The Toxoplasma of Rage

Before "meme" meant doge and all your base, it was a semi-serious attempt to ground Cultural Evolution in parasitology — replacing a model of humans choosing ideas with a model of ideas as parasites that evolve to favor their own transmission. The concept never really caught on, mostly because the response was "that's neat, so what?" But Scott Alexander found the "so what" by identifying a specific memetic lifecycle that explains one of the most destructive patterns in modern discourse: the tendency of activists to systematically sabotage their own causes.¹

The PETA Principle

Start with PETA, the animal rights organization that once offered to pay water bills for needy Detroit families if and only if those families agreed to stop eating meat. This provoked the predictable backlash — "exactly why everyone hates PETA" — but Alexander argues the backlash is the point. Compare PETA with Vegan Outreach, an extremely responsible charity doing excellent work in the same space. Nobody has heard of Vegan Outreach. Everybody has heard of PETA, precisely because of the interminable debates about whether their latest stunt "crossed the line."¹

PETA doesn't shoot themselves in the foot because they're stupid. They shoot themselves in the foot because they're traveling up an incentive gradient that rewards them for doing so, even if it destroys their credibility. This is the core insight: there's a tradeoff between responsibility and attention. Vegan Outreach can get everyone to agree that factory farming is bad, but nobody will talk about it. PETA can get everyone to talk about factory farming, but will catalyze an opposition of people who start eating more meat just to spite them.

Controversy as Selection Pressure

The PETA Principle applies far beyond animal rights. Alexander traces it through the viral dynamics of rape allegations, police brutality cases, and political movements generally. The pattern is always the same: the cases that go viral are not the clearest, most indisputable examples of the problem, but the most controversial ones.¹

Consider the contrast between the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson and the Eric Garner choking in New York City. A Pew poll found that 73% of white people who expressed an opinion about Ferguson sided with the officer, while 63% who expressed an opinion about Garner sided with the black victim. Even Bill O'Reilly called the Garner case "extremely troubling." Saturday Night Live did a skit about Al Sharpton getting upset because "for the first time in my life, everyone agrees with me."¹

And yet Ferguson, not Garner, dominated the national conversation for months. Garner was choked a month before Brown was shot, but the story was ignored, then dug back up as a tie-in to the larger Ferguson narrative. The result: three months of Americans at one another's throats, race relations dropping to a twenty-year low, and white people's confidence that police treat blacks fairly actually increasing from 35% to 52%.

The Ferguson protesters' concrete policy goal was police body cameras. Before Ferguson, polls showed roughly 80-90% support. After Ferguson — after all the damage — support was still about 90%. The controversy changed almost nothing about the policy question while dramatically worsening the broader social dynamics it was supposed to address.

The Toxoplasma Lifecycle

The biological metaphor is precise. Toxoplasma gondii starts in a cat, gets pooped out, infects a rat, hijacks the rat's brain to make it conspicuously visible to cats, gets eaten, and returns to its feline host. A two-host lifecycle where each phase enables the next.

The war on terror works the same way. In an Afghan host, the meme appears as "jihad" and hijacks its host into attacks that spread it to the American host. In the American host, it morphs into "the war on terror" and hijacks Americans into bombing that spreads it back. From the human point of view, these are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they're as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies.¹

On social media platforms like Tumblr (whose reblog architecture is either designed by someone who didn't understand memetics or understood it much too well), this lifecycle runs at full speed. The most controversial takes get reblogged with angry commentary, which spreads them to new audiences who add their own angry commentary, in a chain reaction that serves nobody's interests except the meme's own propagation.

The most disturbing development is when these outrage-memes evolve their own replication enforcement: "If you're not reblogging about Ferguson right now, you should be ashamed." "Ignoring this situation makes you racist." This is, as Alexander notes, the first time outside of chain letters that memetic overlords have thrown off all pretense and just shouted "SPREAD ME OR YOU ARE GARBAGE AND EVERYONE WILL HATE YOU."¹

The Structural Bind

The toxoplasma dynamic creates a genuine dilemma, not a solvable problem. If campaigners against police brutality stick to perfectly clear cases like Eric Garner, everybody agrees and nobody talks about it. If they bring up controversial cases like Michael Brown, everybody talks about it but the conversation makes things worse. This isn't because the people involved are stupid or malicious — it's because the information ecology rewards the controversial over the useful.

Alexander's own blogging data illustrates this perfectly. His posts about charity — probably the most important thing he writes, potentially saving hundreds of lives — get the least traffic. His posts about race and gender and controversial politics get the most. "The less useful, and more controversial, a post here is, the more likely it is to get me lots of page views."¹

This has implications for how we think about media bias. Chomsky's propaganda model assumes that the media serves the interests of power through structural filters. The toxoplasma model suggests something worse: the media serves the interests of controversy itself, which often aligns with power but sometimes doesn't, and is harder to fix because there's no identifiable villain. The structural filters are still there, but they now compete with an attention economy that selects for outrage regardless of who benefits.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that the forces shaping public discourse are not "almost no one is evil; almost everything is broken" — they're that the ecology of information is not your friend. The system that determines which ideas propagate is not optimized for truth, or justice, or even power. It's optimized for engagement, and engagement is optimized for controversy, and controversy is optimized for exactly the wrong cases.