When Outrage Becomes Infrastructure: The Propaganda 2.1 Model

This article develops the concepts of 'manufacture of dissent ', ‘moral outrage networks ’ , and 'Propaganda 2.1 model' as an analytical framework for understanding power, communication and media control under conditions of platform capitalism. Building on Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s classical propaganda model and Christian Fuchs’s formulation of ‘Propaganda 2.0’, the article argues that contemporary propaganda no longer operates primarily through persuasion, ideological coherence or the manufacture of consent. Instead, it functions through the systematic production of dissent and the monetisation of moral outrage as its core economic logic. Propaganda 2.1 describes a media environment in which engagement optimisation displaces truth, meaning and deliberation, and where outrage becomes the most efficient unit of value extraction. The model identifies three interlocking mechanisms: rage-baiting as industrial provocation, semantic banalisation through automated and repetitive content production, and parasociality as simulated intimacy that replaces civic participation with emotional attachment. Together, these mechanisms transform public communication into an infrastructure of affect extraction, where attention is continuously harvested while collective judgement erodes. The article further reframes the classical five-filter model for the digital age, showing how ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak and ideology are reconfigured around engagement metrics, algorithmic governance and emotional volatility. Propaganda 2.1 thus marks a shift from shaping belief to engineering reaction, from public opinion to emotional circulation, and from ideological persuasion to the liquidation of meaning itself. In this environment, dissent is no longer oppositional but systemic, and outrage becomes the dominant technology of power in the digital public sphere.