The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media
Rewired Our Minds and Our World | Paperback

Max Fisher

Little, Brown and Company | Back Bay Books

Social Science / Sociology - Social Theory / Business & Economics / Industries - Computers & Information Technology / Psychology / Social Psychology

Release date Oct 10, 2023 | Demand (#120)

"We all have a vague sense that social media is bad for our
minds, for our children, and for our democracies. But the truth
is that its reach and impact run far deeper than we have
understood. Building on years of international reporting, Max
Fisher tells the gripping and galling inside story of how
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social network preyed on
psychological frailties to create the algorithms that drive
everyday users to extreme opinions and, increasingly, extreme
actions. As Fisher demonstrates, the companies' founding
tenets, combined with a blinkered focus on maximizing
engagement, have led to a destabilized world for everyone.

"Traversing the planet, Fisher tracks the ubiquity of hate
speech and its spillover into violence, ills that first
festered in far-off locales, to their dark culmination in
America during the pandemic, the 2020 election, and the Capitol
Insurrection. Through it all, the social-media giants refused
to intervene in any meaningful way, claiming to champion free
speech when in fact what they most prized were limitless
profits. The result, as Fisher shows, is a cultural shift
toward a world in which people are polarized not by beliefs
based on facts, but by misinformation, outrage, and fear.

"His narrative is about more than the villains, however. Fisher
also weaves together the stories of the heroic outsiders and
Silicon Valley defectors who raised the alarm and revealed what
was happening behind the closed doors of Big Tech. Both
panoramic and intimate, The Chaos Machine is the definitive
account of the meteoric rise and troubled legacy of the tech
titans, as well as a rousing and hopeful call to arrest the
havoc wreaked on our minds and our world before it's too late.

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