We automated outrage and called it a feed

Outrage is the cheapest renewable resource on the internet. It costs nothing to produce, spreads without prompting, and regenerates daily. Any system optimizing for engagement will eventually discover it, and every one of them has.

The discovery is rarely deliberate. No one writes a line of code that says "maximize anger." They write a line that says "maximize engagement," point it at a billion people, and let gradient descent find the rest. Anger just happens to be what's downhill.

Once found, it gets industrialized. The feed becomes a farm, and the crop is your reaction. The cruel efficiency is that you supply the labor — every furious reply is free content that makes the next furious reply more likely.

Breaking the farm is hard precisely because it's profitable. But it starts with a small, almost embarrassing act of refusal: noticing the jolt, naming it, and declining to harvest yourself on the platform's behalf. The machine is powerful. It is not, however, allowed to type for you.