(Get) 🤚 B.o.o.k.s The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

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Review : The debut of a New York Times investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist: a gripping narrative that fuses research, exclusive interviews, and on-the-ground reporting to capture the full inside story of Big Tech's monomaniacal race to drive engagement--and profits--at all costs.
 
We all have a vague sense that social media is bad for us, for our children, and for our democracies. But what exactly is it about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms that causes this creeping feeling of unease? Max Fisher, using years of his own international reporting for the New York Times, tells the inside story of how the social networks fundamentally altered the world, detailing the roots of their ideology, their race to maximize engagement, and the resulting algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions and, increasingly, extreme actions.
 
Taking the reader from deep inside Silicon Valley to the far reaches of Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Germany, and Brazil, Max Fisher unfolds the definitive account of how the social-media harms that sometimes began in forgotten pockets of the world saw their dark culmination in American through the pandemic, the 2020 election,  and Capitol Insurrection. The result is an intimately detailed account of the consequences of the polarization that social media incubates: the cancellations, the omnipotence of hate speech, and the spillover into real-world violence. Fisher weaves together the stories of dozens of alarmed outsiders and Silicon Valley defectors to reveal the true human cost at the heart of social media.
 
The Chaos Machine is a fresh, excoriating, and definitive narrative of the rise and legacy of the social-media giants. Delivering both astounding stories and hard-hitting reporting, Fisher captures the tangible havoc wreaked upon our minds and our world by the titans of the tech industry. Read more

 

Review : This isn't the first book written about the negative effects of social media on individuals and society, but it's one of the most important. For a start the author's sources are as unimpeachable as you're likely to find. They include the likes of former Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Google and Facebook engineers, and people who held leadership positions for these and other companies. The things you learn come directly from the people who enabled and created the very algorithms which are at the root of the problems we face (rampant promoting of misinformation and divisive content, encouraging anger and outrage, etc.) You learn not just what the algorithms do but why they were set up that way. That in the end, Facebook, Google, Twitter and others make their money by blindly assuming that algorithms which train users to spend more and more time on their platforms, is not only good for their bottom line, but good for users. This despite strong evidence that — by design — their systems tap into human addiction mechanisms and psychology, in ways that make us more and more unhappy, the further down the rabbit hole we go. Perhaps most astonishing is the fact that the algorithms have become so automated, that if you ask Facebook and Google today how it works, they will flat out tell you that they don't know. While this may give them some feeling of plausible deniability it does nothing to diminish their responsibility for the harmful impacts of their technology. Equally important as the sourcing and detailed reporting, the author's writing style is quite approachable. So even if you're not technically inclined, you won't get left behind. He does not rely on a lot of technical jargon or concepts to get his points across, which is important when targeting a broad audience. Highly recommended. (And hoping this book ends up in many collegiate classrooms where it can help inform tomorrow's engineers and CEOs.)