How social media became a dangerous outrage machine, manipulated by people who use viral anger to change our world for the worse.
Social media has become a brutal machine that weaponises our own cognition against us: it has mapped the human condition and monetised it. If all intention is driven by the meeting of emotion with attention, then this thing - this machine that covets our attention and mines our emotion - has become the supreme vehicle for social control, political power and cultural capital.
The internet and social media used to be heralded as technologies that would bring us together. Now, these tools are tearing us apart. They have transformed in ways we could not possibly have imagined, as the greater good is trampled for the greater gain.
Social media outrage is now an entire industry. It is hunted, harvested, monetised and weaponised.
Rage bait – the 2025 Oxford Dictionary word of the year – trumps reason. Our offline lives have been hijacked by our online habits: our beliefs and emotions are no longer solely ours. We are all part of the machine, which thrives on our worst impulses. As a result, politics is becoming more extreme, young women are following dangerous health advice and young men are adopting the attitudes of their sexist old grandpas. Most troubling: it has spawned a new class of power – those who know how to game the attention economy.
Ed Coper has a term for this little-understood global phenomenon that fuses emotion and attention to completely upend the way we engage with the world: Angertainment.
First, we must understand it. Then we can work to defeat it.
Angertainment is the book we need to navigate our scary new reality.
