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The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
From a New York Times investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist, “an essential book for our times” (Ezra Klein), tracking the high-stakes inside story of how Big Tech’s breakneck race to drive engagement—and profits—at all costs fractured the world
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 networks, in their pursuit of unfettered profits, 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 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.
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 networks, in their pursuit of unfettered profits, 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 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.
400 pages, Hardcover
First published September 6, 2022
1800 people are currently reading
29417 people want to read
About the author
Max Fisher
4 books97 followersMax 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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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,293 reviews
February 1, 2023
It's even worse than I thought....
This is an incredibly interesting and eye-opening book on what social media does, and has done, to our brains and our societies.
If you use social media, and I think everyone does, you should read this book.
Unfortunately, I'm not up to writing an in-depth review so instead I'll refer you to my GR friend Maukan's review. It's well worth reading, even if you don't plan to read the book.
I'm glad I don't use social media much, and will be using it even less after learning what I just did.
This is an incredibly interesting and eye-opening book on what social media does, and has done, to our brains and our societies.
If you use social media, and I think everyone does, you should read this book.
Unfortunately, I'm not up to writing an in-depth review so instead I'll refer you to my GR friend Maukan's review. It's well worth reading, even if you don't plan to read the book.
I'm glad I don't use social media much, and will be using it even less after learning what I just did.
October 12, 2022
I happened upon The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World 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 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. 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 Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World) making the same jump as Fisher does between prehistory and the present:
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:
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 Shoshana Zuboff's analysis of their optimisation ideology and avoidance of oversight:
I liked this analogy for the experience of news via social media:
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 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:
Despite prior awareness of Facebook's excuses after being a proximate cause of political violence and genocide, this was still shocking to read:
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:
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.
The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World 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 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (for theoretical background), The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (for impact on politics and institutions), and This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality (on the weaponisation of social media by authoritarian states).
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 Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World) 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 Shoshana Zuboff'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.
The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World 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 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (for theoretical background), The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (for impact on politics and institutions), and This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality (on the weaponisation of social media by authoritarian states).
May 18, 2022
I have to say that this book really shocked me. Being someone who likes to think of myself as being well informed, I'm completely surprised at how social media companies have manipulated me. And, for that matter, the world! Never again will I be able to look at Facebook and similar companies as just a way for me to stay in touch with friends. From the manipulation of what you see in order to boost their bottom line to the subversive ploys built into the "Like" button. Good Lord! I have always been a free enterprise, free speech supporter, but this really has to stop. We cannot continue to let these companies manipulate and destroy our world. Unbelievable!
June 7, 2024
I would like to thank my Goodreads friend, Casey for encouraging me to read this book. Their review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
In many ways, I feel like I am in a race against time as I read and write about what we are facing in our country. I am still in “shock” awe by what I am witnessing. A man running for the most important office in the United States of America receives a guilty verdict and becomes a convicted felon. And yet, people gather in support of him. He lies, he is a fraud, he is a convicted rapist. And yet, people continue to support him. He is an insurrectionist, and he is an obvious racist. And yet, people continue to support him. He spews out hate. And yet, people continue to support him.
Why?
There is so much information that I have read that gives me so many reasons as to why people choose to fall under the spells of con men. I understand, and yet, I am perplexed. So, seeking more information, I chose to heed Casey’s recommendation, and read this book.
And, this book helped to provide another point of view. An interesting, rather frightening, yet important and significant view of what could possibly compel humanity to fall under the spell of a con man.
This well-researched book was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist. It is written by a New York Times journalist. He is giving us a devastating account of the inner-manipulations of how social media empires such as Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Twitter (to name a few), have impacted viewers by disinformation that is easily placed on their platforms.
Typically, this information is made up of invented accusations, often against minorities, and, usually political in nature. And, we can see, and, have seen how social media has been responsible for conjuring mass fear and anger.
When you tell enough people lies, soon the lies sound like truth. And thus, individuals who con, amass followers in droves. Because the ones who have been driven to follow have lost their ability to see through the lies.
Why?
They have been intentionally manipulated.
Fisher shows how Google and Facebook and others have monetized their algorithms to promote hyper-partisanship, which drives divisiveness, which drives engagement, which drives advertising revenue. Because it is all about making money to them. Thus…intentional manipulation.
Fisher shares that YouTube, as an example, doesn’t just polarize political discourse and spawn conspiracy theories; by design they elevate extreme content, allowing “crazies” to find one another – and even ushering some of that recklessness to occur.
The question becomes for any of us – why are we choosing to be manipulated? We are/could be a fairly educated society. Why allow the con man to out con us? Why do we allow ourselves to be gullible? We should know better.
But then, the deeper questions might be…
What is this attraction to hate and violence? Is this really what is fueling the chaos?
“We enjoy being outraged. We respond to it as a reward.”
Fisher is being brilliant here. He wants us to be, as well. We don’t need to be conned. He is asking us to critically think.
Think critically. 🤔
We can. And we should. Because when we choose to critically think, we can outmaneuver the con man.
His book is a message book. A strong one. It would be nice if the ones that needed to read it, would. Because if they did maybe this following message might be heard…
Please stop the Hate. Do not let fear or hostile ignorance take any of us down a path that we cannot return from. We deserve a world of…Tolerance. Respect. Empowerment. Dignity. A Free, Just, Peaceful world. For all. We don’t have to live in this chaos machine.
“Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself.” – Robert G. Ingersoll
This book is simply…
Brilliant. Important. Insightful. Powerful. It needs to be read.
In many ways, I feel like I am in a race against time as I read and write about what we are facing in our country. I am still in “shock” awe by what I am witnessing. A man running for the most important office in the United States of America receives a guilty verdict and becomes a convicted felon. And yet, people gather in support of him. He lies, he is a fraud, he is a convicted rapist. And yet, people continue to support him. He is an insurrectionist, and he is an obvious racist. And yet, people continue to support him. He spews out hate. And yet, people continue to support him.
Why?
There is so much information that I have read that gives me so many reasons as to why people choose to fall under the spells of con men. I understand, and yet, I am perplexed. So, seeking more information, I chose to heed Casey’s recommendation, and read this book.
And, this book helped to provide another point of view. An interesting, rather frightening, yet important and significant view of what could possibly compel humanity to fall under the spell of a con man.
This well-researched book was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist. It is written by a New York Times journalist. He is giving us a devastating account of the inner-manipulations of how social media empires such as Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Twitter (to name a few), have impacted viewers by disinformation that is easily placed on their platforms.
Typically, this information is made up of invented accusations, often against minorities, and, usually political in nature. And, we can see, and, have seen how social media has been responsible for conjuring mass fear and anger.
When you tell enough people lies, soon the lies sound like truth. And thus, individuals who con, amass followers in droves. Because the ones who have been driven to follow have lost their ability to see through the lies.
Why?
They have been intentionally manipulated.
Fisher shows how Google and Facebook and others have monetized their algorithms to promote hyper-partisanship, which drives divisiveness, which drives engagement, which drives advertising revenue. Because it is all about making money to them. Thus…intentional manipulation.
Fisher shares that YouTube, as an example, doesn’t just polarize political discourse and spawn conspiracy theories; by design they elevate extreme content, allowing “crazies” to find one another – and even ushering some of that recklessness to occur.
The question becomes for any of us – why are we choosing to be manipulated? We are/could be a fairly educated society. Why allow the con man to out con us? Why do we allow ourselves to be gullible? We should know better.
But then, the deeper questions might be…
What is this attraction to hate and violence? Is this really what is fueling the chaos?
“We enjoy being outraged. We respond to it as a reward.”
Fisher is being brilliant here. He wants us to be, as well. We don’t need to be conned. He is asking us to critically think.
Think critically. 🤔
We can. And we should. Because when we choose to critically think, we can outmaneuver the con man.
His book is a message book. A strong one. It would be nice if the ones that needed to read it, would. Because if they did maybe this following message might be heard…
Please stop the Hate. Do not let fear or hostile ignorance take any of us down a path that we cannot return from. We deserve a world of…Tolerance. Respect. Empowerment. Dignity. A Free, Just, Peaceful world. For all. We don’t have to live in this chaos machine.
“Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself.” – Robert G. Ingersoll
This book is simply…
Brilliant. Important. Insightful. Powerful. It needs to be read.
June 8, 2023
Czyta się wyśmienicie, niczym thriller, który rozgrywał się na naszych oczach. Niby człowiek wiedział, ale kiedy czyta się to w tak uporządkowany sposób i z kompleksowym podejściem, to wszystko uderza w zwielokrotniony sposób. Upadek mediów społecznościowych, rozwój teorii spiskowych, rozprzestrzenianie się fake newsów i radykalizacja społeczeństwa- świetna książka i jeden z lepszych reportaży, jakie miałem przyjemność przeczytać.
July 7, 2022
This is a terrifying, well-argued polemic against the power of social media to turn the average apolitical person into a hate spewing warrior or worse, both at home and abroad in places like Myanmar and Brazil, and even Germany. The origin story of Silicon Valley culture is not nerd kids in garages, but a U.S. military scrambling after Pearl Harbor to diversify bombing targets near the Pacific, while investing in war technologies. Tech companies are not just controlled by their boards, but by the need to keep their libertarian leaning top software engineers from jumping ship, a governance by mostly male gamer culture, with few qualms about the consequences of spreading misinformation. And media content is controlled, with little ethical oversight, by a "Hal"-like system of suggestion algorithms that hooks an all ages audience, by pushing content that increases the ratio of conspiracy, lies, hate, and of course advertising revenue, the longer that you watch. YouTube comes in for the worst drubbing, but it's an "arms race for attention" and Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are creating new tribal identity groups and supplying them with genocidal justification.
December 30, 2022
So biased. I read the intro, part of the first chapter, skimmed the rest, and could not finish it. It was way too one-sided. This is not an unbiased or even fair portrayal of the inner workings of Facebook and other social media platforms. The author almost seems to be torn between proving that social media is detrimental or that it is the protector of our democracy. Fisher seems to be saying that Facebook and social media is evil and bad, but the creators and employees of FB, etc, are completely good people with only the best intentions. Fisher’s writing is all over the place, filled with speculation, hearsay and personal opinion. Which is fine if that’s what you’re looking for in a book about social media and it’s effects on the human race. But I was expecting solid evidence, scientific research and thoughtful conclusions. It was clear I wasn’t going to get that out of this book.
February 22, 2024
Anyone that has a social media account needs to read this!
September 19, 2022
Throughout reading this book, I could not stop thinking about it. After finishing it, I have to say it completely changed the way I understand our current world. I had an inkling about most of what was in this book, but I did not grasp the full scale of any part of it: the greed, the violence, nor the obscene lengths these companies will go to to keep our eyes on their apps.
This book lays out the case against for-profit, Silicon Valley companies being at the helm of all human communication and news/information distribution. I work as a public librarian, and I would go so far as to say every information professional should be required to read this book (I remember back in 2015-2016, scrambling to plan library programs for adults to help them parse out good information from bad. We- or at least definitely I- thought that was the problem at that time: people just needed guidance! Wow was it way deeper, and way more insidious a problem, than I ever imagined back then.) The algorithms that these companies have unleashed, fed, and ceased to understand have done lasting and possibly irreversible damage to not only our democracy but human discourse overall. All in pursuit of monstrous profit. It was sickening to read about.
This book has changed the way I will approach reference work, both in-person and virtual, going forward. It (surprisingly to me) boosted my empathy and understanding for those who have tumbled down a "rabbit hole" or two on Facebook or YouTube. Truly one of the most important and informative books I've read this year.
This book lays out the case against for-profit, Silicon Valley companies being at the helm of all human communication and news/information distribution. I work as a public librarian, and I would go so far as to say every information professional should be required to read this book (I remember back in 2015-2016, scrambling to plan library programs for adults to help them parse out good information from bad. We- or at least definitely I- thought that was the problem at that time: people just needed guidance! Wow was it way deeper, and way more insidious a problem, than I ever imagined back then.) The algorithms that these companies have unleashed, fed, and ceased to understand have done lasting and possibly irreversible damage to not only our democracy but human discourse overall. All in pursuit of monstrous profit. It was sickening to read about.
This book has changed the way I will approach reference work, both in-person and virtual, going forward. It (surprisingly to me) boosted my empathy and understanding for those who have tumbled down a "rabbit hole" or two on Facebook or YouTube. Truly one of the most important and informative books I've read this year.
June 15, 2024
This is definitely one of the most moving and impactful books that I have read in quite awhile. The information inside of this book is nothing short of revelatory. For so long now I have wondered how anyone could be a part of implementing the misinformation that social media consistently spews. Its effects are flagrantly corrosive to healthcare, politics, community building, government, and so many other major institutions of our world. Despite this, it’s influence continues to grow.
What is so mystifying about the current age is that there has never been a time in history where things have been going as well as they are now. There is less war, less death from disease, phenomenal access to information, less poverty, and the highest standard of living in history. China has pulled 750 million people out of poverty. India is becoming a world power. But despite all this, a huge swath of the world believes the exact opposite, that the world is completely disintegrating. And they are convinced that those who believe differently than themselves are actively plotting to destroy the world by implementing outlandishly fiendish conspiracies.
Governments around the world are struggling to combat misinformation that has everyday people believing completely false narratives that are polarizing communities that used to be united in caring for one another.
This book does a great job of helping all of us understand why and how social media has been a major contributor to the feeling of chaos that is so haunting these days.
Let’s start with the good stuff in this book.
"The Chaos Machine" does an amazing job of diving deep into all of the misinformation landmarks of the past 20 years. Fisher gives us a blow by blow rundown of how these trends developed, how they played out around the world, and the consequences of these deeply disturbing misinformation events.
I had no idea how many of them there were and the tragic consequences that ensued in countries like Myanmar, Brazil, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, and the United States. Ethnic cleansing, child endangerment, healthcare catastrophes and overthrown governments are just a sampling of what has gone down...all because the Facebook & YouTube algorithms were allowed to optimize for maximum advertising revenue, unchecked.
The book explains how the social media companies have been able to maximize their profits and avoid government oversight by playing the “free speech” card. It is a bellwether trope that absolves them of responsibility for egregious transgressions around the world. Any time horrible things happen, they conveniently say that their hands are tied. They wish they could help, but they can’t curtail free speech.
Books, newspapers, radio & television have been successfully regulating free speech for hundreds of years, yet the social media companies contend they are incapable of doing the same. The social media companies know that if they go down the regulation path, their profits will suffer.
That’s why they’re all in on unregulated misinformation. Maximum profits necessitate social media companies prey upon the darkest instincts of humanity. People spend the most time on social media when they are overwhelmed by fear and hate. A carefully tuned algorithm can effortlessly optimize that.
This book was a sad check in for me on how social media has affected my own life. I realize that over the course of the last 10 years I have started purposefully avoiding friends who are on the other side of the political divide.
I have had so many heartbreaking conversations where good friends in my life started believing in crazy government plots and nefarious cabals. They usually reference a YouTube or Facebook video as proof. What is sobering is that these are not dumb people. These are average, good, community-minded individuals who were purposefully lured into believing through slow and deliberate manipulation.
When I look at my community now, I see myself in the center of a walled bastion of like-minded people, afraid of the perceived nefarious intents of those on the other side. Most of my friends don’t seek to understand and compromise with people on the other side...they seek to entirely destroy their influence.
Fisher did an absolutely outstanding job helping me to understand exactly why this trend has developed. To me, the social media companies seem so amazingly evil and I've always suspected that my views of them were naive. This book dives very deeply into how the algorithm works, its effect on all of us who have used them, and how these insidious algorithms slowly and methodically turn everyday people into extremists. This understanding has really opened my eyes.
But now, let’s talk about what’s not so good about this book.
As informative as this book is, it is an absolutely TERRIFYING read. I found that I could only spend about 15 minutes with this book before I had to put it down, locate a paper bag in the kitchen, breathe deeply to stop the hyperventilation, then desperately attempt to crawl back to emotionally stable ground.
What I found deeply ironic was that Fisher’s book methodically chronicles how social media purposefully stokes fear and hate to provoke engagement...then Fisher went on to use the exact same tools in his own book. He purposefully used all the worst tactics of social media to tell his story: contempt, fear, loathing, and evil reminiscent of comic book villains.
I understand that these companies are doing bad things, but I just don't think all the people who work in social media wake up in the morning with a dedicated commitment to genocide, hate and destroying the world. There is so much more nuance here that Fisher never got to. He was just too busy making the whole world look like a dumpster fire. I understand his profiling of salacious events to keep the book compelling, but he went too far. Freaked out readers are terrible learners.
This was a very important book for me and I learned such a crazy amount of great stuff. It will have a profound effect on how I view social media and its influence on the world. But I'm sad because I know this book could've been so much more. It could've provided a much deeper understanding of what's going on inside the halls of Facebook and YouTube. Fisher is a fabulous writer and researcher. He’s got the talent to make that happen.
I feel like I got some of that story, but I know there was much more there. Fisher succumbed to the siren’s call to create a potboiler. As good as this book was, I’m just so disappointed at how much more powerful this book could have been, had it only stopped trying to turn all the protagonists into virtuous heroes or dastardly villains.
One final point, this book is not well organized. It is less a methodical explanation of key issues and more like a collection of case studies told one after another. Unfortunately, this lures the author into making the same points repetitively after each case study.
I wish Fisher had used a more traditional structure, laying out key concepts, then illustrated those points using real-world examples. Fisher makes a ton of great observations, but they are randomly scattered about and often made in isolation. This book didn’t build to a conclusion; it wandered through a maze of case studies.
So would I recommend this book? Absolutely. It’s one of the most important books I’ve read this year. You’ll walk away with a revelatory understanding of how social media is influencing our world. But I’d recommend that you hide all the sharp knives in your kitchen and warn your family that you’re about to give a nervous breakdown a trial run. Give yourself a long timeline for reading this because you’re going to need lots of therapy and long walks to keep yourself from freaking out.
What is so mystifying about the current age is that there has never been a time in history where things have been going as well as they are now. There is less war, less death from disease, phenomenal access to information, less poverty, and the highest standard of living in history. China has pulled 750 million people out of poverty. India is becoming a world power. But despite all this, a huge swath of the world believes the exact opposite, that the world is completely disintegrating. And they are convinced that those who believe differently than themselves are actively plotting to destroy the world by implementing outlandishly fiendish conspiracies.
Governments around the world are struggling to combat misinformation that has everyday people believing completely false narratives that are polarizing communities that used to be united in caring for one another.
This book does a great job of helping all of us understand why and how social media has been a major contributor to the feeling of chaos that is so haunting these days.
Let’s start with the good stuff in this book.
"The Chaos Machine" does an amazing job of diving deep into all of the misinformation landmarks of the past 20 years. Fisher gives us a blow by blow rundown of how these trends developed, how they played out around the world, and the consequences of these deeply disturbing misinformation events.
I had no idea how many of them there were and the tragic consequences that ensued in countries like Myanmar, Brazil, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, and the United States. Ethnic cleansing, child endangerment, healthcare catastrophes and overthrown governments are just a sampling of what has gone down...all because the Facebook & YouTube algorithms were allowed to optimize for maximum advertising revenue, unchecked.
The book explains how the social media companies have been able to maximize their profits and avoid government oversight by playing the “free speech” card. It is a bellwether trope that absolves them of responsibility for egregious transgressions around the world. Any time horrible things happen, they conveniently say that their hands are tied. They wish they could help, but they can’t curtail free speech.
Books, newspapers, radio & television have been successfully regulating free speech for hundreds of years, yet the social media companies contend they are incapable of doing the same. The social media companies know that if they go down the regulation path, their profits will suffer.
That’s why they’re all in on unregulated misinformation. Maximum profits necessitate social media companies prey upon the darkest instincts of humanity. People spend the most time on social media when they are overwhelmed by fear and hate. A carefully tuned algorithm can effortlessly optimize that.
This book was a sad check in for me on how social media has affected my own life. I realize that over the course of the last 10 years I have started purposefully avoiding friends who are on the other side of the political divide.
I have had so many heartbreaking conversations where good friends in my life started believing in crazy government plots and nefarious cabals. They usually reference a YouTube or Facebook video as proof. What is sobering is that these are not dumb people. These are average, good, community-minded individuals who were purposefully lured into believing through slow and deliberate manipulation.
When I look at my community now, I see myself in the center of a walled bastion of like-minded people, afraid of the perceived nefarious intents of those on the other side. Most of my friends don’t seek to understand and compromise with people on the other side...they seek to entirely destroy their influence.
Fisher did an absolutely outstanding job helping me to understand exactly why this trend has developed. To me, the social media companies seem so amazingly evil and I've always suspected that my views of them were naive. This book dives very deeply into how the algorithm works, its effect on all of us who have used them, and how these insidious algorithms slowly and methodically turn everyday people into extremists. This understanding has really opened my eyes.
But now, let’s talk about what’s not so good about this book.
As informative as this book is, it is an absolutely TERRIFYING read. I found that I could only spend about 15 minutes with this book before I had to put it down, locate a paper bag in the kitchen, breathe deeply to stop the hyperventilation, then desperately attempt to crawl back to emotionally stable ground.
What I found deeply ironic was that Fisher’s book methodically chronicles how social media purposefully stokes fear and hate to provoke engagement...then Fisher went on to use the exact same tools in his own book. He purposefully used all the worst tactics of social media to tell his story: contempt, fear, loathing, and evil reminiscent of comic book villains.
I understand that these companies are doing bad things, but I just don't think all the people who work in social media wake up in the morning with a dedicated commitment to genocide, hate and destroying the world. There is so much more nuance here that Fisher never got to. He was just too busy making the whole world look like a dumpster fire. I understand his profiling of salacious events to keep the book compelling, but he went too far. Freaked out readers are terrible learners.
This was a very important book for me and I learned such a crazy amount of great stuff. It will have a profound effect on how I view social media and its influence on the world. But I'm sad because I know this book could've been so much more. It could've provided a much deeper understanding of what's going on inside the halls of Facebook and YouTube. Fisher is a fabulous writer and researcher. He’s got the talent to make that happen.
I feel like I got some of that story, but I know there was much more there. Fisher succumbed to the siren’s call to create a potboiler. As good as this book was, I’m just so disappointed at how much more powerful this book could have been, had it only stopped trying to turn all the protagonists into virtuous heroes or dastardly villains.
One final point, this book is not well organized. It is less a methodical explanation of key issues and more like a collection of case studies told one after another. Unfortunately, this lures the author into making the same points repetitively after each case study.
I wish Fisher had used a more traditional structure, laying out key concepts, then illustrated those points using real-world examples. Fisher makes a ton of great observations, but they are randomly scattered about and often made in isolation. This book didn’t build to a conclusion; it wandered through a maze of case studies.
So would I recommend this book? Absolutely. It’s one of the most important books I’ve read this year. You’ll walk away with a revelatory understanding of how social media is influencing our world. But I’d recommend that you hide all the sharp knives in your kitchen and warn your family that you’re about to give a nervous breakdown a trial run. Give yourself a long timeline for reading this because you’re going to need lots of therapy and long walks to keep yourself from freaking out.
September 24, 2022
I think this is probably the best book I've read on the subject some of the information did not surprise me since I think a lot of us instinctively know that social media is to a large degree responsible for the current state of affairs in our country and others around the globe, but some of the hard facts provided here made me sick. I have never been on Facebook, Twitter, or any of the many platforms available to "stay in touch with friends and family" but I do just fine the old fashioned way without the hate machine.
"Engagement equals value" that is the name of the game and that is what all of these companies care about damn the consequences.
"Engagement equals value" that is the name of the game and that is what all of these companies care about damn the consequences.
October 30, 2022
Really digs into the fact that underlying algorithms promote the negative impact social media has on news and an individuals understanding of current events… quite eye opening; however books content is extreme far left bias and promotes the fact that anything or anyone that remotely questions or suggests another perspective from this position is simply wrong.
Meh… critical thinking today is a super power. There is misinformation and disinformation on both sides of the coin. This book is one side of the coin…
Meh… critical thinking today is a super power. There is misinformation and disinformation on both sides of the coin. This book is one side of the coin…
June 27, 2023
Ta książka nie jest przełomowa. Charlie Wylie na przykładzie sprawy Cambridge Analityki przestrzegał już przed zagrożeniami związanymi z mediami społecznościowymi, a Matt Taibbi wytknął palcem tych, którzy czerpią zyski z podsycania konfliktu USA vs USA (w którym to konflikcie nietrudno dopatrzyć się podobieństw do wojenki polsko-polskiej).
Nie zmieni też waszego życia. Do wyplenienia nawyku scrollowania z nudów potrzeba zachęty większej niż kilka słów przypadkowej blogerki, która sama przegląda IG w wolnych chwilach z nudów.
"To po co mam to czytać?", zapytacie.
Pomimo tego, że pewnie co nieco wiecie o sposobie, w który funkcjonują media społecznościowe, "W trybach chaosu" i tak wyrwie was z kapci, a do tego pomoże wam uporządkować myśli i zrozumieć mechanizmy psychologiczne stojące za tym, że raz za razem obsesyjnie sprawdzamy fb czy IG tak, jakby to była lodówka, w której być może w międzyczasie zmaterializował się nowy smakołyk.
Fisher - bez zbędnego dramatyzowania i grania na uczuciach - przedstawia wyniki dziennikarskiego śledztwa w kwestii zakulisowych poczynań gigantów Doliny Krzemowej. Wziąwszy pod lupę z pozoru niegroźne aplikacje, prześledził to, jak na przestrzeni lat za ich pośrednictwem nastąpiła polaryzacja społeczeństw na całym świecie i jak poszczególne platformy stały się urodzajnym gruntem, na którym zaczęto kultywować nienawiść i dezinformację. Zwraca przy tym także uwagę na bańki informacyjne, które służą temu, by użytkownik sam zanurkował w głąb króliczej nory, poszukując wciąż i wciąż coraz bardziej radykalnych w wymowie treści. Na przykładzie wyborów prezydenckich w Stanach oraz tragicznych w skutkach wydarzeń w Sri Lance i Mjanmie autor przedstawia pokłosie gwałtownego, niekontrolowanego wzrostu nastrojów ekstremistycznych.
Moim zdaniem jednym z największych atutów tego reportażu jest to, jak silnie jest zakorzeniony w rzeczywistości. "W trybach chaosu" bez wątpienia zmusza do dostrzeżenia przedstawionych mechanizmów na wszystkich platformach, na których funkcjonujemy i jakie są i będą tego konsekwencje. Szczególnie zainteresował mnie przybliżony przez Fishera aspekt psychologiczny - to, jak poszczególne platformy bezlitośnie wykorzystują nasze słabości do optymalizowania zaangażowania i to, jak te działania rzutują na wybory samych użytkowników.
(Pisząc ten post, zastanawiam się nad doborem słów. Usuwam i poprawiam zdania, mając w pamięci to, że przekaz nacechowany emocjonalnie zwraca większą uwagę, ale tak ciężko jest zachować powściągliwość. Czy to czyni mnie trybikiem w maszynie? Zapewne tak.)
W pewnym momencie przyłapałam się na rozważaniu tego, jak pewne zjawiska z łatwością można zaobserwować w mikroskali na bookstagramie, szczególnie w zakresie tzw. superposterów, pełniących rolę swego rodzaju autorytetów nie z uwagi na wiedzę czy doświadczenie, a to, że poprzez swoją działalność zwiększają zaangażowanie innych użytkowników. W reportażu pada sakramentalne stwierdzenie: "W realnym świecie osoba gadatliwa nie zawsze jest słuchana [...] Tymczasem Facebook skupi na niej powszechną uwagę".
Może dotyczy ono mnie.
Może dotyczy was.
Myślę o tym często.
Nie zmieni też waszego życia. Do wyplenienia nawyku scrollowania z nudów potrzeba zachęty większej niż kilka słów przypadkowej blogerki, która sama przegląda IG w wolnych chwilach z nudów.
"To po co mam to czytać?", zapytacie.
Pomimo tego, że pewnie co nieco wiecie o sposobie, w który funkcjonują media społecznościowe, "W trybach chaosu" i tak wyrwie was z kapci, a do tego pomoże wam uporządkować myśli i zrozumieć mechanizmy psychologiczne stojące za tym, że raz za razem obsesyjnie sprawdzamy fb czy IG tak, jakby to była lodówka, w której być może w międzyczasie zmaterializował się nowy smakołyk.
Fisher - bez zbędnego dramatyzowania i grania na uczuciach - przedstawia wyniki dziennikarskiego śledztwa w kwestii zakulisowych poczynań gigantów Doliny Krzemowej. Wziąwszy pod lupę z pozoru niegroźne aplikacje, prześledził to, jak na przestrzeni lat za ich pośrednictwem nastąpiła polaryzacja społeczeństw na całym świecie i jak poszczególne platformy stały się urodzajnym gruntem, na którym zaczęto kultywować nienawiść i dezinformację. Zwraca przy tym także uwagę na bańki informacyjne, które służą temu, by użytkownik sam zanurkował w głąb króliczej nory, poszukując wciąż i wciąż coraz bardziej radykalnych w wymowie treści. Na przykładzie wyborów prezydenckich w Stanach oraz tragicznych w skutkach wydarzeń w Sri Lance i Mjanmie autor przedstawia pokłosie gwałtownego, niekontrolowanego wzrostu nastrojów ekstremistycznych.
Moim zdaniem jednym z największych atutów tego reportażu jest to, jak silnie jest zakorzeniony w rzeczywistości. "W trybach chaosu" bez wątpienia zmusza do dostrzeżenia przedstawionych mechanizmów na wszystkich platformach, na których funkcjonujemy i jakie są i będą tego konsekwencje. Szczególnie zainteresował mnie przybliżony przez Fishera aspekt psychologiczny - to, jak poszczególne platformy bezlitośnie wykorzystują nasze słabości do optymalizowania zaangażowania i to, jak te działania rzutują na wybory samych użytkowników.
(Pisząc ten post, zastanawiam się nad doborem słów. Usuwam i poprawiam zdania, mając w pamięci to, że przekaz nacechowany emocjonalnie zwraca większą uwagę, ale tak ciężko jest zachować powściągliwość. Czy to czyni mnie trybikiem w maszynie? Zapewne tak.)
W pewnym momencie przyłapałam się na rozważaniu tego, jak pewne zjawiska z łatwością można zaobserwować w mikroskali na bookstagramie, szczególnie w zakresie tzw. superposterów, pełniących rolę swego rodzaju autorytetów nie z uwagi na wiedzę czy doświadczenie, a to, że poprzez swoją działalność zwiększają zaangażowanie innych użytkowników. W reportażu pada sakramentalne stwierdzenie: "W realnym świecie osoba gadatliwa nie zawsze jest słuchana [...] Tymczasem Facebook skupi na niej powszechną uwagę".
Może dotyczy ono mnie.
Może dotyczy was.
Myślę o tym często.
November 7, 2022
2.5 stars Great concept, mildly interesting information, poorly executed. The author had some good data, but repeated himself ad nauseam to the point that it actually weakened his argument because if you have to repeat yourself that many times maybe you need to rework your theory. I lost track of how many times this book put me to sleep before I finally finished it. Also, this book really dug into the alt right and ultraconservativism, but never made it clear if that is because the same issues did not exist for the alt left and ultraliberalism or not so it came off as biased at worst, incredibly one sided at best.
To sum up the book, social media impacts the way we perceive things and that can be bad. There, saved you 350 pages.
To sum up the book, social media impacts the way we perceive things and that can be bad. There, saved you 350 pages.
February 19, 2023
“Like many, I had initially assumed social media’s dangers came mostly from misuse by bad actors: propogandists, foreign agents, fake news peddlers, and that at worst, the various platforms were a passive conduit for society’s preexisting problems; but virtually everywhere I traveled in my reporting, covering far-off despots, wars, and upheavals, strange and extreme events kept getting linked back to social media.“
This book examines the role social media has played in the rise of conspiracy theories, racism, nationalism, disinformation, hate speech, outrage, polarization, and fear. It goes into detail about social media’s role in the:
- Genocide in Myanmar
- Sectarian violence and deaths in Sri Lanka
- Anti-refugee violence in Germany
- January 6th insurrection in the US
Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Google, Instagram, Twitter (and several others) are called out specifically for contributions to the trends toward radicalization and the increase in “us versus them” mentality that is so obvious to anyone who spends time on these sites. The bottom line is that the more outrageous content keeps engagement levels high, and this is the metric the social media companies are using to measure success. One of the most disturbing aspects is the priority placed on profits over all else.
“Social media platforms surfaced whatever content their automated systems had concluded would maximize users’ activity online, thereby allowing the company to sell more ads.”
“This technology exerts such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity and is so pervasive in our lives that it changes how we think, behave, and relate to one another.”
The author presents his case through a mountain of documentation he has gathered from insiders and research. This evidence is presented within the narrative and in the book’s end notes. Recommended to anyone who regularly participates in social media to understand what algorithms and machine learning are doing to society, and how they are engineered to direct users’ attention to more extreme content, regardless of whether or not it is true.
This book examines the role social media has played in the rise of conspiracy theories, racism, nationalism, disinformation, hate speech, outrage, polarization, and fear. It goes into detail about social media’s role in the:
- Genocide in Myanmar
- Sectarian violence and deaths in Sri Lanka
- Anti-refugee violence in Germany
- January 6th insurrection in the US
Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Google, Instagram, Twitter (and several others) are called out specifically for contributions to the trends toward radicalization and the increase in “us versus them” mentality that is so obvious to anyone who spends time on these sites. The bottom line is that the more outrageous content keeps engagement levels high, and this is the metric the social media companies are using to measure success. One of the most disturbing aspects is the priority placed on profits over all else.
“Social media platforms surfaced whatever content their automated systems had concluded would maximize users’ activity online, thereby allowing the company to sell more ads.”
“This technology exerts such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity and is so pervasive in our lives that it changes how we think, behave, and relate to one another.”
The author presents his case through a mountain of documentation he has gathered from insiders and research. This evidence is presented within the narrative and in the book’s end notes. Recommended to anyone who regularly participates in social media to understand what algorithms and machine learning are doing to society, and how they are engineered to direct users’ attention to more extreme content, regardless of whether or not it is true.
September 21, 2022
Quite possibly one of the scariest books I've ever read, it details the nexus between how social media algorithms, many with zero human oversight, exploit weaknesses of human psychology and pull people down the rabbit hole by serving up posts and groups -- not by their accuracy or ability to enlighten, but rather the groups most likely to increase screen time and engagement. Imagine if a computer at a soda plant, constantly tweaked the recipe for ways to to sell more cola, not giving any consideration to safety or nutrition.
It leads to Facebook fueled massacres like in Myanmar and Sri Lanka and medical misinformation via Dr. YouTube in Brazil where parents refuse feeding tubes to save their children because of a video they saw saying doctors are just exploiting their kids to make more money.
Terrifying.
It leads to Facebook fueled massacres like in Myanmar and Sri Lanka and medical misinformation via Dr. YouTube in Brazil where parents refuse feeding tubes to save their children because of a video they saw saying doctors are just exploiting their kids to make more money.
Terrifying.
April 1, 2024
A captivating, terrifying eye-opener.
October 30, 2023
Świetna ale wyczerpująca książka. Max Fisher wykonał kawał dobrej roboty na konkretnych przykładach pokazując, jak social media wpływają na nasze życie, jak wirtualny świat kształtuje ten rzeczywisty, jak algorytmy Youtuba czy Facebooka polaryzują swoich użytkowników w imię większych zysków trafiających do kieszeni inwestorów. Fischer rozprawia się z mitem młodych geniuszy z Doliny Krzemowej (zwanej przez tłumacza "Silikonową"), którzy chcą zmienić świat na lepsze, budować wspólnoty i takie tam pierdoły rodem z przesłuchań kandydatek na Miss World.
Zjeździł Fischer cały świat zbierając materiały do tej książki. Rozmawiał z uczestnikami i ofiarami różnych zjawisk wywołanych przez "socjale". Rozmawiał z całą rzeszą naukowców, analityków i programistów zaangażowanych w uświadamianie opinii publicznej zagrożeń, jakie ze sobą niesie radykalizacja postaw użytkowników Internetu - czuć ogrom pracy i czasu jakie poświęcił na pisanie "W trybach chaosu": bardzo brakuje takiego dziennikarstwa - zaangażowanego i obiektywnego, trafiającego w sedno dzisiejszych problemów.
Zjeździł Fischer cały świat zbierając materiały do tej książki. Rozmawiał z uczestnikami i ofiarami różnych zjawisk wywołanych przez "socjale". Rozmawiał z całą rzeszą naukowców, analityków i programistów zaangażowanych w uświadamianie opinii publicznej zagrożeń, jakie ze sobą niesie radykalizacja postaw użytkowników Internetu - czuć ogrom pracy i czasu jakie poświęcił na pisanie "W trybach chaosu": bardzo brakuje takiego dziennikarstwa - zaangażowanego i obiektywnego, trafiającego w sedno dzisiejszych problemów.
December 1, 2023
This is one of the scariest books I've ever read. It took me months to get through, because as fascinating as it was, I kept finding myself mired in more and more hopelessness the further I got into it. Now that I've finished reading, I have less hope for humanity than I thought possible. We are morons, and we either don't know or don't care about what social media has done and continues to do to how we relate to each other and the world.
This is the last cute moment in this review. Hendrix is recovering from surgery and is happy to pose with blankets.
There's no high horse to climb atop here. You quit Facebook three years ago because you got sick of Aunt Glenda posting boomer memes? You deleted Twitter because Elon is annoying? Well, good for you, I guess. So did I. But we still engage in so many behaviours -- and, I don't know, do we count Goodreads as social media?? I suppose so, in some ways, though its construction seems considerably less intrusive on our daily lives -- that we know are hurting ourselves and other people, but we keep doing it because we're animals that prioritize the little reward centre in our brain. The same thing that gives drug addicts a high, or makes a gambler go back to that slot machine just one more time before dawn...it's what we've trained our brains to get each time someone hits "like" on something we've spewed into the ether. It doesn't matter what form we take it in; if we're connected to the internet (which, obviously, we are, if I'm writing this and you're reading it), we're engaging in it. So many tiny little hits of dopamine.
---
One of the things I was most interested in learning about in THE CHAOS MACHINE was the effects YouTube has had on leading people down more and more radical ways of thought. I'd expected the majority of the book to focus on Facebook, which it did (I mean, it's impossible after reading this to not see Facebook as The Biggest Evil™), but I found the forays into YouTube's algorithm even more interesting and, in some ways, surprising.
I've joked so many times about "messing up my algorithm" when I search for something that comes up during a conversation with friends, knowing I'll now get recommendations for weeks about something I don't actually have a real interest in or feel any allegiance to (whether it's a news piece or a music video for some crappy pop song), but I don't think I fully appreciated how an ignorant use of YouTube can lead to such a high degree of outrage culture. Speaking of joking, though...
I am, unfortunately, close to more than one person who blindly lets themselves go down the YouTube Rabbit Hole™ (a subject on which Max Fisher spends a good deal of time), and yes, I can absolutely tell when it's been happening, because said person is suddenly in A Mood, armed with all kinds of bullshit talking points that are clearly coming from some random dude with a microphone in his basement. It starts by watching one usually fairly innocuous video of your choosing (although your "choice" has probably been dictated to you to a degree, especially if you're "choosing" it from the videos that "happen" to pop up in your stream when you open the app for the first time that day), and if you've enabled AutoPlay, you just keep getting fed more and more videos, a little bit more extreme each time, your "preferences" being replicated and amplified in small enough increments that you'd hardly notice if you weren't paying attention. A copy of a copy of a copy, each one blurrier than the last. And then an hour has gone by, and then two, and you're just passively absorbing all of this baseless crap, until your opinions have swung so much farther to one side (and, let's be real here: this book makes no bones about the fact that right-wing talking points and opinions are the ones that make the outrage money, which is why they're the ones that perpetuate this cycle a thousand times more often than any other) that your friends and family will probably wonder who the hell you are, why you're suddenly so angry, and how you used to be able to engage in polite dinner conversation but are now just a blowhard asshole.
---
Okay, screed over. I think.
Fisher covers so much ground here, talking about the effects social media has had on everything from one-on-one interpersonal relationships to actual genocide, and his research is genuinely staggering.
---
There are interviews with and studies by psychologists, sociologists, computer scientists, medical doctors, political scientists, you name it. He talks about social media's effects on politics, of course, because that's often the biggest one we can see without having to think too hard, and the horrifying effects it had on dealing with COVID is touched on as well ("Plandemic," anyone?), but he also discusses the ways in which we turn social media's effects inward, like the effect it has on young people's self esteem and their ability to realistically gauge where they are in life in comparison with their peers. Instagram and Snapchat are the two biggest killers there. He talks about how much of a role Reddit played in the January 6th insurrection in Washington, as well as how many incel movements have been started there. He talks about how many dark actors there are behind the scenes, paying to use Facebook and Twitter and other platforms to push dangerous information that has cost the lives of countless kids. In a bone-chilling chapter, he even talks about the proliferation of child sexual abuse material and how much easier it's become to get ones hands on such things thanks to social media, and how these companies often know it's happening but turn a blind eye, because: $$$. [Edit: I've made some of my Kindle highlights public; you'll find some of the CSAM stuff there, if you're interested in getting to the source.]
---
One eye-opening section talks about anxiety levels in populations who use Facebook and Twitter versus those who don't. I highlighted the passage in my Kindle, so I'll have to come back and post it verbatim, but the gist is that people in a temporary social media blackout routinely report their stress levels dropping by a significant amount -- we're talking ~40+% -- and their engagement in other, happier, offline activities skyrocketing. Their self-reported levels of anger, alienation, and downright loneliness drop precipitously. These things are actually measurable, and they need to be talked about more. Social media companies -- all of them -- are making money off our unhappiness. The more upset we are, the more clicking we do. [Edit: found one part of the passage...]
---
It's not all "roll over and die," though I've probably made it sound that way. Fisher speaks with countless people who talk about the ways in which social media has created positive connections around the world, and has made getting emergency information out to marginalized populations so much easier and faster. There are also suggestions for how, going forward, humanity could continue to use social media and the internet in general in a much healthier way. The trouble is that there's no money in those solutions, so the likelihood of us seeing those changes implemented is practically zero.
---
If we have to take a test to get our driver's licenses in order to keep ourselves and others safe on shared roads, we should have to take some kind of basic media literacy course before operating the heavy machinery that is social media. Clearly, most of us are too dense to figure out what is needed to use it safely. And, I know I know: this book is preaching to the choir. The dumbasses who just want to spend their lunch hours listening to Alex Jones screaming about water making the frogs gay aren't going to read it. But I wish they would. I wish everyone would, regardless of political stripe or personal beliefs. This is something that affects literally everyone with a phone in their pocket or a laptop on their desk. It's maybe one of the most important investigations I've come across in my adult life. And I know I'm probably screaming into the wind, and nobody is going to delete their Twitter account because I wrote some blustery review, but if nothing else -- assuming you've read this far -- it might make you want to pick up this book and talk about it with your real-life social circle.
If THE CHAOS MACHINE doesn't scare the hell out of you, I really don't know what will.
This is the last cute moment in this review. Hendrix is recovering from surgery and is happy to pose with blankets.
There's no high horse to climb atop here. You quit Facebook three years ago because you got sick of Aunt Glenda posting boomer memes? You deleted Twitter because Elon is annoying? Well, good for you, I guess. So did I. But we still engage in so many behaviours -- and, I don't know, do we count Goodreads as social media?? I suppose so, in some ways, though its construction seems considerably less intrusive on our daily lives -- that we know are hurting ourselves and other people, but we keep doing it because we're animals that prioritize the little reward centre in our brain. The same thing that gives drug addicts a high, or makes a gambler go back to that slot machine just one more time before dawn...it's what we've trained our brains to get each time someone hits "like" on something we've spewed into the ether. It doesn't matter what form we take it in; if we're connected to the internet (which, obviously, we are, if I'm writing this and you're reading it), we're engaging in it. So many tiny little hits of dopamine.
Stage two in social media’s distorting influence, according to the MAD model, is something called internalization. Users who chased the platforms’ incentives received immediate, high-volume social rewards: likes and shares. As psychologists have known since Pavlov, when you are repeatedly rewarded for a behavior, you learn a compulsion to repeat it. As you are trained to turn all discussions into matters of high outrage, to express disgust with out-groups, to assert the superiority of your in-group, you will eventually shift from doing it for external rewards to doing it simply because you want to do it. The drive comes from within. Your nature has been changed.
---
One of the things I was most interested in learning about in THE CHAOS MACHINE was the effects YouTube has had on leading people down more and more radical ways of thought. I'd expected the majority of the book to focus on Facebook, which it did (I mean, it's impossible after reading this to not see Facebook as The Biggest Evil™), but I found the forays into YouTube's algorithm even more interesting and, in some ways, surprising.
But later, near the end of a technical explanation, as he stumbled into a reference to YouTube, his voice rose again. “YouTube is the worst,” he said. Of what he considered the four leading web companies—Google/YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft—the best at managing what he’d called “the poison” was, he believed, Microsoft. “And it makes sense, right? It’s not a social media company,” he said. “But YouTube is the worst on these issues,” he repeated.
“Its search and recommender algorithms are misinformation engines.” She later called it “one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the twenty-first century.” Danah Boyd, the founder of a tech-focused think tank, agreed, telling my colleague Amanda, “YouTube is perhaps the most troubling platform we have out there right now.”
I've joked so many times about "messing up my algorithm" when I search for something that comes up during a conversation with friends, knowing I'll now get recommendations for weeks about something I don't actually have a real interest in or feel any allegiance to (whether it's a news piece or a music video for some crappy pop song), but I don't think I fully appreciated how an ignorant use of YouTube can lead to such a high degree of outrage culture. Speaking of joking, though...
There’s a term for the process Pauli described, of online jokes gradually internalized as sincere. It’s called irony poisoning. Heavy social media users often call themselves “irony poisoned,” a joke on the dulling of the senses that comes from a lifetime engrossed in social media subcultures, where ironic detachment, algorithmic overstimulation, and dare-to-offend humor prevail. In more extreme forms, sustained exposure to objectionable content, spent going down Facebook or YouTube rabbit holes, can lower people’s defenses against it. Desensitization makes the ideas seem less taboo or extreme, which in turn makes them easier to adopt.
I am, unfortunately, close to more than one person who blindly lets themselves go down the YouTube Rabbit Hole™ (a subject on which Max Fisher spends a good deal of time), and yes, I can absolutely tell when it's been happening, because said person is suddenly in A Mood, armed with all kinds of bullshit talking points that are clearly coming from some random dude with a microphone in his basement. It starts by watching one usually fairly innocuous video of your choosing (although your "choice" has probably been dictated to you to a degree, especially if you're "choosing" it from the videos that "happen" to pop up in your stream when you open the app for the first time that day), and if you've enabled AutoPlay, you just keep getting fed more and more videos, a little bit more extreme each time, your "preferences" being replicated and amplified in small enough increments that you'd hardly notice if you weren't paying attention. A copy of a copy of a copy, each one blurrier than the last. And then an hour has gone by, and then two, and you're just passively absorbing all of this baseless crap, until your opinions have swung so much farther to one side (and, let's be real here: this book makes no bones about the fact that right-wing talking points and opinions are the ones that make the outrage money, which is why they're the ones that perpetuate this cycle a thousand times more often than any other) that your friends and family will probably wonder who the hell you are, why you're suddenly so angry, and how you used to be able to engage in polite dinner conversation but are now just a blowhard asshole.
Showing subjects lots of social media posts from peers that expressed outrage made them more outrage-prone themselves. All it takes is regular scrolls through your anger-filled feed not only to make you feel angrier while you’re online, but also to make you an angrier person.
---
Okay, screed over. I think.
Fisher covers so much ground here, talking about the effects social media has had on everything from one-on-one interpersonal relationships to actual genocide, and his research is genuinely staggering.
...his team had concluded that social networks, especially Facebook, had played a “determining role” in the genocide. The platforms, he said, “substantively contributed” to the hate destroying an entire population.
If social media were built to activate majoritarian identity panic, then America’s shrinking white majority—and especially the non-college-graduate or working-class whites who tend to hold their racial identity most closely and who became the bulk of the Trump coalition—would be dangerously susceptible to the same pattern I’d seen in Sri Lanka. Status threat and digital deindividuation on a national scale. By 2018, that tribe had, with a handful of exceptions like the rally in Charlottesville, not yet worked itself up to outright mob violence. But I wondered whether this sort of social media influence might be coming out in other forms, priming people for racial violence in less obvious but still consequential ways.
---
There are interviews with and studies by psychologists, sociologists, computer scientists, medical doctors, political scientists, you name it. He talks about social media's effects on politics, of course, because that's often the biggest one we can see without having to think too hard, and the horrifying effects it had on dealing with COVID is touched on as well ("Plandemic," anyone?), but he also discusses the ways in which we turn social media's effects inward, like the effect it has on young people's self esteem and their ability to realistically gauge where they are in life in comparison with their peers. Instagram and Snapchat are the two biggest killers there. He talks about how much of a role Reddit played in the January 6th insurrection in Washington, as well as how many incel movements have been started there. He talks about how many dark actors there are behind the scenes, paying to use Facebook and Twitter and other platforms to push dangerous information that has cost the lives of countless kids. In a bone-chilling chapter, he even talks about the proliferation of child sexual abuse material and how much easier it's become to get ones hands on such things thanks to social media, and how these companies often know it's happening but turn a blind eye, because: $$$. [Edit: I've made some of my Kindle highlights public; you'll find some of the CSAM stuff there, if you're interested in getting to the source.]
---
One eye-opening section talks about anxiety levels in populations who use Facebook and Twitter versus those who don't. I highlighted the passage in my Kindle, so I'll have to come back and post it verbatim, but the gist is that people in a temporary social media blackout routinely report their stress levels dropping by a significant amount -- we're talking ~40+% -- and their engagement in other, happier, offline activities skyrocketing. Their self-reported levels of anger, alienation, and downright loneliness drop precipitously. These things are actually measurable, and they need to be talked about more. Social media companies -- all of them -- are making money off our unhappiness. The more upset we are, the more clicking we do. [Edit: found one part of the passage...]
The changes were dramatic. People who deleted Facebook became happier, more satisfied with their life, and less anxious. The emotional change was equivalent to 25 to 40 percent of the effect of going to therapy—a stunning drop for a four-week break. Four in five said afterward that deactivating had been good for them. Facebook quitters also spent 15 percent less time consuming the news. They became, as a result, less knowledgeable about current events—the only negative effect. But much of the knowledge they had lost seemed to be from polarizing content; information packaged in a way to indulge tribal antagonisms. Overall, the economists wrote, deactivation “significantly reduced polarization of views on policy issues and a measure of exposure to polarizing news.”
---
It's not all "roll over and die," though I've probably made it sound that way. Fisher speaks with countless people who talk about the ways in which social media has created positive connections around the world, and has made getting emergency information out to marginalized populations so much easier and faster. There are also suggestions for how, going forward, humanity could continue to use social media and the internet in general in a much healthier way. The trouble is that there's no money in those solutions, so the likelihood of us seeing those changes implemented is practically zero.
---
If we have to take a test to get our driver's licenses in order to keep ourselves and others safe on shared roads, we should have to take some kind of basic media literacy course before operating the heavy machinery that is social media. Clearly, most of us are too dense to figure out what is needed to use it safely. And, I know I know: this book is preaching to the choir. The dumbasses who just want to spend their lunch hours listening to Alex Jones screaming about water making the frogs gay aren't going to read it. But I wish they would. I wish everyone would, regardless of political stripe or personal beliefs. This is something that affects literally everyone with a phone in their pocket or a laptop on their desk. It's maybe one of the most important investigations I've come across in my adult life. And I know I'm probably screaming into the wind, and nobody is going to delete their Twitter account because I wrote some blustery review, but if nothing else -- assuming you've read this far -- it might make you want to pick up this book and talk about it with your real-life social circle.
If THE CHAOS MACHINE doesn't scare the hell out of you, I really don't know what will.
November 17, 2022
Summary: A deep dive into how social media has rewired our minds and fueled social divisions.
If the events of the past years have not already done so, this book should give you pause about any of the social media platforms you use regularly. It did so for me.
Max Fisher looks at phenomena as diverse as the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar, the growth of anti-vaccine movements, and the political discord of our recent elections. He shows how these are not simply the result of zealots posting what is often false information or incendiary statements. Rather, he argues that there is something baked into our social media that turns these into potent movements that in some instances have led to the loss of life and the deception of many.
The issue is engagement. If all the things posted on any platform, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or Reddit, were given equal weight, the postings of zealots, social media influencers, and bad actors from other countries would still have minimal effect–getting lost in the mass of material posted every day. What makes it different is that each of these platforms and others, in the pursuit of advertising dollars, where they make their money, promote the material that gets the most engagement through the algorithms that determine what we see when we visit one of these sites. Those algorithms are tailored to our interests and show us more of what we’ve viewed, liked, and clicked on.
But there is more. These platforms use recommendation engines that show you other content that is related to your interests, content that is getting a lot of engagement. And often this is inflammatory, engendering fear or anger. And this can lead people into groups that share that anger, that disengagement with society, and down a rabbit hole, away from family and friends in the real world.
What is chilling is Fisher’s account of the indifference of these platforms, even when their internal research calls attention to the effect of their algorithms. Often, government authorities, seeking to stop the spread of misinformation, find it impossible to even get a response from these platforms–unless they pull the plug on these platforms’ access to their countries. But in many countries, these platforms serve as the primary source of information for their people. Hence, the reluctance to take this step.
I found this a deeply disturbing trend. And in the light of the recent takeover of Twitter and the financial struggles of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, I think the chaos Fisher chronicles could easily increase–unless. Unless we educate ourselves about how these platforms work, how they show us content (or not), and make decisions of how we will engage them without being manipulated by them. But this is a big ask. All I know is that I am asking myself hard questions about how I will engage these platforms going forward–or whether I will continue to do so.
____________________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.
If the events of the past years have not already done so, this book should give you pause about any of the social media platforms you use regularly. It did so for me.
Max Fisher looks at phenomena as diverse as the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar, the growth of anti-vaccine movements, and the political discord of our recent elections. He shows how these are not simply the result of zealots posting what is often false information or incendiary statements. Rather, he argues that there is something baked into our social media that turns these into potent movements that in some instances have led to the loss of life and the deception of many.
The issue is engagement. If all the things posted on any platform, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or Reddit, were given equal weight, the postings of zealots, social media influencers, and bad actors from other countries would still have minimal effect–getting lost in the mass of material posted every day. What makes it different is that each of these platforms and others, in the pursuit of advertising dollars, where they make their money, promote the material that gets the most engagement through the algorithms that determine what we see when we visit one of these sites. Those algorithms are tailored to our interests and show us more of what we’ve viewed, liked, and clicked on.
But there is more. These platforms use recommendation engines that show you other content that is related to your interests, content that is getting a lot of engagement. And often this is inflammatory, engendering fear or anger. And this can lead people into groups that share that anger, that disengagement with society, and down a rabbit hole, away from family and friends in the real world.
What is chilling is Fisher’s account of the indifference of these platforms, even when their internal research calls attention to the effect of their algorithms. Often, government authorities, seeking to stop the spread of misinformation, find it impossible to even get a response from these platforms–unless they pull the plug on these platforms’ access to their countries. But in many countries, these platforms serve as the primary source of information for their people. Hence, the reluctance to take this step.
I found this a deeply disturbing trend. And in the light of the recent takeover of Twitter and the financial struggles of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, I think the chaos Fisher chronicles could easily increase–unless. Unless we educate ourselves about how these platforms work, how they show us content (or not), and make decisions of how we will engage them without being manipulated by them. But this is a big ask. All I know is that I am asking myself hard questions about how I will engage these platforms going forward–or whether I will continue to do so.
____________________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.
September 25, 2022
Listened to this one after hearing about it on a podcast. Super important + very well laid out history of the rise of social media + the companies behind it all. Sobering. Scary. Vital knowledge.
November 8, 2022
I read so I can understand how the world actually works. For a variety of reasons, many non-fiction books cannot help you towards that goal. This one does.
Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit etc) is one of the most significant contemporary dynamics. It is changing our economy, our politics, our entertainment and culture, our way of spending time, and even the way humans interact with each other. Yet it is not very well understood.
Fisher sets out to explain a particular part of social media: why is it associated with such polarization, rise of extremist views, mob-like behaviour (to harass or cancel transgressors) and seemingly working to both strengthen some authoritarian systems while critically undermining democratic ones. Which then makes trying to meaningfully address it a particularly challenging question.
Social media’s ills in some way seem over-determined. From the macro (and therefore unhelpfully broad) categories of Race, Capitalism, Free Speech, to the micro (Zuckaberg’s poor governance, Trump’s particular exploitation etc). What is valuable about The Chaos Machine is that Fisher helps narrow down the focus towards an issue which seems at the crux of the swirling issues: Algorithmic amplification.
Part of why Social Media exploded in popularity was that this was the deliberate intention of social media designers. They want us as engaged with their products as long as possible. And certain kinds of content stimulate stronger and longer engagement. Receiving virtual social kudos (likes, hearts) provides a dopamine hit. Moral-emotional language (Hate, Adore, Frustrated) captures our attention and encourages us to engage. In the search for continuous eyeballs, these sites have developed ways of pushing content that generates strong reactions to the top of our feeds (which have endless cycles so we never run out of new things to respond to).
As such, while 1000 people can be posting happily away about their happy lives, 10 people may be posting cynical, manipulative, outrage-generating content. And because it generates a strong response, those 1000 people will at some point have this content served up to them. 300 may click through for curiosity, 100 may click on a further recommendation, 50 may fall down a youtube rabbit hole. 10 more may end up posters themselves of new outrage generating content. The amount of disturbing content has now just doubled. And it will keep doubling because to the machine, this was a successful pattern of generating engagement (and hence ad revenue for the sites).
The problem, as a French computer scientist who worked at Youtube identifies midway through the book, is thus not the fact those original 10 people had free speech. It was the deliberate amplification of the worst but most engagement-driving, forms of speech.
At times, the sites have deliberately recognised this. In one highly disturbing incident in 2018, youtube’s algorithm discovered that it could cut together thousands of videos of young kids in the pool or in partial clothing. And doing so generated a lot of eyeballs. So it did it again and again. In that case, Youtube eventually acted. But it and other social media companies haven’t done so in cases where people in the US, Germany, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Brazil or dozens of other places around the world. And people have been killed because of their refusal.
You can understand the companies reluctance. They didn't make the conspiracy theories, they know nothing about why the Rohingya people are seen as illegitimate in Myanmar. Turn off the systems always delivering us hot takes and engaging content and we might go and do something else with our time, hurting their profits. But the rise of the far-right in particular, the explosion of conspiracy theories, the re-emergence of political violence and destabilisation in democracies around the world is necessarily (if not sufficiently) tied to these services.
Given the significance of this book’s subject, it reflects what I term a ‘Citizenship book’. Books I think we should be providing on mass to citizens to read and help them engage with the world. To help them understand what makes their world tick. They can choose to respond to it however they wish, but we’d all be far better off if there was a richer foundation on which to do so.
But in a world where citizenship books were a real thing, we’d probably never have the problem with the algorithms that we do today. Our grand parents generation would occasionally go and spend an evening listening to local politicians giving a talk. Tonight our nightly news may offer a 6 second sound bite to the leader of the country. After having shown 15 minutes of stories of crime and celebrities.
Even if we had more clearly defined channels for our content we’d all be in a better situation. Fisher rightly points the finger at Youtube as one of the most disturbing social media sites, directly linked with many (most?) cases of radicalisation. But while I use the site everyday, I’ve almost never seen that material. Why? Because I only use it for my hobbies (cooking, games) and music. I don’t seek news from YouTube. But some of us do. And a mainstream news report reposted on Youtube, as the algorithm has clearly recognised, won’t get a fraction of the attention and emotive engagement that a cynical conspiracy clip will get. The algorithm amplification is the problem, but the problem only exists because of human frailties.
In some ways this is a depressing book. The thing in our pocket which distracts us in the stalled grocery line, is the same thing giving rise to mob violence in our streets, undermining our democracy, and directly killing people around the world. That said, reading The Chaos Machine in November 2022 I do feel a small sense of optimism for three reasons.
First, perhaps through books like this, and the growing recognition within Silicon Valley about their leviathan, we’re coming to better understand the problem. Second, the kinds of mass social movements whose amplification can really have vast scales may be struggling. We’re not going away from social media anytime soon, but Facebook is spiralling and Twitter seems about to break down. To be sure the problem isn’t going away, but the diffusion of sites, the diffusion of networks will create more natural fire breaks.
Finally, Time may help cure some wounds. Parts of the baby boomers generation have been utterly broken by Facebook. And journalists and politicians are unlikely to anoint one single network again in the way they legitimised Twitter in the 2010s. Maybe just maybe the digital natives coming up now will have a slightly better grasp of how to manage such systems. Now, to post this to Goodreas and Twitter. If you enjoyed this review, please like, share and subscribe!
Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit etc) is one of the most significant contemporary dynamics. It is changing our economy, our politics, our entertainment and culture, our way of spending time, and even the way humans interact with each other. Yet it is not very well understood.
Fisher sets out to explain a particular part of social media: why is it associated with such polarization, rise of extremist views, mob-like behaviour (to harass or cancel transgressors) and seemingly working to both strengthen some authoritarian systems while critically undermining democratic ones. Which then makes trying to meaningfully address it a particularly challenging question.
Social media’s ills in some way seem over-determined. From the macro (and therefore unhelpfully broad) categories of Race, Capitalism, Free Speech, to the micro (Zuckaberg’s poor governance, Trump’s particular exploitation etc). What is valuable about The Chaos Machine is that Fisher helps narrow down the focus towards an issue which seems at the crux of the swirling issues: Algorithmic amplification.
Part of why Social Media exploded in popularity was that this was the deliberate intention of social media designers. They want us as engaged with their products as long as possible. And certain kinds of content stimulate stronger and longer engagement. Receiving virtual social kudos (likes, hearts) provides a dopamine hit. Moral-emotional language (Hate, Adore, Frustrated) captures our attention and encourages us to engage. In the search for continuous eyeballs, these sites have developed ways of pushing content that generates strong reactions to the top of our feeds (which have endless cycles so we never run out of new things to respond to).
As such, while 1000 people can be posting happily away about their happy lives, 10 people may be posting cynical, manipulative, outrage-generating content. And because it generates a strong response, those 1000 people will at some point have this content served up to them. 300 may click through for curiosity, 100 may click on a further recommendation, 50 may fall down a youtube rabbit hole. 10 more may end up posters themselves of new outrage generating content. The amount of disturbing content has now just doubled. And it will keep doubling because to the machine, this was a successful pattern of generating engagement (and hence ad revenue for the sites).
The problem, as a French computer scientist who worked at Youtube identifies midway through the book, is thus not the fact those original 10 people had free speech. It was the deliberate amplification of the worst but most engagement-driving, forms of speech.
At times, the sites have deliberately recognised this. In one highly disturbing incident in 2018, youtube’s algorithm discovered that it could cut together thousands of videos of young kids in the pool or in partial clothing. And doing so generated a lot of eyeballs. So it did it again and again. In that case, Youtube eventually acted. But it and other social media companies haven’t done so in cases where people in the US, Germany, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Brazil or dozens of other places around the world. And people have been killed because of their refusal.
You can understand the companies reluctance. They didn't make the conspiracy theories, they know nothing about why the Rohingya people are seen as illegitimate in Myanmar. Turn off the systems always delivering us hot takes and engaging content and we might go and do something else with our time, hurting their profits. But the rise of the far-right in particular, the explosion of conspiracy theories, the re-emergence of political violence and destabilisation in democracies around the world is necessarily (if not sufficiently) tied to these services.
Given the significance of this book’s subject, it reflects what I term a ‘Citizenship book’. Books I think we should be providing on mass to citizens to read and help them engage with the world. To help them understand what makes their world tick. They can choose to respond to it however they wish, but we’d all be far better off if there was a richer foundation on which to do so.
But in a world where citizenship books were a real thing, we’d probably never have the problem with the algorithms that we do today. Our grand parents generation would occasionally go and spend an evening listening to local politicians giving a talk. Tonight our nightly news may offer a 6 second sound bite to the leader of the country. After having shown 15 minutes of stories of crime and celebrities.
Even if we had more clearly defined channels for our content we’d all be in a better situation. Fisher rightly points the finger at Youtube as one of the most disturbing social media sites, directly linked with many (most?) cases of radicalisation. But while I use the site everyday, I’ve almost never seen that material. Why? Because I only use it for my hobbies (cooking, games) and music. I don’t seek news from YouTube. But some of us do. And a mainstream news report reposted on Youtube, as the algorithm has clearly recognised, won’t get a fraction of the attention and emotive engagement that a cynical conspiracy clip will get. The algorithm amplification is the problem, but the problem only exists because of human frailties.
In some ways this is a depressing book. The thing in our pocket which distracts us in the stalled grocery line, is the same thing giving rise to mob violence in our streets, undermining our democracy, and directly killing people around the world. That said, reading The Chaos Machine in November 2022 I do feel a small sense of optimism for three reasons.
First, perhaps through books like this, and the growing recognition within Silicon Valley about their leviathan, we’re coming to better understand the problem. Second, the kinds of mass social movements whose amplification can really have vast scales may be struggling. We’re not going away from social media anytime soon, but Facebook is spiralling and Twitter seems about to break down. To be sure the problem isn’t going away, but the diffusion of sites, the diffusion of networks will create more natural fire breaks.
Finally, Time may help cure some wounds. Parts of the baby boomers generation have been utterly broken by Facebook. And journalists and politicians are unlikely to anoint one single network again in the way they legitimised Twitter in the 2010s. Maybe just maybe the digital natives coming up now will have a slightly better grasp of how to manage such systems. Now, to post this to Goodreas and Twitter. If you enjoyed this review, please like, share and subscribe!
May 25, 2023
I can't really say that I enjoyed this book. It's equal parts enraging and horrifying. But if you've ever come within ten feet of using social media (which I'm pretty sure is the majority of people at this point), you need to read this book. It's extremely important.
I knew social media has some serious, deep-rooted issues before I read this book, but...wow. We have got to overhaul regulations on social media companies.
I knew social media has some serious, deep-rooted issues before I read this book, but...wow. We have got to overhaul regulations on social media companies.
March 14, 2023
I actually agree with the authors overall premise. Where the author goes wrong, unfortunately, is that he seems to have little regard for actually telling the truth. He often employs hyperbolic, extremist language in service to his ideology.He uses loaded words to describe conservatives, but refuses to acknowledge, on any level, the violence and extremism on his side of the aisle. Often, the author conflates alt right and just regular conservatives, forgoing journalistic integrity to completely misrepresent the views of people he doesn’t agree with. His journalism is sloppy and undisciplined and so is this book.
April 7, 2023
Pretty much the best coverage of social media’s effect on disinformation and outrage that I’ve seen. Very little here that I didn’t already know, but so very well presented, with astute bits of psychology where needed. Five full stars for its flaming importance.
Not that anyone here cares, but here’s the strategy I’ve used from the social media get-go, having seen the vitriolic mess of Usenet back in the mid-eighties (where groups for women in computer science were trampled by intruding angry incels before such a term existed, while the corresponding men’s group suffered no such intrusions).
Never Facebook.
Limit Instagram to a small group of gardening buddies (interesting that I’ve always kept that below 150). Ignore all else.
Limit Goodreads to a very small group of people who give me ideas for books to read. Ignore all else, including random book recommendations.
Limit YouTube to looking up fully specified items of interest (how-tos, music, film) in a browser, watching the video (with eyes and ears shut to ads and skipping them as able), then shutting it down. Never auto play more videos. Never scroll through recommendations.
No news feeds of any kind. Get weather, news, etc. from trusted sites directly. Read a variety. Live not in a filter bubble (even though it’s hard to see opposing views).
With this, I control what I see. I spent 40 years writing algorithms (not for social media). I do not want my mental life run by algorithms.
Not that anyone here cares, but here’s the strategy I’ve used from the social media get-go, having seen the vitriolic mess of Usenet back in the mid-eighties (where groups for women in computer science were trampled by intruding angry incels before such a term existed, while the corresponding men’s group suffered no such intrusions).
Never Facebook.
Limit Instagram to a small group of gardening buddies (interesting that I’ve always kept that below 150). Ignore all else.
Limit Goodreads to a very small group of people who give me ideas for books to read. Ignore all else, including random book recommendations.
Limit YouTube to looking up fully specified items of interest (how-tos, music, film) in a browser, watching the video (with eyes and ears shut to ads and skipping them as able), then shutting it down. Never auto play more videos. Never scroll through recommendations.
No news feeds of any kind. Get weather, news, etc. from trusted sites directly. Read a variety. Live not in a filter bubble (even though it’s hard to see opposing views).
With this, I control what I see. I spent 40 years writing algorithms (not for social media). I do not want my mental life run by algorithms.
December 17, 2022
A very important book which all of us should read and discuss. I'm writing an article for a online magazine and planning a bookclub discussion (both in Japanese).
My Japanese review:https://youshofanclub.com/2022/12/17/...
My Japanese review:https://youshofanclub.com/2022/12/17/...
February 14, 2025
This book makes me horrified for our future. Well researched, and extremely thorough
Some cons ** I updated this because I thought about it more
- repeated points a lot
- talked A LOT about right wing radicalization. what I didn’t understand is what do we do now? How do we communicate to others who have different view points? Also - i wish the book talked more about vaccine misinformation or other examples of how social media harms society (mental health, body image, attention span etc)
- I wish he spent more time describing the psychology of what is happening to us as we consume social media vs peppering in a sentence or two on it
- I wish he focused more on what the future looks like, or what to do if a loved one goes down a social media rabbit hole. It seems his thesis is “everything will be destroyed unless algorithms turn off”. Which sounds nice - but will never happen. So what do we do now? Aside from consume less, and be mindful of our consumption / where we get news etc (but even that I had to infer on my own)
Anyways he’s a journalist and it’s his book and it’s still amazing so take that with a grain of salt !!!
Also big 👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼 to Zuckerberg
Some cons ** I updated this because I thought about it more
- repeated points a lot
- talked A LOT about right wing radicalization. what I didn’t understand is what do we do now? How do we communicate to others who have different view points? Also - i wish the book talked more about vaccine misinformation or other examples of how social media harms society (mental health, body image, attention span etc)
- I wish he spent more time describing the psychology of what is happening to us as we consume social media vs peppering in a sentence or two on it
- I wish he focused more on what the future looks like, or what to do if a loved one goes down a social media rabbit hole. It seems his thesis is “everything will be destroyed unless algorithms turn off”. Which sounds nice - but will never happen. So what do we do now? Aside from consume less, and be mindful of our consumption / where we get news etc (but even that I had to infer on my own)
Anyways he’s a journalist and it’s his book and it’s still amazing so take that with a grain of salt !!!
Also big 👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼 to Zuckerberg
January 20, 2024
O livro fala de algumas redes sociais, especialmente o Facebook e YouTube. O autor, jornalista do New York Times, analisa a evolução dessas redes mas principalmente o que foi a virada chave: os algoritmos e o impacto que ele exerceu no comportamento dos usuários.
O papel que as redes tiveram nas eleições de Donald Trump, em guerras civis, linchamentos públicos - inclusive morte. Também há um capítulo sobre o Brasil e o crescimento de pautas negacionistas, além de claro, a eleição de “vocês-sabem-quem” - impulsionado por essas duas redes.
Finalizei o livro com muitas perguntas - além de indignações, claro. Mas me fez refletir bastante sobre o meu uso das redes. E mais ainda: para quem eu direciono minha audiência.
O papel que as redes tiveram nas eleições de Donald Trump, em guerras civis, linchamentos públicos - inclusive morte. Também há um capítulo sobre o Brasil e o crescimento de pautas negacionistas, além de claro, a eleição de “vocês-sabem-quem” - impulsionado por essas duas redes.
Finalizei o livro com muitas perguntas - além de indignações, claro. Mas me fez refletir bastante sobre o meu uso das redes. E mais ainda: para quem eu direciono minha audiência.
January 31, 2023
Finally. A book on the ills of social media that doesn’t blame the individual using it for its addictiveness or polarization. The Chaos Machine is the first book of its kind to actually take a systemic look at social media and have a systemic critique. Social media doesn’t just happen to be addictive and polarizing. It was designed that way by founders and their venture capitalist backers to create markets, control those markets, and make lots and lots of money. If it happens to also rip through the fabric that holds societies together, so be it.
There is too much in this book for me to adequately cover in one review, but Max Fisher presents damning evidence that social media companies know their products are addictive and harmful, and won’t do anything about it. In fact, they are likelier to make their products more addictive and more harmful if it means more market share and more money.
At some point, these companies realized that attention is the main currency that drives internet activity. If you can get people’s attention, and keep that attention on your site, you can sell more ads and command cultural conversations at large. So they have created platforms and algorithms designed to sap as much of your free time as possible and keep you coming back for the dopamine hit they can provide. We check our phones over 150 times a day thanks in large part to social media (27). YouTube purposefully changed its algorithm so that searches for videos do not return the best results, but the results that will create the most engagement (106). Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, all of them will do whatever it takes to keep you coming back. And their algorithms figured out that polarizing content that stirs your emotions is the most attention-grabbing (and attention-keeping) content of all.
That’s why Youtube funnels men looking for self-help to Jordan Peterson (210) and used to recommend Alex Jones’ InfoWars more than any other politics or news channel (216). It’s why anti-vax and q-anon groups run rampant on facebook, and why the January 6th riot was able to organize seemingly out of thin air (321). Social media creates rabbit holes of conspiracy and doom because those rabbit holes hook people to the apps. In fact, Facebook can take credible blame for genocide in Myanmar because of its push to take over the country’s market, disinterest in monitoring and taking down harmful content (Facebook would not even hire any moderators who could speak Burmese, the main language in Myanmar), and its algorithm’s mandate to push the most attention-grabbing posts to the top. Anti-Muslim hate spread like wildfire in the majority-Buddhist nation, and caused real life riots and attacks that killed Muslim people. Facebook ignored all of this until the Myanmar government shut the website down on their national internet. It was then that Facebook checked in, not to apologize for all the problems they caused, but to ask why their engagement in Myanmar had suddenly dipped.
I realize the irony of posting all this to another social media website (Goodreads), but it's the best way to grab some attention lol. I don’t even have time to talk about Silicon Valley is run by libertarian psychopaths who think diversity is bad (51), or how part of the reason facebook doesn’t curtail hate speech is because too many conservatives and their political pages use hate speech, and were getting banned as a result (142), or how Mark Zuckerberg claimed facebook would help prevent pandemics (LOL) (171). There’s even a good section talking about how social media’s one potential benefit, organizing for social justice, is a nonstarter because social media can draw big crowds to protests which usually dissipate and have no durability to create real change (216). This is an absolute must-read, and the most convincing entry in the “Why you should quit social media” subgenre.
TL;DR - Once again, we can blame capitalism.
There is too much in this book for me to adequately cover in one review, but Max Fisher presents damning evidence that social media companies know their products are addictive and harmful, and won’t do anything about it. In fact, they are likelier to make their products more addictive and more harmful if it means more market share and more money.
At some point, these companies realized that attention is the main currency that drives internet activity. If you can get people’s attention, and keep that attention on your site, you can sell more ads and command cultural conversations at large. So they have created platforms and algorithms designed to sap as much of your free time as possible and keep you coming back for the dopamine hit they can provide. We check our phones over 150 times a day thanks in large part to social media (27). YouTube purposefully changed its algorithm so that searches for videos do not return the best results, but the results that will create the most engagement (106). Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, all of them will do whatever it takes to keep you coming back. And their algorithms figured out that polarizing content that stirs your emotions is the most attention-grabbing (and attention-keeping) content of all.
That’s why Youtube funnels men looking for self-help to Jordan Peterson (210) and used to recommend Alex Jones’ InfoWars more than any other politics or news channel (216). It’s why anti-vax and q-anon groups run rampant on facebook, and why the January 6th riot was able to organize seemingly out of thin air (321). Social media creates rabbit holes of conspiracy and doom because those rabbit holes hook people to the apps. In fact, Facebook can take credible blame for genocide in Myanmar because of its push to take over the country’s market, disinterest in monitoring and taking down harmful content (Facebook would not even hire any moderators who could speak Burmese, the main language in Myanmar), and its algorithm’s mandate to push the most attention-grabbing posts to the top. Anti-Muslim hate spread like wildfire in the majority-Buddhist nation, and caused real life riots and attacks that killed Muslim people. Facebook ignored all of this until the Myanmar government shut the website down on their national internet. It was then that Facebook checked in, not to apologize for all the problems they caused, but to ask why their engagement in Myanmar had suddenly dipped.
I realize the irony of posting all this to another social media website (Goodreads), but it's the best way to grab some attention lol. I don’t even have time to talk about Silicon Valley is run by libertarian psychopaths who think diversity is bad (51), or how part of the reason facebook doesn’t curtail hate speech is because too many conservatives and their political pages use hate speech, and were getting banned as a result (142), or how Mark Zuckerberg claimed facebook would help prevent pandemics (LOL) (171). There’s even a good section talking about how social media’s one potential benefit, organizing for social justice, is a nonstarter because social media can draw big crowds to protests which usually dissipate and have no durability to create real change (216). This is an absolute must-read, and the most convincing entry in the “Why you should quit social media” subgenre.
TL;DR - Once again, we can blame capitalism.
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April 1, 2023Os livros "The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World" (2022) e "Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds" (2022) não têm qualquer relação entre si, mas se os juntei neste texto foi porque de formas opostas ambos quebraram uma regra básica da comunicação humana, a definição da audência para quem queriam falar. O primeiro pretende falar sobre um fenómeno novo, mas apresenta informação que qualquer pessoa minimamente interessada no tema já possui. O segundo pretende apresentar uma nova perspectiva sobre uma realidade distante da atualidade, mas não contextualiza a realidade distante, deixando o assunto à mercê apenas de quem estuda o tema.
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