• book: the chaos machine

    From August Abolins@2:221/1.58 to All on Sunday, March 05, 2023 15:20:00
    The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media
    Rewired Our Minds and Our World | Hardcover

    Max Fisher

    Little, Brown and Company

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

    Published Sep 6, 2022

    "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.

    --- OpenXP 5.0.57
    * Origin: A turtle that surfs the dark web. [o] A TORtoise (2:221/1.58)