Fracking the Collective Unconscious

Facing diminishing returns in the limbic attention economy

Exxon Mobil oil refinery, Baton Rouge, via Wikimedia Commons

A few of my news feeds last week were dominated by confusing sexual provocations that I didn’t really understand, as they often are. This time last year it was “brat” with its memorable green; just over twenty years ago Britney Spears had kissed Madonna; fifty years ago it could have been the Rocky Horror Picture Show; five hundred years ago in Florence, it could have been Machiavelli’s Clizia. Last week it was Sabrina Carpenter.

Outrage is a fast route to fame. Certain things do not and have not changed much about the dynamics of seeking public attention since Herostratus, whose name is still widely remembered. Morally, I consider it the interest paid on a long-held cultural debt as old as stampede hunting at desert kites and buffalo jumps: we killed so many naive, easily-goaded herd animals as to drive many species extinct. We got in these habits thousands of years ago, and we turned them on each other when the “natural victims” became sparse. We still haven’t broken the habits.

Some things do change. The details of which philosophical or religious heresies draw attention change, the details of which outrageous sexual performances draw attention change, and the rewards and punishments for provocation change as well. There are alternating contrasts in the changes and some people think that they see predictable cycles in these alternations.

Interestingly to me, there are large-scale changes in cynical social metaphor for the provocations. Cynicism often pretends to be non-ideological and simply strategic, but it is always patterned on underlying ideologies, formed from them by defamiliarization and coarsening. Often, for instance, cynicism arises by treating humans as indifferently exchangeable things, and therefore implicitly as commodities. Whatever the iconic commodities of an era are, some cynics will make a play of understanding people in those terms.

On the Internet today, two of the major natural person-analog commodities are games and chatbots and accordingly cynics call others NPCs and bots. A durably iconic commodity for dehumanizing cynicism, still current, is the sheep. The pattern has been its most brutally recursive with “slave.” In the Renaissance, Giordano Bruno wrote about erotic “chains in general” for capturing and enslaving imaginations and used metal casting metaphors for the formation of compelling manipulative mental images.

In today’s entertainment industry, perhaps due to past material dependences on vinyl for records and nitrocellulose for film or just because industry leaders came of age in a period of oil boom euphoria, many of the metaphors are oil-derived. One “taps into” a new market. Releases are “in the pipeline.” Anything that’s not energetic enough “needs more gas.” A substantial chunk of ideology of the oil economy shows up without reflection in this language. For a different project I might critique that ideology or seek to demystify it, but right now I’m more interested in walking in that woods than in analyzing it or clearing it.

Specifically, I’m often interested in the way that provocations turn latent passions into present desires and interests, and I’m interested today in how oil metaphors cast that process.

When an outrage marketing campaign “taps into something deep” or “releases a gusher,” the campaign has been metaphorically cast as a drill that has hit a pressurized reservoir. The drill head is the image itself: Sabrina Carpenter as a dog pulled by the hair, the Madonna-Britney kiss, Tim Curry in a skimpy dress. What is drilled through is some idea of default resistance, usually an allegedly prudish instinct, habit, or social norm. What emerges through the well is passionate emotional engagement in some combination of outrage, jealousy, and lust.

As with the oil industry’s refineries and distribution networks for kerosene, gas, and tar, the key to making a profit from one of these emotional gushers is to channel each component of the outrage, jealousy and lust into appropriate channels as it rushes forth. The lustful responses ideally channel into purchases: one fraction of outraged rejections are engaged to channel into further marketing material, one fraction of outraged jealousies are engaged to funnel into purchases and next hires, other fractions are dumped directly without engagement and while those may foul up the emotional lives of the targeted social demographic that’s not the marketer’s problem.

The gushers rarely gush for long. When a new reservoir is discovered, there’s a rush to sink new wells to tap it and there are no legal property rights for specific segments of lust and outrage. Britney couldn’t have applied for a patent on kissing other girls and many others have now used the trick. By now that reservoir is largely depleted; there’s almost no outrage left to bring out except in the societies that have excluded the mainstream entertainment industry. Metaphorically, those exclusive societies are the emotional arctic, and the entertainment industry is always looking for new permissions and technologies to drill them.

Instead of trying to drill to the same easy depths in new locations, marketers can also try drilling deeper, a strategy as old as the oil industry. They need harder drill bits — tougher provocations. They try to tap the outrage around stricter and stricter taboos. They need more robust pipes for channeling the more dangerously pressurized outrage — organizations that can keep on message and keep selling through all the pushback they get. These days, one important frontier methodology is zoophilic-drillbit outrage marketing using hardened utilitarian psychology for the piping.

Another alternative is to learn to target different mixes of outrage, like the Standard Oil fragment Amoco’s transition from light crude oil to heavy crude oil in Indiana in the early 20th C. Lust outrages are hardly the only sort of reservoir marketers can target, and with a different sort of organization, violent and racial outrages are also economically viable targets. Like sulfur-mixed sour crude oil can make a total ruin of the wrong refinery equipment, an organization made to exploit unmixed lust-based outrage attention may completely fail when the lust is mixed with racism, but a properly prepared outrage marketer may exploit the extra racial components all the better.

Even then, though, there comes a point where those deeper or more sulfurous reservoirs also empty out. People get tired, they get indifferent, or they leave the social niches where drilling goes farther than they’re comfortable with.

With gushers drying up, a new idea arises: why limit drilling to fluid “gusher” reservoirs when you could fluidize a new reservoir yourself? The outrage marketers enter their fracking era.

Here, the prior existence of naturally pooled latent outrage becomes irrelevant. It can be forced. “Marilyn Manson now going door to door trying to shock people” isn’t as much of an exaggeration as one might hope. Trying to get people to act bigoted or prudish or “oversensitive,” activists of left and right harass them at their daily lives in public and in their homes. “Their reaction is the action,” to quote a commonplace of self-discrediting antifascist political manuals; fascists love to use the same destructive baiting tactics just as much (or more) but their tactical manuals are less quotable.

Whenever there is enough demand for new outrage to allow otherwise dull figures to form and support their identities as outrageous charismatic leaders, it will be supplied artificially. Some other kind of genuine outrage, like a desire for privacy or quiet, will be recast as another kind of more marketable outrage, perhaps prudish or bigoted outrage. And it doesn’t have to stop there: if any victim of this is ungracious enough to become outraged about being misrecognized as prudish or bigoted, that itself may be recast as more prudish or bigoted outrage.

It can really be better just not to share any strong feelings at all in this current limbic identity economy. Expressions of feeling can be alienated and marketized whether one consents or not. TikTok and YouTube are full of examples.

However, the dynamics of this mode of outrage exploitation quickly break out of the oil drilling metaphors. For one thing, if you’re sending pressure and material down into the reservoir you might be better off thinking of it as plowing and sowing a field rather than fracking a shale bed. For another, the latent emotions naturally recharge, unlike oil and gas. In time, as the simple profits of irreversible one-time exploitations become harder to extract, plans naturally shift to repeat extraction more like seasonal harvests. The drilling metaphors cease to resonate with practice, and the ideology of oil goes out of style when those practical resonances end.

It seems to be out of style among my closest friends, happily, but it doesn’t seem out of style yet in the largest parts of society, and I don’t have a timeline for when it might be. I fear it might only finally pass out of style in the major political parties through violent overthrow, likely in the form of civil war if history is a good guide, after which some new Bill of Rights with stronger freedoms of assembly and freedoms of privacy might create a new basis for civic peace — though that happy result could only happen after an effective process of deliberative compromise develops the concrete practical content of those new formal rights.

Whatever the future holds for the larger parts of society following these dynamics, and I am worried, for the moment I’m also simply grateful for my own social niche. In this niche, I’m happy to be able to transform even the most annoyingly insistent or coarsest of these sexual outrage attempts into more light for reflecting on history. I hope this reflection has also felt bright and fruitful to you, even despite its dark, crude subjects.