Peter Ayolov

Moral Outrage Networks: The Sociology of Digital Anger examines how anger has become one of the dominant organising forces of contemporary moral and political life. Rather than treating outrage as an emotional excess, a media pathology, or a democratic failure, the book argues that moral anger is a structural condition of morality itself. Wherever moral boundaries exist, anger emerges as the mechanism through which violations are detected, communicated, and sanctioned. In digital societies, this function has been absorbed into networked communication systems that amplify, stabilise, and monetise outrage. The book develops the concept of moral outrage networks to describe how platforms, institutions, and publics co-produce continuous cycles of moral accusation and response. Drawing on moral psychology, sociology, media theory, and political philosophy, it shows how moral disagreement increasingly takes the form of permanent indignation rather than deliberation. Moral outrage networks do not merely reflect conflict over values; they actively organise political identities, attention economies, and symbolic power. Through a genealogy of anger across historical media regimes, the book traces how moral emotions were once embedded in local communities and institutions, and how digital infrastructures have transformed anger into an always-on, scalable resource. It analyses algorithmic amplification, outrage exploitation, and contemporary propaganda models, demonstrating how moral emotions are operationalised within platform capitalism. The final sections confront the ethical paradox at the heart of digital moral life. If anger is necessary for morality to exist at all, how can it be restrained without undermining moral vigilance itself? The book does not offer prescriptions for eliminating outrage, but instead clarifies the conditions under which moral anger retains its critical function, and the conditions under which it becomes self-reinforcing, corrosive, or nihilistic. In doing so, it provides a sociological framework for understanding polarisation, media distrust, and the transformation of moral authority in networked societies.

This book explores the distortion of communication online, centered around the theory that the economic policy model of online media is primarily based on the systematic manufacture of dissent. Following the media criticism tradition of Habermas and Chomsky, among others, the book shows how anger can motivate news consumption as the principle of divide-and-rule in the online media of the 21st century is systematically applied. The author posits that media addiction increases interest, therefore deliberate distortion of facts and the manufacture of dissent provide the media with a larger audience and this becomes the business model. This insightful volume will interest researchers, scholars, and students of media economics, political economy of media, digital media, propaganda, mass communication, and media literacy.

This article brings into dialogue Michel Foucault’s 1981–1982 Collège de France lectures The Hermeneutics of the Subject and his 1984 course The Courage of Truth with Rick Roderick’s Self Under Siege lectures, in order to reframe the contemporary crisis of subjectivity as a linguistic problem. Foucault’s recovery of epimeleia heautou as a practical, ethical relationship to truth is contrasted with the modern reduction of subjectivity to gnothi seauton, where the self becomes an object of knowledge rather than a practice of transformation. Roderick’s account of the late-modern self describes a condition of radical deflation, in which truth is stripped of ontological weight and the subject is dissolved into discursive fragments, simulations, and performative identities. By synthesising these two trajectories, the article argues that the collapse of the self is not merely ethical or metaphysical but metalinguistic: the self survives only as a grammatical effect, a reflexive function generated by language speaking about itself. The disappearance of care of the self thus coincides with the hypertrophy of the language of the self, producing a subject that is endlessly described yet no longer lived. The article concludes that a renewed ethics of self-care may require not a richer vocabulary of identity, but a partial suspension of the language of the self itself, recovering practices of silence, askēsis, and non-discursive truth that resist the deflationary grammar of late modernity. Does the disappearance of epimeleia heautou mark the moment when Western culture became trapped in the infinite regress of gnothi seauton, mistaking self-knowledge for self-cultivation? Have centuries of attempting to ‘know oneself’ been lost in spirals of self-reference, deferral of meaning, and aporia because the self does not exist as a substance but only as a practice requiring constant cultivation? Is the contemporary crisis of subjectivity therefore not a loss of identity but a loss of care, in which language proliferates while life withers? Can the self be understood only as something alive, in flux, and irreducibly temporal, graspable not as an object but as a movement across different phases of existence? And, like the riddle of the Sphinx, is the self always different in different times, places, and conditions, such that any attempt to fix it conceptually already betrays its living truth? A self that is only spoken about is already under siege, for care begins where grammar falls silent. When askēsis is replaced by algorithms and ‘know thyself’ becomes a slogan, the soul forgets how to stay alive.