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.