Abstract

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to explain how digital capitalism reorganises democratic communication around the production, circulation, and monetisation of moral anger. It argues that contemporary democracies are not collapsing but mutating into forms of decorative democracy, in which institutional procedures persist while their deliberative and integrative functions are hollowed out by market-driven media infrastructures. Under conditions of platform capitalism, dissent is no longer primarily a corrective force directed at power but a commodified resource optimised for attention, engagement, and perpetual conflict. Drawing on political economy, media theory, moral psychology, and communication studies, the article analyses how outrage operates as a stable grammar rather than an episodic emotion, structuring trust, untrust, loyalty, and hostility across digital publics. It shows how informational inequality, algorithmic mediation, and strategic interventions such as cognitive infiltration transform dissent into a managed and often ineffectual spectacle, while simultaneously eroding social capital and shared reality. The article further examines the emotional mechanisms of anger and ressentiment, the rise of grievance politics, and the emergence of performative or kayfabe politics, in which publics knowingly participate in staged conflicts that sustain moral mobilisation without enabling collective resolution. The central claim is that digital capitalism has shifted democratic governance from the manufacture of consent to the manufacture of dissent, producing a communicative environment characterised by permanent polarisation, declining trust, and the planned obsolescence of communication itself. In this environment, political anger circulates freely but rarely translates into structural change, while democracy survives increasingly as form rather than substance.