You know that social media runs on conflict. This ain’t exactly breaking news, — but what’s worth thinking about is how this has spawned an entire class of what we might call “professional conflict entrepreneurs” and their cousins, the “trauma grifters”. These are the folks who have figured out how to monetize interpersonal drama and personal suffering.
Let’s be precise about what I am talking about here.
A conflict entrepreneur is someone who deliberately manufactures or amplifies, and even prolongs online conflicts for personal gain. That could be for followers, Substack subscriptions, Patreon dollars, or pure social capital. And trauma grifter is someone who uses either real or embellished personal trauma narratives to gain authority in online spaces and often monetary support.
A bit like what I did, writing about the 14 year old kid, A tragic bond with a chatbot: The story of Sewell Setzer III | LinkedIn, and the sequel, Grieving mother takes on Character AI | LinkedIn.
Well, the problem isn’t that these people exist, because rabble rousers always have, but the problem is that they’ve become the people you look up to in the online discours.
And when your business model depends on conflict or trauma narratives, you have a strong incentive to find more of both, or manufacture them when supply runs low.
Consider the mechanics, a conflict entrepreneur spots (or creates) a brewing disagreement between two parties. They quote-tweet one side with an inflammatory take.
Their followers pile on.
The other side responds.
Now we have a proper “discourse”.
Of course, the entrepreneur’s engagement metrics spike.
They start a Substack newsletter to “cover the controversy”.
They launch a Patreon to “continue this important work”, and they position themselves as brave truth-tellers speaking truth to power.
The trauma grifter’s playbook runs parallel to this. They share a personal story of trauma or oppression (which may be entirely real). They position themselves as uniquely qualified to speak on related issues because of this experience. They begin selling courses on “healing”. They start charging for “consulting” on how people (or even organizations) can avoid causing similar trauma.
They actually build a brand around their survivor status.
Both types have mastered what I call the “engagement ratchet”.
Every interaction must escalate. Every response must be more inflammatory than the last. Every story must be more shocking. The algorithm rewards it, and their business model demands it.
The incentives here are perfectly aligned to produce exactly what we see, and that is an endless stream of increasingly heated conflicts and increasingly extreme trauma narratives. Fuck resolution or healing, it is about maintaining the tension that keeps people engaged and the money flowing.
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Time for naming and shaming
Let’s start with Ben Shapiro. You may have heard of him, and that’s an understatement. He is the human manifestation of a debate club full of people on cocaine and meth. His shtick is all about obliterating strawmen with surgical smugness, and the while he is yelling “facts don’t care about your feelings” at 17-year-olds on college campuses. He never brings a resolution, only escalation. And of course a merch store.
Then there’s Elon Musk. Not much to tell about him (pun intended). He is tech’s resident drama llama with a god complex and an attention span the size of his d*ck. He moonlit as a visionary once, and I liked him for that, but he now moonlights as a troll king with daddy issues and a freaking verified account. The man doesn’t manufacture conflict for a living, but he does treat every global platform like his personal soapbox. He is the ultimate enabler, because he even bought Xwitter for the pleasure of turning it into a feeding ground for chaos entrepreneurs that saw him fire the moderators and took it as a green light to unleash hell upon their own staff. . .
Let’s take Matt Walsh.
He is a different kind of poison. He is less cocain, more communion wine, but underneath it all, he is full of sanctimonious rage. Walsh has built his identity around moral panic. He uses his Catholic dad energy to go full scorched-earth on LGBTQ+ people, feminism, and, occasionally, the concept of empathy. The hypocrism of it all is that he brands himself as a “truth-teller”, but it is more like disdain and a pipeline of fear. His business model requires a constant stream of enemies, and when those dry if he will start manufacturing demons to keep the fire going.
And then there’s Andrew Tate. Y’all know em, as the roided-up guy with a high blood-pressure who sells young men the lie that misogyny is a viable business plan.
He’s of course a conflict entrepreneur, and he is also a lifestyle guru for the terminally online and sexually frustrated.
Tate turns every critique into clout, and every ban into a martyrdom tour. He feeds his disciples with a steady stream of provocation that he sells as pseudo-philosophy. And all the while he is raking in millions from his pyramid-scheme-adjacent “Hustler’s University”.
He is what happens when the manosphere figures out monetization, and decides that empathy is for the weak, you know, the common theme in Silicon Valley these days.
They are shaping our broader discourse.
They set the tone and terms of debate. They decide which conflicts get amplified and which get ignored. They determine which traumas are culturally valuable and which aren’t worth discussing.
And they’re also incredibly effective at capturing institutional attention. Organizations, terrified of being labeled as being on the “wrong side” of a conflict, repeatedly cave to their demands. This gives the entrepreneurs even more power and influence, which they can monetize further.
The solution isn’t to dismiss all online conflict or discount all trauma narratives.
Both are real and important.
No, the solution is to stop rewarding people who deliberately manufacture and amplify conflict for profit. To stop treating trauma as a form of currency that can be traded for authority and influence.
And for that to work, we need to develop better pattern recognition.
Watch for people who always seem to be at the center of drama but never seem to resolve anything. Notice who profits from prolonging conflicts rather than solving them. Pay attention to who builds their entire brand around their trauma narrative while selling solutions to others.
Having 100,000 followers and a fucked up life doesn’t make someone an expert on anything. Being good at starting X fights doesn’t qualify someone to speak on complex social issues.
Or biology.
Or nuclear armament.
Or fluoridation.
Etc.
The harder part is addressing the underlying incentives.
As long as conflict and trauma narratives drive engagement, there will be entrepreneurs ready to supply them, and as long as we reward people for finding new ways to be publicly aggrieved, they will keep doing it.
The best what we can do is to consciously withdraw our attention, and our money, from people who profit from keeping us angry and afraid. To support voices that seek to clarify rather than inflame, to heal rather than monetize harm.
But the fact is, that some people have built business models that depend on making our online spaces more toxic, and our conversations more extreme. And it’s up to us to decide that maybe we don’t need to keep funding it.
Signing off from the excrement of humanity.
Marco.
Oh? Did I ask you to take the survey?
I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Let’s keep smashing delusions with truth. We are the chaos. We are the firewall. We are Big Tech’s worst PR nightmare.
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To keep you doomscrolling 👇
- The AI kill switch. A PR stunt or a real solution? | LinkedIn
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- AIs dirty little secret. The human cost of ‘automated’ systems | LinkedIn
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- How I quit chasing every AI trend (and finally got my sh** together) | LinkedIn
- The dark visitors lurking in your digital shadows | LinkedIn
- Understanding AI hallucinations | LinkedIn
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- The $95 million apology for Siri’s secret recordings | LinkedIn
- Prediction: OpenAI will go public, and here comes the greedy shitshow | LinkedIn
- Devin the first “AI software engineer” is useless. | LinkedIn
- Self-replicating AI signals a dangerous new era | LinkedIn
- Bill says: only three jobs will survive | LinkedIn
- The AI forged in darkness | LinkedIn
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