Via Stulti

Power isn’t scared of anger anymore.

That’s the part most people miss.

We’re told the system is fragile
that outrage is dangerous
that protest rattles those at the top.

But look around.

Anger is everywhere
constant, loud, unavoidable

and nothing fundamental seems to change.
Unless it’s for the worse.

People are furious all the time
and the machine just keeps humming.

This isn’t because people don’t care.
It’s because anger has been reworked.

Modern power doesn’t crush dissent.

It lets it breathe.

It encourages expression
boosts the loudest voices
and floods the public space with outrage

while quietly making sure that none of it turns into real pressure.

Rage is allowed.
Even celebrated.

It just has to stay harmless.

Social media didn’t create this, but it perfected it.

Anger is easy to post, easy to share, easy to reward.

Organization is slow, messy, and boring by comparison.

A tweet can travel the world in seconds.

A movement takes years
trust
discipline
and sacrifice.

Platforms reward what spreads fastest
not what actually works.

So anger scales.
Organization doesn’t.

That’s the trick.

Rage feels like action.
It feels like resistance.
It feels like doing something.

But rage without leverage doesn’t threaten power
it stabilizes it.

It burns energy
divides people,
justifies crackdowns
and teaches the system exactly how far it can push before the noise peaks and dies down.

None of this requires a secret plan.
No one has to pull strings behind the curtain.

The incentives do the work.

Anger that fragments is profitable.
Anger that coordinates is dangerous.

Guess which one gets amplified.

What we live in now isn’t suppression.
It’s permission.

This is Authorized Rage.

Authorized Rage is the condition in which anger is encouraged, amplified, and rewarded precisely because it is loud, divisive, and directionless

and therefore poses no coordinated threat to power.

Social Media

Social media is not a public square.
It’s a behavior shaping machine.

It doesn’t care what you believe.
It cares how you react.

The platforms that dominate political life today are built to reward whatever keeps you scrolling, sharing, and coming back angry for more.

Calm doesn’t do that.
Nuance doesn’t do that.
Measured thinking dies quietly in the feed.

Anger survives.

Not all anger
the right kind.

The kind that’s loud, moral, personal, and immediate.
The kind that turns politics into identity and disagreement into offense.
The kind that feels powerful while costing nothing.

Social media converts political belief into performance.

You don’t just hold an opinion
you signal it.

You don’t argue
you declare.

You don’t organize
you display.

Being seen replaces being effective.

This is how rage becomes legible.
It becomes shareable.
It becomes rankable.

Likes, shares, follows, ratios

anger gets counted, sorted, and rewarded.

You can watch it climb in real time.
You can feel validated while nothing changes.

Quiet leverage doesn’t survive here.
It doesn’t look exciting.
It doesn’t trigger dopamine.
It doesn’t fit into a clip or a post.

Collective action requires patience, trust, coordination
and a willingness to lose attention in the short term.

Platforms punish all of that.

So people adapt.

They learn, quickly
which emotions get oxygen and which disappear.

They learn how to speak in a way that travels.
They learn that outrage works and restraint doesn’t.

This isn’t manipulation
it’s selection.

The system doesn’t tell you what to say.
It just decides what gets heard.

And what gets heard is anger that burns hot and fast
then fades.

That’s not a bug.
That’s the design environment in which modern politics now lives.

Social media doesn’t silence dissent.
It shapes it into something safe.

Algorithmic Amplification

This is where authorization actually happens.

Not through permission.
Through selection.

No one tells you that you’re allowed to be angry.
No memo goes out approving certain kinds of protest.

The system doesn’t need to speak.
It just quietly decides what spreads and what dies.

Algorithms don’t ask whether something is true, useful, or effective.

They ask one question:
Will this keep people engaged?

Content that spikes emotion
especially anger. wins that test.

Content that requires patience, coordination, or long-term thinking usually fails it.

So emotion rises to the top.

Posts that escalate outrage get boosted.
Posts that try to organize people around concrete demands sink.

Calls for disruption without a plan travel fast.
Plans without spectacle go nowhere.

Anger that fragments is profitable.
Anger that coordinates is dangerous.

That distinction matters.

Fragmented anger keeps people isolated, reactive, and busy fighting each other.
Coordinated anger threatens logistics, profits, legitimacy, and control.

One gets amplified.
The other gets buried, flagged, throttled, or simply ignored.

Again
no conspiracy required.

No one has to sit in a room deciding what the public should think.

The math does the sorting.
The system selects for content that produces engagement and filters out content that produces leverage.

That’s why outrage feels everywhere and power feels untouched.

People mistake visibility for influence.

They see their anger spread and assume it’s working.
But what’s being amplified isn’t pressure

it’s noise.

The system can absorb noise forever.
Pressure is another story.

Algorithmic amplification doesn’t suppress dissent.
It curates it.

And in doing so, it teaches everyone
consciously or not
how to be angry in ways that don’t matter.

Outrage Economics

Properly directed, anger can cause a lot of harm
Authorized rage is tolerated because it pays.

Outrage is one of the most reliable resources in the modern economy.

It keeps people engaged, clicking, donating, subscribing, and consuming content that confirms how they already feel.

Calm doesn’t convert.
Solutions don’t scale.

Rage does.

Every layer of the system feeds on it.

Media outlets turn outrage into traffic.
Influencers turn it into followers.
Activist brands turn it into donations.
Platforms turn it into ad revenue.

Everyone gets paid as long as the anger keeps moving.

That movement is the key.

Outrage creates motion without direction.
It keeps people busy reacting, sharing, arguing, and signaling

but rarely building anything that lasts.

The cycle resets before leverage can accumulate.

Anger spikes.
Attention follows.
Money flows.
Nothing changes.

This is why outrage never resolves.

Resolution would end the revenue stream.
Permanent emergency is more profitable than progress.

The system doesn’t need problems solved
it needs them renewable.

So anger gets harvested

People burn out.
Causes rotate.
New villains replace old ones.

The structure remains.

The energy that could have been aimed upward gets diffused sideways and drained off in endless cycles of reaction.

This doesn’t make anyone immoral.
It makes them adaptive.

When the system rewards outrage
outrage becomes the rational response.

When visibility brings income and influence
escalation becomes survival.

Outrage economics doesn’t suppress resistance.
It monetizes it.

And once anger becomes a product
it stops being a threat.

Identity Politics

This is what keeps the whole machine from tearing itself apart.

Identity politics doesn’t come from nowhere.

Identity matters.

People experience the system differently
and those differences are real.

The problem isn’t identity
it’s what happens when identity replaces strategy.

When politics is framed primarily around identity
conflict turns personal.

Disagreement becomes harm.
Compromise becomes betrayal.

The goal shifts from changing structures to proving moral correctness.
Being right matters more than being effective.

That’s a gift to power.

Identity-first conflict runs sideways
not upward.

It pits groups with overlapping material interests against each other while leaving the underlying systems intact.

People fight over language
symbols
and recognition

while wages
rents
debt
and power concentration stay right where they are.

Or gets worse.

Moral clarity replaces strategic clarity.
Personal offense replaces shared leverage.
Symbolic wins substitute for structural change.

This kind of politics is loud, emotionally satisfying, and endless.

It produces constant engagement without ever threatening the foundations it claims to oppose. Every battle feels urgent.

None of them are decisive.

Most importantly
identity politics fragments solidarity.

Coalition-building becomes suspect.
Class disappears into culture.
The idea of shared pressure across differences starts to look dangerous or naive.

That’s not accidental
it’s stabilizing.

Anger still flows.
Protest still happens.
People still feel like they’re fighting.

But the fights never converge.
They never compound.
They never aim at the same choke points long enough to force change.

This is how rage gets contained without being silenced.

Power needs division to remain permanent.

Identity politics doesn’t end dissent.
It keeps it busy.

What Authorized Rage Leaves Behind

Nothing here requires bad actors.

That’s the part people resist.

They want villains
puppeteers
secret rooms where decisions are made.

Those stories are comforting
they suggest this could all be stopped by exposure.
It gives people justification for their rage

But Authorized Rage doesn’t run on secrecy.
It runs on incentives.

Anger is encouraged because it’s visible.
Visible because it’s profitable.
Profitable because it’s scalable.
Scalable because it’s easy.

Organization is none of those things.

So the system fills with rage and starves of leverage.

People speak constantly and are heard everywhere
yet power barely feels the pressure.

The noise becomes proof of freedom.

The absence of change gets blamed on the wrong people
the wrong language
the wrong attitude
anything except the structure itself.

This is why dissent feels exhausting now.

It never resolves.
It never accumulates.

It resets.

Each cycle teaches the same lesson

be louder
be angrier
be more certain.

And each cycle ends the same way
with attention burned off and nothing fundamentally altered.

Authorized Rage doesn’t make people passive.
It keeps them active in the wrong direction.

Power doesn’t need silence.

It needs motion without coordination.
It needs conflict without convergence.
It needs a public that mistakes expression for pressure and visibility for influence.

That’s what this system delivers.

Rage is allowed.
Protest is allowed.
Even disruption is allowed

so long as it remains episodic
symbolic
and fragmented.

So long as it never hardens into sustained leverage against the structures that actually decide outcomes.

This is not repression.
It’s management.

And as long as anger continues to be easier than organization
louder than strategy
and more rewarding than patience,

Authorized Rage will remain one of the most effective tools of modern power.

Not because people are weak.
But because the system is built to make the strongest emotions do the least damage.