Antisocial: How Online Extremists Broke America
By (Author) Andrew Marantz
Pan Macmillan
Picador
20th December 2020
17th September 2020
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Nationalism
Elections and referenda / suffrage
Reportage, journalism or collected columns
303.48402854678
Paperback
400
Width 130mm, Height 197mm, Spine 27mm
284g
From a rising star at The New Yorker, a deeply immersive chronicle of how the optimistic entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley set out to create a free and democratic internet - and how the cynical propagandists of the alt-right exploited that freedom to propel the extreme into the mainstream. For several years, Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer, has been embedded in two worlds. The first is the world of social-media entrepreneurs, who, acting out of navete and reckless ambition, upended all traditional means of receiving and transmitting information. The second is the world of the people he calls 'the gate crashers' - the conspiracists, white supremacists, and nihilist trolls who have become experts at using social media to advance their corrosive agenda. Antisocial ranges broadly - from the first mass-printed books to the trending hashtags of the present; from secret gatherings of neo-Fascists to the White House press briefing room - and traces how the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and then how it becomes reality. Combining the keen narrative detail of Bill Buford's Among the Thugs and the sweep of George Packer's The Unwinding, Antisocial reveals how the boundaries between technology, media, and politics have been erased, resulting in a deeply broken informational landscape - the landscape in which we all now live. Marantz shows how alienated young people are led down the rabbit hole of online radicalization, and how fringe ideas spread--from anonymous corners of social media to cable TV to the President's Twitter feed. Marantz also sits with the creators of social media as they start to reckon with the forces they've unleashed. Will they be able to solve the communication crisis they helped bring about, or are their interventions too little too late
Andrew Marantz is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he has worked since 2011. His writing has also appeared in Harper's, New York, Mother Jones, the New York Times, and many other publications. A contributor to Radiolab and The New Yorker Radio Hour, he has spoken at TED and has been interviewed on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and many other outlets.