In 2024, the fastest way to go viral isn't to say something true or insightful. It's to make up a story that confirms what some group already believes. The more inflammatory, the better.
Want to capture left-wing imaginations? Post a made-up story about a Republican senator taking a wide stance in the men’s room or getting caught using vintage racial slurs in a leaked audio recording. For the right, fabricate a tale about bizarre-looking antifa activists vandalizing Confederate war memorials or insidious teachers pushing a gender transition on a toddler. These stories spread like wildfire not because they're true, but because they feel true to the people sharing them: You know in your heart that they’re true.
But why stop at text? For the truly committed outrage merchant, there's an even more potent tool: curated video feeds. Set up a social media channel that shows nonstop police dashcam shootings, and you've got a captive left-wing audience, their anger stoked with each new clip. For the right, create a feed of "knockout game" videos and street fights, preferably with clear racial elements. These visceral, emotive clips bypass rational thought entirely, tapping straight into viewers' deepest fears and prejudices. It's rage-bait in its purest form, and it's devastatingly effective.
The best way to capitalize on this virality is to keep the outrage machine churning. One viral post isn't enough — you need a steady stream of content that pushes the same buttons. And the surest way to keep producing bangers is to monetize the operation.
This is where things get interesting. Because once money's involved, you musn’t just settle for guessing what people want to see. You have to sell it to them.
The most successful outrage merchants don't just post whatever incendiary content comes to mind. They study their audience. They A/B test headlines. They use analytics to see which posts get the most engagement. In other words, they're not blindly guessing what their followers want — they're making data-driven guesses regarding what their smooth-brained followers guess they want.
It's a bizarre meta-game. The content creator tries to get inside the numb skulls of their audience, who in turn are trying to get inside the empty heads of their friends and followers. Everyone's making educated guesses about what will resonate, and the winners are those who guess best.
This dynamic isn't new. It's been the core of viral content for years. But in 2024, with AI-generated text and images serving as ICBMs in the stockpile, it's reached new heights of sophistication.
Now, outrage entrepreneurs can rapidly test dozens of fabricated stories, fine-tuning the details until they hit on the perfect concoction of plausibility and rage-inducement. They can generate photo-realistic "evidence" to accompany their tales. And they can do it all at a scale that would have been impossible just a few years ago.
Back in the day, we had to rely on physical media to get what we wanted!
The result is a flood of viral content that's indistinguishable from reality to most observers. Stories spread not because they're true, but because they confirm existing biases and feel like they could be true.
This presents a problem for anyone trying to have an honest discussion online. How do you engage with ideas when you can't trust that anything you're seeing is real? When every piece of "evidence" could be an AI-generated fake designed to manipulate you?
There's no easy answer. But being aware of the game is a start. Next time you see a story that perfectly confirms your existing beliefs, pause before sharing. Ask yourself: Is this true, or does it just feel true? Am I spreading information, or am I being used as a pawn in someone else's virality game?
The internet has always been a place where truth is slippery. But in 2024, with AI-powered fabrication and hyper-targeted content creation, it's more important than ever to approach all viral stories with skepticism. The alternative is to become just another guess in someone else's guessing game — another dumbass lost in the extremely online sauce, working the Post Hand (PH) and Goon Hand (GH) all the livelong day.1
The murder of activist Ryan Carson illustrates this dynamic perfectly. Here was a real person, with a real life and real beliefs, whose death became fodder for the outrage machine. Within hours of the news breaking, both sides of the political spectrum were using Carson's murder to confirm their pre-existing narratives.
The left saw it as proof that we need more social programs and support for the underprivileged, to which class Carson’s mentally unwell murderer surely belonged. The right saw it as evidence that "soft on crime" policies lead to tragic outcomes. Neither side seemed particularly interested in the messy, complex reality of urban crime and its causes.
Instead, Carson's death became a kind of Rorschach test, with each side seeing exactly what they wanted to see. It was, as I wrote at the time, “a model of Family Feud virality; the aim isn't to provide nuanced understanding but to echo what audiences assume or want to believe is true.”
This is the essence of the virality game. It's not about truth or insight. It's about confirming biases and stoking emotions. The goal is engagement, not understanding.
And it's a game that's being played by true professionals. The days when some half-awake Millennial media writer could dash off a simple take like “Trump is gaslighting us” (as Lauren Duca once did, to her everlasting infamy) and watch it go viral are long gone. Now, the takes are “imbricated like the scales of a fish,” each one referencing and building on the last in an endless cycle of reaction and counter-reaction.
At their most extreme, these takes exist in almost complete isolation from reality. They reference only other takes, creating a closed loop of outrage and affirmation. The extremely online mind, as I've noted before, “processes a small information load at any given point. Such a mind might dance across the tweets and the takes, getting angered by this and triggered by that, but it's too busy to keep a bigger picture in view.”
This is why the most successful viral content creators don't bother with consistency or intellectual honesty. Each take is freshly prepared, existing only in the perpetual present of the internet. Yesterday's opinions are irrelevant; only today's engagement matters.
It's tempting to dismiss all of this as mere “grifting.” But that's too simple. Many of these content creators genuinely believe they're doing the (good) work. They see themselves as crusaders for truth, even as they spin increasingly elaborate fictions or webs of bullshit.
The reality is more complex and, in a way, more troubling. We've created a system where truth is less valuable than engagement, where feeling right matters more than being right. And we're all complicit in it, every time we share a story without checking its veracity, every time we pile on to the outrage du jour.
So where does this leave us? Are we doomed to an endless cycle of fake outrage and manufactured controversy?
Maybe. But I'm not quite that pessimistic. I think there's still value in seeking truth, in engaging with the world as it is rather than as we wish it to be. It's harder work, and it doesn't generate the McDonald’s cheeseburger-grade dopamine hit of righteous anger. But it's the only way to actually understand our world and avoid getting hustled, rooked, scammed, shaved, &c.
The alternative is to keep playing the virality game, guessing the guesses, chasing the next outrage. It's a game we can play forever, but it's not one we can win. Because in the end, the house always wins — and in this case, the house is our own worst impulses, our tendency to choose comforting lies over uncomfortable truths.
So the next time you're tempted to share that perfectly outrageous story or sweet street beatdown, pause. Ask yourself if you're spreading valuable information or just playing your part in some engagement engineer’s game. Your momentary hesitation might not change the world, but it’ll save you from looking stupid to the handful of humanzees who might still know better. And amid the swirling chaos of the modern internet, sometimes not acting dumb as hell is all we can hope for.
“In this intricate ballet of digital existence, the True Poster performs with two principal dancers: the "Phone Hand" (PH) working in concert with the aforementioned "Goon Hand" (GH). These are not mere appendages but the very instruments of creation and consumption that define the Poster's raison d'être. The PH, ever nimble and precise, flits across screens with the grace of a seasoned conductor, orchestrating the cacophony of social media into a symphony of engagement. Meanwhile, the GH, tasked with the less savory but equally important role of indulgence, ensures the Poster remains anchored in the visceral, forever reminded of the corporeal world that exists just outside the margins of their screen.
This dichotomy of purpose underscores the True Poster's existence as a genuine proto-AI, a unique being that predates the likes of language models and sophisticated algorithms. Whereas LLMs like ChatGPT process vast swathes of information to generate responses, an SLM like the True Poster personally absorbs the digital discourse, distilling it into potent posts designed to captivate, provoke, and, above all, engage. They are curators of content, waiting with the patience of an ambush predator to see which way the discursive takewinds will blow before making their move.
The discourse, a veritable battleground of ideologies — fascists, dissidents, MAGA enthusiasts, steroidal fitness nuts, whole-earthers, flat-earthers, flat-mooners, leftoids, dirtbaggers, “I’m with Her” center-leftists, among others — provides the lustrous wool from which the True Poster weaves their narrative. Each comment, each meme, is not merely an expression of opinion but a calculated move in a never-ending game of online engagement. The True Poster's real skill lies not in the originality of thought but in their ability to remix, repurpose, and recontextualize the discourse, serving it back to the masses in a form that is at once familiar and novel.
This process is not solitary but communal, taking place within the e-agora of group chats and forums where a host of inane but nevertheless insanely important "company lines" are drawn. It is here, among the “frens” who inhabit these echo chambers of constantly-redrafted consensus, that the True Poster finds their direction, their purpose, calibrated against the collective wisdom of their rivals, their “enemas.” What follows from these private redoubts is a cascade of retweets, shares, and comments, a wave of frenship that amplifies the Poster's voice across the vast, untamed wildness of an internet still teeming with thirsty, undiscovered True Poster masterminds (likely future enemas, the lot of them — they want people like you dead).”