When Bad Behavior Goes Viral
The internet’s reward system favors anger, and it’s catching up with us
In 2016, a 13-year-old girl with clear anger issues glared at a hostile studio audience. The villain in a staged daytime TV pantomime, Danielle Bregoli challenged 200 strangers to a fight with these words: “Cash me outside, how ’bout dat?”
Today, Bregoli has transformed into “Bhad Bhabie,” a renegade enfant terrible of the music industry. She signed with Atlantic Records. She got herself nominated for a 2018 Billboard Music Award as a solo rap artist. Her five-year probation sentence for car theft, drug possession, and filing a false police report was cut short after she found herself able to hire a better legal team. Recent reports suggest she’s just signed a beauty endorsement deal worth nearly $1 million. Rags to riches.
Bregoli is an example of what I’ve termed the “memeocracy,” a social media-based system that rewards people for attention-grabbing behavior rather than talent. Bregoli and those who have engineered her rise have hijacked a psychology that favors outrage over hard work.
My issue isn’t with Bregoli specifically. Having worked with plenty of similarly troubled young people as a professional advocate for looked after children, I quite like her. It takes guts to fight a studio audience…
