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A review by mkesten
Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation by Andrew Marantz
4.0
Try to imagine what an assimilated Jewish journalist would feel like embedded in the Nazi propaganda machine in the lead up to Shoah in the 1930’s.
This is the foreboding one experiences in reading Andrew Marantz’ instant classic: “Anti-Social: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.”
But instead of rolling into Baghdad with American troupes to liberate Muslim Shia, Marantz is rolling into DC to liberate the normies from the iron grip of the media establishment.
This is kind of how American white supremacists see their mission in today’s America. And Marantz is watching it with a modicum of detachment as a reporter for The New Yorker.
Contrast this book with fellow New Yorker writer Jane Mayer’s equally effecting “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.”
There is less obvious detachment in Mayer’s work, and yet less of a personal engagement in the subject matter.
By his own admission, Marantz is something of a lapsed Jew more familiar with defending an independent viewpoint, a familiarity and comfort with modern science and technology, and a stake in pluralism. He invites us to see the threats to pluralism and the subversion of value-free social media. he would argue that humans rush in to fill the void sometimes with good values and often with lousy values.
The effect of viewing racism this closely makes Marantz more sensitive to racism in this society, in his own worldview, even to question the worldview of his most treasured loved ones.
At the same time Marantz is an emissary of sorts for one of America’s largely white eastern media establishment. He sees his job as an observer, not evangelist as much as he (and we) would like to shake some sense into these hoodlums.
Again, more tension underlying the narrative.
Framing the physical visits to white nationalist HQ is a story about Silicon Valley and the making of the modern narrative in chat rooms, video streaming, v-logs and bloggers.
Here the bad guys make a lot of money hawking vitamin supplements and selling ads on the same Internet you and I use to discover our neighbours’ birthday parties and student graduations.
Some feed the hatred out of true belief in the conspiracies. Many do it to escape the urban loneliness and alienation. And some like Milo Yiannopoulos really revel in the celebrity.
The founders of Reddit find themselves grabbing the tail of the tiger trying to shut down anti-Semitic, anti-social, and hate-filled rooms in their own house.
Marantz spends some time pondering how modern minds turn away from truth and how some others return from the edge of lunacy, but this is less the focus of the story as much as the toll it all takes on the life in America today.
What happens when troll “Mike Enoch” finds himself “doxed” (read: revealed) as married to an ethnic Jew while at the same time leading the charge online to purify America?
Mike takes a well-deserved shitstorm from all sides.
Showing that while polite society has its limits of acceptable behaviour, so do the trolls.
The story also gave me pause to reflect on the last 30 years of Islamophobia wondering, once again, if America and the rest of the world didn’t get the whole 9-11 thing wrong.
Today as Muslims are reviled and attacked on the American Right so too are they attacked in Myanmar, China, India, Hungary, France, the United Kingdom, and Israel. By Rightists in Germany, Sweden, Italy, Poland, and elsewhere.
While the hatred for Muslims is widespread, certainly there is a malaise within the world of Islam itself eating away at the fringes of society, and in some states, not so much the fringes as the mainstream.
Where it comes from I still find a little mysterious. Does it come from the historic differences between Shia and Sunni, from the chasm between the obscenely rich and the poor, or that between the assimilated and the observant.
I used to think it had more to do with the absence of economic and educational opportunity for the young originating in the Middle East.
But sometimes I wonder if because the Enlightenment so changed the West that Islam folded in upon itself and awoke to find itself in a very strange world.
Was the War on Terrorism the right response after all?
This is the foreboding one experiences in reading Andrew Marantz’ instant classic: “Anti-Social: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.”
But instead of rolling into Baghdad with American troupes to liberate Muslim Shia, Marantz is rolling into DC to liberate the normies from the iron grip of the media establishment.
This is kind of how American white supremacists see their mission in today’s America. And Marantz is watching it with a modicum of detachment as a reporter for The New Yorker.
Contrast this book with fellow New Yorker writer Jane Mayer’s equally effecting “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.”
There is less obvious detachment in Mayer’s work, and yet less of a personal engagement in the subject matter.
By his own admission, Marantz is something of a lapsed Jew more familiar with defending an independent viewpoint, a familiarity and comfort with modern science and technology, and a stake in pluralism. He invites us to see the threats to pluralism and the subversion of value-free social media. he would argue that humans rush in to fill the void sometimes with good values and often with lousy values.
The effect of viewing racism this closely makes Marantz more sensitive to racism in this society, in his own worldview, even to question the worldview of his most treasured loved ones.
At the same time Marantz is an emissary of sorts for one of America’s largely white eastern media establishment. He sees his job as an observer, not evangelist as much as he (and we) would like to shake some sense into these hoodlums.
Again, more tension underlying the narrative.
Framing the physical visits to white nationalist HQ is a story about Silicon Valley and the making of the modern narrative in chat rooms, video streaming, v-logs and bloggers.
Here the bad guys make a lot of money hawking vitamin supplements and selling ads on the same Internet you and I use to discover our neighbours’ birthday parties and student graduations.
Some feed the hatred out of true belief in the conspiracies. Many do it to escape the urban loneliness and alienation. And some like Milo Yiannopoulos really revel in the celebrity.
The founders of Reddit find themselves grabbing the tail of the tiger trying to shut down anti-Semitic, anti-social, and hate-filled rooms in their own house.
Marantz spends some time pondering how modern minds turn away from truth and how some others return from the edge of lunacy, but this is less the focus of the story as much as the toll it all takes on the life in America today.
What happens when troll “Mike Enoch” finds himself “doxed” (read: revealed) as married to an ethnic Jew while at the same time leading the charge online to purify America?
Mike takes a well-deserved shitstorm from all sides.
Showing that while polite society has its limits of acceptable behaviour, so do the trolls.
The story also gave me pause to reflect on the last 30 years of Islamophobia wondering, once again, if America and the rest of the world didn’t get the whole 9-11 thing wrong.
Today as Muslims are reviled and attacked on the American Right so too are they attacked in Myanmar, China, India, Hungary, France, the United Kingdom, and Israel. By Rightists in Germany, Sweden, Italy, Poland, and elsewhere.
While the hatred for Muslims is widespread, certainly there is a malaise within the world of Islam itself eating away at the fringes of society, and in some states, not so much the fringes as the mainstream.
Where it comes from I still find a little mysterious. Does it come from the historic differences between Shia and Sunni, from the chasm between the obscenely rich and the poor, or that between the assimilated and the observant.
I used to think it had more to do with the absence of economic and educational opportunity for the young originating in the Middle East.
But sometimes I wonder if because the Enlightenment so changed the West that Islam folded in upon itself and awoke to find itself in a very strange world.
Was the War on Terrorism the right response after all?