Member-only story
The Conspirituality Report
The Wellness Pornographers
Gamifying intimacy, abusing public health
This article attempts to define “wellness pornography” and its impacts in the age of COVID. I’ll start with a discussion of terms, and then pivot to some examples.
Defining Wellness Pornography
In their 2019 paper, philosophers C. Thi Nguyen and Bekka Williams defined a form of junk-food communication now common online. “Moral outrage porn”, they argued, is salacious gossip about real-world horrors that users share for personal titillation.
It’s rampant in social media feeds in which users post and comment with intense emotion about political or cultural issues they are not invested in. They bewail the evils of racism and rape culture, for example, without having to commit to the hard work of finding solutions.
Why do they do it? For the pleasure of the emotion — which can bring a profit. In his parallel work on gamification, Nguyen points out the wicked calculus: if heightened emotion raises engagement, it can also raise social capital. The implication is stark: the user is able to build brand value through an absence of commitment to a serious issue.
In order to define moral outrage porn, Nguyen and Williams had to first establish…
