Title: Antisocial
Rating: 4 Stars
Our country is in a difficult place. Over half of the members of the Republican Party believe that the QAnon theory is mostly or partly true. If you’re lucky enough not to have been exposed to it, it’s a bat shit insane theory that Donald Trump is successfully waging a war on some Deep State that is attempting to enslave us. It links in with Pizzagate. Robert Mueller was in cahoots with Donald Trump and his report was going to blow the lid off of the deep state. Needless to say that didn’t happen. Lack of predictive accuracy has had no discernible impact upon the wide spread belief.
Many, if not a majority of White Americans, now believe that white people are the most oppressed minority in the US. Accordingly, there is no shortage of hatred of Muslims, Jewish people, and immigrants.
How did we end up here? That’s the subject of Marantz’s book. I gave it a pretty high rating because is it interesting, well researched, and, considering the fact that Marantz is a Jewish mainstream reporter hipster from Brooklyn, pretty brave when you think of the places that he went and the people that he talked to.
He breaks his work into sections. In each section, he focuses on one topic or one person. He opens the night of Trump’s inauguration, with the DeploraBall, the party where the main internet personalities who were so instrumental in meme-ing Trump into the Presidency, celebrated their new found power. Another section discuss Emerson Spatz, a fairly anonymous, highly intelligent, moderately successful internet entrepreneur seemingly only interested in creating clickable content with absolutely no regard for its quality. Another discusses the social media companies and their techno-utopian ideal that all content should be free and that somehow, magically, bad content will go away while the quality content will rise to the top. Other sections deal with more famous alt-right figures like Mike Cernovich and Mike Enoch. One section deals with a woman that became seduced by the alt-right movement but was able to pull herself out of it.
While well written, it was maddening to read, thus hard for me to rate. There are a set of players in the alt-right world that are simply only financially driven. They have no core beliefs. If it makes them just a little bit richer, they would have no problem burning the country down.
Another set of players are the true believers. As profiled here, they are typically unusually intelligent but seemingly completely lacking in human empathy. They latch onto an abstract political theory that seemingly explains everything. Armed with this dogma, they then completely tunnel reality to force it to match their theory.
In a country this size, there are always going to be people like this. After all, there are people that still think that 9/11 was an inside job. Previously, there was really no way for them to connect with each other or to disseminate their views widely.
In steps the social media companies. Marantz talks specifically about companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. These are all companies founded by young white men who had no historical context at all for what they were doing. If they thought about it at all, they assumed either some libertarian view of ideas competing in the marketplace or thought of themselves as building some utopian global community. Not only did they not see themselves as gatekeepers, but they specifically wanted to destroy the previous such bastions.
We are left in a world where a guy in the basement doing a live stream is not inherently different than a national news organization. Now theoretically, this sounds like something that not only is not bad but is a positive good. After all, media consolidation is a real problem. Freedom of the press is really only free if you own the press. Here, everyone uses the same press.
But.
There are reasons why national news organizations evolved as they have. Responsible news organizations have fact checkers. They print corrections. Journalism is a skill. It requires expertise. Journalists have a set of ethics.
I’m certainly not saying that these legacy news organizations don’t have biases of their own or that they also aren’t profit driven. I am saying that, in a democratic country, the press has an awesome responsibility to report facts and stories with as much rigor as possible to make sure that the people are as well informed as possible.
In our current world, that seemingly has fallen by the wayside. We have grifters telling you anything that you want to hear as long as it gets you to buy their vitamin supplements. We have obsessed true believers preaching their inanities at a global scale. We have social media companies shrugging their shoulders and claiming to be helpless.
Reading this book was hard. It’s probably sometimes hard to tell from my blogging, but I’m actually an optimistic person. Yes, the country has, to say the least, a checkered history, but I believe, to quote Martin Luther King, the arc of history bends towards justice. Even though I do believe that, the arc doesn’t bend on its own. We bend it. We are the justice.
Giving the global megaphone to people that have no interest in justice makes me question whether or not we will be able to continue bending it.
dorkenstein 