When I first read Marantz' "The Virologist" four years ago I was immediately hooked. He became one of the New Yorker writers I was most interested in, along with Hua Hsu, Jia Tolentino, and Emily Nussbaum. They were all fluent in the contradictions and strangeness of the modern world and wrote with a joyous realism about how you could get pleasure from the products of late capitalism while deeply questioning it.

I'm listening to Burial's "Tunes 2011-2019" right now on Hsu's recommendation and it's reminding me how much I love modern music and modern art. I will always be a sucker for some authors of the late 19th and early 20th century, but I like to stay engaged with the present, sniffing for what might be the most exciting cultural products, the things we see as defining of this historical moment a decade or a century from now.

If you aren't interested in the present moment, you won't like "Antisocial." You won't get it. You won't understand why Marantz included the details about how his articles created a new genre of New Yorker article, the "Annals of Media." It's what Hsu and Toletino and Nussbaum are all writing about, in some way: the medium and the message, twined together like a fiber optic cable, so fine and delicate that two can never be untwined.

I teach high schoolers who spend much of their waking hours on social media and in the dark corners of the internet. One of my current students researches World War II battles and the Crimean War on wikipedia all night and asks me about the Barbary Pirates in the morning. Sometimes he talks about the federal deficit and trolling the libs. I worry about him, try to bring him into the world of human contact. Some of his family is undocumented but he was born in the U.S. This identity, like the fact that Mike Cernovich's wife is from Iran or that the author of The Daily Shoah had a Jewish girlfriend insulate him from becoming a member of the alt right. His disgust with identity politics and virtue signaling continues to deepen. He hasn't been particularly successful in school despite his vast ability to memorize weird facts. I want him to turn towards socialism, towards organizing, towards a concern for his community, but the metaverse of conspiracy and blank irony seem to be sinking their hooks deeper into him every day.

Last week a nonprofit from near our school ran an assembly encouraging students to apply to their program. The founder of the nonprofit worked in investment banking and then moved here to work at a tech startup. She joined a mentoring organization and began to mentor a student at another high school near ours. She learned that the student couldn't study at home because she was constantly relied on to take care of her siblings. So she founded this nonprofit that picks up poor students at schools like ours and drives them to tech offices after school to do their homework. They eat tech company snacks and sit in conference rooms that are unused for 99% of the day and then go home and live in the same poverty that our country has damned people to for three hundred years.

She spoke in glowing tones about the five tech companies that are hosting her program. They all make bullshit products. After the presentation the teachers at my school were SO EXCITED about this amazing opportunity. And all I could think about was Marantz's book. While rich tech entrepreneurs create nonprofits to fill needs that don't exist, filling guilt holes with patronizing bullshit, the alt right and the alt light use the same technology to give people a new sense of meaning and identity. This meaning and identity is based on its own baroque bullshit but it's a bullshit that is going to convince many more people that the meritocractic neoliberal consensus.

Anyway, if you've been reading the New Yorker for the last five years, you're going to recognize many of these articles, but Marantz skillfully recontextualizes them. He follows up with the chillingly eager former journalist turned clickbait office drone from "The Virologist" in a wonderful footnote in the chapter that features the original story. She describes her time in clickbait land as part of a massive denial of her own disgust with people like Spartz. Her disgust should mimic our own. The last five years in the Annals of Media have had their strange pleasures, but we are swiftly building an internet and a society full of contradiction, anger, and fear.

This book was immediately engrossing, and I felt like it would be a real revelation about an important topic. It was solid all the way through, but it never quite got there, though. I think there were a few issues for me. The first was that it is essentially a compilation of versions of New Yorker articles I had already read. The second, which is articulated pretty well in this review, is that it delves very deeply into specific tales of radicalization and kind of tacks away from the broader theory of how and why this is happening. Some of the stories are not even terribly interesting, like the pseudo-journalists who get White House credentials because their right-wing politics line up with Trump's. Others -- the two narratives explaining how people became white supremacists -- are fascinating. But in the end these stories don't add up to a full support of the book's promise, which is an overall explanation of the relationship between tech and the far right in the U.S. This is a still a very strong book -- and a fantastic read -- but it didn't quite get there for me.

This is a powerful, well-researched read about who we allow to be the true "gatekeepers" of our thoughts. Language, national media, social media, trolls, etc. Who controls the "narrative"? Who do we allow to control the narrative and the trajectory of our morals and beliefs as a nation and as human beings?

I deeply respect Andrew Marantz's journalistic integrity as a writer for The New Yorker. At one point he mentions to Jim Hoft, founder of The Gateway Pundit (a right wing opinion website that is noted as providing false news, conspiracy theories, and hoaxes by sources ranging from Wikipedia to Media Bias Fact Check), that one of The New Yorker's full-time fact-checkers will probably be in touch prior to a published article, Hoft says, "'Oh yeah, just like The Gateway Pundit . . . We've got a huge department of full-time fact-checkers.' He laughed so hard at his own joke he nearly spilled his lemonade" (236). [Aside: The fact-checker at one point discovers that Marantz has incorrectly labeled someone's pottery as being from New Mexico when it was actually from the country of Mexico--such are the details that fact-checkers unearth, excavate, and expose--even when details are seemingly unimportant to the "story," they still help tell the truth].

This is both a frightening and important book to read.

Solid and engrossing overview of the failings of "free-speech" "market of ideas" techno-utopianism, but most of the embedded reporting on alt-right/alit-lite celebrities felt more voyeuristic than informative.

Really good. Not exactly revelatory if you follow this online at all, but some of the individual anecdotes and interactions are fascinating. The behind-the-scenes segment on Reddit engineers implementing the non-violence rule c. 2017 was absolute gold.

This is not the book the read the week before the 2020 election. I did learn things and would recommend it to friends but not to read any time soon. Also felt a little long.

I so appreciate Marantz’s dedication to understanding and explaining the alt-right and the rise of the internet in the political sphere. As a “normie” who was surprised by the outcome of the 2016 election, I found this book incredibly insightful. While in some ways I was horrified to read how easily many of Marantz’s subjects slipped into a world of online radicalization, I appreciated how he left readers with stories of hope and a reminder that the work toward justice and equality begins with ourselves.

Un acercamiento interesante a las dinámicas de las redes sociales de extrema derecha. Admiro la capacidad y el rigor periodístico del autor para adentrase en ese laberinto de discursos y narrativas. Personalmente mi capítulo favorito ha sido el 27, me pareció una experiencia extrema relatada de una manera impecable.
Debo dar solamente tres estrellas puesto que la lectura me pareció un poco lenta, al no estar familiarizada con ese contexto político tuve que buscar los nombres de los entrevistados la mayor parte del tiempo. Ahora el algoritmo de mis redes sociales está vuelto loco pues me sugiere contenidos realizados por estas personas, con quienes nunca antes me había topado... me tomará un tiempo restaurarlo.