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Transcript

Angertainment: How Online Outrage Ruined Everything · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Can we blame political polarisation on right-wing internet crazies? Or is the whole online system shot? It is tempting, if you're a progressive, to just look at all of the insane things that are coming out of the mouths of so many right-wing podcasters and so much of the drivel on X or Twitter and think, like, this is the cause of all the problems.
• 0:29
  But it's probably just as easy if you're on the other side to look at the failings of elite liberal media institutions and to come to the same conclusion. Today's conversation is a bit of a disagreement between me and one of Australia's most important progressive activists, Ed Copa.
• 0:44
  essentially built digital political campaigning on the left in Australia, turning the left-wing activist group GetUp into a major political force. He has advised everyone from Greta Thunberg to Malala Yousafzai, and he has a new book. It's called Angertainment, How Social Media Outrage Ruined Everything. And it's about how tech platforms farm your anger on an industrial scale and,
• 1:10
  turn outrage into clicks and clicks into money and money into power. As I mentioned, Ed and I disagree a little bit about the political valence of this problem. I sort of feel that he gives left-wing groupthink a little bit too much of a pass, but that makes for a fascinating conversation, and he is a smart and articulate guy. He and I discussed how legacy institutions have failed people, which voices are amplified by the algorithm, and whether we can save the global conversation without censorship.
• 1:38
  I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one, the only Ed Copa.
• 1:49
  I was interested that you take a swipe at the Australian Financial Review for saying that the last, for poo-pooing as to whether or not the last US election was actually a podcast election, which is funny because I have a podcast and a column at the Australian Financial Review. So I am the unicorn who is straddling both of those, well, I think what you called a dying...
• 2:14
  Maybe not a dying publication or a dying industry or newspapers. And I have many friends there and they're a wonderful publication who are nice enough to publish me sometimes as well. Not anymore. But on the particular point of criticizing, it wasn't just the US election, also the Australian election. Remember, some influencers went into the budget lockup and shock horror. You know, they even used to let me into the budget lockup.
• 2:40
  I know the standards aren't that high. That's right. And, you know, they kind of had a tongue-in-cheek go at, you know, the fact that influencers would be invited to a serious political debate. So my joke was that they had a go at them from the deathbed.
• 2:54
  Yeah, which is, and I agree with you on that. I mean, why wouldn't you have the people who are talking to large majorities of young people be as well-informed as they could be instead of just getting their information from other influencers online? Yes. To quote Elon Musk when he bought Twitter, he said, we are the media now. It's true. Yeah. It's true. So what's going on? Explain the overarching thesis of the book.
• 3:19
  Well, where do we begin? As a start of human history, there was a single atom. No, but it's interesting you say that because one of the things that kept popping in my head throughout the book, and it is something that you address, is it's not new that we've used anger as a way to feel enlivened and self-righteous and entertained.
• 3:39
  Yeah, it's not new and it's also not, you know, something that's trite or trivial either. You know, when we think about rage bait, we normally think about non-serious things and anger being a bad emotion. You have to look at the million-year view of history to understand where we are now because it's all about how humans are hardwired. And anger and outrage and all those sorts of negative emotions are really important and they're actually really good and they're there for a reason.
• 4:09
  So we don't exist in our current forms either collectively or as one single biological organism for any part of us that doesn't have an evolutionary purpose. So obviously when we have a threat in nature, we have to respond to it. And the way that we do that is we load this program onto us that makes us stop what we're doing and turn around and reboot and become really angry, which focuses normally on a threat. Yeah.
• 4:38
  And you can see that that's obvious why that's, you know, of evolutionary benefit. And as social creatures, we need to communicate that to others and all get the other people to be really angry about the same threat. So I'm like, hey, you know, Bill...
• 4:53
  another Viking's coming over the ridge. Can you, you know, let's get our pitchforks and go and, you know, defend the village. I like that we've got Bill the Viking here. In my brain I had cavemen, so I was more along like Og or something like that. But yes, from cavemen to Vikings. Pick human history. So it's not only a useful evolutionary adaptation because it stops you from getting slaughtered by your fellow Viking or sabertooth tiger, but because it's a bonding, it's a form of bonding, of cultural and social bonding. Exactly.
• 5:21
  Exactly. So you think about any species in nature, they've all got ways that they defend themselves. Humans, we're not that strong compared to other animals. We don't have claws. Speak for yourself. You go, I would love to see you wrestle a bear. I think that, you know. You haven't seen me in my Viking getup. It's a kinky look. That was you on January 6th on the Capitol. That was me, baby. Yeah, no, only a few people get to see it. But no, yes, I take your point. So we have to rely on our brains. We have to rely on our sociability.
• 5:50
  And we are very powerful together as a group. Look what we've done. We've built nuclear weapons. That's the biggest weapon that anything, because we got together and we can figure stuff out and we've got other skills. And so at the very most basic level, the most important driver inside all of us is to get along with our peers and to be outraged together. Mm-hmm.
• 6:11
  And you look at the modern manifestations of this, it's not just about fending off the Viking or the saber-toothed tiger. If there's something that happens in society now that offends our collective moral code, we all get outraged together. That might be a protest, that might be social media meltdown now, that might be revolution. All of those things just come from that collective emotional experience.
• 6:36
  And the psychologists who study emotion will tell you that they're designed to spread like a virus. You catch emotions from other people. And that's a really important evolutionary tool. That explains how we have made it to here in human history. Right. So that's the ancient bit. Yes. Now, what's the modern bit? Our ancient selves were built for a world where we have a finite amount of information. Most of it's pretty tame. And occasionally, a threat comes up that we have to collectively respond to. Right.
• 7:03
  Now, what do we get on social media? Constant torrents of threats all the time and nothing in between. And we can't change how we respond to them. A lot of people ask me, what should we do about all this social media outrage and rage bait? Should we just, you know, calm down? No, you can't. That's just how we're wired. Mm-hmm.
• 7:21
  But we're not built for the constant threat and we're not built for an information ecosystem that only serves us the type of information that triggers our very primal instincts. And the reason it does that is fairly straightforward. These are platforms that are built to get maximum attention.
• 7:42
  Um, and the more content that you have, the more extreme you have to be in order to get the attention, right? That's the attention economy. Um, if there are only three people out there on Facebook saying something, maybe we could have a nice civilized discussion with nuanced policy points. But the fact is there's hundreds of millions of people out there all trying to get your attention. What's going to get your attention? The thing that incites your emotion. Hmm.
• 8:06
  The platforms know that. They build their algorithms to reward that sort of content. That becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that the people who want to get attention have to make really rage-filled, anger-inducing, outrage-inducing content in order to get noticed.
• 8:22
  and that's the predicament that we live in now. Hey humans, just jumping in here quickly to make sure you're aware that this is just a preview. This is just a brief highlight of one of our premium episodes. If you weren't aware, it is our very generous paid subscribers and channel members who help make all of this possible, and they get extra juicy premium episodes just like this one. You can become a member on YouTube to watch the full episode,
• 8:52
  catalogue of mind-expanding, bullshit-free, uncomfortable conversations. Back to the show. Well, I mean, just to push back on that slightly, I mean, I'm not sure it's 100% the case that the reason why rage bait works on social is because it's easily visible. It stands out of the pack of a very crowded market. Isn't it also because if the algorithm, if the metric, as you say, the social media companies...
• 9:17
  you know, are using a clumsy, I don't think they're doing it in order to destroy civilization, but it is having that unwelcome side effect, that their definition of human connection, of connectedness, of, you know, human belonging is how much time you spend engaging with a piece of content that someone else has produced. How long do you watch the video? Do you share it? Do you like it? Do you comment on it?
• 9:44
  and those are all things that you're likelier to do with something that is either outraging and offending you, or the other half of it is, I mean, if you actually look at your feed, it's not mostly outrage or anger, I doubt. I mean, mine is now after writing this book. Unfortunately, I've cooked my own algorithm. Your comments are. But yes. Your comments are. But it's half things that reinforce what you already believe as well, which you also like. I mean, we like...
• 10:11
  being angry at things, and we also like feeling like we're right about good things. So, facile, vacuous, easy, heartwarming things do well.
• 10:22
  You know, cat videos do well, facile, easy political point scoring that makes you feel like you're on the right side of history does well, and anger-inducing stuff also does well. How is that necessarily different from the historical anger that you were talking about? You know, the French Revolution was an example of mob anger.
• 10:44
  The civil rights movement was an example of mob anger. Talkback radio was an example of mob anger. And now we have the latest incarnation, which is these tools. Is it the fact that they're in our pockets all the time? Is it the, like, what is it? I would have loved to see the French Revolution in the social media era. They did an amazingly effective job of taking, you know, that sort of entertainment. Depends who you were. Depends whether you were inside the Versailles Palace or...
• 11:12
  or whether you're one of the guys outside. And at what point, you know, the revolution eats its own children and then the next generation of revolutionaries weren't, the last ones weren't revolutionary enough and so the guillotine keeps coming out. It's a really good example to think about because there was a really effective information ecosystem there in the form of largely pamphlets that could spread really quickly information between people and there were networks that,
• 11:37
  in forms of societies and parties that were formed to do this. And you saw over the space of a really short time in that period, you know, a matter of years, dozens and dozens of very fast moving movements come and escalate quickly to violence, execute the whole previous mob and then continue the cycle again. Um...
• 11:57
  That is not dissimilar to what happens on social media now because the same things exist. There's an information ecosystem that can spread information very rapidly and there are networks set up that are designed to take advantage of that and manipulate that. I think the only thing that's changed really is the scale and the effectiveness of it and the speed.
• 12:21
  You know, we are outraged these days in the afternoon at something different than what we're outraged in the morning. And so, you know, I'm not out there saying that mob anger is a bad thing. Mob anger has done a lot of great throughout human history. You know, point to any, you mentioned the civil rights movements, you know, all these moments of history where mob anger has been the only thing to correct the wrongs in society and the injustices in society.
• 12:49
  But what we need to keep sight of now is how can we tell if our mob anger is correctly directed? How can we tell if it's at legitimate things or illegitimate things? How can we tell if it's at scapegoats or at the true cause of what's causing our grievances? And this is where social media has changed the rules of the game and changed the dynamic because...
• 13:10
  As a place that we get our opinions and information from on really important issues, it has proven itself to be wholly inadequate. Because what it replaced was by no means perfect, but it had a much higher quality filter than anything on social media does.
• 13:29
  So we used to, in the very near past, get our information from traditional mainstream media, news media. Yes, there was talkback radio. Yes, there was tabloids. There was cheap version. There was quality version like the ABC. There was- Australian Financial Review. Australian Financial Review. Shout out to all my friends there. Please don't counsel me.
• 13:51
  But that was largely something where the incentives were towards mainstream consensus. Now, I'm not saying mainstream consensus is always right. Of course, it's wrong sometimes. And I'm not saying all of those news sources were right. Of course, they're wrong sometimes.
• 14:08
  And even the tabloid and shock jock version was a form of angertainment, right? They went for the thing that would make us cheap anger to get clicks and engagement. Back in the day, that was listeners and people who buy the paper. Someone who spends 25 cents on the newspaper. Exactly. But overall, the entire ecosystem's incentive was...
• 14:28
  was something that couldn't veer too far from mainstream consensus because advertisers were desert in droves and the institutions around it were largely, robustly in tension with them, an equilibrium that had developed over decades. Two other things can I inject there. One is...
• 14:47
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• 15:13
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• 15:36
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• 16:06
  I'll see you in the next free episode, I guess. Take care.