Antisocial
How Online Extremists Broke America
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3 months free
Antisocial
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Narrated by:
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Andrew Marantz
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By:
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Andrew Marantz
About this listen
This is a story about how the extreme became mainstream. It reveals how the truth became ‘fake news’, how fringe ideas spread and how a candidate many dismissed as a joke was propelled to the presidency by the dark side of the internet. For several years, Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer, has been embedded with alt-right propagandists, who have become experts at using social media to advance their corrosive agenda. He also spent time with the social-media entrepreneurs who made this possible, through their naive and reckless ambition, by disrupting all of the traditional information systems.
Join Marantz as some of the biggest brains in Silicon Valley teach him how to make content go viral; as he hangs out with the conspiracists, white supremacists and nihilist trolls using these ideas to make their memes, blogs and podcasts incredibly successful; and as he meets some of the people led down the rabbit hole of online radicalisation.
Antisocial is about how the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and then becomes reality. By telling the story of the people who hijacked the American conversation, Antisocial will help you understand the world they have created, in which we all now live.
©2019 Andrew Marantz (P)2019 Penguin Random HouseListeners also enjoyed...
I didn't always agree with the author's opinions but I admire the face he was clear about what he believes and that he was courageous enough to openly engage with white nationalists, white supremacists, nazis, and various others, often anti-semitic and racist, and pro-Trump.
To me this is one of a growing number of books which shows how much of the world and particularly America have become highly polarised and how social media is a large part of the problem. Depsite the subject matter I couldn't get enough of this book and listened to at every opportunity. It is very well read too.
Very insightful
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Gripping stuff
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It's as if knowing what they ate for lunch, knowing what shoes they are wearing, and having every off the cuffish twattish utterance related verbatim is somehow going to build up to an incisive understanding of these people. It doesn't. It just gets boring.
He narrates in a sneering tone. Don't get me wrong, I dislike the people he writes about as much as him. But it gets very tedious. The people he follows are very tedious. Successful, sadly. Dangerous, certainly. But oh so tedious!
This book could easily have been half the length. And a decent editor could have persuaded the author to avoid ridiculous words like 'facticity'.
If observational documentary in book form is your thing and you have the patience for it, fine. But I am hungry for intelligent analysis.
If you want a book that really gives you an understanding of how and why post-fact, neo-fascist politics is on the rise, with intelligent analysis, then read Peter Pomerantsev's book 'This is not propaganda: adventures in the war against reality'.
Too long, too descriptive, too lacking in analysis
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