Oh... my... God! I've always enjoyed my algorithm on YouTube as it streamlines my next "humiliate your political enemies" videos. Now I know better.

Actually, I'd already quit YouTube before I read this book. Even the fun videos were starting to wear on me. Too much of a sensational echo.

I've also stayed off Facebook for the last year or two. It's a minefield. I was attacked twice by a friend of a friend on the Left. (Guess my liberal posts weren't Leftist enough for her.) She wasn't violent, just annoying. Now I jump on FB for an occasional Happy Birthday but don't linger. Not out of fear. I simply lost interest. I stay in touch with the people I care about by flip phone and email. It's much more personal. (The problem may be exacerbated by smartphones which are always along for the ride and demanding attention. I've never been more glad to not have one. My desktop computer never dings me.)

As for the book... the Alt-Right algorithms? What a nightmare!!! I already knew of the problem, but the book laid out details and horrific consequences, including in other countries to my surprise. We're in a global breakdown of civil society fueled primarily by Facebook and YouTube.

Now if I want a video, I Google the topic, like "earthquakes," and get websites and maybe 3 videos without jumping into the quagmire of a million sensational YouTubers.

For a much better review of this book, see Mikey B's from February 11, 2023.

Highly recommended! ( )

Reading this two days after the 2024 presidential election was a bad idea. This book made me so damn depressed.

But the topic is important, and this is a book people ought to read. If you could remove all the bullsh*t (and frankly, pointless) evo-psych, this book would have gotten 4 stars for sure. ( )

The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher gives readers an eye-opening, sobering look at some of the major social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, and the site formerly known as Twitter) and their impact on individual users and the world.

Fisher explores the libertarian Silicon Valley mindset that led to the creation of these software giants and their hubristic pursuit of unlimited profits and growth. In Fisher’s telling, the callousness, irresponsibility, and greed of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other corporate leaders are mind-boggling to behold. In impoverished countries such as Myanmar and Sri Lanka, social media sites have fanned the flames of hatred, leading directly to rape, murder, and even genocide. Closer to home, heavy social media use makes people isolated, lonely, and prone to buying into conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate and QAnon. Like cigarette company executives, Silicon Valley’s corporate titans and the venture capitalists who finance them consistently dodge responsibility for the long-term harm their products cause.

This well-researched book has me rethinking my social media use. ( )

I happened upon [b:The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World|58950736|The Chaos Machine The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World|Max Fisher|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1632076475l/58950736._SX50_.jpg|92907286] in the library catalogue and realised I hadn't read a book critiquing social media for a few months. On the one hand, nothing in it was completely new to me and there was limited theoretical grounding - oddly, I didn't see any references to [b:The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power|26195941|The Age of Surveillance Capitalism The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power|Shoshana Zuboff|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1521733914l/26195941._SY75_.jpg|46170685]. On the other hand, I found it an excellent, thorough, and terrifying work of reportage on how social media's business model creates extremism and destabilises societies. It goes through a series of carefully documented examples of facebook and youtube's destructive impacts in roughly chronological order, from gamergate to the January 6th 2021 US attack on the Capitol via genocide in Myanmar and the rise of Bolsonaro in Brazil. Brexit in the UK isn't mentioned, which is fair enough as by global standards it's petty by comparison. Fisher writes in a clear, absorbing, and insightful style. Although there is the occasional journalistic phrase that doesn't seem necessary, of the 'but worse was yet to come' type, overall I found the book extremely readable and convincing. I mean, it didn't really need to convince me of social media's harms, but it significantly increased my understanding of their severity and how they operate.

It's worth expanding a little on the weak theoretical grounding, which is only noticeable in the first hundred or so pages. I've noticed other non-fiction (e.g [b:Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World|40672036|Digital Minimalism Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World|Cal Newport|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1549433350l/40672036._SY75_.jpg|63988240]) making the same jump as Fisher does between prehistory and the present:

When you see a post expressing moral outrage, 250,000 years of evolution kick in. It impels you to join in. It makes you forget your moral senses and defer to the group's. And it makes inflicting harm on the _target of the outrage feel necessary - even intensely pleasurable.

Does evolution really kick in? Thousands of years of philosophy and theology explore humanity's ability to actually think about things before reacting to them. I don't think this ahistorical angle based on evolutionary psychology is particularly helpful, as it seems reductive and fatalistic. Not that it particularly undermines Fisher's strong arguments about what social media is doing right now, but it does disregard the relevant historical context of modern capitalist society. After all, people have been living in cities and communicating with more than 150 others for thousands of years. Social media is novel for the speed, distance, and intensity of information and communication that it enables, as the latter part of the paragraph quoted above make clear:

The platforms also remove many of the checks that normally restrain us from taking things too far. From behind a screen, far from our victims, there is no pang of guilt from seeing pain on the face of someone we've harmed. Nor is there shame at realising our anger has visibly crossed into cruelty. In the real world, if you scream expletives at someone for wearing a baseball cap in an expensive restaurant, you'll be shunned yourself, punished for violating norms against excessive displays of anger and for disrupting your fellow restaurant-goers. Online, if others take note of your outburst at all, it will likely be to join in.

Of course, this is not a theory book; it's in-depth reportage and does that really well. Fisher is adept at synthesising key conclusions from chaotic events and limited data jealously guarded by tech companies. He also has great insight into the ethos of Silicon Valley, which meshes neatly with [a:Shoshana Zuboff|710768|Shoshana Zuboff|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1563298665p2/710768.jpg]'s analysis of their optimisation ideology and avoidance of oversight:

But as the Valley expanded its reach, this culture of optimisation at all costs took on second-order effects. Uber optimising for the quickest ride-share pickups engineered labour protections out of the global taxi market. Airbnb optimising for short-term rental income made long-term housing scarcer and more expensive. The social networks, by optimising for how many users they could draw in and how long they could keep them there, may have had the greatest impact of all. "It was a great way to build a startup," Chaslot said. "You focus on one metric, and everybody's on board [for] this one metric. And it's really efficient for growth. But it's a disaster for a lot of other things."

I liked this analogy for the experience of news via social media:

Even its most rudimentary form, the very structure of social media encourages polarisation. [...] Facebook groups amplify this effect even further. By putting users in a homogeneous social space, studies find, groups heighten their sensitivity to social cues and conformity. This overpowers their ability to judge false claims and increases their attraction to identity-affirming falsehoods, making them likelier to share misinformation and conspiracies. "When we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it's not like reading the newspaper when sitting alone," the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has written. "It's like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium... We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one."

Finally, a sports metaphor that I understand. Fisher recounts the radicalising effect of Facebook and Youtube's algorithms that optimise for engagement (e.g commenting) and time spent using the platform - they push content that provokes outrage, fear, and anxiety:

The social platforms had arrived, however unintentionally, at a recruitment strategy embraced by generations of extremists. The scholar J.M. Berger calls it 'the crisis-solution construct'. When people feel destabilised, they often reach for a strong group identity to regain a sense of control. It can be as broad as nationality or as narrow as a church group. Identities that promise to recontextualise individual hardships into a wider conflict hold special appeal. You're not unhappy because of your struggle to contend with personal circumstances; you're unhappy because of Them and their persecution of Us. It makes those hardships feel comprehensible and, because you're no longer facing them alone, a lot less scary.

The depressing thing about this is that some personal hardships do genuinely involve a wider context of structural deprivation, as we live in a world of extreme wealth inequality due to rapacious capitalism. Big tech companies are making this worse with their growth fixation, while spreading the kind of misinformation that blames historically persecuted groups for various consequences (intended and unintended) of the complex global capitalist system. And even if you're not being bombarded by conspiracy theories, sorting truth from lies on social media is extremely difficult:

The problem, in this experiment [on Facebook misinformation], wasn't ignorance or lack of news literacy. Social media, by bombarding users with fast-moving social stimuli, pushed them to rely on a quick-twitch social intuition over deliberate reason. All people contain the capacity for both, as well as the potential for the former to overwhelm the latter, which is often how misinformation spreads. And platforms compound the effect by framing all news and information within high-stakes contexts.

Despite prior awareness of Facebook's excuses after being a proximate cause of political violence and genocide, this was still shocking to read:

[In 2018] Zuckerberg [...] riffed on the nature of free speech: "I'm Jewish, and there's a set of people who deny the Holocaust happened. I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don't believe that our platform should take that down, because I think there are things different people get wrong. I don't think that they're intentionally getting it wrong."

It was vintage Silicon Valley. If Zuckerberg was willing to sacrifice historical consensus on the attempted extermination of his forebears for the sake of a techno-libertarian free-speech ideal, then so should everybody else. And, like many of the Valley's leaders, he seemed to be living in an alternate universe where platforms are neutral vessels with no role in shaping users' experiences, where the only real-world consequence is that somebody might get offended, and where society would appreciate the wisdom of allowing Holocaust denial to flourish.

I particularly appreciated the end of the book, which explains the huge difficulty of regulating vast and hostile social media companies and the technically straightforward solution to social media's dangerous effects:

When asked what would most effectively reform both the platforms and the companies overseeing them, Haugen had a simple answer: turn off the algorithm. "I think we don't want computers deciding what we focus on," she said. She also suggested that if Congress curtailed liability protections, making the companies legally responsible for the consequences of anything their systems promoted, "they would get rid of engagement-based ranking." Platforms would roll back to the 2000s, when they simply displayed your friend's posts by newest to oldest. No AI to swarm you with attention-maximising content or route you down rabbit holes.

Her response followed a reliable pattern that has emerged in the years I've spent covering social media.

Social media companies won't do this unless forced, as it undermines their entire data-harvesting business model, but it would make the world so much better if they did. In the meantime, I have developed a semi-bearable approach to social media. I don't use facebook, instagram, or tiktok at all. I use twitter with the algorithmic timeline switched off, my account locked, following a maximum of 50 people, and turning off the retweets of anyone who does that a lot. I use tumblr, which doesn't have an algorithmic timeline either, but only follow 23 blogs who mostly post pretty pictures. My goodreads feed is set to reviews only and luckily goodreads is largely neglected by amazon so its recommendation algorithms suck. I don't have apps for any of these installed on my smart phone. And I only ever use youtube for listening to music, so have trained it never to recommend me videos in which people speak. Still, I resent the amount of trivial current events and outrage that appear unavoidable if I want to regularly see pictures of my friends' cats.

[b:The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World|58950736|The Chaos Machine The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World|Max Fisher|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1632076475l/58950736._SX50_.jpg|92907286] was a timely reminder that such petty annoyances are nothing in the face of the chaos and death social media have stoked in the past decade. Tech companies refuse to take responsibility despite the wealth of evidence, so this is not a particularly hopeful book. It still struck me as an important one for understanding the world we live in, to be read with [b:The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power|26195941|The Age of Surveillance Capitalism The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power|Shoshana Zuboff|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1521733914l/26195941._SY75_.jpg|46170685] (for theoretical background), [b:The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy|39403470|The People Vs Tech How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (and How We Save It)|Jamie Bartlett|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1521917332l/39403470._SY75_.jpg|61062281] (for impact on politics and institutions), and [b:This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality|41717504|This Is Not Propaganda Adventures in the War Against Reality|Peter Pomerantsev|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1545380013l/41717504._SY75_.jpg|65073585] (on the weaponisation of social media by authoritarian states). ( )

The author amasses sufficient evidence to show that the leadership of the largest social media companies are aware of the negative consequences of their platform's algorithms, but choose not to act because it would affect profits. Unless the federal government acts through its regulatory agencies to curtail the pernicious effect these algorithms have on our democracy, we will suffer the eroding effects these amplifiers of false information will create. ( )