“In summer 2020, an independent audit of Facebook, commissioned by the company under pressure from civil rights groups, concluded that the platform was everything its executives had insisted to me it was not. Its policies permitted rampant misinformation that could undermine elections. Its algorithms and recommendation systems were ‘driving people toward self-reinforcing echo chambers of extremism,’ training them to hate. Perhaps most damning, the report concluded that the company did not understand how its own products affected its billions of users.
But there were a handful of people who did understand and, long before many of us were prepared to listen, tried to warn us. Most began as tech-obsessed true believers, some as denizens themselves of Silicon Valley, which was precisely why they were in a better position to notice early that something was going wrong, to investigate it, and to measure the consequences. But the companies that claimed to want exactly such insights stymied their efforts, questioned their reputations, and disputed their findings—until, in many cases, the companies were forced to acknowledge, if only implicitly, that the alarm raisers had been right all along. They conducted their work, at least initially, independently of one another, pursuing very different methods to the same question: what are the consequences of this technology? This book is about the mission to answer that question, told in part through the people who led it.
The early conventional wisdom, that social media promotes sensationalism and outrage, while accurate, turned out to drastically understate things. An ever-growing pool of evidence, gathered by dozens of academics, reporters, whistleblowers, and concerned citizens, suggests that its impact is far more profound. This technology exerts such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity, and is so persuasive in our lives, that it changes how we think, behave, and relate to one another. The effect, multiplied across billions of users, has been to change society itself.”
~ Max Fisher from The Chaos Machine
As per the back cover, Max Fisher is a former international reporter for the New York Times, where he contributed to a series about social media that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. He previously covered international affairs at The Atlantic and the Washington Post.
I got this book after reading Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Harari referenced it and, following Joseph Campbell’s admonition to read the books the writers you admire read, I got it.
It’s hard to put into words just how powerful the book is.
Booklist captures the essence of the book well in their review: “Well-researched and thoroughly unnerving. … Fisher’s lucid, clear explanations and convincing arguments are bound to leave readers questioning their own use of social media.”
The New York Times Book Review blurb on the front cover also captures it well: “Utterly convincing . . . An authoritative and devastating account of the impacts of social media.”
To put it in perspective, I don’t think I’ve EVER read a book that made me more nervous about the future of our society than this one. I like to think that I’m not easily terrified and that I’m a reasonably hopeful person, but this book was, as per some other reviews: “sobering,” “disturbing,” and “necessarily discomforting.”
If you’ve been following along, you know that I HIGHLY recommend the documentary The Social Dilemma—which revealed, for me, the scope of the unintended catastrophic consequences of attention economics and the social platforms that are driven by those economic engines.
As I just told Alexandra over sunrise coffee, this book shows that the challenges we face are 100 times worse than I thought.
If you have ever found yourself overwhelmed by a sense of moral outrage after spending time on social media platforms and/or if you have ever found yourself down a weird (and potentially dark!) rabbit hole on social media sites and/or if you have fallen prey to conspiracy theory-type misinformation and/or if you have friends/family who have gone off the rails in conspiracy theory thinking and/or if you are a parent committed to helping your kids flourish now and in the decades ahead and/or if you are a human being who wants to help create a more noble and virtuous world in which (and such that!) 51% of humanity is flourishing by the year 2051, I think you will find this book as powerful as I did.
In fact, I’d put this (and Harari’s Nexus) as close to the “must read” category as I ever get. Neither book is even remotely close to the typical “self-development” books we tend to focus on, but as citizens of the 21st century, I believe we need to understand the forces driving our culture. (Get the book here.)
We’re barely going to scratch the surface and I won’t do the power of the book justice in this quick Note but... Let’s get to work.
P.S. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is another book I’d put into the “must read” category to understand what’s going on with social media and how it’s affecting our lives.
Unlock this PhilosophersNote
Create your account to get more wisdom in less time. Personal development made simple so you can flourish in energy, work, and love. Today.
