One of the tech industry’s biggest open secrets, Fisher writes, is that “no one quite knows how the algorithms that govern social media actually work.”įisher doesn’t dwell on the fact that this combination of hubris and ignorance already existed in the behavioral sciences the platforms have recklessly employed. This is what Facebook’s moderators are equipped with. There’s no orderly or comprehensive list, only disconnected PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets, scattered responses to complex geopolitical matters, outsourced guidebooks with contradictory rules. In the opening scene of the book, when Fisher is ushered through Facebook’s “steel and glass playground,” he is carrying leaked documents that outline the platform’s policies on speech. In a culture with a high tolerance for crude simplification, the tech billionaires are cloaked in the most clichéd myths of genius: the white male nerd displaying, to use Thiel’s phrase, an “Asperger’s-like social ineptitude” that is so often associated in popular culture (at the expense of any real understanding of the autism spectrum) with savantlike gifts.īut the mythologies mask deep failings. Fisher traces the tech culture from which they emerged to the Gamergate scandal and to some of the more toxic forums on 4chan and Reddit, where extremist incels and neo-Nazis, among others, got their first inklings of power and forged the alt-right movement. The story of these outsize protagonists is one of hubris and ignorance. Peter Thiel, a founder of the companies PayPal and Palantir, expressed unambiguously antidemocratic leanings as early as 2009, saying that society couldn’t be entrusted to “the unthinking demos.” He and his Silicon Valley peers, Fisher writes, saw society as “a set of engineering problems waiting to be solved.” In 2017, Mark Zuckerberg wrote an essay claiming that the tech industry would be responsible for humanity’s “next step.” Facebook, he said, would provide the “social infrastructure” of a new stage in human relations. These denials also don’t stand up against the stated intentions of company founders. The book explores deeply the question of whether specific features of social media are truly responsible for conjuring mass fear and anger. But he’s careful not to assume causality where there may be mere correlation. Alongside descriptions of stomach-churning brutality, he details the viral disinformation that feeds it, the invented accusations, often against minorities, of espionage, murder, rape and pedophilia. … A sudden riot, a radical new group, widespread belief in some oddball conspiracy.” The way the book connects these dots is utterly convincing and should obliterate any doubts about the significance of algorithmic intervention in human affairs.įisher, a New York Times journalist who has reported on horrific violence in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, offers firsthand accounts from each side of a global conflict, focusing on the role Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube play in fomenting genocidal hate. We see “far-off despots, wars and upheavals. The cinematic opening to Fisher’s book cuts from the shining halls of Facebook’s headquarters to a view of Earth from contemplative heights. And as a story about trying to fix a wayward technology as it hurtles out of control, it is beautifully apt. Its stark, ambiguous aesthetic is perfectly poised between the utopian and the dystopian.
In Max Fisher’s authoritative and devastating account of the impacts of social media, “The Chaos Machine,” he repeatedly invokes Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The 1968 movie, in which a supercomputer coldly kills astronauts on a ship bound for Jupiter, was in Fisher’s thoughts as he researched the book. THE CHAOS MACHINE: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, by Max Fisher
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