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Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy―And What We Can Do About It
Amazon's Best History Book of the Month for July 2023
An invaluable guide to understanding how the internet has broken our brains—and what we can do to fix it.
The original internet was not designed to make us upset, distracted, confused, and outraged. But something unexpected happened at the turn of the last decade, when a handful of small features were quietly launched at social media companies with little fanfare. Together, they triggered a cascading set of dramatic changes to how media, politics, and society itself operate—inadvertently creating an Outrage Machine we cannot ignore.
Author, designer, and media researcher Tobias Rose-Stockwell shares the defining shifts caused by these technologies, and how they have ignited a society-wide crisis of trust. Drawing from cutting-edge research and vivid personal anecdotes, Rose-Stockwell illustrates how social media has bound us to an unprecedented system of public performance, training us to react rather than reflect, and attack rather than debate.
Outrage Machine reveals the triggers and tactics used to exploit our anger, unpacking how these tools hack our deep tribal instincts and psychological vulnerabilities, and how they have become opportunistic platforms for authoritarians and a threat to democratic norms everywhere.
But this book is not just about the problem. In a story spanning continents and generations, Rose-Stockwell explores how every new media technology disrupts our ability to make sense of the world, from the printing press to the telegraph, from radio to television. Outrage Machine situates social media within a historical cycle of confusion, violence, and emerging tolerance. Using clear language and powerful illustrations, this book reveals the magnitude of the challenges we face, while offering realistic solutions and a promising pathway out.
An invaluable guide to understanding how the internet has broken our brains—and what we can do to fix it.
The original internet was not designed to make us upset, distracted, confused, and outraged. But something unexpected happened at the turn of the last decade, when a handful of small features were quietly launched at social media companies with little fanfare. Together, they triggered a cascading set of dramatic changes to how media, politics, and society itself operate—inadvertently creating an Outrage Machine we cannot ignore.
Author, designer, and media researcher Tobias Rose-Stockwell shares the defining shifts caused by these technologies, and how they have ignited a society-wide crisis of trust. Drawing from cutting-edge research and vivid personal anecdotes, Rose-Stockwell illustrates how social media has bound us to an unprecedented system of public performance, training us to react rather than reflect, and attack rather than debate.
Outrage Machine reveals the triggers and tactics used to exploit our anger, unpacking how these tools hack our deep tribal instincts and psychological vulnerabilities, and how they have become opportunistic platforms for authoritarians and a threat to democratic norms everywhere.
But this book is not just about the problem. In a story spanning continents and generations, Rose-Stockwell explores how every new media technology disrupts our ability to make sense of the world, from the printing press to the telegraph, from radio to television. Outrage Machine situates social media within a historical cycle of confusion, violence, and emerging tolerance. Using clear language and powerful illustrations, this book reveals the magnitude of the challenges we face, while offering realistic solutions and a promising pathway out.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published July 11, 2023
94 people are currently reading
2144 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 67 reviews
November 14, 2023
What a wasted opportunity. This book tackles an important, timely topic—what social media is doing to us, both as individuals and via our political systems—then brings virtually nothing new to the table. The pop psych aspects have all been covered before, in many places (if you want an easy rundown on how people come to their opinions, How Minds Change reviews this more thoroughly and is also far more useful). The history is incredibly shallow. The study of social media tells us little more than anyone paying attention already knows: that algorithms prioritize content that gets engagement (reactions, comments), and more controversial content gets more engagement, hence grabbing the tops of feeds and drawing our attention to the most extreme opinions and divisive outrages.
The author appears to be under the impression that his reader base struggles mightily with attention and reading comprehension, though this apparently did not inspire him to cut down the text, which at 363 pages is notably longer than most pop psych, and at least 50% longer than the content justifies. He lengthens it via summaries of what you just read at the end of each chapter, running up to a full page although the chapters themselves are rarely over a dozen, and his prose is full of attention-grabbing gimmicks. When he wants to tell us about the media situation in the 17th century, instead of just telling us, he paints a whole elaborate “Imagine yourself in the 17th century. This is what you see….” picture. When he wants to introduce a historical person, he gives their whole story before telling us their name. He devotes entire chapters to inventing parables or drawing comparisons between the Constitution and computer code. And he assumes a bizarre level of cluelessness from his readers: this might surprise you, but news and editorial pages are separate! (Nope, sorry dude. I have in fact read a newspaper before.)
As for that “what we can do about it” in the subtitle? That was the most disappointing part of all. The book devotes a single, 10-page chapter to this, suggesting that individual readers curate their social media use, avoid involving themselves in perpetuating online outrage or engaging in performative arguments, and focus on connecting with people individually and privately. (Thanks, genius!) He has no systemic or policy suggestions at all, beyond vaguely imagining that one day there might be better algorithms.
That isn’t to say the book doesn’t mean well—I think it does—or there isn’t anything worthwhile in it. The mini-history of journalism and how its ethics developed is interesting, though shallow. The connection drawn between empathy and outrage is an insightful one: empathy on its own can’t be the answer to the political divisions we face or the antidote to outrage, because most outrage is born of empathy for someone. The discussion of the Overton window, though likely not new for many readers, was interesting to me. Essentially, there’s a spectrum of opinion on any political issue, the center generally being a current policy, and the most popular opinions involve moving that policy a bit in one direction or the other. The further from the center you get, the more fringe the opinions become. But if you give enough attention to very fringe opinions, they start to look like real, mainstream contenders, shifting the window of acceptable discourse toward the fringe. Online, people do this on purpose: the problem is that both sides of the spectrum are pulling the window in opposite directions, such that we wind up with no common ground or room for compromise at all.
On the other hand, in other places the book is bizarrely clueless. For instance, there’s the study testing the theory that more contact with other groups increases consensus. Some genius decided to test this by having people follow bots of a different political orientation. In what the author inexplicably describes as “a shock,” this caused polarization to increase. Well, obviously—it’s hard to imagine a better way to polarize people than exposing them to bots spewing opinions they disagree with! The most cursory knowledge of history—or experience of the internet—should make clear that not all contact is good contact; if you want to increase social harmony, people need to interact with actual humans in an environment promoting human connection and collaboration. Stories without person-to-person contact can work too, but then you need vulnerability, not just political positions.
Overall, certainly an easy to understand book where its issues may be new to you, and it is a topic that deserves attention. Those who have never read a pop psych book before will probably be more impressed than I was. But I found the book shallow, padded and repetitive, as well as condescending to the reader. Hopefully someone else will write a better one.
The author appears to be under the impression that his reader base struggles mightily with attention and reading comprehension, though this apparently did not inspire him to cut down the text, which at 363 pages is notably longer than most pop psych, and at least 50% longer than the content justifies. He lengthens it via summaries of what you just read at the end of each chapter, running up to a full page although the chapters themselves are rarely over a dozen, and his prose is full of attention-grabbing gimmicks. When he wants to tell us about the media situation in the 17th century, instead of just telling us, he paints a whole elaborate “Imagine yourself in the 17th century. This is what you see….” picture. When he wants to introduce a historical person, he gives their whole story before telling us their name. He devotes entire chapters to inventing parables or drawing comparisons between the Constitution and computer code. And he assumes a bizarre level of cluelessness from his readers: this might surprise you, but news and editorial pages are separate! (Nope, sorry dude. I have in fact read a newspaper before.)
As for that “what we can do about it” in the subtitle? That was the most disappointing part of all. The book devotes a single, 10-page chapter to this, suggesting that individual readers curate their social media use, avoid involving themselves in perpetuating online outrage or engaging in performative arguments, and focus on connecting with people individually and privately. (Thanks, genius!) He has no systemic or policy suggestions at all, beyond vaguely imagining that one day there might be better algorithms.
That isn’t to say the book doesn’t mean well—I think it does—or there isn’t anything worthwhile in it. The mini-history of journalism and how its ethics developed is interesting, though shallow. The connection drawn between empathy and outrage is an insightful one: empathy on its own can’t be the answer to the political divisions we face or the antidote to outrage, because most outrage is born of empathy for someone. The discussion of the Overton window, though likely not new for many readers, was interesting to me. Essentially, there’s a spectrum of opinion on any political issue, the center generally being a current policy, and the most popular opinions involve moving that policy a bit in one direction or the other. The further from the center you get, the more fringe the opinions become. But if you give enough attention to very fringe opinions, they start to look like real, mainstream contenders, shifting the window of acceptable discourse toward the fringe. Online, people do this on purpose: the problem is that both sides of the spectrum are pulling the window in opposite directions, such that we wind up with no common ground or room for compromise at all.
On the other hand, in other places the book is bizarrely clueless. For instance, there’s the study testing the theory that more contact with other groups increases consensus. Some genius decided to test this by having people follow bots of a different political orientation. In what the author inexplicably describes as “a shock,” this caused polarization to increase. Well, obviously—it’s hard to imagine a better way to polarize people than exposing them to bots spewing opinions they disagree with! The most cursory knowledge of history—or experience of the internet—should make clear that not all contact is good contact; if you want to increase social harmony, people need to interact with actual humans in an environment promoting human connection and collaboration. Stories without person-to-person contact can work too, but then you need vulnerability, not just political positions.
Overall, certainly an easy to understand book where its issues may be new to you, and it is a topic that deserves attention. Those who have never read a pop psych book before will probably be more impressed than I was. But I found the book shallow, padded and repetitive, as well as condescending to the reader. Hopefully someone else will write a better one.
September 4, 2023
I picked up this book on Audible when Esther Perel mentioned it in her newsletter. She said, “The rigor, research, and depth of Tobias’s book is unparalleled, and yet it is refreshingly accessible."
While I think the book is certainly extensively researched, I don't think it is particularly deep. It is sweepingly broad, covering everything from behavioral economics to contemporary trauma theory to Hegelian dialectic to the history of journalism.
At the end of the book, Rose-Stockwell references the essay "Meditations on Moloch" by Scott Alexander of SlateStarCodex, another author who takes a sweeping approach to narrow topics, creating an illusion of depth where there is really mostly bravado.
When Rose-Stockwell references the blog/essay, he is talking about how we've all contributed to making the internet the "outrage machine" it is today even though none of us want it to be that way. This is an example of what game theory would call a "coordination problem." Scott Alexander, in "Meditations on Moloch", speculates that Alan Ginsburg is referring to society's collective coordination problems as "Moloch" in his extended poem Howl.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a dork, so I kind of love the idea of using Alan Ginsburg poetry to explain game theory... or alternatively, using game theory to analyze Alan Ginsburg poetry... It's different, it's unexpected, and some (dorky people like me) might even call it fun. When we bring together ideas from disparate worlds, we spark creativity.
But "Meditations on Moloch" doesn't stop there. Alexander also references gnon and Chthulu and an obscure psuedo-religious text from 1970s San Francisco. To follow a SlateStarCodex post, you have to be able to follow all these references, or look them up along the way, or ride a long wave of incomprehensible references in the hopes of ultimately arriving somewhere comprehensible. This is why many people find Scott Alexander's writing style unbearable.
But the tech elite love SlateStarCodex, and one reason they do is because it provides a common corpus of obscure references, offering a short hand for interesting intellectual concepts as well as a signaling mechanism for in-group status. Moloch. Motte and bailey. Shiri's scissor. Principia Discordia. Albion's Seed.
Rose-Stockwell offers a similarly broad array of disparate and often obscure references to concepts from history, economics, psychology, literature, and so on, but (unlike Alexander), he goes into near excruciating detail for each reference to ensure that his audience can follow along. As I listened to the book, I kept thinking, "Who is this book for?" and "Who would read a book this long that still needs such a detailed explanation of basic high school history concepts?"
A Slate Magazine review helped me realize the answer to my questions:
Ohhhh. That's who.
Anyway... I am clearly not the intended audience for this book.
While I think the book is certainly extensively researched, I don't think it is particularly deep. It is sweepingly broad, covering everything from behavioral economics to contemporary trauma theory to Hegelian dialectic to the history of journalism.
At the end of the book, Rose-Stockwell references the essay "Meditations on Moloch" by Scott Alexander of SlateStarCodex, another author who takes a sweeping approach to narrow topics, creating an illusion of depth where there is really mostly bravado.
When Rose-Stockwell references the blog/essay, he is talking about how we've all contributed to making the internet the "outrage machine" it is today even though none of us want it to be that way. This is an example of what game theory would call a "coordination problem." Scott Alexander, in "Meditations on Moloch", speculates that Alan Ginsburg is referring to society's collective coordination problems as "Moloch" in his extended poem Howl.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a dork, so I kind of love the idea of using Alan Ginsburg poetry to explain game theory... or alternatively, using game theory to analyze Alan Ginsburg poetry... It's different, it's unexpected, and some (dorky people like me) might even call it fun. When we bring together ideas from disparate worlds, we spark creativity.
But "Meditations on Moloch" doesn't stop there. Alexander also references gnon and Chthulu and an obscure psuedo-religious text from 1970s San Francisco. To follow a SlateStarCodex post, you have to be able to follow all these references, or look them up along the way, or ride a long wave of incomprehensible references in the hopes of ultimately arriving somewhere comprehensible. This is why many people find Scott Alexander's writing style unbearable.
But the tech elite love SlateStarCodex, and one reason they do is because it provides a common corpus of obscure references, offering a short hand for interesting intellectual concepts as well as a signaling mechanism for in-group status. Moloch. Motte and bailey. Shiri's scissor. Principia Discordia. Albion's Seed.
Rose-Stockwell offers a similarly broad array of disparate and often obscure references to concepts from history, economics, psychology, literature, and so on, but (unlike Alexander), he goes into near excruciating detail for each reference to ensure that his audience can follow along. As I listened to the book, I kept thinking, "Who is this book for?" and "Who would read a book this long that still needs such a detailed explanation of basic high school history concepts?"
A Slate Magazine review helped me realize the answer to my questions:
"Books like Sapiens and Outrage Machine supply a substitute for the liberal arts education their STEM-oriented readers missed out on or ignored when they were in college. They just wanted to write code and build tools (and get rich), and only late in the game, once those tools were deployed, did they realize that culture and politics had to be taken into consideration as well. So Outrage Machine offers up streamlined versions of the ideas of Hobbes and Locke (with more of those goofy/helpful diagrams) to explain how you can start out making a platform that you think will democratize communications and undermine authoritarians (see: the Arab Spring), only to end up with a playground for extremists that facilitates the election of Donald Trump. "
Ohhhh. That's who.
Anyway... I am clearly not the intended audience for this book.
March 24, 2025
Review on youtube Here.
So many of our problems today seem new, but they aren’t. They are just worse than ever because of the world wide internet – which isn’t all bad and has many good things to it, but also amplifies the bad. We’ve been here before, over and over and over again. The printing press, newspapers, journalism, tv, radio, the internet and now social media. We repeat the same patterns. We get a new “superpower” and we struggle with how to use it. How to get the pros and minimize the cons. And we temporarily end up in a “dark valley”, but eventually we figure it out and make our way out of it.
I’ve seen the good of social media just like the last chapter mentions. I also had a house fire, mine was in 2012, and had friends on social media unexpectedly set up a gofundme to help me get back on my feet, so that last chapter hit me personally.
Among other good things I’ve seen and experienced. But the division, outrage, and toxicity have made the world seem like it’s gone insane. And now I understand more of why thanks to this book, and how this isn’t new and there is hope.
But it is scary at times and has me worried. Is social media the “superpower” that finally does us in and has us destroying ourselves for good? I hope not. And this book is hopeful.
This book made me think, a lot. And I believe it’ll help me have more empathy for people as I look around thinking the world has gone mad. I honestly think this is a must read and highly recommend it.
So many of our problems today seem new, but they aren’t. They are just worse than ever because of the world wide internet – which isn’t all bad and has many good things to it, but also amplifies the bad. We’ve been here before, over and over and over again. The printing press, newspapers, journalism, tv, radio, the internet and now social media. We repeat the same patterns. We get a new “superpower” and we struggle with how to use it. How to get the pros and minimize the cons. And we temporarily end up in a “dark valley”, but eventually we figure it out and make our way out of it.
I’ve seen the good of social media just like the last chapter mentions. I also had a house fire, mine was in 2012, and had friends on social media unexpectedly set up a gofundme to help me get back on my feet, so that last chapter hit me personally.
Among other good things I’ve seen and experienced. But the division, outrage, and toxicity have made the world seem like it’s gone insane. And now I understand more of why thanks to this book, and how this isn’t new and there is hope.
But it is scary at times and has me worried. Is social media the “superpower” that finally does us in and has us destroying ourselves for good? I hope not. And this book is hopeful.
This book made me think, a lot. And I believe it’ll help me have more empathy for people as I look around thinking the world has gone mad. I honestly think this is a must read and highly recommend it.
August 8, 2023
This book scared and overwhelmed me, but it made me rethink my relationship to social media and how I communicate with people I disagree with. It can be a little dry and “textbook” at times, but it’s right on with where things are going unless we can make some changes.
March 27, 2024
I don’t think a book discussing how social media creates outrage for clicks can be partisan. But the “but both sides” misses that not all opinions should be platformed. It also ignores the fact that the cultures that created the social media machines are abundantly cis, white, male. So there is an inherent disadvantage to sides that want to discuss any amount of diversity.
December 12, 2023
The first 3/4 of this book is for anyone who doesn't have a social media and or doesn't understand how it works. The last two chapter was useful for anyone who been watching and reading about algorithms.
December 20, 2023
This is an important book for our time. Very thoughtful.
September 2, 2025
“The boxes are the first thing we see when we wake up, the last thing we see when we go to sleep. The box beckons for us to contribute. They ask for our offering, promising money, notoriety, respect, fame. They become harder and harder to ignore. Before we know it, we live more inside the boxes than outside. The box has become the world.”
Rose-Stockwell covers a lot of fascinating ground in here, one strand he takes up is how language changes faster than morals and he makes a very good point about the speed of language revolution in the 21st century and to the extent that the online world accelerates this and the problems, usually generational and cultural, which arise, and how more patience and tolerance is required on both sides of it.
It’s funny in many ways the more advanced and sophisticated our technological systems become the more primitive and infantile it seems to make us. Another thing I find really interesting is how the online world – very much like capitalism itself, has a dark and nasty habit of rewarding the worst and darkest aspects of human behaviour – in the short the more awful, selfish and ruthless you act the more successful you are likely to become.
Apparently CNN made more than a billion USD in gross profit above the previous year, driven primarily by ads directly tied to news about Trump. Between Oct 2015 and Nov 2016 Trump received an estimated $5.6 billion in free earned media, more than three times the amount given to his nearest rival.
Elsewhere he tells a really interesting rat tail harvesting story in Vietnam from 1902, when Hanoi had a massive rat infestation leading him to conclude that,
“Metrics are a type of abstraction. They flatten complex things into simple things. Because of this, every time a behaviour is turned into a number, pieces of that behaviour are lost.”
He’s actually very good at using useful parables and actual events from the past to illustrate and amplify his points. He uses one of the most blatant and darkest examples of so called “dark valleys” involving the case of when General Motors, who in spite of being fully aware of its well-established toxicity, chose to introduce lead into their fuel in the 1920s, though most worrying of all is that the US government allowed this to happen, also with full knowledge of the danger – this shows just yet another example of governments and politicians prioritising private gain and personal interest over the millions of others who were oblivious to the harm and believed the lies both were telling them. As he says,
“It took more than fifty years to correct this terrible mistake. When additional research was done in the 1970s and 1980s, experts concluded that leaded gasoline had created a public health catastrophe that could be linked to increased crime rates around the world, trillions of dollars in economic damage, and millions of deaths.”
The author shows that social media changed dramatically back in 2009 when three key things happened – algorithmic feeds, social metrics and one click sharing were all introduced, vastly increasing the speed in which people could share information. He is really good on the many other aspects of the new online world of context collapse, context creep, Intermittent Variable Rewards and Dark valleys (when the customer and/or society at large suffer harm and/or problems as a result of teething problems relating to any new technology). He also warns of the perils of the coordination trap, and the power and the danger of “a small but vocal minority”.
I’ve read a fair number of these books from techies and academics alike and this is certainly up there with the best of them, but I suppose the problem with this book and the many books like it, is that there seems to be an element of preaching to the converted, as someone whose never owned a “smart” phone, been on twitter, insta, tik tok or had a fb account or even used a certain search engine for well over ten years, I appear to be one of those.
September 9, 2024
Pretty interesting book that goes through the history of media from the printing press to now, discussing how each leap forward has led to a “dark valley” where society must learn to live with a new medium for information sharing. Also really interesting discussion on the process of both personal and collective sense making when encountering new information. Definitely had a different flavor than other books on social media I’ve ready, which led it to being less repetitive than others. Still lacked a robust “path forward” section, but not unusual for this topic.
January 7, 2024
A MUST read. Truly dives into the fundamental reasons of recent outrage in social media, political instability and what is at stake if we don’t correct the way. Excellent research and writing. Talks about the freedom of speech paradox and the immense power algorithms have over what we consume, as the race for our attention….
December 4, 2023
An interesting if not a little dense look at social media and its tendency to create division and outrage. I loved the little summaries at the end of each chapter. I did find a couple of errors (wrong words) that stuck out to me, but overall, it was a good read/listen.
January 25, 2025
I think I most valued this for the TIMELINE it provided about WHEN various technologies emerged, from TV to to microprocessors to the internet to smart phones and social media. Those of us who lived through all these developments tend to forget how recent most of them are, and haven't taken note of the kind of societal changes that have ocurred as a result. It is very discouraging to realize that "outrage" (eyballs, clicks, what people look at) is so monetized now that it trumps common sense and civility. If you want to understand how it is that we have lost trust in traditional news sources, here it is: it is NOT a pretty picture.
August 29, 2024
I'm gonna go ahead and give this 5 stars because I think it is a good introduction/summary of an important subject. It definitely sparked lines of inquiry for me and I will be mulling over this for a while. I think it will help me shape my view of social media as well as news and "truth". But I am still chewing on all that.
Crybaby score: 0/5 tear drops (but existential dread doesn't make me cry, it just sits like a stone in my gut.. so..)
Crybaby score: 0/5 tear drops (but existential dread doesn't make me cry, it just sits like a stone in my gut.. so..)
September 3, 2024
it was kinda interesting at first and then i got rlly boring
January 21, 2025
DNF, got halfway through and it became repetitive. It gave me some great insights on social media, tech companies and news outlets that have stuck with me though!
April 20, 2025
Liked it, always interested in reading about algorithms. It went off into a few chapters about old style media and how that operated to keep you hooked on news that may or may not be false, and that was interesting too, although it puzzled me for a while while it was there.
October 15, 2025
Now, looking at people scrolling through TikTok scares me even more
March 11, 2025
A must read to understand how Social Media and today’s internet is clogging our moral compass.
September 19, 2023
This book covers the history of viral content and proposes that content is such when it contains elements where the audience receives information that would provoke feelings of righteous indignation. The author looks at Martin Luther’s viral 95 Theses and his advocacy of literacy as the first example of a short pamphlet of news that went viral throughout Europe to bring significant challenges to the authority of the Catholic Church specifically because it was morally outrageous and aided by widespread media. He suggests that in order to become famous today, you must post outrageous content as that is the only content that algorithms with pick up, as they often lead to trigger chains of engagement. In fact, posts with many trigger words with heavy emotional weight are often prioritized for display on news feeds. Interesting review of the modern day journalistic process.
December 17, 2023
Well worth reading in the midst of so much divisiveness. Great explanations of how the definition of news has changed over the years. The author explains how information is chosen and disseminated to us through the internet and how we can impact what we see. Well worth reading!
December 13, 2023
Amazing! Highly recommend.
Read
November 15, 2023Very interesting...this one might have to be one I come back to and try and get more out of it on the next re-read...
January 19, 2024
This was boring and repetitive.
Algorithms currently in use are bad.
Now you know, you don't need to read it.
Algorithms currently in use are bad.
Now you know, you don't need to read it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 31, 2025
The transmission of information has evolved in lock step with society in terms of both politics and technology. Folklore and knowledge used to be passed down from village elders or brought over by messengers from afar. The invention of Gutenberg’s printing press exponentially increased our ability to transmit and receive news as well as perspective. In the early 20th Century, there came to be a dark room with a large box, which put moving pictures on a screen. Come the 1930s, a newer box called a radio was small and inexpensive enough to fit in people’s homes, allowing for the immediate and ubiquitous transmission of information. In the 1950s this box could also broadcast video; news along with shows and other forms of media were now widely disseminated. An even newer version of the box found its way into most homes between the 1980s and early 1990s, which allowed you to interact with it by typing onto a keyboard. In 2007, the box became small enough to fit in your pocket, and just a few years later was powerful enough to intimately connect each of us to the rest of the world. Today, this box is the first thing we look at when we wake and last thing we see before sleep. The box has become our world.
The above is how author Tobias Rose-Stockwell analogizes the titular Outrage Machine, which is as old as the news itself. Put another way, misinformation, virtue-signaling, and propaganda are nothing new, and their existence cannot be blamed on mainstream or social media. The advent of social media through smart phones, however, is akin to a Pandora’s Box with regard to the virality and velocity in which everything has spread. Put in simple terms, social media (currently Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok) are a form of Skinner Box, an operant conditioning chamber that utilizes a variable schedule of reinforcement to control behavior.
If in fact our brains, emotional self-control, and attention spans have not kept pace with that of technology, then we have put ourselves at great risk - both individually and as a society in being ill-equipped to handle what technology, media companies, political machines, et al., have devised in order garner our attention, however well intentioned. Similar to how our ancestors craved fat and sugar, we crave information and news (especially salacious news) because it is the medium by which we can understand the world as well as be connected to it.
Imo, this book was fantastic, not only because of how it delivered its message in neutral terms without resorting to being a philippic (i.e., castigating social media companies as rapacious caricatures), but also because it presents a concise history of the United States, journalism and why the press has become a for-profit entity whose survival depends on hijacking our attention, as well as the (d)evolution of public discourse - for example the origin and shifting of the Overton Window.
The book closes by illuminating some important concepts about tolerance and free speech. “Is it ok to punch a Nazi in the face?” John Stuart Mill felt it necessary to allow all sides to have their time on the soap box, because through conflicting opinions we end up with better understanding, better tolerance, and better ideas: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” To be clear, this is not an argument for moral relativism, as some ideas are certainly shittier than others. In contrast, Karl Popper’s Paradox of Intolerance argued that unlimited tolerance would eventually lead to the disappearance of tolerance altogether, because the most intolerant will do anything within their means to destroy the tolerant. On the subject of censorship, freedom of speech is not equivalent to freedom of reach. In other words, that the government cannot quash your right to expression does not mean a social media or news company is obligated to give you a platform.
The above is how author Tobias Rose-Stockwell analogizes the titular Outrage Machine, which is as old as the news itself. Put another way, misinformation, virtue-signaling, and propaganda are nothing new, and their existence cannot be blamed on mainstream or social media. The advent of social media through smart phones, however, is akin to a Pandora’s Box with regard to the virality and velocity in which everything has spread. Put in simple terms, social media (currently Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok) are a form of Skinner Box, an operant conditioning chamber that utilizes a variable schedule of reinforcement to control behavior.
If in fact our brains, emotional self-control, and attention spans have not kept pace with that of technology, then we have put ourselves at great risk - both individually and as a society in being ill-equipped to handle what technology, media companies, political machines, et al., have devised in order garner our attention, however well intentioned. Similar to how our ancestors craved fat and sugar, we crave information and news (especially salacious news) because it is the medium by which we can understand the world as well as be connected to it.
Imo, this book was fantastic, not only because of how it delivered its message in neutral terms without resorting to being a philippic (i.e., castigating social media companies as rapacious caricatures), but also because it presents a concise history of the United States, journalism and why the press has become a for-profit entity whose survival depends on hijacking our attention, as well as the (d)evolution of public discourse - for example the origin and shifting of the Overton Window.
The book closes by illuminating some important concepts about tolerance and free speech. “Is it ok to punch a Nazi in the face?” John Stuart Mill felt it necessary to allow all sides to have their time on the soap box, because through conflicting opinions we end up with better understanding, better tolerance, and better ideas: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” To be clear, this is not an argument for moral relativism, as some ideas are certainly shittier than others. In contrast, Karl Popper’s Paradox of Intolerance argued that unlimited tolerance would eventually lead to the disappearance of tolerance altogether, because the most intolerant will do anything within their means to destroy the tolerant. On the subject of censorship, freedom of speech is not equivalent to freedom of reach. In other words, that the government cannot quash your right to expression does not mean a social media or news company is obligated to give you a platform.
July 9, 2025
Tobias Rose-Stockwell's "Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy—And What We Can Do About It" offers a compelling and historically grounded look at the forces that shape our modern digital lives.
This review, informed by a reading from the public digital library ebookservice.tw (more publicly known as Taiwan Yunduan Shuku or Taiwan Cloud Library—a platform that, while functional, lacks the user-friendliness of more contemporary applications such as HYREAD, Overdrive Libby, Borrowbox—finds the book's message to be a critical one for our times.
"Outrage Machine" excels in its narration of media manipulation, drawing a direct line from the nascent days of the printing press to the social media behemoths of today. The book compellingly argues that the challenges we face with online discourse are not entirely new but are an accelerated and amplified version of historical patterns. In the early printing press era, for instance, publishers and pamphleteers quickly learned to craft narratives that would support their stance and captivate their audience, often at the expense of nuance and truth.
This historical perspective provides a powerful framework for understanding our current predicament. The age-old practice of publishers shaping public opinion to align with their interests has found a powerful new engine in the algorithms of tech companies. Where a colonial-era publisher might have used inflammatory language to sell papers, today's tech giants employ sophisticated algorithms that amplify a user's existing opinions, systematically pushing individuals toward the extremities of a given viewpoint.
The book astutely points out that the financial underpinnings of media have long relied on capturing public attention. The necessity of advertisements to ensure the continuity of publishers is a concept that predates the internet by centuries. In the modern era, this model has been perfected by companies like Google, which has generated immense revenue through selling advertisement and further directly or indirectly created "Search Engine Optimization (SEO)" and targeted advertising.
It would not be terrible to say that we are the product, and our attention is the commodity being sold. Although several minutes hovering over our mobile phone seems normal and have nothing to lose, but calculate well about the opportunity to do other useful matters. Rose-Stockwell masterfully let me unpacks the concept of the "attention economy," revealing the massive hidden costs that users pay to tech companies. These costs are not monetary but are paid in the currency of our emotions and societal well-being: anger, the proliferation of hoaxes, and the normalization of hate speech. The very architecture of social media platforms is designed to elicit strong emotional responses, as these are the most effective at keeping users engaged.
Features that seem innocuous, such as like buttons, retweets, and even the amount of time a user hovers over a particular post, are all meticulously tracked. This data is then used to refine the algorithms that feed us a continuous stream of content designed to maximize our retention time. The result is a media landscape that rewards outrage and penalizes moderation, leaving little room for constructive dialogue.
In conclusion, "Outrage Machine" is a vital read for anyone seeking to understand the often-unseen forces that are shaping our society and our very modes of thinking. By placing our current struggles within a broader historical context, Tobias Rose-Stockwell provides not only a sobering diagnosis of the problem but also a glimmer of hope for how we might begin to navigate our way out of the morass of algorithmically-fueled outrage.
This review, informed by a reading from the public digital library ebookservice.tw (more publicly known as Taiwan Yunduan Shuku or Taiwan Cloud Library—a platform that, while functional, lacks the user-friendliness of more contemporary applications such as HYREAD, Overdrive Libby, Borrowbox—finds the book's message to be a critical one for our times.
"Outrage Machine" excels in its narration of media manipulation, drawing a direct line from the nascent days of the printing press to the social media behemoths of today. The book compellingly argues that the challenges we face with online discourse are not entirely new but are an accelerated and amplified version of historical patterns. In the early printing press era, for instance, publishers and pamphleteers quickly learned to craft narratives that would support their stance and captivate their audience, often at the expense of nuance and truth.
This historical perspective provides a powerful framework for understanding our current predicament. The age-old practice of publishers shaping public opinion to align with their interests has found a powerful new engine in the algorithms of tech companies. Where a colonial-era publisher might have used inflammatory language to sell papers, today's tech giants employ sophisticated algorithms that amplify a user's existing opinions, systematically pushing individuals toward the extremities of a given viewpoint.
The book astutely points out that the financial underpinnings of media have long relied on capturing public attention. The necessity of advertisements to ensure the continuity of publishers is a concept that predates the internet by centuries. In the modern era, this model has been perfected by companies like Google, which has generated immense revenue through selling advertisement and further directly or indirectly created "Search Engine Optimization (SEO)" and targeted advertising.
It would not be terrible to say that we are the product, and our attention is the commodity being sold. Although several minutes hovering over our mobile phone seems normal and have nothing to lose, but calculate well about the opportunity to do other useful matters. Rose-Stockwell masterfully let me unpacks the concept of the "attention economy," revealing the massive hidden costs that users pay to tech companies. These costs are not monetary but are paid in the currency of our emotions and societal well-being: anger, the proliferation of hoaxes, and the normalization of hate speech. The very architecture of social media platforms is designed to elicit strong emotional responses, as these are the most effective at keeping users engaged.
Features that seem innocuous, such as like buttons, retweets, and even the amount of time a user hovers over a particular post, are all meticulously tracked. This data is then used to refine the algorithms that feed us a continuous stream of content designed to maximize our retention time. The result is a media landscape that rewards outrage and penalizes moderation, leaving little room for constructive dialogue.
In conclusion, "Outrage Machine" is a vital read for anyone seeking to understand the often-unseen forces that are shaping our society and our very modes of thinking. By placing our current struggles within a broader historical context, Tobias Rose-Stockwell provides not only a sobering diagnosis of the problem but also a glimmer of hope for how we might begin to navigate our way out of the morass of algorithmically-fueled outrage.
November 10, 2024
(https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
Check out this review with which I very much agree. What ‘Emma’ says is much more complete than what I intend to say. I also found their review to be quite pithy.
Please find below comments on a few aspects of the book that particularly stood out to me.
Overuse of Silly Metaphors
For example, he equates the constitution to code, and commercial newspapers to algorithms vying for attention.
Overuse of Parables
Rather than giving real-life examples to illustrate certain points, he invents rather tedious parables. For example, he employs ‘The Parable of the Island’ in which he recounts the story of a democratically run farming island which, because of misinformation, disinformation, and greed, descends into autocracy. Possibly, he avoids examples from life because he wishes to maintain a facade of neutrality. But this subject is (or should be) inherently political. Maybe the famous phrase popularized by Howard Zinn is apt here: “you can’t be neutral on a moving train”.
Overuse of Jargon
He spends a lot of time defining terms and/or jargon that are used only once in the book. Rather than explaining terms that we won’t encounter again while reading this book, the author could have simply given the example without having to name the phenomenon.
I am all for learning new terms etc., and I even enjoy the jargon of certain fields; however, unless the term is repeatedly used throughout the book, I, personally, am unlikely to learn it. These definitions, therefore, end up feeling like time-wasting filler.
Lack of distinction or creation of hierarchies between the different classes of purveyors of misinformation
⁃ Public/private citizens
⁃ Big tech companies
⁃ Politicians
All of these actors are presented as equally problematic. He feels that there are inherent fallacies in the “the algorithms are the problem thesis”.
He uses large groups on messaging apps (that don’t use algorithms to promote any viewpoint) to illustrate how users of these services themselves push misinformation to the forefront. He likens these users to an algorithm with poor epistemic filters. Which begs the question: where does the misinformation being pushed by these users come from originally? It seems unlikely that users are making things up to maliciously spread false rumors, and more likely that the source of most, if not all of the falsehoods being unwittingly spread can be traced back to big tech’s algorithms.
These distinctions seem crucial to me because, on the one hand, private citizens who push misinformation are presumably not spreading falsehoods by financial gain or political advantages. Whereas, on the other hand, politicians/big tech manipulate us for their own gain.
No Mechanism for Implementing his Concluding Solutions
Finally, his solutions seemed logical, but how would big tech/politicians be induced/forced to implement his solutions? Laws? Boycotts? Since he suggests no mechanism for bringing about these changes, his solutions section is the functional equivalent of saying ‘we should all just be nice to each other’. I agree, and?
Check out this review with which I very much agree. What ‘Emma’ says is much more complete than what I intend to say. I also found their review to be quite pithy.
Please find below comments on a few aspects of the book that particularly stood out to me.
Overuse of Silly Metaphors
For example, he equates the constitution to code, and commercial newspapers to algorithms vying for attention.
Overuse of Parables
Rather than giving real-life examples to illustrate certain points, he invents rather tedious parables. For example, he employs ‘The Parable of the Island’ in which he recounts the story of a democratically run farming island which, because of misinformation, disinformation, and greed, descends into autocracy. Possibly, he avoids examples from life because he wishes to maintain a facade of neutrality. But this subject is (or should be) inherently political. Maybe the famous phrase popularized by Howard Zinn is apt here: “you can’t be neutral on a moving train”.
Overuse of Jargon
He spends a lot of time defining terms and/or jargon that are used only once in the book. Rather than explaining terms that we won’t encounter again while reading this book, the author could have simply given the example without having to name the phenomenon.
I am all for learning new terms etc., and I even enjoy the jargon of certain fields; however, unless the term is repeatedly used throughout the book, I, personally, am unlikely to learn it. These definitions, therefore, end up feeling like time-wasting filler.
Lack of distinction or creation of hierarchies between the different classes of purveyors of misinformation
⁃ Public/private citizens
⁃ Big tech companies
⁃ Politicians
All of these actors are presented as equally problematic. He feels that there are inherent fallacies in the “the algorithms are the problem thesis”.
He uses large groups on messaging apps (that don’t use algorithms to promote any viewpoint) to illustrate how users of these services themselves push misinformation to the forefront. He likens these users to an algorithm with poor epistemic filters. Which begs the question: where does the misinformation being pushed by these users come from originally? It seems unlikely that users are making things up to maliciously spread false rumors, and more likely that the source of most, if not all of the falsehoods being unwittingly spread can be traced back to big tech’s algorithms.
These distinctions seem crucial to me because, on the one hand, private citizens who push misinformation are presumably not spreading falsehoods by financial gain or political advantages. Whereas, on the other hand, politicians/big tech manipulate us for their own gain.
No Mechanism for Implementing his Concluding Solutions
Finally, his solutions seemed logical, but how would big tech/politicians be induced/forced to implement his solutions? Laws? Boycotts? Since he suggests no mechanism for bringing about these changes, his solutions section is the functional equivalent of saying ‘we should all just be nice to each other’. I agree, and?
May 3, 2023
Strong Claims Need Strong Documentation. Ultimately, the greatest weakness of this book comes down to the title of the review - and the reason for both star deductions here. The text is barely documented at all, coming in at just 10% or so of the overall text - well below the 20-30% which is more typical in my extensive experience reading advance reviewer copies of nonfiction texts. Though as I've begun noting of late, I may need to revise that expectation down a touch - to 15%, not 10%. The other star deduction comes from the other part of the title - while the overall premise about the titular Outrage Machine seems sound and the explanations directly on it seem fairly spot-on, Rose-Stockwell uses the sciences, history, and even semi-current events in a way that actually brings to mind the practice rampant in the Christian nonfiction space known as "prooftexting", wherein Bible verses are cited outside of their context, and often even contrary to their original context, in "proof" of some point or another. Here, Rose-Stockwell does this with the sciences and history, both near and far. Yes, many of the examples he cites seem at least somewhat relevant, but even in the most relevant of them (such as his discussion of COVID), he ignores and even denigrates needed context which deviates from his intention. At other times, he simply gets the needed context quite wrong, which was particularly noticeable in his treatment of some of the issues surrounding the Founding of the United States and which other, far more well documented, texts have explored in much more and more even depth.
All of this noted, to be crystal clear, this really is an important book that when focusing on its central premise of the Outrage Machine and how it works both now and throughout history, is actually quite good. I was simply hoping for a better argued, perhaps slightly more academically rigorous, explanation of the topic at hand - and this is almost more of a memoir form of discussing how Rose-Stockwell realized the idea himself and came to explain it to himself, if that makes any sense. But again, truly an important work that can legitimately add to the overall discussion, and thus recommended.
All of this noted, to be crystal clear, this really is an important book that when focusing on its central premise of the Outrage Machine and how it works both now and throughout history, is actually quite good. I was simply hoping for a better argued, perhaps slightly more academically rigorous, explanation of the topic at hand - and this is almost more of a memoir form of discussing how Rose-Stockwell realized the idea himself and came to explain it to himself, if that makes any sense. But again, truly an important work that can legitimately add to the overall discussion, and thus recommended.
February 17, 2025
I remember reading Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody" when the Internet was a relatively new thing, and enjoying the optimism. Since then, as I've watched the general decline of social media, I've often wondered how he'd update that book. Maybe he would have come up with Outrage Machine. Maybe not. But I think a follow-up needs to be made that's better than this one.
Rose-Stockwell does an admirable job explaining to the layman what's occurred with social media to lead to the mess we've seen today. His solutions, however, are pedestrian and a bit disappointing if you ask me. On an individual basis, if applied, they could work fine. On a collective basis, it just leaves the public square even more open to the shouters, liars, and droolers. I'm all for individual action, but I think we're to that point that some kind of collective action is needed to claw the public space back from the crazies and the profiteers.
Absent in this book is any discussion with the social media titans about what they could do to help fix the problem. He appears to say the genie is out of the bottle and shrugs his shoulders at those in power doing anything to fix things. That's a serious flaw that permeates the book. What he suggests social media users do is fine -- although his solutions also have their flaws -- but dumping it all in the lap of social media users seems cowardly.
Fortunately, I have other guidelines I'm putting in place to help fix my social media interactions. This book is a small part of it, yes, but it's not much more than general advice without a call to action on the part of social media companies. Industrial polluters get CERCLA and RCRA, while social media polluters apparently get a "Get out of Jail Free" card from this author at least.
Rose-Stockwell does an admirable job explaining to the layman what's occurred with social media to lead to the mess we've seen today. His solutions, however, are pedestrian and a bit disappointing if you ask me. On an individual basis, if applied, they could work fine. On a collective basis, it just leaves the public square even more open to the shouters, liars, and droolers. I'm all for individual action, but I think we're to that point that some kind of collective action is needed to claw the public space back from the crazies and the profiteers.
Absent in this book is any discussion with the social media titans about what they could do to help fix the problem. He appears to say the genie is out of the bottle and shrugs his shoulders at those in power doing anything to fix things. That's a serious flaw that permeates the book. What he suggests social media users do is fine -- although his solutions also have their flaws -- but dumping it all in the lap of social media users seems cowardly.
Fortunately, I have other guidelines I'm putting in place to help fix my social media interactions. This book is a small part of it, yes, but it's not much more than general advice without a call to action on the part of social media companies. Industrial polluters get CERCLA and RCRA, while social media polluters apparently get a "Get out of Jail Free" card from this author at least.
August 30, 2024
I was stuck between 4 and 5 stars for this one, but lean toward 4 because the structure made the reading process feel a bit mechanical. Rose-Stockwell provides a unique lens for understanding the current role of social media technology in our public discourse and provides some concrete ideas about how we can modify our relationship to technology to address the pitfalls. The book covers a broad range of topics and takes a distinctly journalistic lens toward understanding social media behavior, which was helpful in some ways, but felt like a stretch in others. While the book was very well-structured, I felt like the argument tended to get thinner toward the end of the book and I was left feeling like the argument would have benefited from a deeper dive into information networks and how information travels. I also think that the book had a very deterministic explanation of how social media defines the tenor of our conversation and ignores how people's lived experience may also play a role in the increasingly negative tone of our public discourse. While the structured nature of the book made it feel monotonal at times, there was a lot of interesting information and context that was useful for understanding the larger discussion around technology. Of the books I have read that reflect upon this topic, this would not be at the top of my recommendations, but one I would suggest for folks taking a particularly deep dive.
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