How effective do you think this will be for the people that it actually could benefit?

well that's the beauty of this change is it's not about the government controlling what you can and can't see because we've tried that you know the government have tried to introduce a misinformation bill that failed because lead to the government censoring what's on social media so globally not just australia we've learned the lessons that that's not the way that you should approach this um what this tries to do instead is give you control over what you're seeing and so if you opt out of a personalized recommendation algorithm, that means that you're opting out on the social media platform deciding for you what you should see.

So the problem with that was being, if you're a young man, it might decide, oh, you're a young man, I'm going to show them Manosphere content.

Or if you're a young woman, it might be, I'm going to show you eating disorder content.

All these things that have been really harmful, they all came from a personalized recommendation algorithm.

So this is not about controlling what people can or can't say.

It's about giving people the ability to say, I don't want the social media platform to decide what I see and what I don't see.

My thought is that when you are suckered into the algorithm and you start being served the things that you like and for the example of a young man being suckered in to that manosphere content and when they're in the bubble of that they feel like that is the content they want to see are they not the people that we need to be opting out that probably aren't going to press that opt out button have you come across this in your research you did for entertainment

It's the story of a 48-hour frenzy over gas stove tops in the US and the gobsmacking consequences for our collective commons.

I, I love the example of the, the gas stoves because it is, um, spookily, uh, neat, tidy little, uh, 48-hour window into, into the world of angertainment.

So a couple of years ago, in the US, there's a, a federal body called the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Uh, they, you know, look after product recalls and, uh, you know, public information campaigns around them, as you, as you would expect.

One of the commissioners sat down for an interview with Bloomberg, and they asked him, "Well, there's new research that's come out on gas stoves, you know, emitting harmful toxins into the household.

Uh, what are you gonna do about that?" And, uh, the commissioner said off the cuff, "Oh, we'll take a look at that," and, you know, "Everything's on the table, everything ranging from doing nothing to a full ban.

We'll, we'll look at everything." Now, the internet just needs a little tease of, uh, of an idea to take it and run, and so what is a well-organized and a well-oiled machine exists waiting for an outrage to weaponize? And they were ready to go, and they took that little notion.

Can you give us a bit of a flavor for that? Because turning evidence-based policy analysis into anger-tainment is not a simple task, I don't think.

Like a survival instinct.

Like a woolly mammoth charging at your cave, and we're designed to put down whatever we're doing and say, "Hey, Bob, let's go pick up the spear." That's the ancient part.

Now, the modern part is that we now largely inhabit these platforms that are designed to map onto our emotional wiring.

And so there's so much content on them that we are designed to pay attention to everything that triggers our negative emotions, everything that feels like a threat.

Unfortunately, it's much more common to get something that is a rage-bait political outrage on social media than it is to get a woolly mammoth charging at you in prehistoric times.

So we are bombarded constantly with things that trigger this response, and we're powerless against it.

This is just our wiring.

So what's wrong with this?

How the failure of the voice referendum was, in your mind, different from, say, the failure of the Republic referendum decades before?

Yeah, and amazing.

And, you know, the same four-word slogan that sank the Republic was don't know, vote no, sank the voice to parliament referendum, you know, almost 25 years later.

And there was something incredibly different about the world in the Voice Department referendum.

And you ask public opinion experts about that turnaround.

The Voice enjoyed about 70% approval and got less than 40% approval on referendum day in the space of under a year.

It went from overwhelming support to quite decent rejection.

What does being nice involve?

How the failure of the Voice referendum was, in your mind, different from, say, the failure of the Republic referendum decades

before? There was something incredibly different about the world in the Voice Department referendum.

And you ask public opinion experts about that turnaround.

The Voice enjoyed about 70% approval and got less than 40% approval on... on referendum day in the space of under a year.

It went from overwhelming support to quite, you know, decent rejection.

And every Australian that was following the issue at the time would have had this very unsettling experience.

Every time they opened their social media feed... to see this hysterical outrage, quite often misinformation, sometimes AI generated, sometimes not even about the issue at hand, just this canvas that all this grievance politics was painted onto.

I wonder if you could explain what you're thinking there.

Why have right-wing populists done better than left-wing populists?

Well, I think the first thing to recognise is it's not because of their policy ideas.

I don't think there's inherently something that's better suited on the right than the left to policies.

I think there's a style of politics at the moment that is a really good fit for the algorithm.

And I think it's largely been movements on the right, especially the populist far right, who've cottoned on to the fact that negative engagement is just as good as positive engagement.

And there are ways to game the algorithm.

So of course, they're doing really well.

that's

How is our attention being hijacked by anger attainment?

Well, when we have finite amounts of attention but infinite amounts of content, the question is what wins that battle for our attention? And unfortunately, it will be the most extreme or contrarian or novel or fringe take on an issue.

So if you think about the traditional media ecosystem, like traditional news, they had all these incentives to just service what most people would think.

Now, it wasn't always right or wrong, but the incentive was to service what the mainstream opinion is.

The opposite is true on social media.

The incentive is to serve you information that is more extreme than the next piece of information because you won't see the things that aren't extreme.

It's a competition and really it's a race to the bottom.

And it wasn't easy because, you know, you had to build it up before you got that momentum.

Could you tell us what happened there so we can understand what angertainment is?

I love the example of the gas stoves because it is spookily neat, tidy little 48-hour window into the world of entertainment.

So a couple of years ago in the US, there's a federal body called the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

They look after product recalls and public information campaigns around them, as you would expect.

One of the commissioners sat down for an interview with Bloomberg and they asked him, well, there's new research that's come out on gas stoves, you know, emitting harmful toxins into the household.

What are you going to do about that? And the commissioner said off the cuff, oh, we'll take a look at that and, you know, everything's on the table, everything ranging from doing nothing to a full ban.

We'll look at everything.

Can you just explain the parallels here with

a position like a proposition very conservative we're talking about a constitutionally protected advisory body uh to the parliament and the executive so a committee uh we're talking about here um uh you know broadly supported uh with uh you know near super majority support in the polls and then one of the worst referendum defeats um in our country's recent history so you know um Perhaps that's a good way to sort of explain how these things work.

Yeah, it's a really great example because in many ways it was kind of the perfect storm for this kind of brand of social media outrage and entertainment.

And so we saw all of the elements of these networks of outrage activated during it and very effectively.

And I think for a lot of Australians, it was quite a confronting experience to actually see it in their feeds for the first time, as opposed to reading about it happening in the Philippines or the US or Eastern Europe.

And so what were those elements? First of all, the issue became this spectre for all of these other grievances and anxieties that are as old as time.

If you look back through the arguments against Mabo and Wick and Native Title 30 years ago, it was exactly the same stuff.

But it's actually really good for the internet.

Yeah, wow.

Like you guys weren't winning by playing nice.

Yeah, and for any listeners who haven't read the book, it's about the dangers of angry internet mobs.

What do I do for a day job? I create angry internet mobs in politics.

And you're absolutely right.

Anger is really important and outrage is really important.

Moral outrage is really important.

That's why we've had it for millions of years.

Okay.

Mm.

And if you think about at its very m- most simple level, every few years we head to the ballot box, and we are expected to pick a candidate that aligns with our values and aligns with our interests.

And in order to do that, we need to understand what is going on in the world around us.

And we're not just selfish creatures.

We, we often vote for, you know, the, the advancement of others, the helping hand in society.

So we need to understand what's going on across Australia and across the world, and we need to do so in a way that is accurate and fair and, and balanced in a way that, that news should be.

And then we go and make informed choices and, and politicians, if they wanna get elected, have to appeal to you based on reality.

Mm.

You say in the book, "Like all good angertainment, it was a manufactured provocation." Why do you say that?

Well, if you think about anyone who remembers that scandal, it came to their attention somehow.

It was probably by someone giving some commentary on it.

Certainly for me, I never saw the ad.

I saw the reaction to the ad, and the reactions that I started seeing on social media were all about, "Everyone is outraged by this Sydney Sweeney ad," and this was a jeans campaign that said Sydney Sweeney has great jeans, J-E-A-N-S.

The outrage that, uh, everyone saw was that all of these people, the progressives were angry that that was, you know, kind of racial coding for, you know, she's blonde, blue-eyed, and white and G-E-N-E-S, yes, of course.

Is she from the master race? Y- you know, all of these kind of racial coding, and then everyone on the other side was saying, "Oh, you know, the left's war on hot women.

How do you see One Nation employing some of these tactics in the months and, and years ahead heading up to the next election?

Ed, no ignoring the impact in the CBD, but do we have to come to terms with this that it may just be the new norm?

Yeah, I think it is the new normal.

And I think what we found during the pandemic, you know, before that, if you tried to work from home, your employer might have said the sky's going to fall.

And it didn't happen.

There's pros and cons.

And look, it's bad for cafes in the CBD.

Great for cafes in the suburbs.

of the times?

Ed, no ignoring the impact in the CBD, but do we have to come to terms with this that it may just be the new norm?

Yeah, I think it is the new normal.

And I think what we found during the pandemic, you know, before that, if you tried to work from home, your employer might have said the sky's going to fall.

And it didn't happen.

There's pros and cons.

And look, it's bad for cafes in the CBD.

Great for cafes in the suburbs.

of the times?

Can you explain the concept of dark woke? Because that's also something that you reference in the book.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, you know, Donald Trump wins again in 2024, and the whole, uh, Democratic establishment just goes to pieces.

They don't know why they didn't win.

They don't really mount an effective response.

The leaders are all out there saying, "Oh, we've gotta respect the public opinion.

Let's not just go around trashing MAGA and Trump," and th- th- there's a lot of navel-gazing.

How do you see One Nation employing some of these tactics in the months and, and years ahead heading up to the next election?

There's so many ways I could take this conversation, but I suppose right now I want to ask, who are the worst culprits? Is it politicians? Is it people that these groups are employed by politicians to create content for them? Where is it?

There's two main groups that I think you've got to think about.

Some of them are political and their motives are obvious, right? If you want to get attention in politics, you've got to do some rage bait.

You've got to get out there and say something that you know is going to either annoy half the people and please half the people.

You get all the engagement because it doesn't matter if someone's writing a comment saying, I hate this, you're garbage, or if they're clicking like or share or love, it's all engagement.

So if you're in politics, then that's the best way to get attention.

So a lot of people have realized that.

But we still get caught, don't we? Do you still find yourself getting caught out? Yes,

And it's easier to just be against something than to come up with something which is effectively a solution, right? So am I missing something here? Like, what, how do you make the ideas stack up against people who are just pissed off all the time and, and shouting about it?

Well, there, there are a few, there are a few different elements to, to the ideas part of this.

And, and some of them, um, i-i-in how we tell the ideas, that's really in the narrative, y- you know, and, and, and that's in the, in the style.

Ideas, when I'm talking about ideas, is really in the substance.

And, and there's a few, th- there's a few ideas that will make the outrage spreaders less effective, and those are the ideas that fix people's grievances, for example.

So, you know, if we, if we wanna look at One Nation as the example here, um, yes, they have, uh, you know, some ideas that aren't particularly healthy or well thought through or practical.

Um, and it's, it's partially about combating, you know, our ideas against their ideas, but it's also built on a platform of largely economic grievances and growing inequality.

Like, what's a, what's a pro-social alternative to some of this tech in, in your view?

You know, Andrew Tate is, is another really good example, but the, the fact that Andrew Tate or Calibiculla and then these, um, these other grifters exist, don't they exist because there is a market there for them?

Absolutely, and the market is old, right? This is another ancient thing, and the ancient thing is teenage, uh, teenage development for, for a young teenage boy goes through this period of, um, you know, self, uh, realization and insecurities and trying to fit in and trying to be cool, uh, as you find your place in the world and you wanna be, uh, you wanna be cool, you wanna be attractive, you wanna be buff, you wanna, um, y- you know, know how to be, uh, talking to women and, you know, all of these things that, um, that i- that are normal for teenage boy development.

Those can be mined now for attention and monetization, and whereas if you carried on like a pork chop as a teenage boy, I can attest through personal experience, you were kind of slapped down back in your place by society, you know? Right.

You're not cool.

You don't know what you're talking about.

You'll realize this the hard way, and you'll have a life lesson that, uh, you know, you're just being a, a teenage boy carrying on and, um, you know, you grow out of it and, and, and find your place in the world.

But now, the same things that were kind of, you know, uh, shut down by society and the groups around you are rewarded, and those same teenage male impulses that come from a place of insecurity find a home, and you get all the toxic elements are amplified and rewarded.

Is this a passing fad? Will we get over it? Do we need to regulate our way out of this problem? Should governments be looking harder at algorithms and, and the incentives, the platform incentives which are offered up?

What are we talking about here or who are we talking about here?

Well, there's really two classes of people that we've got to focus on because there's different reasons why you want attention on social media.

And the first one is very transactional.

If you get a lot of engagement on social media platforms, you get paid.

If you get a lot of followers, you can have paid partnerships.

You can get them to pay for your content.

So the way that you make money on social media now is to get a lot of engagement, and the way you get a lot of engagement, the cheap sugar hit way, is by making people outraged and by saying things that are more extreme than everyone else.

But Ed, as a consumer, as a news consumer today, what can people do?

What are we talking about here or who are we talking about here? Yeah.

Well, there's really two classes of people that we've got to focus on because there's different reasons why you want attention on social media.

And the first one is very transactional.

If you get a lot of engagement on social media platforms, you get paid.

If you get a lot of followers, you can have paid partnerships.

You can get them to pay for your content.

So the way that you make money on social media now is to get a lot of engagement.

But Ed, as a consumer, as a news consumer today, what can people do?

How much does this concern you, Ed?

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, uh, appeal to or else be booted out of office.

There are the conventional ways of expressing outrage, like protests or, you know, 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, of not pissing off your neighbor, meant that consensus is the only solution to, to, 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 polarize and incite and are more extreme.

Do you have a theory on that, Ed?

Mm-hmm.

They couldn't do it.

All of the gravitational force is like, "We've gotta stick with the mainstream consensus, right or wrong." Now, the equivalent of the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald is your Instagram feed or, you know, your YouTube recommendation algorithm, and that favors the fringy shit that would never get an advertiser in a traditional publisher.

So the more, uh, counter-narrative your story is, and the more, uh, you know, uh, outside of the mainstream consensus, the more interesting it is to the algorithm.

Yeah

... will come out and, and decide, you know, what's, what's important.

And most people are decent.

Most people are, you know, want others to do well.