The Business of Outrage: From Cracker Barrel to Sydney Sweeney
Have you ever scrolled your feed and felt your blood pressure rise over something that, if you step back, isn’t really life or death? A logo change. A celebrity ad. A coffee cup.
These flare-ups aren’t random. They’re part of a pattern. Outrage is one of the easiest ways to hijack our attention, and in the online economy, attention is gold. The more riled up we get, the more we click, share, and comment. What feels like genuine grassroots anger is often carefully exaggerated—or even invented outright—to keep us engaged in battles that don’t matter nearly as much as we’re told they do.
When a Logo Becomes a Battlefield
Take Cracker Barrel’s recent logo change. The company swapped its old-fashioned illustration—a bearded man leaning on a barrel—for a cleaner, modern design. That’s the kind of refresh brands do all the time, usually without anyone noticing. But this time, outrage exploded.
Commentators on the right framed it as an assault on tradition, a betrayal of Cracker Barrel’s “real America” identity. Fox Business even tied the change to the background of a board member with experience in diversity and equity initiatives, feeding the idea that the logo wasn’t just different—it was political. On social media, that narrative was repeated, memed, and shared until the story became less about design and more about identity.
A simple marketing update turned into a cultural flashpoint, not because of the logo itself, but because outrage drives attention. The logo became a symbol in a larger story about “heritage under attack,” and suddenly a routine branding decision was cast as part of a war over who gets to define America.
The Outrage That Wasn’t
The Sydney Sweeney ad campaign shows a different version of the same game. American Eagle released a cheeky “Great Jeans/Genes” ad starring Sweeney. Almost immediately, some conservative outlets claimed “the left” was furious—linking the wordplay to eugenics and mocking progressives as humorless scolds.
But here’s the twist: there wasn’t much actual outrage from the left to begin with. Outside of a few stray posts, there was no real movement of critics demanding the ad be pulled. The supposed backlash was largely invented. The story wasn’t really about Sweeney, or even the ad. It was about keeping the culture war churning—framing progressives as perpetually angry, even when they weren’t.
This is a subtler trick. Instead of blowing up a minor change into a major betrayal, you create a phantom outrage and then dunk on it. The tactic works because it doesn’t matter if anyone was truly upset; what matters is the perception that “the other side” is always irrational, always overreacting.
Two Tricks, Same Purpose
One logo and one ad. Two very different tactics:
In one case, a minor change is blown up into a betrayal.
In the other, outrage is fabricated out of thin air.
Both serve the same purpose: to keep us distracted, angry, and engaged in battles that don’t change much of anything. And both are rewarded by the systems we use every day. Media outlets get clicks. Social platforms get engagement. Politicians get talking points. We—the audience—get the fleeting rush of outrage, followed by exhaustion.
Meanwhile, the problems that actually shape our lives—wages, healthcare, housing, corruption—rarely generate the same sustained attention. They’re too complex, too messy, and too hard to fix to compete with a quick hit of anger about a logo or an ad.
The Real Punchline
As George Carlin warned, the outrage machine has a purpose: “They keep the lower and middle classes fighting with each other so they can run off with all the f*ing money.”
That’s the punchline of these culture-war flare-ups. We think we’re defending tradition or calling out hypocrisy, but the real joke is on us—our attention gets hijacked while real problems go unaddressed. The same trick shows up in conspiracy narratives like the so-called “deep state.” Both outrage and conspiracy thrive on exaggerating threats, keeping us angry and distracted while very little changes in our daily lives. I’ve broken that down more here: Is the Deep State Real—or Just a Symptom of a Bigger Problem?.
Awareness Is the Antidote
Manufactured rage is a shell game: keep the public angry about distractions while power and wealth shift quietly in the background. The antidote isn’t more outrage—it’s awareness. Before sharing the next viral “can you believe this” moment, pause.
Ask who benefits from this story being amplified.
Ask whether the outrage reflects real harm, or just symbolic theater.
Ask what’s being ignored while we argue over logos and ads.
The business of outrage only works if we keep buying in. Awareness gives us the chance to break the cycle.