A review by junderscoreb
Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation by Andrew Marantz

4.0

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.