In a week we’ve heard at least four stories of regular people like you and me making regular mistakes like knocking on the wrong door, driving up the wrong driveway, or trying to get into the wrong car. Except instead of having a good laugh about it and saying, “Oh man I’ve done that, have a good one.” They were shot. These events aren’t new—in 2013 a Black woman was shot by a white man through the screen door for knocking on doors asking for help after a car accident— it was just wild seeing so many happen in just a few days.
In the midst of this I keep thinking of the term “rage farming.” I found a definition on Dictionary.com that defines it like this: “Rage farming is a slang term for the political tactic of intentionally provoking political opponents in order to create or increase exposure to one’s group or cause.” So by the agreed-upon dictionary term it’s when the most annoying of senatorial grandstanders or internet trolls say or do intentionally inflammatory things to get a response. News sites and social media algorithms don’t care if a reaction is angry or mocking, they only care if there is a reaction. That traffic is what pays the server bills and keeps the kombucha flowing in break rooms. In fact, angry eyeballs seeing ads may be more decisive when making purchases than neutral ones.
I want to mess around a little with that traditional definition, though, because the concept of farming rage is interesting in other ways. In the typical scenario, a rage farmer plants rage and gets virality. Even when that virality is fury and mockery and endless videos where people respond to your original post with a smug rejoinder, it’s still boosting your profile and generating income. So what if your name is Mud when you can happily sign that name on a mortgage contract. You plant anger and get fame and money. But that’s not all you get. Some farming techniques get results but leave the soil barren. Scorched earth is no kind of legacy.
Now I don’t have the acreage to farm rage. I’m at best a rage gardener. I may have a little patio garden of curated pots of rage. I have a little rage bonsai that I tend to from time to time. While I try to generate almost exclusively fun and harmless online content, I have also been guilty of starting a tik tok with a little jab at toxic masculinity, or encouraging doing drag and committing crimes. My main goal is to add a little forewarning when I make general interest content that there will be other things you see me talk about that’s not in the same niche. But also it’s a little funny to see people boost my content by making bad faith arguments. And by funny I mean viral.
It’s like I have a big farm in which I grow all the wholesome and fresh things and then actively tend a tiny corner of just weeds. And in my mind that patch of weeds won’t spread because I’m tending it carefully. “It’s not a rage farm,” I console myself. “It’s just a lil’ rage patch. If it’s sincere enough maybe the Great Field Bindweed will visit and shower me and Sally with gifts.”
But what if for some reason in spite of all the lovely and nutritious heirlooms my remaining farm generates, people only want to stop by and purchase the weeds? Why do they even want my weeds? It doesn’t matter, really. Value only exists if someone is willing to pay it, after all. All I know is that when I grow weeds I get customers and when I get customers I pay the bills. So maybe I let the weed patch grow. And little by little I start annexing other parts of the farm. The brandywine patch, a legendarily resource intensive and finicky plant, gives way to thistle. I barely even have to work to produce rage. It takes care of itself. Why would I keep trying to get diva ghost pepper plants to actually produce more than 3 peppers a season when without even watering I can fill a plot with poison sumac?
Have you heard of the Crunchy to alt-right pipeline? I really hope you’re not as online as I am for your own sake, so I’ll briefly summarize it. Sometime just before and especially during the (ongoing) covid pandemic, wellness and homesteader influencers (AKA crunchy, granola) began using their pastel and aesthetically impeccable Instagram feeds to spread anti-vax conspiracy theories. Then, bolstered by the response, started dabbling in racist child trafficking myths. Many of these accounts are not unrecognizable as pleasant spaces to swap canning tips; the money just wasn’t there. Their literal organic farms became full-time rage operations.
Farming is ingrained in culture. There are lots of quotes playing with the idea of reaping and sowing. A good one is Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.” Evocative! My favorite, though, is the old chestnut from Hosea: “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”
If you’ve spent more than a few minutes on this little tiny corner of the massive wordsmithing forge we know as Substack, you’ll know that I adore a needlessly complex metaphor. Why I love it the way an early robin of optimism sets its little alarm of diligence to be the first to devour the worm of success. But we don’t use reap and sow much in modern day to mean anything but the metaphor. I wonder if it sometimes loses its meaning if you’ve never done the real-life planting and harvesting.
We’re pretty disconnected from the concept of the harvest, aside from the lingering dances and feasts associated with the harvest season that we’ve turned into reasons to take pictures in flannel shirts with little vests over them surrounded by pumpkins we will do everything to but eat. So it’s not as compelling a framework as it was to our ancestors. Virtually any fruit or veggie is readily available on any given wednesday. Even in Stardew Valley it just takes a couple of minutes to seed and grow the produce necessary to produce the vegetable medley to Leah that will soften her initial reticence of dating the small-town farmer who will give her the gumption to finally share her art with the world.
We’re even more disconnected when thinking about connection. We don’t think very hard about negative externalities. A rage farm doesn’t stay within the borders drawn on a surveyors map. Have you ever tried to dig up field bindweed? Its roots can go 20 feet down, which is absolutely wild. But even more impressive is their lateral growth. One acre of field bindweed can reach 5 tons of underground biomass. You may think your little plot just incorporates your land, but in fact those tendrils are infecting every neighbor surrounding you. And bindweed’s seed bank can last up to 60 years. So a bit you may have allowed to flourish today may affect your grandchildren as they inherit what you left behind.
I’ve been around long enough to watch the very beginning of the industrial rage farm complex grow from a failed radio dj who realized that discussing classic rock on the airwaves would never pay the bills as well as stoking the fear and rage of commuters would, to a 24-hour deluge of hate-thy-neighbor insinuation. We all know or are someone who has watched a family member become unrecognizable due to this steady diet of fear. Their reality completely disconnected from yours. Words don’t even mean the same thing anymore.
As we’ve become increasingly separated from one another, we start using our phones, tvs, and radios as a window to the world. But that window no longer shows what’s really outside. Outside our parents and grandparents see the same families on walks, children riding bikes, and goofily dressed noisy teens that were always there, but the distortion of the window makes them sinister. The children are criminals and the parents on walks are socialists. The library is poisoning your grandchildren. The local teacher is a groomer. When one day you see a teen boy approaching your doorstep, the idea that he’s a multi-instrumental musical prodigy looking for his younger siblings doesn’t enter your mind. Nobody has shown you that person on tv or in a movie, and if they did, you were told to ignore it because it was “woke.” Instead, you reach for the pistol you’ve been told is the only thing standing between your community and chaos. The action ripples throughout a nation.
Maybe the man who planted that seed is long dead. His money stayed behind, of no use to him. People celebrated his death, even. But the seed he planted remained. The roots had spread. Serial sexual abuser and lifetime stirrer of outrage Roger Ailes died the same week as musician and refugee champion Chris Cornell. Results varied. I think about that a lot.
I love the language, the pictures this creates, except for how ugly rage farming and its consequences actually is. So what do you call someone who works to destroy the "seeds of fear", or someone who works at countering their effects of their harm at the "harvest"?