Quote of the Day
Our accelerating cavalcade of bloodshed rests on three pillars:
First, the massive tech media platforms, which feed us a daily diet of misinformation and tribal distrust. Sex sells. But Big Tech — 40% of the S&P 500 — has found something even better: rage. Eisenhower rightly warned us about the military industrial complex. In the decades after he left office, weapons manufacturers, think tanks, and politicians — the violence entrepreneurs of their era — conspired to make foreign wars and proxy conflicts into billion-dollar businesses. Today, Meta dwarves Lockheed Martin. “Make Memes Not War” is the trillion-dollar strategy.
My argument is not that politics is unrelated to the violence. (Or that there isn’t actual organized political violence, mostly from the far right, as has been well documented.) On the contrary, the ever more violent and inflammatory rhetoric and misinformation and the relentless demonization of every available scapegoat have left their marks all over the lives of the perpetrators. But demagoguery, dog whistles, and tribalism aren’t new. The dangerous novelty of our time is the fusing of capitalism and technology to make rage, and violence, profitable.
We’d go a long way toward dismantling the rage machine if we exposed its makers to liability, as we do with every other corporation. Reforming Section 230, which insulates online platforms from the externalities of the conspiracy theories and Chinese misinformation schemes they peddle, would be a massive first step. Age-gating social media would be a good follow-up.
And online media is an accelerant to our problem. As I often say, (including in my next book), the fire it fuels is disconnected rage. Rarely has a cohort fallen further, faster than young men. Most angry young men find peace. Some grasp a gun instead.My friend Richard Reeves wrote a book, Of Boys and Men, that’s replete with good ideas: recruit more male teachers, invest in vocational training, destigmatize mental health problems. We should raise the minimum wage and create tax breaks for people paying off student debt and saving for home ownership. Implement national service to get young people off their devices and into their communities. Use tax credits that unleash the private building sector and anti-Nimby laws, to help us build 8 million new homes in 10 years. Enforce retirement ages and term limits so older people make room for the rising generation.
The third leg of this stool is the most obvious, but also the most politicized. This post comes nine days after Kirk was killed. In those nine days, 1,125 other Americans died from gun violence. Fifty were children. Two more people have been shot and killed since you began reading this post.
The U.K., where I’ve been living for the past three years, has much in common with the U.S. The problems are familiar: racial division, arguments over immigration, declining opportunity for young people. Yet one difference stands out. It will take more than a year for the U.K. to see as many gun deaths (per capita) as the U.S. experienced in the nine days since Kirk’s murder. Private handguns are outlawed here, and hunting firearms are tightly controlled.
This isn’t complicated: break Big Tech’s immunity, invest in boys, rein in guns. The hard part isn’t policy — it’s courage. The violence entrepreneurs aren’t selling solutions, they’re selling rage. And business is booming.
Scott Galloway
September 29, 2025
Violence Entrepreneurs | No Mercy / No Malice
Interesting… There probably is some truth in what he says about the problem. But what jumps out at me is the mindset of the proposed solutions. Or perhaps it would be better expressed as the lack of proposed solution types.
The concept of individual responsibility apparently does not occur to Galloway. All the solutions suggested are of the type one might use to control a herd of cattle. Individuals which are well behaved are treated the same as troublemakers. Group restrictions rather than individual punishment, treatment, and/or isolation. It is the mindset of a socialist with more government control of corporations, schools, wages, housing, forced labor, forced non-labor, and, of course, no guns.
The one final thing is probably the most mind boggling ignorant. He asserts, “The hard part isn’t policy.” He is certain to get a lot of pushbacks on the first two “pillars”. But regarding the third, he is an alternate reality if he is not aware of the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. Ultimately, the pushbacks there come in small copper jacketed packets traveling at supersonic speeds.