I think that's a part of it but it's not the whole story.
It's not just a society of consumers, it's a society of ... well, children really, although that might be too insulting. "Dependents" might be better. A society of people who are increasingly urbanized, increasingly educated, increasingly always online. And some of that is good but it has come along with and enabled a culture of dependence. People expect that society at large and the state specifically is going to be there to help them out. Help them get their car back on the road, defend them from the bad guys, keep a roof over their heads, keep their bellies full, and so on. This is the "brave new world" route. A population that's blissed out and utterly incapable of self-reliance.
Add to that a somewhat related phenomenon which I'll just call "fuck the rich". The idea being that those who are wealthy/famous/successful somehow "have more" than their "fair share" and therefore are less deserving of social niceties and are a valid target for abuse. The justification being that "they're rich" (or famous or whatever) and "can take it" or "deserve it". It's surprising how quickly this view has become lodges in the zeitgeist. Here's a revealing little test: if you could press a magic button which would randomly pick someone who made more than $200k/yr in the US and, via a robot or magic or whatever, punch them HARD in the face but at the same time pick someone randomly in the US who made less than $15k/yr and give them $1k in cash would you press the button? How many times? How many people would press the button? How much? Would they feel bad about it?
Add to that the general vitriol that stews in some parts of the internet due to anonymity and a variety of other factors and you get the conditions that this story talks about. It's pretty disgusting, and it's probably not going to just magically go away just by hoping it does. So what are we going to do about it?
Be kind and empathic to those around you, and call out those around you who are not. Try to use technology to further liberate people's minds from the drudgery of everyday life and give them that time back, for them to invest in actively bettering themselves. Long term, institute a living wage such that everyone is freed from the worries of everyday survival and develops a kinder, less stressed mindset. A lot of the hostility we see on and off line would go away.
Respectfully, I think your critique is entirely misguided. What you wrote above sounds more like a explanation in search of a phenomenon rather than the reverse. Couching a social phenomenon in a socioeconomic context seems like an especially poor fit, IMHO.
For instance, do you really think the police, SNAP, and federal assistance for hurricane victims incline people to flame others on the Internet? Folks who need food stamps are probably among the least likely to spend "all their time on the Internet," and more likely to be working two jobs. I'm not sure the presence of cops, SNAP, or FEMA matter to folks who don't need any of those things in a concrete fashion.
More importantly, though, it's a fallacy to assume that this sentiment is new merely because it's newly-ish observed. I do think there's an economic component, given how shitty the economy is compared to previous generations' experience; people are unhappy, but I suspect some of that stems from the idea that they're on their own, whereas "everyone else" (or perhaps the rich) is getting a handout. Actually, I'm not even sure folks like millennials believe that in aggregate, but I don't know for sure.
That said, anonymity combined with increased connectivity is novel, and I think it's an enabling factor. I think our social mores and our tools haven't caught up. People can say whatever comes to mind with little or no consequences, and the onus is on the recipient to filter that. There's a many-to-one relationship there and it's hard to manage.
A technological, "dumb" answer would be applying sentiment analysis to emails, tweets, et al. Incorporate as signals stuff like: whether it's a first-time sender; whether the Twitter account has followers; and so on. It's possible these would be band-aids for a real social problem. Or perhaps they would at least lower the percentage in harassing people online.
Socially, it might help if escalated harassment (i.e. persistent, involving death threats, etc) were treated as legal matters. As it is now I suspect it's too hard for victims to do much, and that it can be difficult to get the police to pay attention to it. I don't really have a concrete proposal; I just have a intuition that reporting harassment or stalking to the police is unlikely to be productive as it stands now, and I think the law is unfortunately a really blunt instrument, so this would be hard to get right. (It wouldn't have to be perfect, since no solution which will scale to hundreds of millions of people could possibly be.)
Internet mob justice is probably the answer that will happen from time to time, when people decide to deliberately out trolls. I am not a big fan of Internet mob justice, but sometimes it seems like it's that or no justice at all.
It's not just a society of consumers, it's a society of ... well, children really, although that might be too insulting. "Dependents" might be better. A society of people who are increasingly urbanized, increasingly educated, increasingly always online. And some of that is good but it has come along with and enabled a culture of dependence. People expect that society at large and the state specifically is going to be there to help them out. Help them get their car back on the road, defend them from the bad guys, keep a roof over their heads, keep their bellies full, and so on. This is the "brave new world" route. A population that's blissed out and utterly incapable of self-reliance.
Add to that a somewhat related phenomenon which I'll just call "fuck the rich". The idea being that those who are wealthy/famous/successful somehow "have more" than their "fair share" and therefore are less deserving of social niceties and are a valid target for abuse. The justification being that "they're rich" (or famous or whatever) and "can take it" or "deserve it". It's surprising how quickly this view has become lodges in the zeitgeist. Here's a revealing little test: if you could press a magic button which would randomly pick someone who made more than $200k/yr in the US and, via a robot or magic or whatever, punch them HARD in the face but at the same time pick someone randomly in the US who made less than $15k/yr and give them $1k in cash would you press the button? How many times? How many people would press the button? How much? Would they feel bad about it?
Add to that the general vitriol that stews in some parts of the internet due to anonymity and a variety of other factors and you get the conditions that this story talks about. It's pretty disgusting, and it's probably not going to just magically go away just by hoping it does. So what are we going to do about it?