Ed Coper

And it came and washed over me.

And my chants turned to shouts.

Other protesters started smashing windows and looting and rioting and vandalising.

And this is what happens at the

or gathering where anger spreads through it.

We lose control of our faculties and our animal brains take over and we become one organism that shares and spreads its anger.

Now, exactly the same thing happens on social media.

It turns out you don't have to be physically next to the person who's angry to...

to catch their viral anger.

Emotion spreads on social media just as it does in real life.

So we have unwittingly built these machines that collectively make us angry every single day that we spend time on them.

And that has an incredibly negative effect, not just on our mental health, but on our shared common purpose as well.

This is everything.

So if you think about why we have that consensus-based politics, what are the forces that drive that?

Well, there is an information system that veers to the mainstream when you talk about traditional legacy media.

There are voters in the middle that parties have to appeal to or else be booted out of office.

There are the conventional ways of expressing outrage, like protests or media meltdown, that would traditionally be triggered if a political group veered too far from the mainstream.

All of those forces, as well as the interpersonal dynamics of not pissing off your neighbour, meant that consensus is the only solution to succeed within that environment.

Now, every single one of those has been thrown out the window in a world where there are political rewards for people that polarise and incite and are more extreme.

So now you have a system where...