Angertainment: How Online Outrage Ruined Everything

Can we blame polarisation on right-wing internet crazies? Or is the whole online system shot?

The most valuable thing we produce online is anger. Not our data, our habits, or our clicks, but our anger.

Ed Coper is a progressive activist who wants us to understand how tech platforms farm anger on an industrial scale. He calls it angertainment: the machinery that turns outrage into clicks, clicks into money, and money into power.

Ed and Josh disagree on the politics of the problem, with Josh feeling Ed gives left-wing groupthink too much of a pass. Ed built digital political campaigning on the left in Australia, turning left-wing activist group GetUp into a political force. He’s advised everyone from Greta Thunberg to Malala Yousafzai.

This conversation is a fascinating rumble about how legacy institutions have failed people, which voices are amplified by the algorithm, and whether we can save the conversation without censorship.

Ed’s new book is “Angertainment: How Social Media Outrage Ruined Everything”. He appears at The Wheeler Centre in Melbourne on Wednesday 24 June.