Angertainment by Ed Coper

We were promised a global village; we got a gladiatorial arena.

Social media is no longer a tool for connection but a viral outrage machine that harvests and monetises our worst impulses.

As a result, we are being driven apart: politics is becoming more extreme, young women are following dangerous health advice and young men are adopting the sexist attitudes of their grandpas. Most troubling: it has spawned a new class of power-those who know how to game the outrage economy to change how you vote, what you buy, and who you hate.

Welcome to the era of Angertainment.

Social media outrage is an entire industry. Rage-bait-the 2025 Word of the Year-isn’t just an internet annoyance, it has become the supreme vehicle for building political and cultural capital. Angertainment is the tale of how people manipulate and weaponise our viral anger to change our world for the worse.

In this high-stakes, highly entertaining journey through our new reality, Ed Coper unmasks the architects of this new power-from manosphere gurus to political demagogues and corporate giants-who have realised that in the attention economy, your anger is the only currency that matters.

Darkly funny and terrifyingly urgent, Angertainment provides a chilling look at how the fusion of anger and entertainment has upended everything from the family dinner table to the halls of government.

Coper doesn’t just show you how the world was broken; he hands you the toolkit to fix it-the groundbreaking first manual for dismantling the outrage machine.

First, we must understand it. Then we can work to defeat it.

About the Author: Ed Coper is a pioneer of politics in the digital age. A leading political communications expert and authority on the internet and democracy, he built the global blueprints for modern advocacy. He grew Australia’s first online political movement, GetUp, and launched Australian Labor’s first digital presence before exporting these techniques across six continents. He has been behind the scenes of many of the last two decades’ most prominent social movements, and has advised high-profile changemakers ranging from Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg to Sir Richard Branson and Shakira. Ed founded a New York-based agency servicing multiple Nobel Peace laureates, and established the Center for Impact Communications which led efforts to safeguard US elections from disinformation and combat vaccine hesitancy. His groundbreaking campaigns have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for social causes and have featured in several museum exhibitions. Now CEO of the agency Populares, Ed remains at the vanguard of political disruption; he was a key strategist behind Australia’s historic ‘Teal’ movement. Ed is the author of the acclaimed book Facts and Other Lies, which has become the definitive handbook for defending truth in the disinformation age.

26 May 2026
 

Angertainment: How social media outrage ruined everything by Ed Coper ISBN 9781761636691