When the Monster Lost Its Bite (By Design)
To call someone a monster once meant banishment from the moral community. Now it means trending on Twitter.
The word once carried weight, demanded attention, forced a moral reckoning. It was reserved for the truly horrific - those who had crossed fundamental lines of human decency in ways that shocked the conscience and demanded response.
But the devaluation of "monster" wasn't an accident of linguistic evolution or digital-age hyperbole. It was engineered by specific actors who understood that the best way to protect real evil is to make the word meaningless. Political operatives trained in narrative warfare, media executives who profit from engagement regardless of content, and the actual perpetrators of systematic cruelty all benefit when moral language becomes background noise.
This isn't the first time powerful interests have deliberately corrupted moral vocabulary. During McCarthyism, "communist" was weaponized until it could describe anyone from actual Soviet agents to civil rights activists to union organizers - the word retained its power to destroy reputations, but lost its ability to accurately identify actual communists. Post-9/11, "terrorist" became so overused on everything from environmental activists to political opponents that actual terrorism could operate with reduced scrutiny while the distorted term continued to justify expanded surveillance powers. The strategy is cyclical and proven: corrupt the meaning while preserving the emotional impact, or flood the zone with accusations until accusations become meaningless.
The current iteration is particularly sophisticated. Instead of simply suppressing criticism, these attention markets encourage everyone to use the strongest possible language for the smallest possible offenses. Train people to call every political disagreement monstrous, every cultural friction genocidal, every personal slight fascistic. When everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency. When everyone is a monster, no one is.
This linguistic sabotage creates perfect cover for actual evil. When detention center guards can post selfies with facility merchandise, when public figures casually suggest feeding humans to alligators, when systematic cruelty gets processed into quarterly performance metrics - they operate in an environment where being called a "monster" carries no more weight than being called annoying. The word that once conjured images of genocide, sadism, or unthinkable cruelty now sits beside 'cringe' in the comment thread. The word has been hollowed out by repetition, its meaning emptied but its emotional charge intact.
The genius lies not in suppressing criticism, but in making criticism ineffective while simultaneously profiting from it. Moral outrage becomes just another form of content, consumed and forgotten in the endless scroll. Transform righteous anger into engagement metrics that fund the very platforms amplifying the behavior being criticized.
This process follows the classic Debordian logic of recuperation - the spectacle's ability to absorb and neutralize any challenge to its authority. The word "monster," once a weapon against the spectacle's cruelty, becomes just another commodity within it. Calling someone a monster generates clicks, drives engagement, builds personal brands, and ultimately feeds the same algorithmic machinery that profits from the very behavior being criticized. The epithet gets consumed by the narrative economy it was meant to challenge, stripped of its disruptive power and repackaged as entertainment. Resistance becomes content, moral judgment becomes performance, and the spectacle grows stronger by digesting its own opposition.
But we are not merely victims of this manipulation - we are often eager participants. People enjoy the moral clarity that comes from calling out the monstrous. It feels good to be righteously angry, to signal virtue through passionate denunciation, to belong to the side that cares about the right things. The influence architecture works partly because it gives people what they want: permission to feel morally superior without having to do anything difficult or costly.
Those who would resist genuine evil find themselves linguistically impoverished by a process they helped enable—having been encouraged, and having eagerly agreed, to spend their moral vocabulary on symbolic battles, they discover they have no words left that can cut through the noise when truly needed. These algorithmic platforms have weaponized our own ethical instincts against us, turning every attempt to identify injustice into proof of hysteria.
The real monsters understand this dynamic perfectly. They don't need to silence their critics - they just need to ensure those critics sound exactly like everyone else who's angry about everything. "Oh, you're calling me a monster? Get in line - everyone's a monster according to you people." The very intensity of the opposition becomes evidence of its illegitimacy, while the algorithms monetize both the outrage and the cruelty with equal efficiency.
This manufactured chaos serves multiple functions simultaneously. It exhausts the public's capacity for moral judgment while providing plausible deniability for those implementing harmful policies. When every political disagreement gets framed in apocalyptic terms, actual apocalyptic behavior becomes just another opinion in the marketplace of ideas. The extremes get normalized through constant exposure while genuine moderation gets dismissed as naïve centrism.
The result is a society that has been deliberately trained out of its ability to recognize genuine evil. We rage against symbols while systems of cruelty operate with impunity. We fight culture wars while the material reality of exploitation continues unchanged. We exhaust ourselves on performance while actual power consolidates behind the spectacle, often using our own passionate criticism as fuel for its growth.
Perhaps most insidiously, this influence architecture encourages us to mistake our own manipulation for moral clarity. The more frantically we denounce everything as monstrous, the more virtuous we feel - never recognizing that our very passion is being harvested, monetized, and used to protect the things we claim to oppose. We become unwitting collaborators in our own moral disarmament, generating revenue for the platforms that amplify the very behavior we're denouncing.
When the monster lost its bite, it wasn't through overuse or accident. It was through deliberate design by those who understood that the best way to shield real monsters is to make the word meaningless while profiting from the meaninglessness itself. In a world where everyone is called a monster, no one has to fear being one - and everyone can make money from the accusation.
If meaning can be hollowed by design, perhaps it can also be restored by intention. But only if we learn to guard our language not just from others’ manipulation, but from our own need to feel righteous.