People to roam and be generalist and go wherever they find interesting stories and something i found interesting at the time was what the internet was doing there was as a society in terms of our information streams. It wasnt political in my mind at that time but it was what happens when the trusted systems of information breakdown and people no longer know its true or important versus irrelevant and out to spend her time so i was looking at this as a tech story and business story and i was looking at quick bait forms and how they get you to click on things and wister died and money from that and then in the middle of 2015 they was a big bronze conference at trump tower and tromping down the escalator and suddenly these forces have been looking at about how informational architecture online is treated as is a political story as well. From then it was off to the races. Host you generally grouped your book into two groups of people, if i understand it correctly. You 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 dried to address in the book. Guest thats exactly right. The subtitle is online extremist, technological utopianism and on the hijacking of the conversation. These two groups, strange bedfellows that were either wittingly or unwittingly collaborating to hijack the covers is it that we are all a part of and those two groups, as you say, the big swinging brain is my kind of rise of title for the and those would be the signal utopian, silicone valley disruptors, the people that were so recklessly optimistic about our future they couldnt yet envision that they they thought will disrupt every big every hierarchy that we know come grudging down and whatever happens next it will probably be fine but we dont know it what it is. In retrospect, spoiler alert, it was not fine and into that power vacuum that silicone valley created a rousing these people i called the gate pressures which are a nihilist, trolls, liars, bigots, propagandists and the internet did not invent racism and misogyny and lives but the internet credit much more rapidly and made it more viral and the most all the known information as it existed. The gator shoes and unprecedented amount of power and thats a huge part of the story will be in president and was leading liberal democracies around the world and how we relate to each other and now we go about our lives. Host back to the president elect, you open the book talking about a group of people at the been an event called the deplorable so talk about those parties of the people you met and how it relates to the gate pressures or the idea obligate browser. Guest i wanted to give the narrative new yorker style of reporting i like to do but i would didnt want to opine or over my analysis although i do that but i wanted to invent myself and be a fly on the wall for a long, long time. I spent three years fully embedded with both the people who are rubbing silicone valley platforms particularly read it but also people who were actively trying to dismantle and destroy the roots of our commons and credit understanding. So often and let me two events, as you say, like the deplorable ball which was an inauguration we can party and these are the people that like to say they had named donald trump into the presidency and they were subconsciously taking on Hillary Clinton and tried to admonish them in the basket of deplorable spirit they owned it and celebrated it and as they were so good at doing turning it around and pleaded with the phrase fake good news or so many other phrases and these were people who did and said odious things and people, quite frankly, i was hesitant to legitimize imprint, either in the book, or in the articles i was writing but at the end of the day theres so much influence on the road and so much power that influence itself was part of the story that i felt we in the mainstream were missing and ignoring my belt i had to invent and expand what they were doing so that the rest of society could understand what theyre doing and to inoculate itself against it because it was happening whether we look at it or not. Couple of names to the point that you mentioned and if you could just briefly explain who these gentlemen are and influence they had. Gavin mcginnis is one of those names, mike is another and who are they and what part do they play in your book . Guest of the only part i would quibble with is a gentleman. They are at core its important to point out they and dozens of other in the book are essentially propagandists. I call them meta media insurgents. They are not properly speaking political figures although Gavin Mcginnis, who you mentioned at a consulting gig on fox news for a long time in or sorry, correspondent big on fox news but mike was a lawyer and these are all smart people, they are not, you know, ignoramuses and they are very handy and well spoken in some sense as part of their power but they also got what they are not straightforward political analysts who are working with something take or something but their main skill is propagating ideas and beams and talking points and propelling them into the mainstream. These things would start as friends, mike came up as a pickup artist and a misogynist blogger and Gavin Mcginnis founded power boys which is a white Pride Organization that goes around getting into island altercations and these are things that should remain on the bridge but the fact is they have it and the big part of the reason for that is these people and other people i spend time with her so good at taking these french ideologies and pushing them into the mainstream for the new information ecosystem allows them to do that so theyve taken the lunatic fringe, as we once called it, and make it no longer the bridge. Host one of the lines in your book reads as such animal and get you to expand on it. Youre right, the disruptors had gleaned through cultural osmosis that free speech was value worth protecting and beyond that they were excited to spend much time thinking through the underlined visible but instead they release their product into the world and then waited to see what would happen. Could you expand on that . Guest there disruptors is standing in for the big swinging brains, the people pounding these social Media Companies. In 2004, 2005 around with facebook and reddit and twitter and companies were coming into existence there was this feeling in the air that cultural osmosis consensus that the more freespeech the better and we 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 an examined phase basically and that base was so entrenched as a techno libertarian axiom of the internet and our society that it was a question that much. It wasnt just a few guys and hoodies in california who believe this. He would hear it on the cover of magazines and you hear it from politicians giving speeches and it was a surround sound of things so with that all came crashing down it was basically too little, too late. We had built the system in this unexamined way. Post trump the conversation split open and the public is not very critical of these companies, as i think it should have been all along but the bag is they built around this fundamental structure and baked a week to week to be at the base of the way the algorithms work our emotional engagement and the unfettered marketplace of ideas and that is not going away. I should be cleared out of this is anti freespeech argument that i want to be clear the First Amendment is a sacred to be. Im a journalist and there is no call anywhere close to any bank for the government to government and stable speech. Basically when you take freespeech absolutism as an axiom and when you assume because its known what it must be good you must be blind to the ways in which speech can harm us and we all know that unfettered speech can harm us and that does not mean you censor it but it does mean you have to speed up systems to deal with that very real fact. Host in your book you talk with several of these people in the companies and giving an example of how they wrestle with this issue and what justification and the conclusions they come due in dealing with this issue. Guest yet, the most interesting one and the one i most spend the time on is reddit. I talk to people from facebook and twitter and reddit is a social network that is much bigger than twitter in terms of traffic. It was the fourth or fifth biggest site of the country when i was there and you know like all the other sites it was founded on this idea of full freedom, never take anything down, only deal with or anything down when it is a clear violation of u. S. Law which is very, very few things. The founders made it in the image and they loved for about ten years and went and pounded other companies and when they came back the images i compare it to is open Warehouse Party that turned to chaos. Start this party and you let anyone come in and you dont stop them, then you leave the lights off and then people are throwing couches out the window and wreaking havoc. As leaders of the company they decided to do was rather than let the party raged on and continue to be fully loves a fair they decided to take it at hand and lay let me sit in the room and watch as they turned into gatekeepers in real time so they were alumni of the university of virginia and they would after charlottesville systematically go through and assigned 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 nuke them. If they are on our platform i want them gone. This is a total 180 from where he originally had been which was live and let live. He said to me i like the idea of unchallenged freespeech in theory 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 watch them as they went through sub reddit and sub tonight and it felt weird and messy and human but it also felt better than doing nothing. Host your book recounts it when they did that there was some retaliation on the reddit self site. Guest they had [inaudible] everyone but a lot of people on reddit whenever you take anything away from him they would say this is inhumane and suppresses our freespeech right and we might as well live in north korea and they dont think thats a good way of thinking of it. Reddit is not a government but a private company and can do what he wants but they had created this established precedent that you can do and say whatever you want and essentially you will never be challenged but when they did start to challenge things and these are really gross things, things like reddit people hates where you go to hate fat people and i can go on and that is the most say for tv want. Even taken weight that stuff was still very controversial because they set up the president of anything goes. Host the idea of types of content you write this in your book, antisocial, for a certain kind of reader discovering these alt rate fights but like stumbling onto a concert cultural intellectual vanguard and you could post something because you believe it or because you didnt believe it and he wanted to see who would break could you expand on that . Guest there is this clandestine subversive thrill to discovering something on the internet that feel like something you are not supposed to discover, something dangerous. Metaphor people use is the red pill. It comes from the matrix where the blue pill allows you to wake up and forget the reality youve glimpsed in the get was a dream in the red pill lets you see the real truth which is been hidden from you all along. This is an attractive trope that goes back to platos cave in alice in wonderland and other things in the internet is very good at delivering this feeling of you are being brought into a secret society of people who are the only chosen few who understand the truth. Thats a fun appealing and a very fun mental space to live in, if you can keep it under control. The problem is a lot of times the red pill, quote unquote, is used to show the people the truth of the jews are running the world or women are oppressing men or any number of things and those things are true but if you are joining the society of people who is repeatedly begging into her at the nos and that sort of droop is in fact the real reality people get sucked into that and i spent time with people who had gotten tangled up in that interview people who work their way out of that which is startling to see. Host going to that for second but that idea that its mike or maybe someone else but in some cases they view themselves and publishes contests as journalists and can you expand on that . Guest oh yeah, there was a whole range of people who sometimes just as a troll would say im a worldfamous journalist and would do it to get a rise out of me because i was embedded with them for so long that i would hang out and get drinks and they would say you are writing a book about us but i writing a book too and he just published a book last week. There was this status hierarchy of which they found very amusing but in point of fact, a lot of them did act as journalists and i would argue they werent good ones but i spent time with a young man named [inaudible] who i met at the deplorable all and went stage at that event and said hold my drink and listen to what im about to say. I was trying to frankly not give him that mother attended because he clearly wanted so much a diligent and they didnt want to promote with unstated mood being ugly is about to be given a White House Press credentials that would be the White House Correspondent for publication called the gateway pendant. The gateway pundit, if you viewers are not familiar, it makes breitbart look like the london review of the books. Its not a good publication and yet we now live in a timeline where the gateway pundit gets a White House Correspondent so i said yeah, i got to check this and see where it goes. I got on the megabus from new york to dz and i watched him go down there and instead of starting up for the job and learning all about how the white house works and who was in 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 ween it. 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. He was there as a Performance Art to freak everyone out and desecrate the norms of what happened in spaces like that. It worked. On one level he wasnt doing real journalism or wellinformed or telling you the truth but on another level he had a press pass they got him into the White House Press room so in that sense he was a journalist. That is part of the point of this is it supposed to scramble everything and upend everything we thought we knew and that is part of the goal of the Trump Administration and on the altar right. Host this is the author of antisocial, Andrew Marantz joining on this edition of the communicators. You mentioned all right and use another so what is that . These terms are disputed and a lot of people mean Different Things by them when they say them. The key distinction between the altright is a hardcore antisemitic openly White Nationalist bigoted group and then the alt light are the people that might share some commitment but are not antisemitic and some are jewish and they are not openly White Nationalists but call themselves civic nationalists and some of them are people of color or married to people of color or rk so like any world the further you burrow into the world the more it surprises you with a lot of people came from new york or california, who i was tracking who are master propagandists of this world, even within the hardcore altright hardcore antisemitic close to 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 nasty terms in his mind and had a black brother who was adopted so there is always more strangeness to the stuff than first appears but most basic distinction is the altright and alt light were divided over the jewish question, the jq. That turned into a cleavage point where they started to separate and even though they claimed to be free speech absolutist as we talked about earlier they claim that anyone should be able to speak their mind on any topic and in practice they started feuding and holding competing rallies and the deplorable which we mentioned actually the hardcore antisemitic alt right people were precluded from getting inside that party and so he loitered around outside trying to recruit people so it was messy and full of squabbling but it spoke to just how many ways there are to mess with the national discourse. Theres a whole range and for some people it was more just a game and for other it was a hardcore ideological exercise and that confusion and slippage also worked to their advantage because there were dog whistles and layers of irony and ways to get them wrong if you werent paying attention. Host rv as a society more sophisticated about the speech and could that 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 really gotten to the bottom of it. There are certain framings that people are less likely to fall for, certain types of false information in 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 to me the key insights are structural. I spent a lot of time with the particular people i did because i thought they were good case studies and examples and that we will learn for a long time from these case studies but im also cognizant of 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 just fundamentally on the wrong axis. Host is there then a remedy . Guest there are a few remedies but they are hard. Facebook well, you know i talk about facebook because its the biggest one but all social Media Companies are sensually built around emotional engagements. Meaning that all they can measure is whether you click on something and whether you share something, how long you spend scrolling past something, behaviors. The way they make things go viral and the way they put things in your feed is by gauging which things are likely to provoke those behaviors in you and those things tend to be things that are twitchy and reactive and things that cause an immediate spike of what i call activating emotion or what social scientists call activating emotion which could be rage or fear or lust or envy and these things to get your blood boiling. That is not everything on the internet and obviously, my work is on the internet and this clip will be on the internet. Everything is on the internet but the fact that the way these fees are built there built to incentivize things that spike your heart rate and get your response going. Companies could change that and they could change that tomorrow but the question is whether they would lose too much money and whether their shield holders would be happy so theres a problem here that is around capitalism and a problem here around stubbornness and these founders dont want to reckon with the notion that what they have built might be causing harm in the world so as i say, deep structural problems but the fact is, you know, we had a lot of deep structural problems like the Climate Crisis for the Opioid Crisis in the response we have to take to those and get to work digging ourselves out. We cant throw up our hands and say free speech or in the caves of the climate freedom of enterprise and lets just let the market sort it out. I think the more skeptical and appropriate view would be while the market and has failed two sources out so now we as a society have to come up with a better solution. Host you talk about politics overall and is the current structure of the federal government particularly called or interested in dealing with this type of speech . Are they capable of doing so, do you think . Guest progress, i think, is making more and more noise about regulating this stuff for a long time and for a decade or more of these companies basically got a free pass. I think the free pass era is over. Elizabeth warren talked about bringing about these companies and sanders talk about that to some of the other democrats will follow suit eventually in the senate and in the house. Some legislation could be useful. I do think that facebook is too big but that is just my opinion. I also dont think any particular set of regulatory measures would be enough to address the problems im focused on in terms of what kinds of behaviors and frankly ideological patterns are incentivized by abusive doves. There are no ways to do that through regulation. Antitrust off could be useful in all sec and sec stuff could be useful but i dont think we will regulate ourselves out of the problem but it doesnt mean we shouldnt try to or can but i think its deeper than that. Host Andrew Marantz writes for the new yorker and author of the antisocial. Thank you for your time and thank you for joining us on the communicators . Guest thank you so much. Cspan has unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house about the Supreme Court and Public Policy events from the president ial primaries to the impeachment process and now the federal response to the coronavirus. You can watch all of cspan Public Affairs programming on television, online or listen on every radio app and be a part of the National Conversation through cspans daily Washington Journal Program or through our social media feeds cspan created by americas Cable Television company as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. 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