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Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation
by Andrew Marantz
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 naïvete 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?
"A searching study of the right-wing gate-crashers who have overwhelmed social media in the Trump era...Invaluable political reportage in a time of crisis." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Marantz doesn't shy away from asking pointed questions or noting his subjects' inconsistencies. This insightful and well-crafted book is a must-read account of how quickly the ideas of what's acceptable public discourse can shift." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"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
"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, author of A Colony in a Nation and host of All In with Chris Hayes
This information about Antisocial was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Andrew Marantz is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he has worked since 2011. His work 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.
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