21 May 2025 6 min read

The Business Model of Outrage

We Must Sever the Incentive Loop Before It Devours Us

There’s a moment—fleeting, but sharp—when you realise the noise is not accidental. The chaos is engineered. The outrage, curated. And the ideology? A scaffold built after the fire, not before it. That’s the moment you see the system. You see the loop. And you understand why nothing truly changes.

Jordan Klepper said it clearly to Kara Swisher: “They create the outrage so they can build their ideology around it.”

This isn’t just a media criticism. It’s not satire, either. It’s a diagnosis of a culture that no longer runs on truth, leadership, or principle—but on outrage-as-a-service. And behind that outrage? A monetisation engine so precise it would make Wall Street blush.

This is not a left-versus-right problem. It’s a profit-over-everything problem.

We are not being informed. We are being conditioned. Not for coherence, but for consumption. The system does not want clarity. It wants conflict. And it's very, very good at creating it.

I. THE LOOP: OUTRAGE → IDENTITY → MONETISATION

First, the system identifies the spark. A comment, a clip, a meme. It is elevated not because it's true, or important—but because it triggers. Outrage becomes the ignition point.

Second, the outrage is shaped into identity. “If you’re angry, you must be one of us.” This is the most dangerous step. It doesn’t just inform beliefs—it manufactures belonging. And in a fragmented, isolated digital culture, identity is everything.

Third, and this is the apex: the identity is monetised. Subscriptions. Donations. Merchandise. Courses. Clicks. Engagement. Ideology is built backwards from the most profitable emotions—fury, fear, tribal pride. The business model is not to inform the public. It's to radicalise the customer.

And it’s working.

Every post, every sound bite, every “gotcha” moment is one more node in the architecture of engineered allegiance. The result? A society incapable of complexity. A populace addicted to certainty. And a market absolutely thriving on division.

We are no longer debating facts. We are defending revenue streams disguised as belief systems.

II. THE CONSEQUENCE: COLLAPSE BY DESIGN

The cost is not theoretical. It’s economic, social, and existential.

Policy paralysis. Real issues—climate, housing, health, infrastructure—are sidelined by performative skirmishes.
Economic degradation. Innovation is sacrificed for virality. Complexity is discarded in favour of emotional simplicity. True problem solvers get drowned out by content machines.
Mental collapse. Outrage is not sustainable. It depletes cognitive bandwidth, erodes empathy, and breaks the internal compass. When everything is urgent, nothing is sacred.

And behind it all, an elite class of media operators, digital oligarchs, and ideology brokers rake in profits while the public tears itself to pieces.

This isn’t just mismanagement. It’s strategic entropy. It’s the intentional fracturing of civic infrastructure in exchange for audience monetisation.

III. THE TRUTH: IT ALL GOES BACK TO THE MONEY

If you follow the noise, you get lost.

If you follow the power, you find the architecture.

But if you follow the money—you find the truth.

Outrage is not the root. It’s the tool. The lever is financial. And that means the solution is structural.

This isn’t about better content moderation, more civil discourse, or reforming algorithms. Those are surface-level interventions in a deep system.

The real fix is economic weapon disarmament.

IV. THE SOLUTION: DECOUPLE OUTRAGE FROM PROFIT

We need to sever the incentive loop that converts emotional manipulation into capital.

To do that, we install structure. Not censorship. Not neutrality theatre. But hard, tactical architecture that breaks the revenue model of chaos.

1. Install Platform Accountability Frameworks

Mandate transparency on revenue sources linked to content virality.
Require publicly listed companies to report emotional content bias as a risk factor in shareholder reports.
Impose economic penalties for deliberate outrage seeding—using pattern detection, AI auditing, and advertiser disclosure.

2. Shift Capital Toward Infrastructure, Not Influence

Create public-interest capital corridors—equity investments into systems that reward accuracy, depth, and long-term analysis.
Build out “Slow News Trusts” that deliver yield through verified impact, not impression metrics.

3. Regulate Data Leverage as a Public Asset

Treat user behaviour data as a collective resource, not a corporate weapon.
Require platforms to license use of aggregate psychological insights rather than hoarding them for ad targeting.

4. Build Parallel Economies of Belief

Develop alternative content ecosystems where profit is decoupled from emotional volatility.
Use tokenised content equity models, where producers and consumers share upside from verified truth impact—not outrage clicks.

These are not theories. They are architectures. If implemented, they begin to kill the core economic driver of mass polarisation.

V. THE ARCHITECTURE: REPLACE THE LOOP

We do not fight ideology with better arguments. We fight it by collapsing its economic engine.

That means installing new incentive architectures:

Replace advertising-based funding models with equity-based truth markets.
Reward narrative integrity with access to verified distribution.
Empower creators with decentralised infrastructure that punishes volatility profiteering.

And we must do this knowing that the incumbents will resist. Because the current system is profitable. It works. For them.

But for society? For cohesion? For the next generation?

It is death by monetised confusion.

VI. THE CLOSER: THE NEW RULE

If outrage is the product, we are not the customer. We are the raw material.

Refuse to be processed.

Here’s the truth:

You are not polarised. You are being polarised.

You are not uninformed. You are being misinformed—strategically, continuously, profitably.

And until we sever the loop that turns your attention into their capital, nothing will change.

This is the architecture of consequence.

Refuse to fund your own manipulation.

Refuse to be the product.

Kill the loop.

Build better systems.

This is what I’m working on. Tell me what you think, I enjoy the conversation! Subscribe and follow the work in real time.

Thanks!

They’re not angry because they believe.
They believe because they’re angry.
And someone is paying for both.

PS -