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In economics, a Veblen good is one for whom demand increases as the price increases. Luxury goods like Birkin bags are often cited as examples of these exceptional goods that violate the conventional relationship between price and demand.

Social media has created what I think of as Veblen values. That is, values we tend to clutch more tightly and defend more vigorously the more expensive they are to hold.

This isn’t odd in itself; we tend to think of those values we pay for dearly as among the most precious we hold. Freedom. Equality. And so on.

However, social media has opened an exploit on this concept. Others can cause us to rate some values more highly than we might otherwise just by raising the cost to us of holding them.

A troll might mock you as a snowflake on social media for something you posted, and the next thing you know you’re in an online back alley engaged in a knife fight to defend a view that, before the fracas, you cared about but not that passionately.

Perhaps trolling is just a condition in which there are asymmetric emotional costs to engaging in a debate. Since it’s relatively cheap for a troll to push buttons while the emotional cost to the one whose buttons are pushed is high, the incentive and all the positive optionality is in favor of the attacker.

Sometimes these are values we do hold dearly. The trick, then, is to match your emotional energy expenditures to the strength of your values prior to factoring in the costs from all the trolls attacking you for it. Easier said than done, especially in the West where major social networks have tended to be fairly lax in moderation, and where, not surprisingly, many describe time online as exhausting and precarious. Part of this is the performative structure of social media, as I’ve written about before, but some of it is just the emotional attrition of endless border skirmishes.

As with email, I recommend applying aggressive personal spam filters on social media. That saying that one should “feed a cold, starve a fever”? There’s a reason we say “don’t feed the trolls.” One person's filter bubble is another person's emotional quarantine.