Disavowing the Outrage Machine

For the last couple of years I've been trying to escape the worst of what the internet has become. I've let myself get pulled back in more than once, so the exit has been uneven. Here's what I'm learning about enjoying it again, and why I needed to.

Start with Jared Henderson, a YouTuber. He and I probably disagree on plenty, but he's one of the more sensible voices I've found on the attention economy and what it does to people who try to build an audience without selling themselves out. I recommend this video and this one.

One story he tells is worth repeating. Here is my paraphrasing…

In The Attention Merchants, Timothy Wu traces how advertising took over the world. The first villain is Benjamin Day, founder of the New York Sun. Before Day, newspapers served elite readers. At six cents an issue, they were priced for people whose jobs depended on business news. Day was a printer who started his own paper to drum up work for his shop. His idea was simple: sell it for a penny, what most New Yorkers could afford. That opened a much larger market. The problem was that a penny didn't cover production costs. So he sold ads. Advertising existed before Day, but he was the first to make it the core of the business model. His real product was reader attention, sold to whoever would buy it.

You've heard the line: if you're not the customer, you're the product. Day's readers were both. They paid for the paper and their attention was still sold out from under them.

The sensationalism we complain about online isn't new. It was baked in from the start. To make the ad model work, you need massive readership. To get massive readership, you print what grabs people. Day's first headline was "Melancholy Suicide," the story of a young man whose father tried to end a romance by shipping him to India, and who took his own life in response. Romance, family conflict, death. It sold. The Sun kept doing it. Within a year the paper was profitable and eventually became the largest in New York City.

Competitors followed. Newspapers invented court reporting specifically to harvest dramatic stories. Editors picked fights with other editors because the drama sold copies for everyone. Eventually the Sun just started making things up. Wu's most striking example is a five-part series claiming an astronomer had found life on the moon, complete with unicorns and half-man, half-bat creatures, presented as genuine scientific discovery. Every copy sold. Day knew it wasn't true. He printed it anyway.

Fake news sells. Outrage sells. Drama sells. That proof of concept is older than anyone alive.

That's the machine I don't want to be part of. To whatever degree I was, I repent.

I never expected the audience we've built. Most of it came through work on masculinity, which started as an attempt to address the false claims of the red pill while acknowledging what it was getting right. One of our first newsletters, before It's Good to Be a Man came out, was on the red pill as a false religion. I saw it as ground for both evangelism and real discipleship. We caught a wave as it was building, and that brought attention from across the spectrum.

Early on I hoped we could build something coherent: men committed to historical biblical Christianity, willing to push back against feminism, the woke drift, the celebrity circus. The old institutions had made clear they weren't interested in reform. For a while it seemed possible. There were men with genuine promise. Over time our paths diverged.

By 2022 I was already discouraged. Not everything in the "new Christian right" was bad, but the corrupting influences were visible enough that you could see the trajectory. Even so, in 2023 I hadn't fully given up.

Then two things happened.

First, it became clear that some men didn't want to dismantle Big Eva. They wanted to replace it with themselves. Same machine, new faces. I had no interest in building a parallel version of what I thought needed to die.

Second, my mother went in for routine surgery. It became a cascade of medical malpractice. Months of fighting the hospital followed. It cost her her life.
That broke me. Not all at once, and not evenly. But it was real.

I started pulling back. Conferences got canceled. Big-time podcast opportunities passed. Things I'd thought mattered didn't anymore. Then the situation with the CREC came to a head. A constitutional change put us in a position where we either abandoned our confessional commitments or left. So we left.

That stretch was deeply depressing. Both my ecclesiastical life and my personal life got shaken hard. It took about two years to find our footing again.

God is wise and he is kind. He uses suffering to strip things down and show you what actually matters.

During that season we rethought everything: commitments, margins, pace. You can't do everything. Every yes costs something. So the question becomes what you're not willing to trade. We began to cut and rebuild. That process isn't finished, but it's real.

I've faced pressure to publicly disavow people, name names, spell out every disagreement. I'm not going to.

Many of those relationships were never as significant as others made them out to be. But more than that, I'm not interested in feeding a cycle that never closes. The demand to constantly clarify and denounce doesn't produce clarity. It produces content. Running drama where no statement is ever enough and nothing is ever settled. Both sides would still be frustrated I didn't go far enough. We just get pulled back into a cesspool of unresolvable conflict. Even this post risks being water on a grease fire.

A lot of the recent controversy has centered on people's obsession with "the Jews" and Israel. My Jewish roots are no secret, nor is the strong secular streak in my upbringing. I'm not ashamed of being part Jewish, part German, and mostly Irish. I'm not a Messianic Jew. I'm an American Protestant Christian.

I'm not a Zionist. I hold no special loyalty to the modern nation-state of Israel. I do think that a lot of the online stuff has curdled into irrational hatred of Jews as a group for some folks. At the same time, many people refuse to acknowledge that Israel lobbies effectively and persistently for interests that often are to the detriment of America, and particularly of American Christians. Both of those things can be true.

There it is. Something to disappoint most everyone.

Anyhow…

My focus is simple: build what is good, be clear where I stand, move forward.

The last time I engaged in a controversial online effort was the issue of female functional officers in the PCA. I put most of it together in a single day while on vacation. Even at the time I wasn't sure it would matter. In the end, most of the evidence was dismissed. If there aren't bold reformers inside the PCA, those on the outside can do very little. I believe good men are there, trying. I'll pray for them and leave it at that.

I have eight children. I have a church full of people to shepherd. I've already spent too much time on things that didn't amount to much, and I'm not getting younger.

I’m being more deliberate about what I write, where I speak, and who I partner with. What my church needs most isn’t more controversy. It’s steady, practical teaching on how to live the Christian life.

If we’re going to be an intergenerational church, we also need a real pipeline for training pastors. That’s where energy should go.

Toward that end, my wife and I have started a small press to publish the work we’re doing. I’ve partnered with Grimké to help with their church planting concentration. We’ll still do a few conferences here and there. But that’s it. Nothing new for a while.

What about making the internet more enjoyable?

A big part of this, for me, is just disavowing the outrage machine on both sides. I don’t want to be part of it anymore.

So I’ve started making some small, deliberate changes. I’ve been unfollowing people on Twitter who don’t have anything constructive or positive to say. Many have been muted for a long, long. In their place, I’ve been following comic book creators, boxing commentators, and writers I actually enjoy. Same thing on YouTube, which I probably use the most. I’ve been gravitating toward art history, writing strategy, story structure… that kind of thing. Some of it is entertainment, but most of it is helping me get projects done. So, it’s more productive content.

It’s been a noticeable shift. I’m less pulled into the constant churn of the news cycle, less tempted to get worked up about whatever the latest thing is supposed to be. The internet actually becomes enjoyable again when you stop feeding on outrage all day.