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Antisocial

How Online Extremists Broke America

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Antisocial

By: Andrew Marantz
Narrated by: Andrew Marantz
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About this listen

‘An absorbing study of online propaganda and its threat to democracy’ Guardian, Book of the Day.

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 radicalization.

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.

 Elections & Political Process Politics & Government United States Words, Language & Grammar World Writing & Publishing

Critic Reviews

Antisocial is at once funny and scary, antic and illuminating. It’s a must-read for anyone still struggling to understand the last election or hoping to make sense of the next one (Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction)
Anyone who wants to know how Silicon Valley’s dream turned into democracy’s nightmare should read Antisocial, Andrew Marantz’s fascinating firsthand exploration of the trolls and nihilists who have hijacked the internet. This book puts contemporary politics in an alarming new light (Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money)
Marantz has produced an essential work of reporting—one that illuminates not only how our information landscape emerged but also how it has become so corrupted and dangerous. If you want to comprehend the world in which we live, Antisocial is a book you must read (David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon)
A riveting exploration of the causes and consequences of our current societal nervous breakdown. Antisocial is absolutely essential reading to understand This Moment., and it will stick in your brain long after you’ve devoured it (Chris Hayes, host of All In with Chris Hayes)
We live in an era where current events are driven as much by scrolls of binary code as they are by matters in the physical world. With Antisocial Andrew Marantz has crafted a map of this digital landscape, charted how it came to be, and pointed to its implications for all of us. This is an important book whose relevance will only grow over time (Jelani Cobb, Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism at Columbia University and author of The Substance of Hope)
Antisocial is a close-up portrait of the new species of online shock artists who have taken over the American conversation. It is the most detailed and concrete account of how our politics have been changed by social media. This book is essential reading (Jaron Lanier, Interdisciplinary Scientist at Microsoft Research and author of You Are Not a Gadget)
Nowhere is the propagation of racist ideas more apparent today than on the social media platforms Silicon Valley created—but failed to govern. In Antisocial, Andrew Marantz crafted a complex, unsettling portrait of how blind techno-utopianism can lead to disaster. This is necessary reading if we intend to keep the next generation of social networks from becoming yet another American source of oppression (Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist)
All stars
Most relevant
The author tries to mimic someone's voice when quoting them which becomes very grating.

Besides that, it's very interesting and well crafted.

Only complaint is he adopts voices for quotes

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Like a NYer article, but longer. The book gives an account of how the techno-utopians’ optimism blinded them to their platforms’ potential to wreck havoc on our civic fabric. You can’t understand this decade without this book. Here it is, in careful detail.

Excellent — required to understand the contemporary world

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Anyone who uses the internet should read this book.

Fascinating, frightening and incisive.

Highly recommended

A very important, illuminating book

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Antisocial is a deeply concerning indictment of our 'new world'.

This isn't one of those hastily researched books about Trump and Trump does not feature much at all. But his most ardent fans certainly do. Marantz was researching the alt-right before 2016 and has rare insights into their attitudes from that time.
The book tells the stories of quite a few of these 'characters'. The fact that he could spend so much time with them and come out seemingly unscathed (at least in a literary sense) is of real credit to him and his art.
It's a well researched and astutely written description of a deeply troubled time that should be read as widely as possible.

If an author can get away with reading their own book (and most can't and usually don't) then it adds another dimension as nobody knows the content better. Marantz does and excellent job.

Everyone should read this book

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