This book was so absorbing and well-reported that sometimes I had to take breaks. Marantz went as deep as any sane person could go into the delusions of neo-fascists and alt-right trolls, seemed keep his emotional boundaries even in the face of bigotry toward his own person, and still shared what he found with balanced care and complexity. My only wish was that he had put his rigor and enthusiasm toward (at least) a chapter on the power of online communities to foster *the opposite* of hate and paranoia. If an actual techno-utopia could exist, what might it look like? In the opinions of those who still believe in it, why isn’t it happening?

After hearing his analysis of the profit-driven or pseudo-philosophy-driven choices that lead to the hijacking of social networks, I think he could have made the stakes higher if he showed more of us a taste of what these techno-utopians imagined (was it really just early Reddit?). We get a hint of that in the Reddit epilogue, but I think there are still Internet optimists/visionaries out there, for better or worse. What less harmful communities are thriving because of new Internet vocabulary? Anyway, I will be following Marantz’s tech reporting more closely at The New Yorker.