Vincent Trapinaud
Social media makes us anxious because its business model runs on engagement, and fear, anger and outrage are the emotions that hold attention best. Nobody decided to make us anxious: feeds that are optimized around the clock simply discovered, by trial and error, that anger pays. Understanding this mechanism, without hunting for culprits, is already the first way to protect yourself from it.
What you feel is not an illusion
You know the scene. You pick up your phone to check a message, two minutes, no more. Twenty-five minutes later you close the app with your jaw a little tight, your breath a little shorter, and a vague sense that the world is going wrong and there is nothing you can do about it. You read about a horrific crime, a controversy you had never heard of that morning, three outraged replies to a sentence torn from its context. None of it concerned you directly. And yet all of it went through you.
People speak of news anxiety, of information fatigue. The vocabulary changes; the experience stays the same: you come out of the screen more tense than you went in, without quite knowing why you keep going back.
The first thing to say is simple: you are not weak, and you are not alone. What you feel is not a flaw of character or a lack of willpower. It is the predictable effect of an environment that has been shaped, patiently, to produce exactly this reaction. To understand it, you don’t need to look for a villain. You need to look at a number.
How does the attention economy work?
Most of the big social platforms are free for the people who use them. They are funded by advertising, and advertising is sold by the minute of attention: the longer you stay, the more ads you see and the more usable traces you leave behind. As early as the 1970s, the economist Herbert Simon put into words the intuition that underlies all of this: where information is abundant, attention becomes scarce. And what is scarce gets sold.
In this model, the reigning metric is called engagement: time spent, clicks, shares, comments, reactions. Book I of Les Fermiers (The Farmers), a trilogy currently published in French, describes it with an almost clinical restraint:
That is the whole of it. No secret plan, no dark room where someone decides to make humanity anxious: a company, an indicator, teams tasked with pushing it up. That very banality is what makes the mechanism powerful: it needs no one’s complicity.
In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the scholar Shoshana Zuboff describes this economy as the capture of human experience, turned into data and then into predictions about our future behavior.
Why do algorithms favor anger?
This is where the mechanism becomes truly interesting. The engineers who optimize a news feed are not reflecting on the nature of the human soul. They test. They compare two versions of the feed, keep the one that makes the number rise, and start again. Thousands, millions of times. The process looks less like design than like blind selection: whatever raises engagement survives, whatever lowers it disappears.
And at the end of that selection, something emerges that nobody drew up.
Why anger and fear rather than joy? Psychology offers part of the answer, and it is an old one. Our nervous system gives more weight to what threatens than to what reassures: researchers call it the negativity bias. For an organism that has to survive, missing a danger costs more than missing a piece of good news. Alarming information therefore triggers vigilance, a need to know what happens next, an urge to react. Moral outrage adds a social force of its own: it pushes us to take a stand, to share, to rally our side.
An algorithm doesn’t need to know these laws to exploit them. It only has to measure what works. And what works, on an endless feed, is whatever hooks the alarm system. Joy, in the end, has a fatal commercial flaw: it satisfies. A person at peace puts the phone down. Book II sums it up in one sentence: the attention economy “does not feed on our joy—joy would make us let go of the screen.”
One last refinement: the feed is personalized. Each of us watches a wall calculated for us alone, based on what made us react the day before. Book I speaks of “a cave for each person,” tuned to the sensitivity of whoever is looking at it.
What is established, and what is hypothesis
On a subject like this, it is easy to slide from observation to panic, or from criticism to conspiracy. So the levels have to be carefully separated.
First, what is public. In 2021, a former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen, made internal company documents public. These documents, widely covered by the press and discussed before lawmakers, showed that the platform knew its ranking choices could favor divisive, outraged content, and that at one point its algorithm gave emotional reactions, anger among them, considerably more weight than a simple “like.” Book I keeps this detail because it says everything: in a ranking calculation, an angry reaction could count several times more than an expression of approval.
The precise effects on mental health are still the subject of serious scientific debate, and those debates should be left open. But the economic logic is hardly contested anymore: engagement rewards strong reactions, and the most reliable ones are fear, anger and outrage.
The Farmers’ reading: a harvest made visible
Here, now, is what the trilogy proposes, fully aware of what it is putting forward: a map, not a belief.
In the universe of Les Fermiers, human emotions produce an energy that others consume. The Honey comes in two main qualities. Ba-Honey, produced by fear, anger, despair and division: abundant, stable, easy to provoke. Hab-Honey, produced by joy, gratitude and wonder: subtler, rarer, more volatile. If you had a farm to run, says book I, you would optimize for the first. That is the hierarchy of the harvest.
Now reread what the engagement machine does. It puts anger, fear and outrage at the very top of its priorities. It sidelines joy, which makes people let go of the screen. It even puts a number on the gap between the two. The Farmers’ hypothesis fits in one sentence: by optimizing its number, the machine has rebuilt precisely the hierarchy of the harvest, with Ba-Honey at the top. Without knowing it. Without wanting it.
This parallel does not prove that the Farmers exist, and the book does not claim otherwise. It shows that a fragment of the system the map describes, its lowest mechanics, has passed into the realm of the measurable: it now has dashboards and whistleblowers.
You will find these three qualities of energy in detail, the third of which matters a great deal for what follows, in our article on the three honeys and the emotions.
Who profits from anger?
The question in the title deserves an honest answer, and it is not the one you might expect. It would be comfortable to point at culprits: a few cynical executives, an initiated elite who know exactly what they are doing. Book I explicitly refuses that easy way out, and it refuses it for a reason worth understanding.
The people who build and run these platforms are, for the vast majority, engineers, managers, metrics specialists. Rational people, often in a hurry, who believe none of what the trilogy describes. They do not know the system. In the Farmers’ vocabulary, they are unconscious cooperators: the first level of cooperation, the most widespread, the one that requires no belief at all, only decisions.
At the first level, then, anger profits a business model: it is converted into screen time, and so into revenue. According to the Farmers’ hypothesis, it also feeds a larger harvest, in which the human players are the least informed cogs.
But there is a third point, the most delicate one, and it is what forbids turning this observation into a weapon. Outrage against the platforms is harvested too. A fiery denunciation of anger algorithms is excellent content for the anger algorithm. It engages, it gets shared, it holds attention. The feed loves criticism of the feed. Whoever discovers they are being exploited and flies into a rage against the exploiters produces exactly what the machine expects. Book I says it bluntly: you don’t leave the farm by hating the farmer. You stay in it, with extra rage to be harvested.
That is why this article does not ask you to be outraged. Outrage is the fuel of the problem, not its solution.
The same screen that harvests you is the first place to see the harvest
You might feel trapped: if anger against the system feeds it too, what is left? What is left is what book I calls calm lucidity, and an irony that looks a lot like good news.
By industrializing the capture of attention, the machine made it observable. You only have to look at your own phone with a little attention to see the mechanism working live: the headline designed to shock, the video that rolls into a more infuriating one, the comment that makes your blood rise, and the half hour that has evaporated.
The chapter closes on an image that stays with you: the tower is tall, but it is made of glass. For the first time in a long while, you can see through it. This is not the position of the fighter. It is the position of the observer. The trilogy does not teach you to defeat anything; it teaches you to see. Sight, never power.
How can you actually protect yourself from social media anxiety?
A lot of advice on the subject is guilt-inducing: delete your accounts, blame yourself for every minute spent scrolling. That is not the Farmers’ approach. You don’t have to quit everything, or judge yourself. The question is not whether you are inside or outside. It is whether you are present there or simply being harvested. Three gestures are enough to begin.
1. See the harvest as it happens
The first gesture is a simple shift of gaze. When a piece of content grabs you, ask yourself a single question: what does this content want me to feel, and why was it shown to me, now? Not to reject it, nor to distrust it on principle. Just to see it for what it is: an object selected because it was likely to make you react.
That small step back changes a great deal. An alarmist headline seen as an alarmist headline loses part of its grip. You can keep informing yourself, even seriously, without being harvested by the information. Book II puts it this way: you choose where to place your attention, instead of letting it be sucked away.
2. Notice the contraction in the body
The second gesture goes through the body, because that is where everything plays out before thought gets involved. Anger rising in front of a screen doesn’t begin with an idea. It begins with a contraction: the jaw tightening, the shoulders creeping up, the stomach knotting, the breath catching high in the chest. Book II describes this “small contraction in the pit of the stomach” as the very substance of ordinary Ba-Honey, produced without a thought, day after day.
Learning to spot it means taking back the moment. It is not about suppressing the emotion: it is legitimate, and the news often justifies being moved. It is about noticing it, letting the breath settle, feeling your feet on the ground. A tiny shift helps a lot. Book II suggests it in relation to anxiety: stop saying “I am anxious” and say instead “there is some anxiety passing through me.” It works for anger too. The anger is still there, but you are no longer entirely it.
According to the tradition of Wilhelm Reich, these repeated contractions end up lodging themselves durably in posture. If you want to understand how the body keeps the memory of our tensions, read our article on Reich’s character armor.
3. Stop betting
The third gesture is the subtlest. Every time you answer a provocation with a provocation, share something only to vent your fury, or stay an hour longer in a quarrel no one will win, you put another stake on the table. You are playing the feed’s game, by its rules.
Stopping betting doesn’t mean losing interest in the world, or keeping quiet in the face of injustice. It means refusing the format the machine prefers: instant reaction, shared fury, contempt. In practice, it can take very simple forms. Waiting before you reply. Not passing on what serves only to enrage. Turning off notifications that keep you on permanent alert. Choosing, sometimes, slower formats for your news. Noticing what truly nourishes you on your screens, and letting it take up more room.
None of these gestures is heroic. They don’t need to be. What the system cannot process, says book I, is neither submission nor revolt: it is the being who sees the mechanism and, without anger, stops feeding it.
Toward another quality of attention
You might think the only way out is to manufacture more joy to offset the fear: more inspiring content, more positive thinking. The trilogy proposes something else. Between the Ba-Honey of fear and the Hab-Honey of joy, it describes a third quality of energy, the Third Honey: that of conscious lucidity, of attention that sees what is happening at the moment it happens. According to the Farmers’ hypothesis, this is precisely the one the harvest cannot take.
Applied to our screens, the idea is very simple. You can read the same news, scroll the same feed, and come out either more tense or more lucid. The difference does not lie in the content. It lies in the presence with which you move through it. Attention, says book II, is precisely what cannot be harvested: to take it back is already to take yourself back.
This reading does not ask you to believe it. It offers a test, starting tonight: open your favorite app, feel what it does in your body, and notice the moment you want to react. That moment, seen clearly, is already a little freedom.
The chapter on the towers, in book I of Les Fermiers (in French), develops this whole line of reasoning, from Steiner to the platforms’ internal documents. And if you would like to take the exploration further in a more symbolic way, card 22 of the Atanor, Anger, lets you meditate on that red fire that rises so fast, and on what it becomes when you look at it instead of serving it.
