Cui Bono? Who Profits from Your Outrage?

How the outrage economy trains us to be angry, and who’s cashing the checks.

There’s a moment in The Departed that has been lodged in my brain for years.

Martin Scorsese drops us into a cramped briefing room. Alec Baldwin’s character is leading a task force trying to figure out who’s moving stolen microprocessors. The room is buzzing with theories and speculation. At one point, he turns to the whiteboard and writes two simple Latin words:

Cui bono?

Who benefits?

It’s a blunt instrument of a question, but also a scalpel. Instead of getting lost in conspiracy and noise, he wants his team to start with the most basic filter:
If you want to understand what’s really going on, follow the benefit. Who gets the power, the money, the leverage, the story they wanted all along?

I think about that scene every time I open my phone.

Because these days, your feed is that briefing room. Everyone is waving their hands, yelling their theory, urgently promising that this is the thing you must be furious about right now. And if you strip away the graphics, the slogans, and the moral posturing, you’re left with the same core question:

Who benefits from all this outrage?

Rage Is Not an Accident. It’s a Business Model.

We talk about “rage” and “polarization” as if they’re a tragic weather system that just rolled in one day.

But our anger is not random. It is highly curated.

Social media platforms like X/Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube make money when you stay on the app. Fox News, MSNBC, and the rest of cable news make money when you keep watching. Political campaigns make money when you donate. Culture-war ministries and influencers make money when you buy the book, the conference ticket, or the merch.

What keeps you engaged? Not calm, nuanced information. Not, “Here’s a complicated issue; let’s walk through it slowly.”

What keeps you engaged is activation.

Fear. Indignation. Contempt. The hit of superiority you feel when you see “your side” owning “their side.” That tiny rush when you share a clip and the likes start rolling in. That low simmer of rage you carry through the day like a space heater.

None of this is accidental. The algorithms favor the posts and clips that hook your emotions, and rage is one of the most reliable ways to do that.

If you doubt that, look at who floats to the top of the attention economy:

• The culture-war segments on Fox News

• The clips that go viral on X/Twitter

• The soundbites from Charlie Kirk, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, and a long line of imitators

• The “prophetic” hot takes from religious personalities whose entire brand seems to be: “Let me tell you who you should be furious at today.”

That isn’t the occasional byproduct of a healthy conversation. That’s the product. That’s the business.

My Eric Metaxas Wake-Up Call

I wish I could say I spotted this early, but I didn’t.

For a long time, I admired Eric Metaxas. He was a thoughtful writer and commentator who introduced many people to serious ideas, history, and faith. I recommended his work. I pointed people to him as someone worth listening to.

Then, slowly—but also somehow all at once—his public voice shifted.

The tone hardened. The guests and topics tilted harder into grievance. The arguments became less about persuading and more about stoking a constant state of emergency. Election conspiracies, apocalyptic political rhetoric, a steady stream of content suggesting that if you weren’t as outraged as he was, you were naïve, compromised, or worse.

And suddenly, I had to face an uncomfortable question:

Who was benefiting from this new tone—and who was paying the price?

It clearly benefited him in some ways. It built a brand. It solidified a certain audience. It generated attention, bookings, donations, and a kind of hero status in the culture war.

But what did it do to the people listening?

What did it do to their view of their neighbors?
To their relationships with family members who voted differently?
To the way they interpreted every news story as confirmation that the other side was evil and must be defeated at all costs?

I started seeing the fallout in real life.
Friendships strained. Families split. Church communities pulled apart. Not just because people disagreed on issues—that’s normal in a pluralistic society—but because they had been trained to treat disagreement as betrayal.

Eric Metaxas is just one example. There are plenty of others across the spectrum—political commentators, influencers, pastors, pundits—who realized that rage is rocket fuel. Once they strap it to their brand, it’s hard to let go.

Cui bono?

Who Actually Benefits from Your Anger?

Let’s be explicit.

When you find yourself furious at something you saw online, when you can’t stop thinking about that clip, when you’re tempted to share it immediately—who benefits?

Here’s a short list:

1. Social media companies

Every extra minute you spend on X/Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube is more ad inventory.
Your outrage is engagement. Engagement is revenue.

You are not the customer. You are the product.

2. Cable news and talk shows

The more “breaking” the headline, the more intense the panel, the more unhinged the monologue, the better the ratings.

Calm people don’t binge-watch cable news.
Calm people don’t sit through four hours of talk radio.
Outraged people do.

3. Political campaigns and PACs

Nothing opens a wallet like fear and anger.

The email subject lines say it plainly:

• “We’re under attack.”

• “They’re coming for your kids.”

• “This is our last chance to save America.”

Political fundraising is one long, finely tuned exercise in emotional manipulation. The more threatened you feel, the more likely you are to smash the “donate” button.

4. Ministries and culture-war grifters

Not every ministry or religious leader is doing this, obviously. But a growing number of voices have discovered that if you mix spiritual language with political rage, you can build a very loyal following very quickly.

You can sell books, run conferences, launch “institutes,” and become the go-to person for people who want their political anger baptized as courage and conviction.

The more they can convince you that you’re part of an embattled remnant and everyone else is compromised or demonic, the more you’ll cling to them. The more you’ll give.

5. Influencers who trade in perpetual crisis

There’s a whole class of people—left, right, and beyond—whose livelihood depends on convincing you that you are constantly under threat.

If you ever calm down, they’re out of work.

They benefit from your rage.
They benefit from your fear.
They benefit from you seeing every headline as another sign that we’re inches from collapse.

Meanwhile, you’re the one staying up at night doomscrolling.

Cui bono? Not you.

And Who Loses?

The short answer: we do.

Ordinary people almost always lose in this arrangement. That loss shows up in ways that are subtle and slow, until suddenly they’re not:

• Our relationships deteriorate.
  It becomes impossible to have a normal conversation across differences because we’ve been trained to script the other person as an enemy.

• Our capacity for nuance shrinks.
  We lose the ability to say, “I agree with them on this and disagree with them on that.” Everything collapses into total loyalty or total rejection.

• Our mental health suffers.
  We’re not built to live in a constant state of alarm. The nervous system eventually frays. Anxiety and anger become the air we breathe.

• Our politics become performative.
  Instead of asking, “What will actually help real people?”, we get stuck asking, “What will own the other side?” and “What will prove I’m one of the good guys?”

• Our character deforms.
  The habits of attention we practice every day are forming us into a certain kind of person. If your media diet is 90% outrage, it will not make you more patient, more curious, or more humane.

This is where it connects to something I’ve written about before: how we do politics matters as much as what we believe.

If our political engagement runs on contempt, if we are constantly mainlining content designed to make us hate people we’ve never met, then even if we’re “right” on the issues, we are being shaped into the kind of people who can’t live in a society with anyone who disagrees.

That’s not just bad politics. That’s bad formation.

The Question Before You Click “Share”

So what do we do?

We’re not going to shut down social media or cable news or political campaigns. The outrage machine isn’t going away. But we can decide whether to feed it.

Before you click, comment, or share, try interrogating the moment with a few simple questions:

1. Cui bono?
   Who benefits if I feel outraged by this?

   • A platform?

   • A campaign?

   • A pundit or pastor building a brand?

   • A “movement” that seems to need fresh enemies every day?

2. Who pays the price?

   • Does this make me more suspicious of my neighbors?

   • Will sharing this make it harder for me to have an honest conversation with people I actually know?

   • Is this increasing my capacity for empathy—or draining it?

3. What is this training me to become?
   If I consume and share stuff like this every day for the next five years, what kind of person will I be?
   More open or more closed?
   More grounded or more paranoid?
   More courageous or more brittle?

4. Would I talk this way in person?
   Would I use the same language, the same level of sarcasm and scorn, with an actual human being sitting across from me at a table?

These aren’t complicated questions. They’re just inconvenient. They slow us down long enough to realize that a lot of what we’re told is “urgent” is really just profitable.

Starving the Outrage Machine

I don’t think the answer is to unplug from the world or to pretend everything is fine. There are real injustices. Real dangers. Real reasons to be angry and to act.

The issue is not whether we care. The issue is whether we’re letting people who profit from our rage decide how we care, and who we’re allowed to see as fully human.

So maybe the most radical thing you can do this week is not to post the perfect clapback, but to change your diet:

• Mute or unfollow the accounts—left, right, or religious—that clearly exist to keep you outraged.

• Diversify the voices you listen to so you’re not just marinating in one tribe’s fear.

• Limit the amount of time you spend inside the rage economy. (The world will keep spinning if you don’t see every single take about every single controversy.)

• Invest more time in conversations and relationships that require nuance, listening, and actual presence.

None of that will trend. No one is raising venture capital to build the “Calm, Nuanced, Slow-Take Platform.” But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.

I feel this tension in my own writing. If I wanted more reach, I could crank out spicier hot takes, name more enemies, and sand off the nuance. Substack rewards that kind of thing; outrage almost always travels farther than reflection. I’m under no illusion that my slower, more measured approach is an algorithmic growth strategy. It probably costs me readers. But if I’m honest about cui bono, I’d rather lose a bit of reach than participate in the same outrage economy I’m critiquing.

Back to the Whiteboard

I keep coming back to that scene in The Departed: the whiteboard, the chaos of opinions, Alec Baldwin writing two small words that cut through the fog.

Cui bono?

Who benefits?

The next time a clip makes your pulse race, the next time a headline seems tailor-made to make you furious, the next time a “leader” tells you that your primary duty is to stay angry—about them, about those people, about this crisis—try borrowing that question.

Who benefits from me feeling this way?
Who benefits if I stay this angry?
And what would it look like, for once, if I chose not to?

Because if the people who profit most from your outrage are platforms, politicians, TV networks, and culture-war entrepreneurs—and the person losing the most is you—maybe it’s time to stop playing the role they’ve written for you.

You can still care. You can still act. You can still hold firm convictions.

You just don’t have to let your anger be someone else’s business model.