Summit acquires Coper’s “Angertainment”
Summit Books Australia has acquired ANZ rights to Angertainment: How Social Media Outrange Ruined Everything by political communications specialist Ed Coper.
“Rage-bait – the 2025 Word of the Year – isn’t just an internet annoyance, it has become the supreme vehicle for building political and cultural capital,” said the publisher. “Angertainment is the tale of how people manipulate and weaponise our viral anger to change our world for the worse.
“Ed Coper unmasks the architects of this new power – from manosphere gurus to political demagogues and corporate giants – who have realised that in the attention economy, your anger is the only currency that matters. They mine it to change how you vote, what you buy, and who you hate.”
Coper is author of Facts and Other Lies (A&U), which has “become the definitive handbook for defending truth in the disinformation age,” said the publisher. Described as “a pioneer of politics in the digital age,” the Sydney-based director of the Populares agency has worked with Australian online political movement GetUp!, launched Australian Labor’s first digital presence and was a strategist with Australia’s “Teal” movement.
Coper founded the New York-based Center for Impact Communications, which aims to safeguard US elections from disinformation and overcome vaccine hesitancy. He also founded a New York City creative agency that serviced multiple Nobel Peace laureates, political and social leaders to scale their social impact.
Coper said, “We were promised a global village; we got a gladiatorial arena. Social media outrage now dominates our lives in ways we are seldom even aware of. Pauline Hanson, Nigel Farage in the UK and a host of other populists worldwide, are all riding high in the polls not because of their policies – it is because they have become masters of outrage. I wrote this book to help people decode the world around them as they wonder why everyone seems so angry all of a sudden.”
Summit publishing director Jane Palfreyman said, “Social media was supposed to be the great democratising force of our time, but it has become an outrage machine that baits, gaslights and even controls us. We can feel it happening as we scroll but still we keep returning to our phones. In this vital and urgent book, Ed Coper shows us how our offline lives have been hijacked by our online habits, and how our worst impulses are being stoked and exploited. Angertainment blew my mind and restored my reason. It will be the most important book you read this year.”
Summit has scheduled a June 2026 release.
Category: Local news Rights and acquisitions
