![]() ![]() And the more we engage with that content, the more mad and scared we become. Read Moreīecause our attention naturally locks on content that inspires negative emotions like anger and fear, those urges are currently baked into social media’s algorithms. Heather Schwedel I Revisited Jonah Hill’s Netflix Documentary About His Therapist After Those Texts. “We assumed that this technology was virtuous in itself,” Rose-Stockwell writes of his cohort in Silicon Valley at the time, “that these tools had their own kind of hidden agenda-one that was inherently beneficial for humanity-regardless of intent.” But capitalism and human nature proved them wrong. 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. ![]() 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. Constitution, for example, as “the most basic operating code for a democratic republic.”īooks 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. It’s an approach that focuses on systems rather than individuals, and it holds a lot of appeal for software engineers it leads to Rose-Stockwell describing the U.S. Harari describes human behavior and the forces shaping it on a megascale, zooming out to take in millennia and survey revolutions in social life caused by massive changes like the shift from hunter-gatherer subsistence to agricultural surpluses. The model is Yuval Noah Harari, whose Sapiens and other titles became all the rage in Silicon Valley about five years ago. These people-rather than journalists, who expect more in the way of stylistic panache from a book like this-are the real audience for Outrage Machine. Friends of his were working at Facebook or for the Obama campaign, and founding sites like, convinced that new technologies could be used to foster empathy and to power a new form of philanthropy. Rose-Stockwell returned to the Bay Area in 2009, just as the social web was taking off. ![]() Here’s the Episode You Should Start With. Why the Lawsuit From Lizzo’s Former Dancers Is Such a BombshellĪ Controversial New Movie Got One of the First NC-17 Ratings in Years, and Boy Did It Earn It After seven years of fundraising and hard work, the reservoir was rebuilt. Rose-Stockwell sent out an email appeal to friends back in the States, a request for donations that spread through listservs and online communities. The book opens with an early example of the internet’s positive potential, in the early 2000s, when the 22-year-old Rose-Stockwell was traveling in Cambodia and met a monk who asked him to help restore a broken reservoir that had once served 5,000 farmers and villagers. But in Outrage Machine he paints himself more as a tech insider who has witnessed the transition from the rosy blush of social media’s initial promise to the red-faced rage of its current discontent while standing alongside friends in the industry who never anticipated how bad things would get. That outrage is often stoked by journalists, who, Rose-Stockwell notes, “are shockingly susceptible to reporting on this kind of thing,” furthering what he calls “trigger chains: cascades of outrage that are divorced from the original event.” Self-described in his author bio as “a renowned media researcher,” Rose-Stockwell is in some respects a journalist as well. ![]()
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