Part of the joy of working in digital policy in the UK is that many of your days start like this:
I, a Tory politician, have a brilliant plan / erudite commentary / a policy announcement on tech policy strategy. Click here to read it in this EXCLUSIVE Elite Broadsheet Newspaper piece.
We all know full well that this is how the game of politics works. These brilliant plans, erudite commentaries, and policy announcements aren’t made for you plebs. They’re made for the machine to feed the beast inside it.
The bipartisan deal contains a pot of money to repair America’s roads and bridges, and build a few more besides. This is the way we usually do infrastructure in America. First we build a ton of roads and bridges that are highly expensive to maintain, especially with our ruinously high construction costs (see this recent article by Jerusalem Demsas). Then, because costs are so high, we wait for a long time to repair the roads and bridges, until civil engineers start screeching, roads get potholed, and there’s a bridge collapse or two. Then we muster up the political will to throw the requisite shit-ton of money at the problem, the potholes and weak bridges get repaired for twice the amount it would have cost had we done it on a regular schedule and three times the amount it would cost if we were a normal rich country. And the whole cycle begins again.
So when you have a bad take machine, you get the following processes:
They make a bad take.
People are outraged and talk about it.
The bad take machine likes it and does more of that behaviour in future.
If, on the other hand, they make a take and nobody cares, they do not get reward and the behaviour is selected against.
The behaviours drove the spread of the outrage replicator, and the outrage replicator provides the selection mechanism for the behaviours. Thus, via the spread of our outrage on Twitter, we have operant conditioned the bad take machine into producing worse takes.
Which is to say, it's bad on purpose to make you replicate it.