• book: The Chaos Machine

    From Ogg@21:4/106.21 to All on Sat Oct 14 21:57:00 2023
    The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media
    Rewired Our Minds and Our World | Paperback

    Max Fisher

    Little, Brown and Company | Back Bay Books

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

    Release date Oct 10, 2023 | Demand (#120)

    "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.

    USA buyers, support the local bookshop of your choice here:

    http://bookshop.org/a/93260/9780316703307

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    * Origin: Ogg's WestCoast Point (21:4/106.21)