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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

Coverage from The Nation [thenation.com]. (Worth checking out just for the leading photo!)

Amid a surge in white supremacist violence and far-right ideology, a troubling reality has become clear: Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, once heralded for their ability to bring the world closer together, have been central to spreading hateful and divisive ideas. The architecture and recommendation algorithms of mainstream sites like Reddit and YouTube seem primed to shepherd young people down a pipeline that leads to edgy sites that work the thin line between cruel irony and committed sadism, like 4chan and Gab, or to communities of dedicated fascists huddled around 8chan and an archipelago of racist and sexist blogs. While the extent of these sites’ influence and the direction of causality are up for debate, this pipeline is directly related to a wider cultural turn that has inspired a spate of domestic terrorist attacks and elevated dog-whistling nationalists to positions of institutional power.

Yes, but wait, there's more!

In his new book, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation, New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz grapples with this issue via a collection of in-depth profiles that juxtapose the legitimized worlds of the new media moguls with the various tiers of what is often called “the alt-right.”

Marantz spends more time exploring how trolls and right-wing organizers navigate digital spaces than he does on how those spaces are designed. (Reddit is the only major platform to get a detailed treatment or provide extensive comment on the record.) But he does spend plenty of time unpacking the uncritical and underdeveloped “free speech” ideology at the heart of Silicon Valley’s once-pervasive techno-utopianism. His central contention: The digital media titans, or “new gatekeepers,” have failed to understand the profound social responsibility that comes with their disruption of traditional media.

Hmm, no mention of SoylentNews. Where have we failed, Soylentils? Is it our censorship of aristarchus submissions?

Antisocial is an engrossing work of literary journalism, but Marantz’s persistent focus on the words and deeds of individuals often obscures underlying power structures and, as a result, potential avenues for structural intervention. While it ends on a vague glimmer of hope—a wishy-washy, ill-defined call for us to live up to America’s ideals and create “a new moral, social, and political vocabulary”—this is not an optimistic book. Antisocial ventures into dark places,

But evidently not quite dark enough!

The market for writing about the alt-right has at times felt oversaturated. Yet despite its faults, Antisocial is a genuine first of its kind: ambitious, attuned to the novel features of social media, and written with enough detail and perspective to survey the subtle grain of a multifaceted movement. David Neiwert’s Alt-America and Vegas Tenold’s Everything You Love Will Burn come to mind as serious works of reported nonfiction on the rising influence of the radical right, but both ultimately chart the phenomenon from the perspective of older racist groups rather than digital-native ones. And while Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies was (very) briefly considered an authoritative text on the far-right cultural turn in certain sectors of the Internet, it proved a shaky rush job with little staying power, incomplete argumentation, and questionable originality.

Antisocial thus stands alone in print so far, but it nonetheless epitomizes a glossy style of writing on the contemporary far right that we often see in magazine profiles and reported essays—including those by Marantz in The New Yorker, a number of which have been refashioned into chapters in this book.

None of this "over-saturation" on SoylentNews! In fact, hardly any mention of the alt-right at all. Mission accomplished?

Original Submission