Outrage Machine

by Tobias Rose-Stockwell

A noticeable shift has occurred in the last two decades. The prevalence of hate speech online. The turn toward authoritarianism and populism across the western world. Every day, it seems, we're hearing more angry voices and fearful opinions, we're seeing more threats and frightening news, and we're reacting faster and less rationally.

The cause is hidden in plain sight: for the first time, almost all of the information we consume is controlled and curated by algorithms designed to capture our emotional attention. This is the outrage machine. It is the wide-cast net of social media that is propelled by tech, has been exploited by all of us, and which has been allowed to steadily replace our newspapers, emergency communication systems, town halls, churches, and more. And this ubiquity has had unintended consequences.

OUTRAGE MACHINE reveals how to navigate a world that has been thoroughly disrupted by technology. It demystifies the underlying machinery that has come to control us and will help guide readers toward reflection rather than reaction. Pulling together 15 years of research and inquiry, Tobias Rose-Stockwell will give readers a language with which to comprehend what is happening to society, and offer new mental models for how to manage our time, our technology, and our attention, as well as big-picture recommendations for the way forward, how to redesign these platforms, and methods for fixing this broken system before it changes us for ever.

• ISBN10: 0349427380
• ISBN13: 9780349427386
• Publish Date: 7 February 2023
• Publish Status: Forthcoming
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
• Imprint: Piatkus Books
• Format: Paperback (UK Trade)
• Pages: 320
• Language: English

Reviews

[Jeff Sexton]

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.