Antisocial

Starred review from August 19, 2019
Marantz, a staff writer at the New Yorker, makes a timely and excellent debut with his chronicle of how a “motley cadre of edgelords” gleefully embraced social media to spread their “puerile” brand of white nationalism. In examining how “the unthinkable became thinkable” in American politics, he narrates that tech entrepreneurs disrupted the old ways of vetting and spreading information—including the traditional media of which Marantz identifies himself as a part—but refused to take up a role as gatekeepers, and the white nationalists seeped in like poison. Marantz profiles alt-right figures and tech titans alike: vlogger Cassandra Fairbanks, Proud Boys leader Gavin McInnes, antifeminist Mike Cernovich, Reddit founder Steve Huffman (who experimented with gatekeeping by deleting the site’s forum dedicated to the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory), The Filter Bubble author and tech entrepreneur Eli Pariser, and clickbait startup CEO Emerson Spartz, who opines, “If it gets shared, it’s quality.” A running theme is how journalists should cover “a racist movement full of hypocrites and liars,” and, indeed, Marantz doesn’t shy away from asking pointed questions or noting his subjects’ inconsistencies. This insightful and well-crafted book is a must-read account of how quickly the ideas of what’s acceptable public discourse can shift.

August 23, 2019

New Yorker staff writer Marantz relates his experiences reporting on members of the alt-right. Although the media often portrays the alt-right as a monolithic group, Marantz argues that while these individuals have reasons for their views, their mission is to shift cultural norms to the right. He profiles prominent white supremacists, men's rights activists, and content creators, and shows how their messaging is increasingly normalized under the Trump administration. A powerful passage showcases the journey of one young woman as she became involved with and eventually left various white supremacist groups. Additionally, Marantz muses on the changing nature of journalism and the challenges of countering hateful statements in traditional media. A smaller portion of the book explores the rise of social media and how companies' hands-off approach to regulation enabled the alt-right movement to spread. Marantz takes pains to counter the hateful speech of his subjects but never makes a compelling argument for featuring them in a full-length work. VERDICT A promising but disjointed look into the rise of hate groups, recommended for readers interested in politics, social media, and the intersection of the two.--Rebekah Kati, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2019
A searching study of the right-wing gate-crashers who have overwhelmed social media in the Trump era. New Yorker staff writer Marantz is fond of Martin Luther King's arc of history/arc of justice trope, though he allows that King himself wasn't quite as optimistic as his famed aphorism might suggest: We bend the arc of history, he notes, and it's pretty twisted at the moment. More to the point is political philosopher Richard Rorty's 20-year-old warning that the decline of progressivism meant that the only political figures "channeling the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed" would be populists on the right. Bingo, and with them, Rorty added, would come the rollback of civil rights gains, to say nothing of heightened misogyny and socially acceptable sadism. Marantz's travels into the camps of those right-wingers at the gates proves Rorty correct, and the author clearly documents their use of social media to advance right-wing causes, leveraging such vehicles as Facebook, whose owner, Mark Zuckerberg, pleaded innocence by insisting "that Facebook was a platform, not a publisher." Some of the figures that Marantz covers are self-serving disrupters who threw verbal grenades into the crowd just to see what would happen. Others are true believers, notably the alt-right figure Richard Spencer, who turns up at odd moments. Some are even more or less reputable journalists who weren't upset to see the "smug little cartel" of the establishment press taken down a few notches by the Trump administration. TV news, "dominated by horse-race politics and missing planes and viral outrage," may be bad, writes Marantz, but what if what comes along next is worse? He makes his own case, wading into the throngs of rightist influencers with some trepidation but no effort to disguise his establishment credentials. It's not a happy picture, but Marantz does offer some hope in the evident splintering of the right as the provocateurs discover that "all memes eventually outlast their utility." Invaluable political reportage in a time of crisis--and with little comfort in sight.

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