A day of travelling by train offered the time and distance needed to create five connected essays. Rage bait, aura farming, guided discovery, and practical resistance are not isolated topics. Together they describe one system, how it works, how it shapes behaviour, and where space for autonomy still exists.
Five essays, one system, and a train ride to write them
Yesterday I took a day off to meet my boss in Bruges. Because I hate traffic jams, I decided to travel by train. That choice came with an unexpected luxury. No meetings, no calls, no obligation to react immediately to anything. Just a window, the steady rhythm of stations passing by, and, for once, enough uninterrupted time to write. By the time I arrived, I had created five posts, all circling the same question from different directions.
They were not planned as a series, but they clearly belong together.
Each essay looks at a different surface of the same underlying system, the way the modern internet no longer merely hosts human behaviour, but actively shapes it.
The first piece, Rage bait and the economics of engineered emotions, began with a word. Oxford Languages’ Word of the Year offered a precise name for something that had already become impossible to ignore. Anger is no longer a side effect of online discourse. It has become a resource. Platforms have learned that outrage produces predictable engagement, and they optimise for it. Rage bait is not an aberration. It is a feature.
The second essay, How the internet stopped being a place you explore and became a place you are guided through, shifted the focus from emotion to structure. It described how navigation itself has been replaced. Search, links, and intentional discovery still exist, but they are no longer central. Feeds and recommendations now decide what appears, when it appears, and what quietly disappears. Choice remains in theory, but in practice it has been hollowed out.
From there, Aura farming and the industrialisation of authenticity. If rage bait exploits anger, aura farming exploits presence. It is the careful construction of effortlessness, the performance of sincerity, the optimisation of being perceived as real. Authenticity becomes something to manage rather than something to inhabit.
The fourth piece, Rage bait, aura farming, and the fatigue economy, tied these threads together. Outrage and aura may look like opposites, but they are complementary strategies within the same system. One agitates, the other soothes. One accelerates emotion, the other slows it just enough to hold attention. What remains is not engagement in any meaningful sense, but exhaustion.
The final piece, Practical resistance in a guided internet, shifted the focus from diagnosis to response. Critique alone easily turns into resignation, so the question became how to act without theatrics or withdrawal. The answer was deliberately unspectacular. Reclaiming navigation instead of scrolling. Preferring search over recommendation. Choosing local systems that wait for input rather than pushing stimuli. Allowing media consumption to slow down again. None of these gestures dismantle the system, but together they restore something essential, the ability to decide when and how to engage.
Algorithmic fatigue is the natural outcome of this loop.
What became clear, somewhere between stations, is that none of these phenomena are accidental. They form a coherent system with clear incentives. Platforms are not primarily designed to inform, connect, or empower. They are designed to optimise engagement, and engagement is easiest to extract from emotion, identity, and habit.
That is why the final piece in the sequence, Practical resistance in a guided internet, was necessary. Critique without response easily turns into resignation. The aim was not to reject technology, but to identify where agency can still be reclaimed. Reclaiming navigation. Choosing search over scroll. Preferring local systems that wait for input instead of pushing stimuli. Allowing media consumption to slow down again.
Seen together, these essays describe a full loop. From emotional manipulation, to guided choice, to performative identity, to collective exhaustion, and finally to small, practical ways of stepping sideways.
None of this will dismantle the system overnight. But understanding it matters. Systems are most powerful when they remain unnamed. Once you can see how outrage is incentivised, how authenticity is engineered, how choice is curated, and how fatigue is produced, participation becomes a decision rather than a reflex.
Perhaps that is what the train ride really offered. Not just time to write, but enough distance from the feed to see the pattern as a whole.
The internet did not suddenly become hostile. It became optimised. And optimisation, left unchecked, always comes at the cost of human depth. Recognising that cost is the beginning of something else.