The New Reaction Economy

Preface

What a lovely essay William Davies’ The Reaction Economy was. He weaves together so many different observations about the Reaction Economy we seem to live in—I can see its colour stitched everywhere now. I want to build on Davies’ argument, and sharpen the focus to aspects more relevant to my generation.

The Reaction Economy

A few months ago, I had ordered my brother to put me on a drug tapering program, limiting my access to Instagram behind a passcode only he knew to a maximum of twenty minutes a day. Like Davies, I was left feeling bereft and naked, as any addict does when their drug is taken away. Like Davies, I asked how I was supposed to react to the Instagram Reels my friends sent me, or the photos and stories they posted? Was I even interested in seeing what my friends were sending to me or posting if I couldn’t heart or comment on their post? Like Davies suggests, being online with no opportunity to react is a bit like being trapped in a shopping mall without any money. But this analogy misses the fact that it can be deeply entertaining to send posts to friends and see their reaction. So, it’s also a bit like owning a store in the shopping mall that no one can spend any money in. We’re all like merchants that exchange content with each other for the prized currency of a reaction. Hence, the Reaction Economy.

I want to point out that the crux of what Davies’ is getting at is a sharp observation about the type of culture we live in, that is, one that obsesses over reactions. This sounds so obvious it seems almost trite—we might point out that newspapers, governments, and writ large people have been reacting to things forever. The salient difference is that we are now obsessed with a particular type of impulsive, short, emotional reaction that ostensibly people have little control over. We don’t just want to see the thing, we want to see someone else see the thing, and ideally we want to clearly see the reaction plastered all over their face. It is the emotional reaction to the content that we want to consume. Once you see this pattern, it’s not hard to recognise it across the entire ecosystem of content.

Consider some examples that point at what I’m getting at:

• Videos of deaf and blind children experiencing sound or sight for the first time.
• College decision reaction videos, where teenagers open their acceptance and rejection letters on camera, their family gathered around to witness (and be witnessed witnessing) the result.
• Surprise reunion videos of a long-distance partner or child showing up unexpectedly.
• Prank channels putting people in odd situations and capturing their reactions. This idea has been a popular TV show since at least 1948 with Candid Camera¹.
• Reaction channels or reaction videos on YouTube that record the experience of listening to a song for the first time, the experience of trying a food for the first time, reacting to a violin prodigy, and so on. Reaction channels are themselves a very strange mise en abyme of reaction, and their virality suggests we have an almost unlimited appetite for them. I will revisit this later.

These types of reaction videos seem to fit into one category that causes us to feel the same emotion as the person we are watching. We like these reactions because they make us feel good, because we’ve forgotten what’s it’s like to see for the first time, or to listen to a song for the first time. We like these impulsive emotional reactions because 1) they signal that the circumstance was real (if it wasn’t real then there would be no emotional reaction) and 2) allow us to vicariously live through the other person. One explanation for the mechanism which allows this to happen that Davies forwards is our mirror neurons. While it’s not entirely clear what their purpose is, one possible function is in generating empathy. So, we feel happy watching the reaction of someone else’s face become happy. But I think 2) is usually conditional on 1) being true: we only want to allow ourselves to feel an emotion if we’re reasonably sure that what we’re watching is authentic. People are upset when they find out the reaction they’re watching is staged, e.g. Adrian Gee². Perhaps this is partially why the reactions and behaviour of animals are loved without qualification—presumably an animal can’t fake or stage its reaction.

So, we love consuming reactions because they make us feel a certain way. But how are we to make sense of streamers, a new era of UGC marketing, and a new breed of memes that are centered on the reaction of the video?³

Streamers and IShowSpeed

Davies notes that Twitch streamers must be both elite gamers and emotionally engaging performers, but I think this understates things. Increasingly, the emotional performance has eclipsed skill as the primary criterion for success.

The streamer Darren Watkins, known as IShowSpeed, is probably the purest distillation of this trend. While Watkins is skilled at playing video games, his most viral moments come from his outsized and often violent reactions to games that require little to no skill. Watkins is famous for the spectacle of his engagement with simple horror games or mobile games like Talking Ben. Notice that the games he plays are instrumental in prompting the real content, which is his emotional volatility and excess, which millions find entertaining and amusing.

But, everyone knows that IShowSpeed is a personality Watkins performs when he streams. If emotional reactions are supposed to be impulsive, free from fakery, and therefore authentic, and yet we know that IShowSpeed is not being authentic, surely authenticity isn’t what we’re consuming. Maybe what we want instead is the aesthetic of authenticity. As long it appears that the reactions are genuine, we are entertained. Professional wrestling worked all of this out decades ago and even gave it a name: kayfabe⁴, the convention by which performers and audience agree to treat the staged as though it were real. Everyone knows the matches are choreographed, and nobody much minds, because what was being sold was never the fact of the contest but the performance of it. IShowSpeed is kayfabe for the streaming era.

UGC Marketing

Brands now pay ordinary-seeming people to perform first encounters with their products, portrayed as a candid video for how they solved X common problem. The entire grammar of social media made me buy it is the grammar of the reaction video. It launders advertising through a signal we still instinctively trust: a face reacting in real time. We spent two decades learning to skip ads and distrust polish, so the ad disguised itself as the thing we cannot help but watch.

The new breed of memes goes one step stranger. Here the reaction clip detaches from whatever originally provoked it and becomes a free-floating unit of vocabulary. A clip of a streamer’s stunned face, captioned How it genuinely feels to do X, no longer has anything to do with the streamer or whatever he was looking at; it is a gif, available to anyone who needs to say that. This seems to me the Reaction Economy’s most complete victory: we have outsourced not just the things we react to, but the reactions themselves.