The Rage Machine

I'd bet I know what you want. A community you can feel safe in. A good job with a decent paycheck. Affordable healthcare. To be able to buy a home after working 40 hours a week. A government that feels stable instead of engaging in constant theatrics and chaos.

About 70% of the global population uses social media. If you’re reading this, odds are that you do too.

Maybe you use TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, or Twitter. Maybe more than one. Do me a favor: grab your phone, open your preferred social media app, and do your regular scroll for about 30 seconds. Seriously, do it.

I’m going to guess that in those 30 seconds you were probably already handed reasons to hate strangers. Maybe there was a clip of someone screaming at a school board meeting, or a politician putting on a ridiculous performance while the cameras are on so they can get social media engagement. Maybe headlines warning that “they” are coming for your kids, or stories of people being awful to one another.

Then you open the comments and it’s like watching the dumbest people you’ve ever seen throwing feces at each other from the safety of pseudo-anonymity.

And the worst part is that on a regular basis you probably don’t even go looking for that kind of content. At least not consciously. It’s designed to come looking for you.

Outrage is part of an incredibly sophisticated psychological ecosystem. In the modern attention economy, anger is the most reliable fuel for grabbing and keeping your focus.

And rather than merely reflecting anger, the system we live inside of actively manufactures it, measures it, optimizes it, and sells it back to you. Over and over and over.

It’s the ultimate drug.

There’s a very distinct feeling associated with outrage.

Your chest might tighten, and your jaw may set. You might feel a tiny surge of righteousness whispering in your ear. And why shouldn’t you? It feels good to be angry, especially when you’re absolutely sure you’re right.

Research has consistently shown that outrage gets rewarded disproportionately on social platforms. It draws attention and drives engagement, and over time everyone gets conditioned to learn the same lesson. Platforms, advertisers, creators, and users. Anger pays best.

Platforms see this in the form of increased share prices, advertisers sell more of whatever they’re hawking, creators get more reach, and end-users get to feel that sweet hit of moral righteousness.

Then bad-faith political actors show up and say: Cool. We can use that too.

The political atmosphere feels like we’re constantly teetering on the brink of civil war. And maybe we are. But if we are, it’s not because you and I actually disagree on a whole lot.

Alarm bells have been sounded about this topic for years. Divisive content performs best. Because of that, engagement-based systems tend to continuously nudge people toward more extreme material over time. The system learns what keeps you glued to the screen and it just keeps feeding you more and more of it.

And when you combine outrage with tribal identity, it becomes very sticky. Once you’re in, you continuously get shaped by it. The recommendation systems keep funneling you deeper and deeper into echo chambers (including extremist ones), because that’s what reliably holds your attention.

So when you apply that same mechanism to politics, you eventually end up with feeds that almost exclusively prioritize ideological extremism instead of actual competence. And you also end up with a politics where the most rewarded behavior is no longer governance (or even pretending to govern), rather public fights and humiliation.

Because the algorithm doesn’t care whether or not something is true. All it really cares about, and the only question it asks, is “did this keep you here?”

A decade ago, you could watch cable news and call it “journalism with bias problems.”

Today, that feels quaint.

The alternative media — to include podcasts, streamers, and creators — has exploded, and a lot of it runs on the same logic as your social media feeds. Rage packaged as authenticity. And a lot of these personalities share a business model:

1. Tell the audience the other side is deranged or evil.
2. Confirm the audience are the sane ones.
3. Keep them coming back for the next Two Minute Hate.

The result is a media landscape where the loudest voices are rarely the wisest. They’re just the most reliably incendiary.

We’ve talked a lot about how profitable outrage is. But it’s also just a really useful tool in general.

Outraged voters donate faster. They share more. They show up with a sense of purpose and they believe in the cause. Not because they actually agree with the cause, but because the other side is so much worse. They also forgive bad behavior from “their” side, because you just can’t cede any ground when you’re convinced the other side is evil.

And so political operatives quickly figured out that the best way to win isn’t to persuade the other side. It’s to harden the base and scare the middle into moving ever-so-slightly in their direction. Fundraising emails that sound like policy memos don’t activate your adrenal glands the way that outrage and fear do.

Disinformation campaigns deliberately inflame division by feeding each side content designed to provoke fear and anger.

After a decade-plus of outrage being refined into more and more effective ammunition, mainstream politics has essentially stopped being about competing visions for shared futures and is instead about managing your enemy. Moves and countermoves. Psychological warfare. You have to keep your side fired up while trying to exhaust the enemy’s troops.

Weaponization.

This can often feel abstract, which is where people get tempted to minimize and say things like “it’s just online,” or, “people are venting.”

That might have been true once. It isn’t anymore.

Online outrage spills into workplaces, family conversations, group chats, school boards, and city councils. It changes how we see our fellow Americans; not as neighbors with different ideas, but as existential threats.

When the default framing becomes “the other side is an existential danger,” a small number of people will inevitably act accordingly. It manifests as violence. As harassment campaigns against local officials. As intimidation. As people deciding politics doesn’t need to be settled with ballots and debate, but with authoritarian force.

And when you’re constantly fighting (actively or passively) in this information war, you inevitably burn out. Most people aren’t professional political combatants. They’re busy working, raising kids, and trying to build a life. So they disengage because it’s toxic, exhausting, and feels pointless.

The vacuum left behind by political burnout then gets filled by the loudest and angriest voices. Thus the voices of the reasonable many are snuffed out.

This is the part that makes me want to sell our house, move to a middle-of-nowhere compound in the Rockies, and never touch a phone or computer again.

Underneath all the screaming, Americans actually agree on a lot. Whether you consider yourself a Democrat, a Republican, or something in-between, I’d bet I know what you want:

A community you can feel safe in. A good job with a decent paycheck. Affordable healthcare. To be able to buy a home after working 40 hours a week. A government that feels stable instead of engaging in constant theatrics and chaos.

Polls regularly find that an “exhausted majority” of people say the parties should just suck it up and work together; especially when it comes to real issues like housing, jobs, health, and childcare. As it turns out, when you strip away partisan labels, you find that support often converges across party lines.

So…why doesn’t it actually feel that way, then?

It’s simple: Because agreement doesn’t go viral.

Agreement doesn’t make you retweet. It doesn’t keep you doom-scrolling at 1:00 a.m. with your heart rate up. It doesn’t drive ad impressions.

Outrage does.

And when your entire information environment is built to prioritize the things that make you have an emotional reaction, you inevitably begin to confuse what gets you fired up and what actually matters. You start to believe that the very worst people on the “other side” represent the median voter. Meanwhile, the most reasonable people are just…invisible.

That’s how a nation becomes convinced that it’s split into two very different species of people.

Technology, the internet, and social media are ubiquitous. They’re how we work, stay informed, and stay connected. You can’t realistically just log off to escape these structural incentives.

But you can learn to tell the difference between righteous anger and the hollow emotional responses that peddlers of ragebait want you to feel.

Some things genuinely do deserve your anger. Things like corruption, cruelty, abuses of power, and injustices against your fellow human beings. Righteous anger can be an incredibly powerful moral signal, as well as a force for good.

But the never-ending cycle of outrage? It does nothing to protect your values. It certainly doesn’t protect your peace. Instead it maintains the status quo and feeds the system that’s profiting off of your attention.

So, no. We don’t need to become monks or pretend like everything is fine. Things are most certainly not fine.

But we do have to stop nourishing this toxic system that’s training us to hate each other on command.

Staying human is harder than doomscrolling. Trust me, I know.

But it’s also the only way out.

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