap with me, succeed in the face of all that?
Our messaging needs to motivate people to act, and it has to leave internet echo chambers and make it into the hearts and minds of everyone who is capable of opposing authoritarianism. Right now someone hearts a post or feels validated, and that is enough to give them the satisfaction of acting on the same thought. It felt great to complain about our own leaders and policies and that felt like enough to make the authoritarian problem go away… for millions of people.
That cannot happen when… if there is another chance to reverse course. So I suggest a few corrective measures and maybe Substack will be my second chance to motivate widespread change.
Post. Lurking is great and easy, but in posting you accomplish a lot for yourself. You develop stronger and more confident rhetoric to bring into the real world. You dive deeper into issues and reinforce your most motivating convictions. You put ideas out for scrutiny and that feedback helps shape how you approach a concept. You learn what is more or less convincing to motivate others to join your team.
Entertain ideas as if you believe them, and logic it out that way. There is nothing I loathe more than when a creator puts out exceptional observations about concepts like ideology and cults and groupthink, only to come right out with a thought that is clearly born out of their own ideological hangups.
Give and receive feedback. Not about a feeling or approval of the message, but tangible data or techniques to reframe the narrative. The feedback doesn't have to be correct, but it should be pertinent. A culture of feedback, elaboration, adding additional data, etc will engage more minds and thus increase user motivation to act in the real world.
Take a line of thought one step further than you normally have the patience to. The best connections are seen after we fight through our mental “that's enough" barrier. We're no longer a species that focuses on raw survival in an environment, we have developed abstract thought amd apply it on a global scale. That takes more effort to navigate than our brains are evolved to keep up with. You can't rest and you must convince your viewers to follow you into those voids.
Make content that drives real change for a person. Soliciting hearts is necessary to increase our messaging and allow us to earn some side income, but it cannot be the core of your content if you wish for your words to make a difference. Socio-Political content needs to bring viewers to new realizations about the world, media and their lives. It needs to advise them on action and how to spread the messages meaningfully.
So I will be out here soliciting hearts like the rest of you, but I invite you all to work on content that inspires action over satisfying grievance.