If you're online at all, you've probably at least heard of the American Eagle controversy around Sydney Sweeney's ad campaign in which she talks about her "good jeans". It's an intentionally provocative campaign, but I don't know if American Eagle expected the "it’s literally giving Nazi propaganda" or "American Eagle supports eugenics" reactions. My opinion is that it's inadvertently "giving Nazi" but ignorance of Nazi propaganda does not give immunity from serious criticism for accidentally using that same message.

I wouldn't have talked about this since it's not really my typical arena on this blog, but I read Charlie Warzel's piece about it, and this bit landed with me:

The trajectory of all this is well rehearsed at this point. Progressive posters register their genuine outrage. Reactionaries respond in kind by cataloging that outrage and using it to portray their ideological opponents as hysterical, overreactive, and out of touch. Then savvy content creators glom on to the trending discourse and surf the algorithmic waves on TikTok, X, and every other platform. Yet another faction emerges: People who agree politically with those who are outraged about Sydney Sweeney but wish they would instead channel their anger toward actual Nazis. All the while, media outlets survey the landscape and attempt to round up these conversations into clickable content—search Google’s “News” tab for Sydney Sweeney, and you’ll get the gist.

And:

What can start out as a legitimate grievance becomes something else altogether—an internet event, an attention spectacle. This is not a process for sense-making; it is a process for making people feel upset at scale.

Once you notice this playbook, you start seeing it everywhere. For me, this really hit home in 2022's trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard…which for the record was a serious and depressing domestic violence trial…and the internet broke into factions, with content creators jumping on board because outrage at either party in that trial got views.

I don't have a good solution here, but I continue to think that staring at our phones for hours a day at "the attention economy" that is social media is not a net good for most of us. It's why I've taken a step back and severely limit my time there.