Rage Bait: Manufactured anger online keeps the proletariat exactly where the bourgeois wants them.

High up in the ranks of social media companies, there exists a job title that probably wont surprise you. Behavioral engineers at Meta, Tik Tok, Reddit, or any other algorithmically generated place you might scroll, are getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to figure out ways to keep us online. The good feelings we get from [scrolling] social media keep us entertained, but it’s the feelings of fear and especially anger that keep us addicted. Rage is the currency of the modern age, and I think this is hurting our movement more than it's helping it. Organized socialists need to develop defensive strategies to handle these attacks on our psyches from the bourgeois, and fast.

Capitalists will be the first to (proudly) admit that social media algorithms are designed to work like a slot machine. You put your attention in, pull the lever, and see what happens next. The addictive part about a slot machine is that when you pull the lever, you don't know what you're going to get. You might line up three cherries in a row and get a decent payout, or more often than not, you'll lose and pull the lever again. We pull the lever again because we're seeking out the dopamine from a payout. The machine trains our brains using conditioning tactics to seek out the reward of a big payout, in spite of the negative consequences.

The thing about social media is the illusory reward isn't even money, it's just exploitation. When we see a sad video when scrolling, the response planned by the bourgeois is for us to keep scrolling until that feeling can be reconciled. They’ve researched the emotions of the working class, they’ve researched the mechanisms of learning and behavior, and they’ve landed on an equation that keeps us online. And while the interplay between positive and negative emotions alone is enough to pull us in, some emotions do a better job than others. Anger, for example, does both. The endorphins released when we get embroiled in some heated argument on Reddit are addictive on their own, even though most people would not exactly classify rage as positive.

Anger isn't bad. It's a reasonable response to the state of things, and, in the right circumstances, it's one of the cornerstones of emotion that movements are built on. You should be angry! The thing is, behavioral engineers at social media companies know what they're doing. They're not manufacturing the kind of rage that gets most people off their asses and into the streets. The kind of rage they want on their platforms is designed to keep people glued to comment sections– brooding, and scared, but complacent. They want us to be good little soldiers of a culture war that none of us ever consented to fighting. In most circumstances, online discourse is a shell of what debate should be by design. These jerks deal in the business of exploitation, like all great capitalists do. Every second of doomscrolling means another dollar in their offshore banks to them.

Propaganda isn’t always explicit, and the content of a medium isn’t always the only thing impacting us. How we engage with the internet can and does impact our behavior off of it, even if the effects are subtle. The way that social media is designed means that we are constantly battling propaganda that urges us to stay online, to disregard complexity, and to stay angry, even when avoiding the more obvious pro-fascist content. A working class that is distracted by their anger is a lot easier to beat than one motivated to organize by it. To me, the scariest part is that these companies aren't only keeping us scrolling, commenting, and fighting. They're actively making it harder to organize a united front against their BS, using tactics ranging in complexity from simple algorithm planning and shadow banning to literally hiring trolls to agitate activists online.

For every DSA member there is a platoon of people who are just as activated by the media they consume on these platforms as they are paralyzed. And just because you and I, comrade, broke through the fog to join DSA, doesn't mean we're free from their psychological warfare. Now, I’m not saying we should give up on social media entirely. Many of us woke up to the tyranny of the modern age through social media, and it is necessary that we be engaging with primary sources as our country descends even further into fascism. It’s also necessary that we use these platforms to urge our future comrades to join the fight. Instead, I’m saying this as a reminder that none of us are immune to propaganda, and that propaganda isn’t always what it seems. Stay angry, but be mindful of who is benefiting from it- us or them?

Oxford report on industrial social media manipulation by political actors:
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-01-13-social-media-manipulation-political-actors-industrial-scale-problem-oxford-report
Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products by Nir Eyal, Israeli born (surprise, surprise) behavioral engineer
https://denver.overdrive.com/media/1817200