Baiting With Rage

Social media makes money by algohacking many human brains. Contrast that model with responsible media’s 

Anger can be a useful emotion. It can play a key role in building a strong individual psyche, as also a  just society. But the algohacking of our brains to keep them in a state of incessant anger? That’s pure poison. Some companies and individuals draw colossal profits from it, but at terrible cost to general well-being. That rage bait has been declared Oxford’s word of 2025 is indicative of the spread of this poison. In 2024, it was brain rot that came on top. Both speak of the same diseased online ecosystem. Enshittification is another name for it, given by Cory Doctorow. Attention deficit epidemic, is how Jonathan Haidt annotates it. All of this is bad enough for adults, but what it’s doing to children is a great nightmare. 

Specifically, rage bait refers to online content designed to elicit anger or outrage. Once tech platforms figured out how this kind of content spirals user engagement, the algorithms got tweaked to feed us more and more of the same, activating a diabolical incentive structure of hate. Of course, in this swamp, reality is completely distorted. You could take any major event of recent times as an example and the difference between your newspaper’s reportage and your online feed would be dramatic. Reading responsible accounts of pollution, terror attack, election result…would give you food for thought. On social media, you would be targeted with stuff doctored to send you into troll mode. 

If you block the accounts that most inflame you, you deprive them of your attention, you refuse to buy the hate they are selling. Blocking even hurts them with the algorithm. David did defeat Goliath. And make no mistake, this is a civilisational battle. We must fight against the atrophy of our attention, its capture by the most terrible types of things that human nature can be drawn to, to regain our sense and sensibility. 

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