The Price of a Click
The internet has turned into an arena where almost anything can become a spectacle if framed the right wrong way.
The latest example was the viral clip of Jimmy Wales, the public face of Wikipedia, walking out of an interview, a 48-second implosion replayed millions of times. It spread because it had all the ingredients the online arena rewards: conflict, shock, a hint of scandal, and the illusion that we, passive spectators, are suddenly insiders to a drama we never asked for.
But the real story was not Wales.
It was not even the debate about who founded what or who owns which narrative of early internet history. Whether Wales lives up to his organisation’s ideals is also something we set aside for now. In my view the core was simpler, almost embarrassingly simple. It was a bad faith setup. In good faith you start with curiosity, not confrontation.
An interviewer out of his depth, hunting for a dramatic moment, building tension from the first line, treating the whole conversation like a trapdoor. Anyone with street instincts would have felt it. Anyone with experience in people would have walked out too.
That dynamic is familiar. It is the same energy behind another image that made the rounds recently, a mother and her small child in a restaurant, both staring into screens. The photo was taken from behind, posted online, and declared bad parenting by someone who has never met either of them. A stranger turned two other strangers into content. A moment of exhaustion became a moral lecture. And the cyber crowd applauded because it was easy. Because judging from a distance is safe. Because outrage is a cheap currency and costs nothing to mint.
This is what the digital arena incentivizes: snap judgments that feel like righteous insights, quick condemnations that travel faster than understanding, the thrill of seeing someone paraded for flaws we are not completely free of. These things spread because they reward the algorithm. They reward the spectators. And so they escalate.
The question is not how to fix the internet. We will not. Its architecture rewards spectacle and spectacle will continue to win. The more relevant question is what we do with ourselves inside such a system.
Here is the only answer that remains halfway sane.
Stop feeding the arena with cheap judgments.
Treat attention as moral action. Every click is a vote. Every share is consent.
Outrage is not free. It shapes the world, one small reinforcement at a time. If we reward cruelty, we manufacture more cruelty. If we reward thought, we create space for thought.
Most of what travels online travels because it is cheap. Cheap anger. Cheap certainty. Cheap villains. Cheap heroes. But there is always a cost somewhere, a real person on the other side, or a piece of our own character, chipped away.
The price of a click is never zero.
In a world that treats humiliation like entertainment, dignity begins in what we do not reward with a click. The internet’s economy runs on whatever we decide to feed with our attention.