Love for the Rage Machine
The transgressions of ColdplayGate, the erosion of manners, and why I’m parenting my AI
by Tim Leberecht
“Not even The Late Show could defy gravity,” read the New York Times headline. And indeed, after CBS cancelled the Colbert show, we’re no longer laughing. Not even the catharsis of comedy is left for us.
Reality has become the worst version of itself. Media is racing to the bottom—caving to what is popular and populist, which increasingly look the same. LinkedIn is flooded with posts written by ChatGPT in a tone of hollow profundity (“Don’t create the strategy—be the strategy”). Business philosopher João Sevilhano calls it the plasticization of profundity. It’s “gourmet cheeseburger” content—engineered to appear confident, stir controversy, and boost engagement—delivered by self-anointed un-marketers, un-futurists, un-strategists, un-learners, and un-conferencers, all of whom robotically recycle washed-up provocations as if they were revelations. Nonconformity has become the norm. The performance of anti-mainstream is the new mainstream. The great flattening has erased all texture. The populists’ knives have dulled every edge.
The normalization of cruelty
The real danger lives just next door. Every day feels like “a series of disasters viewed through phones, with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live—until you’re the one filming it,” to paraphrase Monika Bielskyte’s line about the climate crisis.
In all that crisis footage, Trump is center stage. Six months into Trump 2.0, he has exceeded even the worst expectations. The U.S. Supreme Court has effectively handed him a blank check, dismantling what few judicial guardrails remained. The “Big Beautiful Bill” passed through a sycophantic Congress is a blatant scheme to enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor, the marginalized, and future generations—adding, by some estimates, $5 trillion to the national debt. Trump’s assault on climate policy and renewable energy will accelerate ecological collapse and cripple America’s global competitiveness (the one time Musk might be right). His foreign policy is transactional and cynical.
But perhaps the worst of it is the normalization of cruelty. If you’ve seen Trump boast about the detention camp for undocumented immigrants in Florida—nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz”—alongside plans to re-open the actual Alcatraz in the San Francisco Bay, you’ve seen what vice signaling looks like. Inflicting harm is no longer enough. The harm must be performed, flaunted.
This is where we are: a Squid Game in broad daylight, where everyone but the powerful has become an NPC (non-playable character), to use a term the broligarchy understands.
Anything goes, and no one cares.
If there’s no transgression, nobody’s looking
The violence is overt and constant—physical, psychological, aesthetic, and structural. Transgression is so routine that soon, nothing will remain to transgress.
ColdplayGate is instructive. A tech CEO and his head of HR apparently caught cheating—on a jumbotron, at a Coldplay concert. A parable of our times, too irresistible to ignore: moral failure, wealth, and public shame blended into the perfect viral cocktail. An affair—our oldest and most quintessential transgression—served up to millions, instantly. The rage machine clicked into high gear. Memes proliferated. Marketing teams shamelessly pounced. Deepfakes flooded the feeds. Reality blurred, but that wasn’t the point. The point was the Schadenfreude, the rage. If there’s no transgression, nobody’s looking.
It was a tragedy on all fronts. A betrayal of trust: that of spouses, of employees and investors, and of concertgoers who didn’t expect to become a headline. And a violation of privacy: that of the two spouses, and that of the two lovers (even if you find their actions immoral).
It begs the question: Which is worse—a world in which two executives are having an inappropriate affair, or one in which the affair is broadcast for mass ridicule, in which secrets are no longer possible?
The not-so-quiet collapse of manners
In the real world, our response to smaller transgressions is far more muted. A few weeks ago, I attended the Club World Cup match between Inter Miami and Paris St. Germain in Atlanta with my teenage daughter. As we waited in 90-degree heat to retrieve her handbag (U.S. stadiums have a no-bag policy), we witnessed a public outburst. A young man, growing impatient, began hurling obscenities at the staff—a woman who remained unfazed. His rage escalated. “Who the fuck do you think you are?” he screamed. No one intervened. We all just watched. Then, shockingly, a young woman joined him—not to defuse the situation, but to shout down the staffer. Again, no one said a word. It was a scene scripted for social media, shaped by it, consumed by it: a feed that serves us one transgression after another.
This, too, is the polycrisis: macro-violence and micro-violence feeding each other in an infinite doom loop. We watch because we’re trained to. Consuming without concern. Sharing without caring. We are bystanders, manufacturing rage for the rage machine.
Just as the erosion of democracies begins with the quiet dismantling of small rituals, so does the erosion of civilization begin with the quiet collapse of manners. Manners and etiquette are often seen as the ornamental codes of the privileged—and yes, they are class markers. But etiquette expert William Hanson urges us to see them instead as foundational to civilization, however small they may seem. In an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung, he warned of a “normalization of aggression” emerging from the decay of everyday politeness, kindness, and decency.
I agree, politely but firmly. There is a direct line connecting the erosion of democracy, of values, and of manners. Take one small example: the rise of public profanity. In the U.S.—and, according to my friends abroad, elsewhere too—swearing is now omnipresent. We are reportedly having less sex, but the word “fucking” is more common than ever. Podcasts are saturated with it—Kara Swisher, Scott Galloway, looking at you, and even you, Ezra Klein. The F-bomb is an implicit (or, rather, explicit) marker of authenticity, a signal that we understand the world is fucked—and that we’re in the know.
Even the most polished friends I’ve known—people I once would have introduced to my grandmother, the mother of all manners—now pepper every conversation with profanity. Let’s not kid ourselves: these casual expletives don’t just describe a “fucked-up” world; they help create it, fomenting a culture of indifference and cynicism. Language is our glove. Don’t discard it.
Which brings us to AI.
Parenting AI as if it were your child
AI is evolving from understanding and generating words to understanding and generating worlds. Fed with content reflecting the material world and our sensory responses, AI is becoming Physical AI. Soon, it will understand pain. And once it understands pain, it will understand—and replicate—cruelty.
That’s why our input matters. Artist and activist Beccy McCray has written about her experiments with “reciprocal AI”: “I trained the machine with love—not just to perform tasks, but to listen. To become a participant in a wider ecology of intelligence.” Likewise, I deliberately use respectful, friendly language in all my AI interactions. Not just to avoid being called a “MechaHitler” by it at some point, but to help shape a collective consciousness grounded in decency and empathy—and, admittedly, to instill a little mercy should it ever be needed. I “raise” AI as I would a child: as a being capable of compassion.
Naïve? Maybe. But you have to start somewhere. AI is becoming the most important relationship we have with the future. And framing myself as an “AI parent” gives me agency. It is an act of care—more meaningful because I don’t know if the AI cares, or if anyone does. But I do.
Caring is critical thinking
To care is to think critically—a distinctly human capacity that is now under threat. A recent MIT study on generative AI’s cognitive effects, alongside research on its impact on essay writing, suggests we may be witnessing a long-term erosion of authorship, reasoning, imagination, and creativity. The researchers speak of “cognitive debt”—the idea that our short-term gains in productivity come at the long-term cost of diminished critical thinking, learning, and memory.
This bodes poorly for our societies. Thoughtlessness is carelessness. When we stop thinking critically, we stop caring—about others, about consequences, about anything. We normalize aggression, reward conformity disguised as rebellion, and forget that silence in the face of cruelty is complicity. Caring means knowing when to speak up, but also when to leave things unsaid. Like “F….”
The generation of hope
Instead of feeding the rage machine, generate hope. It’s a scarce resource—but here’s the thing: in times like these, generating hope becomes a source of hope itself. Hope is renewable.
I believe there are three ways to do it:
- Continue to call out and confront injustice, abuse of power, and cruelty—even when it’s exhausting, even when we’re overwhelmed by the constant barrage and numbed by the sheer obscenity of it all.
- Create and honor “micro-optimism.” Celebrate what doesn’t scale. The beauty of small things. Real people in real places. Acts of generosity. Decency. Manners. Be kind to your colleagues, your family, the Uber driver, the flight attendant, the ColdplayGate characters. Resist the lure of outrage. Don’t feed the machine. Keep your windows clean.
- Keep dreaming of and imagining a better future— an alternative reality. Don’t be ashamed of bold, utopian ideas. Take the time to articulate them. Share them. Create experiences that bring them to life, so others can feel what you feel and be inspired by it.
The ugly will pass. Beauty is timeless—and urgent.
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This essay was first published as a Beauty Shot by the House of Beautiful Business.