Tobias Rose-Stockwell on Dismantling the Outrage Machine
On the Jordan Harbinger Show
The Technoskeptic readers might be interested in this episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show podcast. Jordan interviews “Outrage Machine” author Tobias Rose-Stockwell, who explains how social media fuels our negative emotions and disrupts society — and what we can do about it.
Jordan talks with Tobias Rose-Stockwell about how social media inadvertently created an “outrage machine” that fuels our negative emotions and disrupts society.
Because it generates more attention (which translates into more money), negative news is more widely shared and discussed than good news, which makes it seem like the world is worse than it actually is.
Rose-Stockwell’s book integrates the work of social psychologist Dr. Jon Haidt on moral emotions, explaining how those fundamental emotions can be engaged by Big Tech to manipulate our attention. (We recently shared a cross-post from Dr. Haidt’s “After Babel” Substack about smartphones in classrooms.)
The more information we produce and share online, the more powerful the algorithms and AI designed to keep us engaged — and outraged — become.
The longer people spend on social media, the more likely they are to be politically extreme — and elements on every inch of the political spectrum manipulate this to their advantage.
On a hopeful note, they conclude by discussing the steps we can take to guard against the outrage machine’s control over our emotions and distortion of our reality.