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The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and
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The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World Paperback - 2023

by Max Fisher

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

From the publisher

Finalist for the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism


From a New York Times investigative reporter, this "authoritative and devastating account of the impacts of social media" (New York Times Book Review) tracks the high-stakes inside story of how Big Tech's breakneck race to drive engagement--and profits--at all costs fractured the world. The Chaos Machine is "an essential book for our times" (Ezra Klein).

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 network 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 on 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.

Details

  • Title The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
  • Author Max Fisher
  • Binding Paperback
  • Pages 432
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Little, Brown Paperbacks
  • Publication date 2023-10-10
  • Features Bibliography, Index
  • ISBN 9780316703307 / 0316703303
  • Weight 0.85 lbs (0.39 kg)
  • Dimensions 8 x 5.5 x 1.2 in (20.32 x 13.97 x 3.05 cm)
  • Themes
    • Chronological Period: 21st Century
  • Category Business / Economics / Finance
  • Library of Congress subjects Influence (Psychology), Internet - Social aspects
  • Dewey Decimal Code 302.231

Media reviews

Citations

  • Choice, 08/01/2023, Page 0

About the author

Max Fisher is an international reporter for the New York Times, where he authors a column called "The Interpreter," which explains global trends and major world events, and where he contributed to a series about social media that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. Fisher previously covered international affairs at The Atlantic and the Washington Post. He lives in Los Angeles.

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