Rage Bait: Attention, Attention Hijacking, and the Neuroscience of Protecting Your Life

Esther Ruth Friedman
Aug 25
3 min read

In 2014, journalist and author Matt Richtel published A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention.

The tragedy: a college student, while texting and driving, hit another car. Two men died. The state investigated and prosecuted the student.

The redemption: with time, he took emotional responsibility for the accident and the fatalities and became a leading voice in speaking about the dangers of distracted driving.

The chapters alternate between the story and Richtel’s interviews with neuroscientists, who explain this:

Top-down attention: intentional focus that engages prior knowledge, goals, plans, and expectations. The prefrontal cortex, the brain’s executive suite, takes charge. It filters out irrelevant information so that we can prioritize the relevant information. It engages the learning, creating, organizing, and implementing functions of our brain.

Bottom-up attention: instinctive responses to stimuli in real time. In a burning building, bottom-up attention takes control and saves our lives. It also wires us to respond to social cues, like text notifications while driving.

Both are necessary. But online grifters hijack bottom-up attention for selfish reasons.

About the Hijacking

Have you heard of rage bait, hate bait, rage farming, and rage seeding? These interchangeable labels describe intentional provocation of outrage and hate to get and keep people fighting. Rage and hate increase traffic, grow subscribers, sell products and ideologies. This marketing capitalizes on and monetizes our bottom-up survival hardwiring.

If a Putin-troll is pulling you down a rabid rabbit hole of conspiracy theory, you want your top-down attention to see the grift and reverse course. This pernicious, profit-generating attention grab works too well. Even my awareness of such cynical tactics doesn’t stop my bottom-up attention from scanning screens and taking the bait. One minute I’m scrolling cat posts, the next I’m ranting on the screen.

When I engage, I cede my power. The grifter wins. I lose. I don’t get that wasted time and focus back.

A woman who is frustrated grabbing her head and grimacing. — Photo by Simran Sood on Unsplash

Countering Online Hijacking

Awareness does help mitigate my automated rage response starts. Recognizing the grift is step one. Naming rage/hate bait calms down my nervous system. Step two is to engage top-down attention.

When calm, this is a fascinating exercise. Questions help:

Who is the source? Check the profile. Does it look legit? Does the source have an agenda?
What’s the tone? Check adjectives – are they incendiary and written in ALL CAPS?
Is the information relevant and important, or provocative? Does it solve anything, or just make claims and accusations without proof?
Is it worth a response?
If I really need to comment (at times, I give in), is it enough to label the post “Rage Bait” and move on?

Claiming and Protecting Your Attention Is Recovery

Trust me, in today’s political climate, I don’t need to check my phone to feel enraged. I wake up and my mind starts ranting about grifters hijacking democracy and gaslighting the nation.

Knowledge empowers. I know that the cynical attention economy steals my focus and time to feed the worst actors. When I, instead, write a post, work on my latest book project (more on that soon), play my guitar or mandolin, or work on a new song, I set the tone for my day. I am present to my life. I am present to the people that I love—a better person, therapist, wife, sister, and friend.

Gentle Souls, this reclamation and protection of my energy, time, and focus is cult recovery. Boundaries. As I say no to grifters of all forms, I am healing. Since 2011, when I stumbled out of “school,” the mom-and-pop cult, I work on this daily. It doesn’t end. It DOES get easier.

Recently, I heard about the ten-minute transition from asleep to awake that can set the tone for your day. It’s worth experimenting: where does your mind go when waking up? Can you choose to engage top-down attention and focus on the people and things that you love—your fascinations and passions? See if you can upgrade the quality of your day, every morning.

So far, so good. Some days are harder than others. But the effort always pays off—proving (so far) that the best revenge is a life well lived. Because life is too short to give away your heart, mind, and soul.