“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.
Social Referents
“Most of the time, deducing our peers’ moral views is not so easy. So we use a shortcut. We pay special attention to a handful of peers whom we consider to be influential, take our cues from them, and assume this will reflect the norms of the group. The people we pick as moral benchmarks are known as ‘social referents.’ In this way, morality is ‘a sort of perceptual task,’ [Betsy Levy] Paluck [who had won a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius grant’ for her work exploring how social norms influence behavior] said. ‘Who in our group is actually popping out to us? Who do we recruit in our memories when we think about what’s common, what’s desirable?’
To test this, Paluck had her team fan out to fifty-six schools, identifying which students were influential among their peers as well as which students considered bullying to be morally acceptable. Then she picked twenty or thirty students at each school who seemed to fit both conditions: these were, presumably, the students who played the greatest role in instilling pro-bullying social norms in their communities. They were asked to publicly condemn bullying—not forced, just asked. The gentle nudge to this tiny population proved transformative. Psychological benchmarks found that thousands of students became internally opposed to bullying, their moral compasses pulled toward compassion. Bullying-related disciplinary reports dropped by 30 percent.
Social media platforms place us all in a version of Paluck’s school experiment. But, online, our social referents, the people artificially pushed into our moral fields of vision, are the superposters. Not because they are persuasive, thoughtful, or important, but because they drive engagement. That was something unique to platforms like Facebook, Paluck said. Anyone who got a lot of time on the feed became influential. ‘In real life, some people might talk a lot but not be the most listened to. But Facebook,’ she said, ‘puts them in front of you every time.’”
There’s a LOT we can talk about from that passage.
For now, know this: “Social referents” have a LOT of power over culture.
Unfortunately, on social platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok, the LOUDEST, MOST VITRIOLIC “superposters” who create the most moral outrage are the ones the platform’s algorithm’s tend to put front and center—influencing the moral decisions of the BILLIONS (!) of people who are exposed to them. (Yikes.)
It’s like the vicious version of “moral charisma” we’re always talking about. A sort of magnetically powerful IMMORAL charisma these platforms amplify.
From my vantage point, there are a couple of things we should consider doing. First, I think we’d be wise to spend A LOT less time on these platforms, dying our souls in the wrong moral colors. Second, as we discuss all the time (!), we each need to do the hard work to cultivate our moral charisma (Soul Force!) that helps qualify us to be the “social referents” who can positively influence the individuals in our community.
As we’ve discussed many times, this is what Gandhi aspired to do and what he encouraged his followers to embrace, which is exactly what Martin Luther King, Jr. aspired to do as well.
Check out this +1 on Soul Force, An Origin Story (micro-chapter #384 in Areté) and this +1 on Moral Charisma (micro-chapter #366 in Areté!) and our Notes on Trying Not to Try for more on the neurobiology of moral charisma and how to cultivate it.
P.S. As I read that passage, I also thought of wisdom from our Notes on The Captain Class by Sam Walker. Want to know what makes GREAT teams great? It’s their Captains—the ultimate “social referents.” Want to know what makes GREAT communities great? It’s their Captains—the “social referents.” I repeat: YOU are the Hero/Captain/social referrent we’ve been waiting for.
P.P.S. As I read that passage, I ALSO thought of the story about the smoke in the room from Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. Short story: Bring people into a lab. Have them sit in the waiting room. Then, after a few minutes, have a strange smoke come through the vents. See how quickly they will get up and do something about it.
When the individuals are ALONE, 75% of them took action, with half of them leaving the room within two minutes of noticing the smoke’s appearance. But… When the person is in a room with OTHER people, they will look around and see if anyone else appears concerned. When no one else does anything about it, basically NO ONE (only 3 out of 25 people!) does anything about it until the smoke COMPLETELY covers the room.
Moral of the story: There’s smoke in the room. Get up and do something about it.