It’s no secret that we live in an era of outrage. Political views are more polarised than they’ve ever been, we have the world’s information at our fingertips, and frankly our brains are not equipped to work this way.

In this book, Ashley ‘Dotty’ Charles sets out to uncover why we get so easily outraged, the effects that outrage has on its victims, and whether or not it’s actually an effective tool. A lot of this discussion was incredibly thought-provoking, and I particularly enjoyed the inclusion of interviews with people we have been outraged against, specifically Rachel Dolezal and Katie Hopkins. I thought a really good balance was struck between the kind of online campaigns that are actually effective and the ones that aren’t, as well as the always-timely reminder that many people – Hopkins included – are deliberately trying to provoke outrage, and that to respond is to feed the beast.

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As with any book about social media, it was inevitably out of date within weeks of being published. Even without the knowledge of events such as the January 6th insurrection, though, there was remarkably little about right-wing outrage. I think the context of online backlash about a squint-and-it’s-racist soap advert is very different when it’s placed next to the backlash of the casting of a Black person in a TV show, and it felt like an oversight not to be included here.

Ironically, I thought there were many points that lacked a lot of nuance. In one passage for instance, the author went on a rant about what she saw as tiny, inconsequential debates (specifically whether ‘guys’ is a gender neutral term, or whether ‘nude’ should be used in fashion and beauty). Besides the tasteless hyperbole at the end which I won’t repeat here, I would have really welcome a discussion about these micro-issues, and with a book so short there was certainly room for it. My two cents is that they should be discussed and welcomed, because they force the non-marginalised group to confront pre-conceptions and assumptions they have made (I was a pre-teen when the book Noughts and Crosses first opened my eyes to ‘skin-tone’ products being designed with someone who looks like me in mind, for example). It was a short passage, but I thought it was indicative of the single-minded approach this book took.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this book feels like an extension of the article that inspired it. In many ways it’s a manifesto, or a very long opinion piece, and there were so many ideas that could have been brought in to explore the topic further. That’s not to say that it’s not worth a read, though, as it still offers a fascinating insight into our online outrage.