A_Marantz

Well it certainly wasn't my deep and abiding desire to spend three years hanging out in the living rooms and Airbnbs and hotel rooms of misogynists and Islamophobes and propagandists :) I wanted to find out what the internet was doing to our brains, to our informational ecosystem, and to our society. I didn't want to just think about it abstractly and have an opinion or an argument about it -- I wanted to live and breathe it, to see in vivid and immersive detail how it actually worked. I think it's hard to gain real understanding about a phenomenon without first truly seeing and understanding what it looks like up close.

What shocked me the most was how easy it is to be a highly successful propagandist. I spent a lot of time with some people whose names you may know -- Mike Cernovich, Lucian Wintrich, Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer -- and some people whose names you surely don't know. In every case, I was shocked by how with just a bit of skill, some practice, and essentially no investment of resources, they could take whatever fringe meme or talking point they wanted and propel it into the middle of the national discourse (get it trending on Twitter, on the front page of Drudge, on Fox News, even on CNN). I watched this happen again and again, in front of my eyes, in a matter of minutes.

Yeah I do not think it would be wise for me to copy their tactics. I do think however that the tactics are worth learning so that they can be understood, and in some cases countered

This stuff is complicated, for sure, so I don't want to be too reductive. I could point to some very tangible outward manifestations—Trump, Brexit, Duterte, the Rohingya massacres, and on and on—and argue that all of those were spurred, either partially or directly, by the internet. But I actually think that the primary problem is deeper than that. In the book, I talk a lot about what the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty called "vocabularies"—the deep moral and political assumptions in which a society is embedded. A functioning society should have a functioning vocabulary, one in which people can discern the truth and be mutually intelligible to one another. Our vocabulary is deeply broken, and I think the internet, particularly the social internet, is one of a few culprits.

Definitely. I think they're all feeling some form of guilt, and I think they're all processing it in their own ways. It's recently become fashionable to think of social media executives as mere robber barons, making decisions only out of greed and the profit motive. There's some truth to that -- they are businesspeople, after all -- but I also think they're former idealists who have, in a sense, been betrayed by the naivete of their own ideals. In a way, this makes the problem harder to solve, because idealists are in many ways not purely rational actors.