"I'm Mad as Hell..."

That’s right. I’m mad as hell. Surprised? The Edgy Optimist? Mad as hell? Let me tell you why.

First, however, let me explain why I’m saying it. In 1976, the film Network, directed by Sydney Lumet and written by Paddy Chayefsky, won multiple Academy awards for its eerily prescient take on the direction of modern media, shifting away from neutral news and toward its hyper-charged nature as just another source of entertainment competing for attention. In its most famous scene (part of which was filmed, by a coincidence meaningful only to me, in front of my Upper West Side Manhattan high school complete with a fake rainstorm), a network news anchor played by Peter Finch has a meltdown on camera about the degradation of consumerist culture and exhorts the audience to demand it stop. He says to the audience, “I want you to get up right now and go to the window and open it and stick your head out and yell ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore. Things have got to change. You’ve got to get mad!’”

What, you may be asking at this point, does that have to do with a Substack purportedly dedicated to looking at what is going right? What would I be mad as hell about, given my stated commitment to moderation and a tone of acceptance even for our greatest human foibles, especially after what was supposed to be a few summer weeks away from the fray, whatever fray that is?

I’ve often wondered, and not happily, about the challenge of attracting attention in a world geared to attend only to hot emotions—anger, outrage, fear, sensationalism, and hyperbole. As Tim Wu (updating the themes above) wrote in The Attention Merchants, social media has hyper-charged the incentives called out in Network. The problem of what gets emphasized and what gets buried in our culture has gotten considerably worse in the past decades, though it’s not as if it was ever not a problem given human nature and our blood lust for the spectacle of violence and drama.

So, I’ve wondered how one could possibly stand on a digital street corner and yell, “Everyone calm the fuck down” without that being part of the problem—how one could do a modern version of Peter Finch without the nervous breakdown, and without it immediately becoming part of the same narrative of noise.

My answer has tended to be that you can’t. You can’t fight hot emotions with more hot emotions. You can’t fight fear with more fear. You can’t fight anger with more anger.

The problem with that, however, is whether that consigns efforts such as this Substack to a niche, whether the dedication to a different tone means being stuck in a Sisyphean loop of rolling the boulder of good news up an endless hill, only to have it inevitably roll back down again.

Listen to me talk more about the need for optimism here:

In that vein, an old friend, Eric Schmidt (yes, that Eric Schmidt) said to me at Burning Man (yes, cue the eye rolls and groans of “you’ve got to be kidding me…”), “your problem is that you’re too reasonable. Some will listen but not enough. You’ve got to copy Network. You’ve got to get mad as hell.” And I thought, maybe he’s right.

Look, it’s not the first time someone has put their arm on my shoulder and said that I need more edge and less optimism, more fire and less calm. But in response to a world awash in fire and hysteria, I have always elected to try to be a source of calm and not of more heat. I’ve no regrets about that, and I doubt that will change in any fundamental way. It is equally true that there is one thing I am indeed mad as hell about:

I’m mad as hell that we do not collectively recognize the incredible progress we have made in transforming our material condition. In the course of a little more than a century, we’ve flipped the entire script of human history from one of scarcity to one of abundance. We have eradicated caloric deficits, diseases born of malnutrition and exposure to the elements. We have inoculated ourselves against the eternal dangers of the natural world. We have raised our level of consciousness through the simple act of near universal literacy. We have created societies governed more by the rule of law than the whims of the powerful.

I’m mad as hell that every time—every single time—someone points out the above, it’s followed by a litany of “yes, buts” highlighting all the many ways in which the progress is not yet perfectly complete, which is true and yet in no way changes the essential point. Yes, there is still mass starvation, but we live in a world of caloric excess nonetheless, where human beings dispose of 30 percent of all the food we produce. We don’t have a food problem, anywhere. We have a distribution problem, everywhere. And that contrasts with the entire arc of human history until the late 20th century. What’s more, there is no longer any single deadly communicable disease that threatens society at scale. Not one. Not even Covid. Do millions die from diseases? Yes. But societies do not die from disease, as they did until the 20th century.

I’m mad as hell that we do not recognize how modern information technologies have made all of us far more informed and far more aware of the human condition and the way others live. I’m mad as hell that we do not sit back, at least once a day, and marvel that we can traverse our planet in less than a day, that we can carry the accumulated knowledge of the human race in our pocket, that more of us than ever can say what we think and find others to listen to us, that we can find digital communities even if rejected or marginalized by the communities of our birth, that we can explore our passions and learn unfettered by the size of a local library or the resources of a nearby school or even the whims of a local government attempting the create barriers to knowledge.

I’m mad as hell that we do not celebrate the best in all of us with nearly the same rigor that we excoriate the worst of us. I’m mad as hell we don’t acknowledge how much we have torn down barriers of racial prejudice and gender discrimination even as barriers remain. I’m mad as hell that we don’t, each time something troubling happens, take a moment and breathe and ask if the specific deserves a generalization. I’m mad as hell that we focus on the few wars going on at any given time and not on the peace breaking out everywhere. And I’m mad as hell that we seem collectively hell bent in talking ourselves into jumping off a ledge instead of stepping back from one.

And most of all, I’m mad as hell that each time one of us attempts to break out of that circle of hot emotions, they aren’t lauded for it. Our incentives—in politics, in news, sometimes in business, definitely in social media—demand behaviors that serve us badly. We have so much to celebrate, so much that is wondrous and beautiful. Human history remains a close-knit contest between our incredible capacity to destroy and our amazing ability to create. The fact that we are still locked in that dualism means our ability to create has narrowly triumphed over time. If we want that to continue, we need to be less mad at our many and constant failings and madder that we fail to trumpet all that we are doing well.

Unlike Peter Finch’s character, I’ve not yet broken down in despair. But like him, I’d urge all of you to be less accepting of the relentless drone of negativity, to challenge any and all who emphasize the worst of our societies at the expense of the best and to demand that we acknowledge not just all that we aren’t but also all that we have accomplished and all that so many of us are doing each day to shape a better future.

So let’s be mad as hell. Not to add to the cacophony of crisis and despair, but to replace that dismal noise with a full-throated shout that we’ve done so much good, and we can and will do so much more.