Propaganda 2.1 Model, Manufacture of Dissent and Monetisation of Outrage

This article introduces the Propaganda 2.1 model as a theoretical extension of the author's earlier Propaganda 2.0 framework, arguing that contemporary online media ecosystems are no longer governed primarily by political, ideological or cultural objectives but by a dominant economic policy of platform capitalism. In this regime, revenue optimisation trumps belief formation, identity construction and persuasive coherence, transforming propaganda from a project of ideological influence into an infrastructure for affect extraction. The model identifies three core mechanisms structuring this new phase. First, rage-baiting or the monetisation of outrage becomes the central commodity form of public discourse, replacing persuasion with the algorithmic optimisation of irritation, humiliation and moral injury. Second, the proliferation of AI 'slop' produces a regime of semantic banalisation in which meaning is not distorted but dissolved through excess, flooding the public sphere with syntactically fluent yet cognitively weightless content that exhausts attention rather than informing it. Third, parasociality functions as simulated intimacy, substituting civic belonging and social reciprocity with managed emotional attachment to influencers, automated agents and personalised feeds. Together these mechanisms describe a propaganda system that no longer requires belief, truth or ideological consistency. Outrage replaces conviction, automation replaces meaning, and artificial intimacy replaces sociality, marking the transition from the manufacture of dissent to the liquidation of public opinion itself. Does a media system that no longer seeks to persuade but to provoke still qualify as propaganda, or has it become a different technology of power altogether? If outrage is now more profitable than truth, what remains of public opinion as a democratic force? Can meaning survive in a communicative environment flooded by automated, semantically empty content? And when artificial intimacy replaces social relations, is the public sphere still a space for politics, or only a marketplace for emotions?