Home › Books › The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social…
The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by
49/99
Critics' Rating Index
75/99
Readers' Rating Index
97/99
Scholars' Citation Index
51/99
Volume of Reviews
86/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
From a New York Times investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist, "an essential book for our times" (Ezra Klein), tracking the high-stakes inside story of how Big Tech's breakneck race to drive engagement—and profits—at all costs fractured the world We all have a vague sense that social media is bad for our minds, for our children, and for our democracies. But the truth is that its reach and impact run far deeper than we have understood. Building on years of international reporting, Max Fisher tells the gripping and galling inside story of how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks, in their pursuit of unfettered profits, preyed on psychological frailties to create the algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions and, increasingly, extreme actions. As Fisher demonstrates, the companies' founding tenets, combined with a blinkered focus maximizing engagement, have led to a destabilized world for everyone. Traversing the planet, Fisher tracks the ubiquity of hate speech and its spillover into violence, ills that first festered in far-off locales to their dark culmination in America during the pandemic, the 2020 election, and the Capitol Insurrection. Through it all, the social-media giants refused to intervene in any meaningful way, claiming to champion free speech when in fact what they most prized were limitless profits. The result, as Fisher shows, is a cultural shift toward a world in which people are polarized not by beliefs based on facts, but by misinformation, outrage, and fear. His narrative is about more than the villains, however. Fisher also weaves together the stories of the heroic outsiders and Silicon Valley defectors who raised the alarm and revealed what was happening behind the closed doors of Big Tech. Both panoramic and intimate, The Chaos Machine is the definitive account of the meteoric rise and troubled legacy of the tech titans, as well as a rousing and hopeful call to arrest the havoc wreaked on our minds and our world before it's too late.
Reviews
"A veteran journalist examines the rise of the social media giants and the dangers they have created for our society...Fisher, a columnist and international reporter for the New York Times, dives into the chaotic social media landscape, synthesizing dozens of interviews from a wide range of sources...Focusing primarily on Facebook, the author walks through the key steps in the progress of the technology, seeing the advent of algorithms as a turning point...An often riveting, disturbing examination of the social media labyrinth and the companies that created it."
"A deeply researched and well-written study for anybody interested in social media or technology and their effects on society and the transmission of news."
"Human judgment and morality, in other words, aren't reducible to instinctual drives that can be manipulated...So we need to ask not just what makes some people susceptible to manipulation, but also what in the mind's 'wiring' protects others, even in lives saturated with social media...The answer will presumably include education, and will span the range from individual critical thinking skills to the overall quality of the information environment...The lesson of Fisher's book is surely that we don't need more celestial inspirations for ambitious projects of human transformation...Rather, we need to make individual members of societies resistant to such efforts...We have the means to do so if the political will is strong enough, and if our political system hasn't yet been wrecked by the chaos machine."
"New York Times reporter Fisher debuts with a scathing account of the manifold ills wrought by social media...He explores toxic misogyny, recounting the unsavory particulars of 'GamerGate,' in which a woman video game developer was subjected to 'collective harassment' after false allegations that she slept with a journalist in exchange for a positive review of her game...There's no shortage of books lamenting the evils of social media, but what's impressive here is how Fisher brings it all together: the breadth of information, covering everything from the intricacies of engagement-boosting algorithms to theories of sentimentalism, makes this a one-stop shop...It's a well-researched, damning picture of just what happens online."
"Fisher's lucid, clear explanations and convincing arguments are bound to leave readers questioning their own use of social media."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!