Ed Coper

They don't actually care about it.

They are looking for things that they can weaponize into the culture wars, because the culture wars get a lot of clicks.

They get a lot of engagement, and that's true power now.

All right.

Absolutely, Richard.

I am writing this book not as a, you know, arm's length researcher.

I'm a practitioner.

My day job is to make people whipped into a frenzy using the internet about political issues.

And I've done so for decades now.

And that is why I'm ringing the alarm bell, because it is not your grandparents' social media outrage.

This is something different.

This is something where all proportion is lost.

It's all theatre now.

Now it is about trying to be more extreme, more ragey, more fringy than everyone else because the attention economy is won by the things that are more extreme and less consensus-based and less mainstream than what everyone else is saying.

And this small tweak to society has

fundamentally upset the apple cart of how we interact with each other, how we interact with really important issues, what sets the political agenda of the day, how our relationships with our friends and neighbours are, which groups we should hate, which brands we should hate, which people we should hate.

It's all determined by this very simple fact that we are served a diet of information that rewards all the wrong things, not all the healthy things.

Why not?

Absolutely, and this is the fundamental key understanding that I think people should really take away with them, that...

We think it's about ideology.