Algorithms are feeding you this toxic emotion every day – are you hooked?

The internet hasn’t yet destroyed books wholesale, but it has brought some genres close to extinction. Google Translate has generally superseded language dictionaries; a student is more likely to turn to ChatGPT than a textbook; Mills and Boon can’t compete with the internet’s infinite erotica. There is, then, a particular irony in the fact that Ed Coper’s new book Angertainment straddles the archaic genres of political pamphlet and humorous non-fiction as it examines the distraction and rage that drive social media.

Coper, a political communications expert best known for his work with GetUp and the Climate 200 “teal” independents, begins his book with a brief jaunt through the history of angry crowds. From the 1999 Seattle WTO Protests to the Paris Commune, he concisely and engagingly shows how mass rage can incite both progress and destruction. Now, with the advent of social media, algorithms skew content to new extremes: “The more engaging, the more powerful. The more contrarian, the more visible. The more outrageous, the more persuasive”.

Thus, Andrew Tate tells boys that feminism is the root of all evil; thus, X profiles confect outrage at transgender influencers; thus, Fox News hosts warn that wind turbines kill whales. Thus, angertainment – a portmanteau standing for all the distraction and provocation and lies of online discourse, at least from the view of a bien-pensant progressive.

The unwieldy nature of this argument becomes clear when it is applied to contemporary examples such as the 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum. At the start of Labor’s term, polls showed widespread support for constitutionally enshrining a representative body for Indigenous Australians; by the time of the vote, more than 60 per cent of Australian voters rejected it.

In Coper’s telling, it was the result of “a flood of clickable, fear- and rage inducing social media vitriol,” propelled by “fringe social media groups,” “elite political actors,” and “AI-generated profiles.” To his credit, he does show how mendacious content was artificially inserted into the political debate, misinforming Australians in multiple languages that a Yes vote would abolish Australia Day. What is less clear is why these memes and fake accounts were decisive for the final result, rather than the campaign of racial and cultural animus run by the Coalition in the legacy media.

In this, Coper unwittingly echoes Hillary Clinton’s decrying of Russian misinformation in the 2016 election, both convinced that their opponents could only win by cheating. It is not only here but throughout Angertainment that Coper seems dewy-eyed about the past, declaring that “in the pre-internet era, all the social forces told us to conform away from outrage, towards consensus.”

There is much to be nostalgic for in the era before the internet, when personal data was not a commodity, and death threats were not a standard feature of public life. Still, it is wilfully ignorant not to acknowledge that an outrage could also become the consensus, as in the Red Scare or the Cronulla riots. Indeed, the saving grace of the cacophony of online discourse today may be that information is too available, and too decentralised, for any particular outrage to become a Reichstag fire. For all the evils of TikTok, it has done far less for fascism than the radio.

After laying out these broad problems under the umbrella of angertainment, Coper struggles to present credible solutions to match them. Following some reheated arguments about the censoriousness and moral righteousness of the Left, he offers some positive, airy ideas: “fixing the economy”, so that grievance politics no longer has any grievances to exploit, and removing the “financial incentives for outrage” on social media platforms. These would undeniably be good for the world and for our collective psyche; they are also as likely to happen as Gina Rinehart voluntarily paying higher taxes.

Angertainment will no doubt find success in the publishing marketplace, catering to political naïfs looking to flesh out a vague unease about the state of the world, to communications professionals wanting to translate politics to a general audience, and to schoolteachers educating students about civics. But, for those who are repelled by the superficiality and crudeness of political discourse, who want an incisive study of our distracted age coupled with a credible case for change, Angertainment only leaves us wishing we lived in a different world entirely – one where books like this still mattered.

Angertainment by Ed Coper is published by Summit Books ($37).