TLDR: my first book, Outrage Machine, was recently published by Hachette. If you, a loved one, or a colleague has struggled to make sense of how the internet has warped our minds and our attitudes, please consider picking up a copy—at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, or Books-a-Million.
My first book was recently published. It took awhile.
The book looks like this!
The idea for this book began almost a decade ago while I was working in San Francisco as a designer. A lot of my friends were early employees at Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Most of them were good people, just trying to make helpful products. They didn’t think they were building an engine of discord or anything like that.
Most of us were in fact very optimistic about social media’s ability to help make great things happen. I had recently built a sizable humanitarian project in Cambodia partially by using the internet to raise awareness for it.
Many of my friends were enamored with the idea of an emerging “empathic civilization” — the idea that empathy was a soft-wired fundamental emotion that could help us all cohere as a single human community. We were just missing the right technology to bring us all together. Easy as that!
You might remember people saying stuff like: “Twitter gave us the Arab Spring!” “Social media is a giant connection machine!” and, even “Facebook is making democracy so much better.”
At this moment, we had all just been given a new superpower: hyper-virality. There was a fresh feeling that anyone, anywhere could make something interesting, funny, or important, and get noticed. Anyone could change the world with the right messaging.
And over the next ten years, change they did.
Of course, it turns out there are many many opinions on exactly how the world should be changed, and that people disagree very strongly about this.
This book is about our new viral superpower. It’s about how we need to reckon with it in order to be more like Spider Man (great power, great responsibility) and less like baby Godzillas (blowing up buildings and institutions because we don’t know any better).
It’s also about how we might manage the new superpowers we seem to be getting every day. Technology is bombarding us with new mutant abilities on a weekly basis (I’m looking at you, AI). We don’t have a good framework for navigating these changes, and it’s making our existence on this planet much more tenuous.
I wrote this to help us navigate our anxious future
Fears about the future are everywhere. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to know what is a real threat and what is just a moral panic.
In the process of researching this book, I went WAY back. I asked the question: are there patterns that we can learn from tech disruptions of the past? Can we look to history to help navigate the future? What I found was surprising:
History is full enormously violent unintended consequences from new viral technology, but as humans living in the now, we are blind to these changes.
New media technology is often dangerous and chaotic because it actually confuses us while it’s changing society. We don’t know what’s going on, and it causes a lot of strife. It usually goes like this:
New tech causes an explosion of viral information
Bad-faith actors exploit it to cause chaos, confusion, violence
We figure it out after enough time (Or, we don’t).
How far back did I go?
Well I’ll just say the first viral tweet-storm was actually Martin Luther’s 95 Theses in 1517, which went viral because it intersected with the radical new technology of the printing press. The printing press caused a viral cascade of new information that turned Europe on its head. It led to decades of civil wars that reorganized the entire continent. Eventually, we got the Enlightenment, but there were millions of deaths and many religious wars in the space between.
I track these disruptions in the book, from the penny presses to the telegraph to radio and the television, and lay them out with a bunch of really fun/interesting anecdotes about how we have successfully (or unsuccessfully) navigated these disruptions.
(Fun fact: Did you know that in the 1930s, one of the most popular radio broadcasters in the country was an actual Nazi propagandist that reached quarter of American households every week? We got through that, too.)
In this book I try to make the invisible forces that shape our perceptions visible to all of us.
Your life is dramatically influenced by social media. If you want to get ahead, and understand exactly how these tools are influencing you—and what you can do about it, this book is for you. It includes a whole lot of illustrations, graphics and fun metaphors to help make these complex dynamics easily understandable.
The Audiobook version has me narrating the first bit, then a great narrator with a storybook voice doing the rest, also comes with a full-color PDF of illustrations.
You can buy the book here: at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Books-a-Million
What do people think of the book?
“The rigor, research, and depth of Tobias’s book is unparalleled, and yet it is refreshingly accessible. I am recommending this book to everyone, not just those interested in technology.”
— Esther Perel, NYT Bestselling Author and Psychotherapist
“Tobias is a master of intuition and metaphor. This is a vivid and unforgettable book… the best thing I have read on this subject.”
— Jonathan Haidt, NYT Bestselling Author of The Righteous Mind (Jon wrote the foreword)
“Tobias provides badly-needed perspective in an era that feels increasingly confusing and chaotic.”
— Tim Urban, Creator of Wait But Why
“This book offers a vital perspective that’s needed for us to build a more humane future.”
— Tristan Harris, Cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology
“Rose-Stockwell debuts with a masterful appraisal... a superior take on how to tame social media.”
— Publisher's Weekly Starred Review
How the book launch is going…
The reception has been surprisingly great. I’ve loved being able to actually talk about these ideas rather than being trapped in a multi-year abusive relationship with a google doc. These are a few notable hits:
MSNBC interview on Morning Joe [video]. This was weird and fun and required me getting powdered with makeup and going live on-air after approximately 3 hours of sleep.
A Gizmodo interview on so-called “rage-baiting” techniques
Podcasts! I’ve been on so many great podcasts. One of the recent interviews I enjoyed doing was a deep dive on the Conspirituality podcast about the history of fake news and how we learned to make sense of things in a world that loves misinformation. Also enjoyed my time on Denizen, Futureproof, and many more.
A few small asks
1 minute asks:
Share this post! It makes a difference. One can surprisingly use social media to help fix social media :)
If you haven’t yet purchased a copy, please pick one up! If you have a loved one that is struggling with by the internet and what it’s doing to our brains, please consider grabbing a copy for them. I’ve tried to make this book as accessible as possible.
And if you’ve bought the book, leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads actually makes a huge difference (algorithm gods control book world, too).
5 minute ask: If you know people with platforms (Podcasts, YouTube channels, TV shows, blogs, IG lives) that might be a good fit for conversation about the book, please hit me up! I’m talking with many people from many different communities about this project. Email me at book@tobias.cc. More info is here: outragemachine.org
I’m incredibly grateful for your attention and time. Thank you. It is a resource I really do value.