Joining us on the communicators is Andrew Marantz, a writer for the new yorker and the author of the book, easy social online extremist in the hijacking of the american conversation. Andrew marantz, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having. The book grew out of reporting that you do for the new yorker, can you excite network and how it led to the genesis of the book . Guest around 2014, 2015 i was writing for the new yorker and its a magazine that allows people to roam and be generalists and go wherever they find interesting stories and something that i was finding interesting at the time was what the internet was doing to us as a society in terms of our information streams. It wasnt political, and my mind at that time, it was just sort of what happens when the trusted systems of information breakdown and people no longer know what is true or important versus irrelevant or how to spend their time and so i was looking at this as a tech story and a business story and i was looking at click bait farms and how they get you to click on things and waste your time and how they make money from that and then in the middle of 2015 there was a Big Press Conference that trump tower and trump came down the escalator and i suddenly thought, you know, all these forces have been looking at about how informational architecture online is changing us and thats a political story as well so then from there it was off to the races. Host so generally you group your book into two groups of people and correct me if im wrong but have a group called the big swinging brain and then you have the gate pressures. Explain the groups and how they interact with each other to the topic youre trying to adjust in this book . Guest thats right. The subtitle is online extremist, techno utopians and the hijacking of the american conversation and the idea is there were these two groups and these strange bedfellows that were either wittingly or unwittingly collaborating to hijack the conversations that were all a part of and those two groups, as you say, the big swinging brains, my kind of derisive title for them those would be the techno utopian, Silicon Valley destructors, the people who are so blithely recklessly optimistic about a future they could not envision that they just thought we will disrupt everything and we will have every hierarchy event we know just come crashing down and whatever happens next it will probably be fine but we dont really know what it is and we now know in retrospect, spoiler, it was not fine and into that power vacuum that Silicon Valley created came rushing what i call the great gate pressures which are nihilists, trolls, liars, bigots, propaganda and the internet did not invent racism and misogyny and lies but the internet spread it more rapidly and made it much more viral and it demolished all the known informational ecosystems that have existed here to four which gave the gate pressures this unprecedented amount of power and to me that is a huge part of the story of how we ended up where we are now both in terms of who the president is, who is leading lots of other liberal democracies around the world and how we relate to each other and go about our lives on a daily basis. Host back to the president election you open the book talking to group of people attending an event called [inaudible] if i have it correctly and tell how that relates to the term gate pressures or lease the big idea or the idea. Guest yeah, a lot of the narrative new yorker style reporting that id like to do, i just did not want to opine or offer my analysis they did do a bunch of that and i really wanted to embed myself and be a fly on the wall for a long, long time. I spent three years just fully embedded with both the people who were running these Silicon Valley platforms, particularly read it, but also with the people who were actively trying to dismantle and destroy the roots of our common democratic understanding and often and let me two events as you say like the deplorable ball and inauguration and these were the people who, as they like to say they had named donald trump into the presidency and they were selfconsciously taking on the moniker that Hillary Clinton had tried to admonish them with which was the basket of deplorables and they were only not celebrating it and as they were so good at doing turning it around as they did the fake news or so many other phrases and these were people who really did and said a lot of odious things and wrinkly at first i was hesitant to legitimize in print either in the book and the articles are learning that at the end of the date and some of the influence own and so much power that influence was part of the story we in the mainstream were missing and ignoring and i thought i had to embed if only so the rest of society could understand what they were doing and start to inoculate itself against it because it was happening whether we look at it or not. Host a couple of names to that point and if you could briefly explain who these gentlemen are in the influence they have, Gavin Mcginnis is one of those names, mike is another and who are they and what part do they play in your book . Guest the only part i would trouble with his gentlemen. [laughter] you know, they are at courts important to point out they and the dozens of other people in my book are essentially propagandists and i call them meta media insurgents. They are not properly speaking political thinkers although Gavin Mcginnis, who you mentioned, had a consultant gig on fox news for a long time or im sorry, correspondent gig on fox news for a long time, mike was a lawyer and these are smart people not ignoramus or anything but they are canny and well spoken and in some sense, that is part of their power but they also, they are not straightforward political analysts who are working at some of think tanks. Their main school scale is propagating ideas and means and talking points and prepare leading them into the mainstream. The things that would start as friends, mike came up as a pickup artist and a misogynistic blogger, kevin founded the blog buys which is a white Pride Organization that goes around getting into violent altercations and these are things that should remain on the french but the fact is they havent and a big part of the reason for that is that these people and a lot of people i spend time with are so good at taking these french ideologies and pushing him into the mainstream and the new information ecosystem allows them to do that so they have taken the lunatic fringe, as we once called it, and made it no longer the french. Host one of the lines in your book reads as such and will get you to expand on it but you write to destructors had gleaned through osmosis that free speech was value with protecting beyond that they werent expected to spend much time thinking through the underlying principles instead they released the product into the world and then waited to see what would happen paid could you expand on that . Guest there destructors is standing in for the big swinging brain, the people who are counting the social Media Companies so in 2004, 2005 around when facebook and reddit and twitter and comedies were coming to existence there was this feeling in the air that cultural osmosis consensus that the more freespeech the better and we will put it all out there in the market place of ideas will take care of the rest almost automatically. There was never any real reason to believe that other than unexamined faith. That faith got so entrenched as a kind of techno libertarian axiom of the internet and of our society that it really wasnt questioned. It was not just a few guys and hoodies in california who believe this. You hear it on the cover of the magazines and he read from politicians giving speeches and it was a surround sound things so when that all came crashing down it was basically too little, too late. We had built this system in a very unexamined way. Post trump the conversation really split open and the public is now very critical of these companies, as i think it should have been all along but the fact is they have been built around this fundamental structure and they can be tweaked at the edges but the basic rate the algorithms are built which is round emotional engagement around the unfettered marketplace of ideas that is not going away. I should be clear that none of this is an anti freespeech argument but i want to be very clear that the First Amendment is sacred to me and im a journalist. There is no call anywhere close to anything for the government to come in and stifle speech and basically im saying when you take freespeech absolutism as the axiom when youve just assumed that because its speech it must be good you are going to be blind to the ways that this can harm us and we know unfettered speech can harm us and that does not mean that you censor it but it does mean you have to set up systems to try to deal with that very real fact. Host in your book you talk about several of these people in their companies and give an example of how they wrestled with this issue and what justification they come to or what conclusions they come to in dealing with this issue. Guest yeah, the most interesting one and the one i spent the most time on is reddit. I talked to facebook and twitter but reddit is a social network that is much bigger than twitter in terms of traffic and it was the fourth or fifth biggest site in the country when i was there and you know, like all other sites it was founded on this idea of full freedom, never take anything down, only deal with or only take anything down when its a clear violation of u. S. Law which is very few things. And the founders made it in that image and left for about ten years and went and founded other companies and when they came back one of the images i compare it to is like an open Warehouse Party that had just turned to chaos. He started this party and you let anyone come in and you dont pardon them and you leave the lights off and people do whatever they want and then come back and people are throwing couches out to the window and wreaking havoc. The founders who came back as leaders of the company decided to do was rather then let the party rage on and continue to be fully laws a fair about it to take it in hand and let me sit in the room and watch as they turned into gatekeepers in real time. They were alumni of the university of virginia and after charlottesville they would systematically go through and find all the people on the platform who had been using it to organize white supremacist violence and get rid of them, the founders quote was and if they are on our platform we want them gone. This was 180 from the live and let live that he had followed with he said to me i like the fund challenged freespeech injury but in practice there are people who are not good for the world and i brought them into this platform and i can take them out. I watched as they went through sub reddit by sub reddit and press the delete button. It felt messy and human but better than doing nothing, i guess. Host your book recounts when they did that there was retaliation on the reddit site itself. Guest yeah, they implicated the spirit of freespeech [inaudible] and everyone on while not everyone but a lot of people on reddit when you take anything away from them they say this is inhumane and suppresses our freespeech rights we might as well live in north korea but i dont think this is a way of looking at it, reddit is a private company, not the government, they can do what they want but they created this established president that you can do and say whatever they want and essentially you will never be a challenge. When they did start to challenge things and these are really, really gross things but things like that people hate where you go to hate fat people. Id go on and thats the most safe for tv one but even taking away that stuff was still very controversial because they had set up such a president of anything goes. Host the idea of content you write in your book, antisocial you write for certain kind of reader discovering these altright is like stumbling on an [inaudible] post something because he believes or did not believe it and you wanted to see who would. Could you expand on that . Guest there is this clandestine subversive thrill to discovering something on the internet that feels like something you are not supposed to discover. Something dangerous. The metaphor who people use for this is the red pill, an image from the movie of the matrix when the blue pill allows you to wake up and forget the reality when they thought it was all a dream in the red pill lets you see the real truth which has been hidden from you all along. This is a very attractive that goes back to platos cave in alice in wonderland and so many things that the internet is very good at delivering this feeling of you are being brought into a secret society of people who are the only sort of a chosen few who understand the truth and that is a fun feeling and a very fun sort of mental space to live in if you can keep it under control but the problem is a lot of times the red pill, quote unquote, is being used to show people the truth that the jews are running the world or that women are oppressing men or any number of other things. Those things arent true but if you are joining a society of people who is repeatedly banging into your heads the notion that this counterintuitive truth is, in fact, the real reality a lot of people get sucked into that and i spent a lot of time with a few people whod gotten tangled up in that and a few people who had worked their way out of that which was startling to see. Host we will go into that for a second but that idea i think it its my course terminals but in some cases that they view themselves, those who publish this content, as journalists. Could you expand on this . Guest oh yeah. There was a whole range of people who sometimes as a troll would say im a worldfamous journalist and we went to a rise out of me because i was embedded with them for so long. I would hang out and get drinks and they would say, oh yeah, you writing a book about us but im writing a book too. He just published a book last week. There was this flattening of all kind of status hierarchies which they found very amusing but in point of fact a lot of them did act as journalists. I would argue that they werent good ones but they spent i spent time with a man named lucian who i met at the deplorable ball and went on stage at the event and said hold my drink and listen to what im about to say and i was trying to frankly, not give him that much attention because he clearly wanted to so much attention and i did not want to promote him but he went on stage and made the announcement that he was about to be Given White House press credentials and he would be the White House Correspondent for publication called the gateway pungent. The gateway pundit, if your viewers are not familiar, it makes breitbart look like the london review of books or something. Its not a good publication and yet, we now live in a timeline where the gateway pungent gets a White House Correspondent and so i said yeah, i got to practice and see where it goes so i got on a mega bus with lucian from new york to dc and i watched him go down there and instead of studying up for the job in learning about how the white house works and who was which undersecretary of which part of government he took a nap and then watched king of the hill on his laptop and then arrived in dc and started to wing it and essentially he did not need to do any homework because he wasnt there to ask probing questions or do the real work of journalism but was there as a troll, there is a Performance Art to freak everyone out and desecrate the norms of what happened in spaces like that and it worked. On one level he wasnt doing real journalism and he wasnt wellinformed and wasnt telling the truth but on another level he had a trespass that got him into the White House Press room so in that sense he was a journalist. That is part of the point of this stuff. Its supposed to scramble everything and append everything we thought we knew and thats part of the goal of the Trump Administration and of the altright. Host author of antisocial, Andrew Marantz joining us on this edition of the communicators. You mentioned altright and use another term all right. What is that . Guest these terms are all disputed and a lot of people mean Different Things when they say none but the key distinction between the altright and the all white as i frame it is the altright is a hardcore antisemitic, openly white nationalist, bigoted group and then the old light is some who share some commitments and some are jewish but theyre not openly white nationalists and some are people are of color or are gay or married to people of color so like any world the further you burrow into it the more its just more people came from new york and california who i was tracking who were the master propagandists of this world and even within the hardcore altright really hardcore antisemitic post neonazi segments of the movement you still find one of the guys i spent time with tracking was lived in the Upper East Side of manhattan and was married to a jewish woman before he went down some not see turns in his mind and had a black brother who was adopted so there is always more strangeness to the stuff then first appears but the most basic distinction is the altright and the old light were separating over the jewish point of view and even though they claim to be free speech absolutist as they claim to be earlier and anyone should be able to speak their minds on any topic in fact practice they started feeding and holding competing rallies and the deplorable ball which we mentioned, the hardcore antisemitic all great people like Richard Spencer were precluded from getting inside that party and he loitered around outside, trying to recruit people so it was very messy and full of squabbling but it also spoke to just how anyways there are to mess with the national discourse. There is a whole range and for some people it was the game and for others it was a hardcore ideologically exercise and that confusion also worked to their advantage because there were dog whistles and layers of irony and ways to get them wrong if you werent really paying attention. Host are we as a society more sophisticated about this speech and could this lessen the impact, do you think . Guest in some ways i think we are more sophisticated but in other ways i dont think we have gone to the bottom of it. There are certain framings that people are less likely to fall for now, certain types of false information and certain types of dog whistles but the fact that the internet is constantly evolving and as soon as one trope gets discovered they will be on to the next one so for me the key insights are structural and i spent a lot of time with the particular people i did because i thought they were good case studies and good examples and i feel we would learn from a long time from these case studies but im also cognizant that those particular people will eventually go away and what will be left over is the underlying structures that are always going to incentivize and produce the kind of behavior that they are known for so its not as if they are a few bad apples and once we get rid of them everything will go back to normal. These are case studies that show how the system we have built is actually just fundamentally on the wrong excess. Host is there then a remedy . Guest a few remedies but they are hard. Facebook, you know, i talk about facebook because its the biggest one but all social Media Companies are centrally built around emotional engagement. Meaning that all they can measure is whether you click on something or whether you share something and how long you spend scrolling past something haters. The way they make things go viral and way things put in your feed by keychain which things are likely to provoke those behaviors in a you and those things tend to be things that are twitchy and reactive things that cause an immediate spike of what i call activating emotion which could be rage or fear or loss or envy and gets your blood boiling. That is not everything on the internet obviously. My work is on the internet and the clip will be on the internet and this clip will be on the internet but the way these speeds are built they are going to incentivize things that will spike your heart rate and get your skin response going to the committees could change that. They could change that tomorrow the question is whether they would lose too much money and whether their shareholders would not be happy. Theres a problem here that is around capitalism and a problem here around stubbornness and a lot of these founders dont want to reckon with the notion that what they built might be causing harm in the world. As i say there are deep structural problems but the fact is we have a lot of deep structural problems like the Climate Crisis or like the Opioid Crisis and the response that we have to take to those is to get to work digging ourselves out but we cant just drop our hands and say free speech or in the case of climate freedom of enterprise and lets just let the markets sorted out. The more skeptical and appropriate he would be the market has failed to sort this out so now, we as a society, have to come up with a better solution. Host you talk about politics overall in this and is the current structure of the federal government particularly Congress Interested in the, in dealing with this type of speech and not a capable of doing so, do you think . Guest i think congress is making more and more noise about regulating the stuff for a long time for a decade or more. These comedies basically got a free pass and i think the free pass era is over. You know, obviously Elizabeth Warren talks a lot about breaking up some of these companies, sanders talked about that to the other democrats that what will follow suit in the senate and in the house but some legislation could be useful and i do think that he spoke is too big but that is just my opinion. I also dont think that any particular set of regulatory measures would be enough to address the problems i am focused on in terms of what kinds of behaviors and frankly, ideological patterns are incentivized by these systems buried there is really no way to address that through regulation. I think its a combination. Antitrust stuff could be useful in all kinds of ftc and fcc stuff could be useful but i dont think we will regulate our way out of the problem but it does not mean that we should not try to do what we can but i think its deeper than that. Host Andrew Marantz writes for the new yorker and author of antisocial. Thank you for your time and thank you for joining us on communicators. Guest thank you so much. Cspan your unfiltered view of government. Greeted by cable in 1979 and brought to you today by your television provider. Starting now it is booktv on cspan2. Booktv focuses on pandemics and begins with discussions from the brooklyn book festival featuring author carl zimmer, planet of viruses and ed youngs, i contain multitudes. The next pandemic on the front lines of frontlines greatest dangers. Followed by Jeremy Browns book, influenza. [inaudible conversations] thank you all for coming. You are in a panel called microbes, viruses and destiny. This is a discussion in which we will reveal how microbes are our secret puppet masters