It was founded in 1927 in fourth avenues will grow from union square, and it gradually dwindled until 92 years, the sole survivor, it is run by the original family who founded it. We are running 400 events a year nearly and still have used books after all this time. We are excited to be hosting Andrew Morantz, author of the new book antisocial online extremists, technoutopians, and the hijacking of the american conversation, online extremists, techno utopians and the hijacking of the american conversation. He has written for the new yorker since 2011 and also appeared in harpers, new york magazine, mother jones, the New York Times among others and contributed to the new yorker radio hour and radio lab. Joining him his fellow new yorker staff writer Vinson Cunningham, the magazines theater critic. His byline has been in New York Times magazine, excuse me, and book review, the all and mc sweeneys internet tendencies. He is currently teaching a writing course. I couldnt be more excited to hear from the mall about our informational landscape and how it has been transformed and monopolized and radicalized and what its inhabitants have to say about the results. With that in mind join me in welcoming Vinson Cunningham and Andrew Morantz to the stand. [applause] mount these precarious chairs. I think we made it. Great to be here. So it is right there in the title sort of. You have set out to draw what i think of as a triangle, online extremists that took the bullet for all of us in exposing yourself, tech to vote techno utopian, the top of the tech world and the implied third part of the triangle is us, squares who work for the new yorker. I would love to trace all parts of that triangle. First thing i want to ask is just about the question a lot of people ask, why would you spend your time with these people, why give them oxygen or Something Like that. What was the impulse that made you say no it is important to understand who they are . A good question on multiple levels to wonder why put yourself through that psychologically, why legitimate is and i didnt want to be flip about that because the question when to avoid normalization is how to avoid normalization should be on everybodys mind constantly these days and to not become inured to things that should be marginal and incredible, but basically 2014 i was very interested in what the internet was doing to us psychologically, societally, more as a business story, there is no logical limit to how weird and darwinian and bleak the internet can be and there are not great checks on any american businesses but because of the First Amendment among other reasons the internet is made of speech acts that cant be regulated in any way and that is to the good but it gets really weird and really fast and there is this darwinian this was before politics entered into it. It was me thinking what it would do to news and the information ecosystem. I was at the new yorker talking to people about it seemed amoral and like cat gifts and that kind of thing and i was getting really worked up. They are like we get it but chill out, we are oldschool but we dont have to look down our nose at what kids are doing on the internet. It is not that, its that theres nothing preventing them from taking over the whole internet and thus everything. The internet is everything and is governed by the darwinian rules of virality and we are screwed. No one could argue me out of how that didnt mean we were screwed so i went to chicago, donald trump was a thing but wasnt loving, hadnt come down the escalator and i was just sort of like this kid, where the techno utopian thing comes in, this kid was a 26yearold making money like you do, im an innovator, a disruptor, i want to change the world, they never want to say want to change the world for the better, just want to change the world and assume that will automatically happen for the better. And he was like theres all this ways the markets can be made more efficient, this meritocracy and we can tip elections with virality, change the world with virality and i kept posing one obvious question over and over, how do you know the change will happen in the right direction and he would get really prickly, your luddite, you dont get it so i was like okay, theres an ideology underlying this that is faithbased, that isnt rationale even though they pride themselves on rationality, donald trump comes down the escalator and now we are really screwed. There was a 2week window where collectively as a nation we could have said absolutely not, not enough of us did and then if the darwinian the reason i use the word darwinian is theirs arrests in the book about the word fit, all the news that is fit to print which presupposes the human with moral values to make the decision about fitness and the darwinian sense of fitness which there is no human at the helm, just algorithms duking it out. Throw trump into that and i was like okay, i dont feel sanguine at all not only about the outcome of this election but also the future of our democracy and then because of the way we operate at the new yorker, instead of sitting here and opining about it im going to go out into the world and watch it happen in a fly on the wall way. Interesting you mention that sort of faith that things wont change for the worse. What is an amazing somatic thread is you show how much that is not just a tech belief but a national believe, the arc of the moral universe bending but who is bending it and in which direction. I didnt use this in the book but it doesnt happen on the wills of inevitability. There is multiple, the mythmaking of america is such that we can draw on lincoln or king in specific and heavily curated ways where we can remember the king that says we are going to live up to our ideals and it will all work out but we deliver the king that is like we all have to go to jail and boycott things. Lots of things have to happen to get there and the way that filters and the consciousness of people, lets say hypothetically you spend a couple semesters at harvard and drop out and you start a company, hypothetically, you are not thinking hard about you are not wrestling with this stuff, not like reading revisionist histories of how american exceptionalism works, humanitys majors should rule the world and we never will but we should. The reason that is not purely sour grapes and it has material consequences is if you just absorb the National Myth that never made much sense that makes you sleep better at night, when you go build something that might turn into the Worlds Largest platform for human discourse you dont build it in a way that has safeguards built into it. There is a metaphor of a party where if you start a party and just say come on in and we will just hope it will all be great in the arc of the party will be good, okay, what if things start happening, what if somebody starts poisoning the drinks or start a rumor that people are poisoning drinks and there is a stampede for the door, you didnt check ids, you dont have a pa system, you are just sort of hoping it is going to work out and then now you have 2. 4 billion people at your party and to be the power of that phrase, you mention obama sometimes in this book, you talk about a speech he gave in the middle east where he says nobody can hide from the truth anymore because the sunlight, nature of the internet and i wonder if theres a subtle critique that over the past 50 years we have been lulled to sleep. There is an obama critique somewhere in there. The critique runs through reagan, obama, on the way to one of these propaganda houses, like childhood homes, i land at chicago airport and drove into rural illinois and on the past reagans hometown and reagan, a plaque with reagans name, im optimistic about our future, lets play to the better angels of our nature, lincoln all the way through, trying to put a nice positive spin on in lincolns case robbing corpses, the worst of us. But think about the best of us and that happens with reagan, bush, clinton. I get why it is a good stump speech but its not good policy and it doesnt help us and then theres this weird thing that happens where you could get stuck on the flipside that and go what we actually are is deemed to pessimism about ourselves and i dont think either of those things gets us very far. You can give a speech in 2010 in egypt that so sunlight is the best disinfectant but if you go back to egypt in 201213 you are going to get laughed out of the room, you cant just the arab spring is a good example where the internet guys, techno utopians love talking about the arab spring, you dont hear them talking about the Muslim Brotherhood very often but they are facets of our history, cant have one or the other. The original question was why Pay Attention to online extremists, that is why. If you only do one and not the other we all know the story of three guys in hoodies got in the garage and started a company and it changed the world. The reason the book is antisocial is not that this is my polemic that it is antisocial media but we have assumed for so long the internet can only ever be prosocial in the sense of weaving together our social fabric, if we ignore the other side of the coin the antisocial side whether it is 40 to 60 or whatever it is immaterial, it is a lot, whatever it is it is a lot and we ignore it at our peril and so i have to see. The other weird thing is they dont, they are fine with you knocking on their door and letting them in. This is the weird thing about fly on the wall along for reporting, you never know who is going to be okay with you coming in and these were the last people i would expect to be like sure, new yorker guy with glasses and whatever, come on in but some people slammed the door in my face, alex jones second out at the last minute. I was bummed about that. You talked to him and he said no nothing more before you he was like ive got nothing to hide, i have a mass operation and he has done profiles before. I mister predations because of the oxygen thing but he has a massive audience, not going to make or break alex jones, only twitter can do that and they did. But at the time they hadnt and there was a whole thing, the new yorker is a minor character in the book and i didnt include any of this stuff because i was struggling with how metato get. You dont want to be too navelgazing but the way these things happen is part of the story of how media is produced in the 21st century as part of the book so theres a lot of stuff about how the new yorker does things in a proudly noninternety way and so i didnt get into this but there was a whole thing like youve got to put me on the phone with alex jones because weve got to make arrangements and i was like as much as i would really like to be in the room for that i dont think he is the biggest fan and i dont know if that would really help that much and hes like just set up a phone call but then alex chickened out, wouldnt get on the phone but i didnt do that but the thing is i ended up going to Orange County, california and sitting with this dude who was an info wars contribute or and a lawyer and a married guy and had a dog and a kid but was also just out there and was just like i really think that hillary has an undiagnosed neurological condition and i am going to edit video footage of her blinking in a way that seems suggestive and you could never get to the bottom of do you really believe this or just thinking it is effective propaganda, sometimes he would save course i believe it and other moments he would sort of winking goalie be like i know what is going to go viral and i have a policy outcome i want which is when the selection for trump and i know that my abstract notions about Saudi Arabian policy are not going to get us there so i will do this blinking thing and that will get us there and i would watch him do it. These werent state owns russian troll farms. It was a dude in Orange County and a bunch of people he was connected to through podcasts and whats apps chains and whatever who would informally coordinate and i would show up at his house and okay, watch me do this thing and he would set up an ipad and all the commenters, it would be hardcore what is our hashtag . Hillary seizures, no, that is not quite, hillary, stuttering hillary in this kind of workshop and then they would pick one and get it trending at once it was trending on twitter, twitter is where all the journalists are in the journalists would see it and it would jump over to fox news and some fox news would jump to cnn and literally i would be like in my hotel room in Orange County pick up the newspaper and be like that guy did this, headline is in the newspaper because of what i watched yesterday so it is marginal but so not marginal, it is one of the things the internet does is break down all barriers between the fringe and the mainstream, between what is little and what is big, the metaphor of infection so you can be some weird virus off in the middle of nowhere but if you get on the right jetliner you are everywhere. Speaking of this sort of juxtaposition of that incredibly dark phenomenon and the new yorker has a secondary character i want to read one of my favorite passages from this book, you say for much of 201516 while everyone i knew was incredulous of the notion that donald trump thought he could be president i was in my office in the World Trade Center reading such blog posts as globally secret plan revealed and the rational racist and misogyny gets you laid whenever colin walked in and saw what was on my screen i would scramble to say several things that should go without saying, i was not reading on the merits of bigotry because i was open to being convinced, i was not scouring the internet rumor mill for deletion, something was happening and i was trying to figure out what it was. How was it doing this at the new yorker . The world could not be more incongruous and the speech codes, the ways of being to the heart of darkness, how does that on a daytoday basis but another one of the themes of this book is what it is like to be a journalist and what you have to do in pursuit of the truth. Yes, it was weird and i did have these moments that i almost could get a vicarious picture of the thrill of why these people did find it to the lady even though i was constantly mortified. I could understand this feeling, so few things are still for bidden, you know . Kanye is talking about being a porn addict, there are no boundaries anymore. Everybody can do everything so to find the few things in life you are not supposed to look at, i understood vicariously the thrill of it but i could feel my brain be split into trying to understand but not excuse or trying to emphasize but not go native, i guess why if you are a certain type of person in a certain you you would want to be drawn to this but not using my moral compass, to the deck of the part of the book that is about what a journalist is supposed to be there is a perhaps irresolvable clash between pursuing the truth and keeping a kind of moral compass. Theres a kind of journalism where the moral compass parties undertheorize and this is where you get i use the phrase at some point about being an astoundingly frictionless weathervane which is my dig at journalists who i think i doing it wrong, which is dont just go it sounds obvious in the abstract, dont just go where the wind blows and you see it all over the place. Some people say this is divisive provocative rhetoric and there have been complaints that it has raised eyebrows like come on, just say what it is but where that confusion is coming in is you dont want to seem, it is weird to live in a world where the president is an idiot and a liar so to say that sound like you are being biased although it is the plain fact, but to say it, feels weird to me even to say it and it feels somehow under journalistic to save even though that is precisely the job of journalism. One job is to tell the truth and the other is to sound candid and they cant always be done at the same time. Its not only the president , the whole notion of trolls and internet shysters to put you in situations you cannot describe without being tension just because to describe the neutrally used to miss the point. I had a lot more new yorker stuck in early drafts as you know. I read this book very on, the gift that keeps on giving. But it was also my wife was tough on me on this, she read the manuscript many times and we had many conversations about how to deal with the new yorker of it all because on the one hand it is clear why the temptation is there to be like if im going to talk about the way these people do media it is weird and dishonest to not talk about the way i do media. On the other hand there is this weird kind of almost just to mention the new yorker is kind of like just weird in its own right and it is there is a thing where i am quoting one of these people the day after the election and he is like a vote for trump is a vote against smug, elitist ass holes and when i go to quote that in the new yorker they put a little accent over the dna elitist and i was like goddamnit. I wanted to talk about the multilayering affect in the book but to talk about it was to play into the multilayered effect of it. I didnt want to fall into that trap but i didnt want to just pretend i didnt notice it. The trap is there. To get right down to it there are different kinds of elitism and most of them are bad. I dont think this is technically elitism but there is a slippage between actual elitism and this notion of making decisions based on taste which goes against the darwinian notion of letting the marketplace of ideas sort it out so there is the bad caricature of elitism and then the thing you want to preserve which is you dont get to just both sides this or just say this because it feels right or your arguments dont scan and in that there is in addition to the deep preoccupation in the book with how we are skating on thin ice as a country and have a history of White Supremacy we have never grappled with and all that stuff, theres also the media of it all, there is nowhere, the constitution guarantees the government cant shut down the press. It doesnt guarantee what the press means the weather will be good or served democratic games or whether it will have a Business Model that continues to function. It is just this feeling of there is no safety net, theres just you hope people want to buy what you are selling but it turns out if you test it rigorously in the marketplace of ideas they win. They just do. The let the marketplace sorted out have you ever seen what the market place does when it sorts things out . Not all of it but pretty you talk about that fundamental, hate to make the new yorker the underdog but this inequality that the weenieism the talks about this strand, you talk about yourself. We conceive of ourselves as antielite or the fruity the funny thing, when i was a kid there were no kurt cobain posters, we have this idea of defining ourselves against something, rebel sensibility, a lot of people, Bernie Sanders in 2016 most come from the far left or whatever or they go through this halfway to the pipeline, left libertarian, right libertarian and whatever it takes, 60 pages to get there but basically this guy hans herman hoffa who is a german sort of just asking the question, why cant we have covenants of freedom of association, there are more steps in the book but basically that is a scary thing and there is this, it is not, it is weird to think of the kind of traditional thing as an underdog. Economically just sort of is, its weird to talk about it that way but it is the case. There also is this reluctant institutionalist thing is the way i kept thinking of it, you never once, when i showed up to these peoples parties in the opening session of the book, inauguration weekend i was at a Inauguration Party called the deplorable which is a witty plan because you have to explain it. They are all again, sort of me trying to anthropologically, vicariously go what is this and the only way i could hit on it was to go what they are fighting with is the part of me, the eighthgrade part of me that is like dont tell me not to skateboard on that statue, i will do it if i want to but the statue you are skating on is called democratic norms. Im sure its fun for you right now but the notion that women should be allowed to work and trans people are okay and you shouldnt punch people, those it might feel cool to you be a renegade and, why, prove it, but youve got to grow up eventually and im talking 40yearold, 50yearolds, some of them are 14yearold children but a lot of these people are like the founder of vice media was just sort of like i really want to go fight someone because im just it is punk and countercultural and your ideas arent interesting but this is another thing where there was a part of me in those moments that wanted to say that and there was another part of me that was like actually it would be better if i hold my tongue for three years, give or take and then say it in a book because that is sort of what journalism is. It feels weird because it feels like you are kind of playing a persona but you have to do it to get the goods. It is weird how many of them even though they knew who i was and where i came from, just by showing up in setting up they get lulled into this thing, not lying, they appreciate that you are not lying about them but they kind of forget you still have a brain and are perceiving things they are doing and forming judgments in your head. Not to spoil it but some of them they are intent that they will just waiting for you to make this switch. I dont think so. Because so many of them have switched from bernie supporters or whatever other ideological, some of them dont have ideologies but some of them are like they just think all this stuff is so flimsy and meaningless anyway, we will get you too. I remember being at the deplorable all and being like talking to some trolly performance artist guy who then was kind of trying to schmooze me up and to your question about oxygen i was trying to not give him the time of day because i was like i dont want to plant your shtick. Im not naive enough to think that there is no transactional nature to any journalistic direction, sometimes it is going to be worth it for me to write about you guys but im still aware that you are using me as a much as im using you so is trying to kind of and then he gets up on the stage and makes his announcement that he is going to be the White House Press correspondent for this thing called the gateway pundit which is, i have a blanket, dont google the stuff in my book but if you do do it incognito because through youtube it will never look the same. But i i cant believe you did that to yourself. I thought it would just be, safe browser. This is part of what journalism is, going into weird worlds and weird spaces and in a way it is funny how much we are so tripped up on this, how much should we know, how much should we look away. It is good we are tripped up on it because we are struggling through it but it is like we dont really do that with boca her rom or something. I think it just feels far away, with this it feels too close, almost like some people are just kind of like i dont know how much of that i can really refute. You can go to a place where you are like i think some people dont want to look at it because theyre like i dont necessarily want to do the work of actually sussing out how much of this i can explicitly disagree with. So it is kind of like lets just make it go away. But then once this guy was like making his announcement, my point is he is from the gateway pundit which it is like a 4. 5 tears below breitbart weber tabloid and that was who he was reporting for from the white house. I say reporting quote because he wasnt doing objection, he was there is a troll, as an active but i was like i will go with you on the mega bus to dc and i will sit next to you in the mega bus as you watch king of the hill on your laptop and snack. That was his preparation for the white house and because he knew, on the one hand he was just not a serious person but on the other hand he knew his job was not to hold the powerful to accounts or come up with the question that was going to break open the russia scandal. His job was to show up and freak people out and he did it. What strikes me it blows my mind every time and you went into the white house, the press Briefing Room with all of the performance artists doing under the guise of journalism but what is interesting is you show how its impossible to ignore for these reasons, they are permeating the white house itself physically and on the other hand at the beginning, one of the things i found so jarring immediately was which shows how important this book is is at the deplorable, peter fields, somebody who is wrapped in a certain respectability, not anathema as other people are and you show the tech elite are implicated, watching Mark Zuckerberg being peppered on these precise things, what are you doing to keep these people away from our eyes and ears on the internet and i found myself wondering how you took that in and i think the answer is no but whether you think they learned any lessons about their power with respect to all this. These people being the technoutopians, zuckerberg and even that, he was asked directly, was he a board member and all these things so i dont think they learned i dont think they learned nothing. I think Mark Zuckerberg is now aware that he cannot just ignore this stuff from a pr perspective, its just not going to fly, ever since facebook, before spake was facebook, ever since it was like to you think this girl is hot or whatever it was before it was facebook he has been breaking rules and then apologizing and i think thats just the strategy, do you what you want, apologize later and he knows this what is too began by this when i mean data, privacy, how do we to me it is not only how do we keep these things out of our eyes and ears because his strategy recently has been to just rely on the notion of freespeech. He gave this big speech at georgetown last week where he said we believe in free speech and because of freespeech, speech is good in the answer to speech you dont like is more speech and therefore we are doing fine because freespeech. It was 40 minutes of that and also referencing Frederick Douglass. Referencing king again. It is a little shameless, it is also, again this very selective reading of American History that goes, the facts are accurate, we have a First Amendment, yes, Frederick Douglass was a fan of it, yes the parts that are being left out are okay, because we have a First Amendment and freespeech is good how does it then follow that that is the only good worth pursuing, the only kind of freedom that matters . It is especially offensive to invoke douglass and king and be like the only kind of freedom that matters is everyone is freedom to give me money through their time and attention. That is not what freedom means. That is the kind of freedom if you want to define it extremely narrowly but it is not a robust vision of freedom and i think the thing that has been left out, not just as a cupboard thing but as we talked about earlier, a general society thing, we dont think about freedoms as just being right or big abstract concept is being able to have complex tradeoffs among them. It is a time when things that dont need to be set dont need to be said so im going to say the First Amendment is lovely, i love it, Frederick Douglass loved it, lets not get rid of it, it is wonderful and i dont want anybody with bed political ideas being sent to jail. What im advocating is that that not be the end of the discussion. Is weird to me how often we establish those very simple facts and go are we good, everybody good and imagine if we did that with the second amendment, we have established reason aside the wellregulated militia but if you just say there is a right to bear arms, good . Can we go home . These things are thorny and complicated and to raise the complexity of them flies in the face of this notion that we are done. We have done our Innovative Disruptive work and it is up to the great arc of history to fix it for us. That era might be over. I dont think the stock price is doing fine. I dont think they are feeling up like a pocket level and i dont think i actually, i am weirdly, i am not the guy you go to for optimism but i do feel there are levers to push with the technoutopians that are not all about money. Theyve got enough of that. But they want to be luminaries. They want legacies. They want their names on the side of buildings. One lever we can push as a society is as they move out of their upper no bill building dynamite face to their nobel prizes phase, we collectively as a society and as journalists prevail in that sense of are you sure you are helping . I know you felt you are helping and we never held you to account for that but now youre being held to account a little bit. That is the only way the theater of these congressional hearings is useful. I dont know how much specific law or policy comes out of it but shame is useful, one of the chapter epigraphs in the book is about references. Shame is useful. On that note i would love it to get some questions from the audience. While they are lining up you conserve one more thing out there. I will. Next to all that, the way you sort of make all of that resident in this book is another of my favorite lines when you say what we need instead of sort of small piecemeal solutions are trying to nuke the entire internet, what we need is a new moral and you answered it a little bit but i wonder how you think that starts to play out not only among those titans and barons and potential nobel prizes but among all of us, how do we put that together . This book seems to me like one of those thefts so i can sell to those who are already here but how do we keep that going . That is where i was able to rationalize, writers are always trying to rationalize why they are at home writing instead of on the frontlines of some demonstration or doing something more directly socially useful and that is how i was able to rationalize it to myself. I think not that this book has all the answers but we need to try to reconceptualize how we think about these things more coherently and more robustly and it is weird that a book that is about characters would be an attempt to try to knit together a new moral vocabulary and yet that is sort of a reference to this philosopher who is hanging over a lot of the concerns in the book who is a pragmatist and in many ways antiphilosopher, very interesting writer who essentially has this notion that comes from anthropology of the descriptions, the way we reconceived of our soldiers thickly read describe ourselves to ourselves. We dont get to new moral positions or even new profoundly new political positions by out arguing each other, that there is this enlightenment tendency to be it is either going to be lincoln or douglas and one of them is going to win. He makes a very compelling case that that is not how Society Moves forward, weightless forward is by telling better stories. So this is in part an attempt to tell a story that wraps its arms around more than the glossy hollywood version of how we got here. Question over here . Thank you for doing this work over the past couple years so the rest of us dont have to. Something i found particularly interesting was the discussion of how there were two sides when you were thinking about these people, one was i want to understand them but the other is i dont want to emphasize and get rid pilled. Im curious if there was ever a time you felt that line was being maybe not crossed but blurred and sort of the second part of that question is how do we as a society make sure we dont go through that process or the blur process . That is a good question. There are many kinds, the red pill metaphor comes from the matrix where you take the red pill and it shows you the truth and it is like platos cave is like this, one of our favorite allegories to tell as a society because that feeling is really addictive and a powerful feeling, the feeling of having secret knowledge. There was never a moment where i was like it really is the jews. There were a couple times when i will say i didnt know the due thing would be hang up for so many people. I found that really quaint, you guys are still doing that. Really funny moment when a guy over the phone this was a guy the kind of dissent throughout the book into deeper and deeper layers of nottingham and assist with the end when you are meeting the pick of the litter and there was a guy who i had been circling around talking to his family, this is kind of like a philip ross novel, this guys story, not that i did it that way but it is that. He was born in bucolic idyllic jersey, his parents are professors, the most progressive old milk idle you could imagine and he then through a series of red pills and actual steroids ends up in this place where hes in the darkest of the dark rabbit holes and theres a lot of things going on but hes married to a jewish woman when he discovers that the jews are the central problem with the world so he has to deal with that, presents problems and so i have been circling around talking to his parents, one side, parents are divorced, once i do so to me the other is trying to stick with him and his mom is like i hear you are going to this rally in charlottesville, let me buy you some shirts because your other shirts i too baggy and i wanted to look good on tv. Those are the two sides of his experience. He finally calls me, we were supposed to go out for friday dinner and i am on speaker phone with the guy and didnt realize this about me but i have a journalistic tick where to draw people out i now know my take is to go right, right, right, to get them to keep talking so hes like that is why we need a white is no state in the united states, right right right. My wife runs into the room and is like do not agree with the nazi. In the midst of all that hes about to recommend the book that sold him on the jewish question and in the middle of that utterance he goes wait, you are not a jew, are you . And im like did you google me . You have so many facts at your disposal and we kept talking for hours after that and we met up for beer, he wanted me to meet him at a german beer hall so i did not i take your question which is how do we guard against this stuff and i dont think censorship is the answer. We have to have guardrails, better algorithms that are not built on outrage and emotional engagement and fear and discussed and all the rest of it but some of it is going to be building a society in which this stuff is not shocking or rage baity or titillating but just, we are not interested in it anymore. It is not emotional engagement in a positive or negative since that will get us out of it. It will be nobody talks about that stuff anymore. You said you are not the guy to go to for optimism or hope and obviously the people you talk to in this story a lot of them, it is pretty horrifying. Is there anyone you talked to in the process of this that did give you some hope . Any bright points in the darkness . Yes. One of the things, one bright point is some of these people are darkly funny and sometimes just inadvertently pathetically funny which gives the reader a lot of schadenfreude. You get to end on a note of a lot of these characters are going to politically implode. That doesnt mean their ideas go away but it provides a level of sort of comfort but the real moments of hope for me are this notion the ark does move. The mistake is to think that the ark moves by itself but it does move. Watching the way that our society has responded post trump, brexit, should not have taken all that but the fact that the response to that has been such that in the space between when i started working on this and now we have a totally different way of thinking is a society about the responsibilities the architect of algorithms have, responsibility this entire sector of our economy has. To go from hagiography to vilifying these guys, i dont think vilifying them is entirely the answer but it shows how quickly this stuff, i wouldnt have believed we could move this fast on this kind of stuff. I never thought the golden boys of Tech Innovation would be essentially seen as tobacco executives 5 years later. That does give me hope, not that there literally tobacco, the window can shift a lot of surprising and interesting directions. All im trying to deck out the window can shift in scary, bad directions but a lot of times it goes in a nice direction. The overton window on samesex marriage is a really hopeful thing to think about and that happened because of democratization of media and the rest of it so these can be marshaled powerfully for the good. We have to stop being in denial about the fact that that will happen on its own. Im curious. On some level, is the human brain hardwired in a certain direction towards hate . It is interesting in the age of trump when the rock has been lifted off the whole and all of this kind of hate has seeped so deeply in society, is there something about the human brain . I am just curious because in the beginning i found this sort of shocking, we have become anesthetized but at the end of the day, what caused germany to embrace the Nazi Movement . What is allowing people this kind of group hate is okay. Good question. I think the hardwired thing is tough. Not to go back to one of the internal preoccupations of my household is does free will exist and are we hardwired into everything so that was a background preoccupation we would argue about and again, this shows up in a footnotes when i talk about the nazis. The philosophy of public defenders, my wife was a public defender, my child is named after the case that gave us public defenders but one of the tenets of that was people are not reducible to the worst thing they have ever done. Thats hard to apply to nazis and i dont always get all the way there and i dont feel i should get all the way there but i dont think we want to get stuck if that means predetermined. We want to hold people into account for their ability to be more classic and malleable, the thing that makes societies descend is the moral vocabulary spinning out of control. That seems squishy and soft as opposed to hardnosed things or policy or biology and we exist in social structure and language games and speech conditions more than we want to think. It is not an thinkable or controversial but actually desirable but not desirable but inevitable. That leads people into this dangerous groupthink. It is abstract but material conditions matter. One of the phrases, we change who we are and i mean that in a literal way. The way we talk is a product of the internet which again is not this i think that is where we need to get control of this internet stuff not just as a business question or tech media question but who we are as a question. We have time for a couple more questions. You talked about how you saw your role in all of this but i wonder how you see the role of journalism Going Forward and i cover this stuff. Amplification is a huge concern, one base like thing, it is an option not to do the story and it to be exercised a lot. There are many times i talked about the guy at the deplorable who successfully pitched me on his misadventures into dc. Everyone else was pitching the two. It was a room of 1000 people who were professional trolls. We got 999 of them didnt. Amplification is a concern and the other thing is context in how you couch things. There is an uncritical amplification, and how these people learn to be trolls, they are not like Internet Research agency, not being secretly told by Vladimir Putin what to do, they are american citizens operating in plain sight. Most of them are not breaking the rules of the platforms they are operating on much less the laws of the land. When we strip constructs how we did that a lot is through on critical amplification, like a buzz feed feed. And and this hashtag sucks, and and that is not the right answer either. They are going unchallenged. We have learned better than to uncritically if youre going to do it, it would be a bigger question than it is for most journalists and what am i really adding and can i do it in a way that even if theres amplification it goes is there a larger thing im learning, a larger pattern i am pointing to. Evening here. How are you going to handle that . Hopefully not on the block. A few of them. One of the people i wrote about a lot was a guy named mike serna which who was again not a punchline, extremely influential in ways that is not fun to hear about. You dont want to hear the punchline on twitter is actually shaping your news on a daily basis. He wrote a review that was not positive. A few people have written someone times amazon reviews, i am no forensic speech expert but i think i know who wrote this. The people who is very concerned with how one particular character in the book is portrayed, generally there is one person who is like following me around on twitter saying you have factual inaccuracies in your book about me, that is weird because you didnt respond to my Fact Checkers at all and then she ran away. There have been a few of those but to the extent they thought they would red pill me either they were joking or they realize how dumb that was. Because of these mistakes journalists have been making for a while. It has created this false norm that all journalists can do, give a little sort of week quick encapsulation and that is it. On some level the more naive ones thought that was what it was going to be, someone wrinkling his nose in disapproval quote of a man saying there you have it, ladies and gentlemen and when the book was more than that, they felt dumb. They were like that to protest too much would draw attention to that. Either that or they havent read it. All right, ladies and gentlemen, big round of applause for Andrew Morantz and Vinson Cunningham. [applause] thank you so much, guys. If you will stay tuned for a few minutes while we get this signing set up. Type the authors name in the search bar at the top of the page. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] it is great to be here with you all. To celebrate and discuss an excellent new book by one of our original and insightful economic thinkers