Oh My God, What For, My Eyes!
Someone Find Me Some Goddamn Lye
In my tiny belfry,
I stare at a fly,
Slyly landing,
On foody panoply.
Funny fucking fly.
If I killed him, though,
I surely would cry.
Keening to the sky,
Wrists sliced, I'd die.
For in my hoosegow high,
I have naught to read,
But fucking CATCHER IN THE RYE.
About the Creator
Brent Tharp
I edit STEM books. I like writing, cats, and wine, though not necessarily in that order.
I was raised by wolves in a small forest somewhere in Middle America.
Why don't ketchup bottles squirt correctly? All or nothing seems grifty to me.
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(Ideas from the book The Economic Policy of Online Media: Manufacture of Dissent, Routledge, 2024) Abstract This article examines the formula ‘angry people click more’ as a core logic of contemporary online media and as a structural transformation of propaganda in the digital age. It argues that the defining feature of the current attention economy is not only the circulation of misinformation, but the systematic deployment of openly implausible claims designed to provoke moral outrage and sustain profitable engagement cycles. The analysis links Oxford’s 2025 Word of the Year ‘rage bait’ to earlier lexical markers of epistemic crisis such as ‘truthiness’ and ‘post-truth’, and situates this trajectory against the older ‘manufacture of consent’ model of Herman and Chomsky. While classical propaganda in totalitarian and mass-media systems sought ideological unity through censorship and the Big Lie, the emerging Propaganda 2.0 model, articulated by Peter Ayolov, monetises anger by manufacturing dissent and deliberately populating the public sphere with absurd, polarising narratives. The article interprets this dynamic through the allegories of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and Václav Havel’s greengrocer, showing how the move from fearful silence to permanent online rage changes both the psychology and political economy of propaganda. Drawing on Evgeny Morozov’s critique of fake-news moral panics, Frances Haugen’s disclosures about Facebook, and the documentary The Social Dilemma, it concludes that anger has become a tradable asset and that blatant lying has shifted from an authoritarian instrument of control to a market mechanism in a global ‘free trade in slogans’.
By Peter Ayolov7 days ago in Critique
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