At cspan. Org coronavirus. Host joining us on the communicators is Andrew Marantz, a writer for the new yorker magazine, also the author of the book antisocial online extremists, technoutopians, and the hijacking of the american conversation. Andrew marantz, thanks for joining us try to thanks for having me. Host if i understand correctly the book grew and reporting you do for the new yorker. Can you explain that work and how it led to the genesis of the book . Guest yes. Around 2014, 2015 i was writing for the new yorker and its magazine that allows people to kind of rome and the generalists and go wherever they find interesting stories. Something else find it interesting time was what the internet was doing to us as a society in terms of our information streams. It wasnt fully political in my mind at that time. It was just sort of what happens when the trusted systems of information breakdown and people no longer know whats true or whats important versus irrelevant or how to spend the time. I was looking at this as a text great, a business story. I was look at clickbait farms and how to 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 at trump tower and trumpkim down the escalator and then i suddenly thought all these forces ive been looking at about how informational architecture online is changing us, thats a political street as well. From there it was kind of off to the races. Host you kind of generally grouped your book into two groups of people if understand correctly and correct me if im wrong. You have a group called the big swinging brain and then you have the gatecrashers. Explained the groups and other interact with each other to the topic youre trying to address in this book. Guest thats exactly right. The subtitle is online extremists, technoutopians, and the hijacking of the american conversation, and the idea is that there were these two groups come these kind of strange bedfellows that were either wittingly or unwittingly kind of collaborating to hijack the conversation that we are all a part of. Those groups as you say the big swinging brains, my kind of derisive title for them, those would be the technoutopians, the Silicon Valley disruptors, the people who were so blithely, recklessly optimistic about the future they couldnt yet envision that they just thought we would just disrupt everything and we will have every hierarchy that we know just come crashing down. Whatever happens next it will probably be fine but we really dont know what it is. We now know in retrospect, spoiler, it was not fine. And into that power vacuum that Silicon Valley created came rushing these people i call the gatecrashers, which are nihilists, trolls, liars, biggest, propagandists. The internet did not invent racism and misogyny and lies but the internet spread it much more rapidly, made it much more viral and it demolished all the known informational ecosystems that had existed heretofore which gave the gatecrashers, this unprecedented amount of power and to me thats a huge part of the story of how we ended up where we are now both in terms of who the president is, who was leading lots of other liberal democracies around the world and also how we relate to each other and have 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 the deplorable if i have correctly. Talk about the sports come the people you met and those the link to the term it crashes at least they get the of the great crash or try to a lot of what you want to do is because they kind of narrative new yorker style of reporting i like to do, i do want to opine or offer my analysis, although i did do a bunch of that. I wanted to embed myself and be a fly on the wall for a long, long time. I really spent three years fully embedded with both the people who are were running the silicn valley platforms, particularly read it, but also mostly with the people who were actively trying to dismantle and destroy the roots of our common democratic understanding. Often it led to events as you say like the deploraball which was Inauguration Party because all the people who is like to say they got donald trump into the presidency and they were selfconsciously taking on the moniker that Hillary Clinton at try to admonish them with which was basket of deplorable. They were only that and so burning at, and as theres so good at doing kind of turning it around as they did with the phrase fake news so many other phrases. These were people who really did and said a lot of prettiest odious things and people who are frankly first was kind of hesitant to legitimize in print either in the book or in the articles i was writing, but at the end of the day they had some influence on their own, they have so much power, that influences of what sort of part of the story that i felt we in the mainstream were sort of missing at ignoring. So i felt i had to embed and explain what they were doing, if only so that the rest of society could understand what theyre doing and start to inoculate itself against it because it was happening when we look at it or not. Host a couple of names that you mentioned, and each goode briefly cling to these gentlemen are and the influence they have. Gavin mcinnis is one of those names. My concern of which is the. Who are they and what part of the play your book . Gilly part i would quibble with is the word gentleman. At core its important point out they and the dozens of other people in my book are essentially propagandists. I call them medicine media insurgents. They are not properly speaking political thinkers, although Gavin Mcinnis who you mentioned had a consultant gig on foxs for a long time. Sorry, a correspondent gig foa long time. Mike sernavich was a lawyer and these are all smart people. They are not sort of ignoramuses or anything. They are very canny and well spoken and in some sense thats part of their power. But they are not sort of straightforward political analyst or working at some think tank or something. Their is propagating ideas and memes and talking points and propelling them into the mainstream. These things that would start as french, mike sernavich came up as a pickup artist and a misogynist blocker, Gavin Mcinnis doubted the proud boys which essentially a white pride organization. These are things that should remain on the fringe but the fact is they havent and a big part of the reason is that these people and a lot of other people i spent time with are so good at taking these fringe ideologies and pushing them into the mainstream, as new information ecosystem allows them to do that. Theyve taken the lunatic fringe and made it no longer the fringe. Host one of the lines in your book reads, you write, the disruptors had gleaned through cultural osmosis that free speech was a value with protecting. Beyond that there were not expected to spend much time thinking. They released their products and the world and and waited to see what would happen. Could you expand on that . Guest so there disruptors is standing in for the big swinging brains, the people who are found in the social media companies. In 2004, 2005, around when facebook and reddit and twitter and all these companies were come into existence, there was just the feeling in the air, the sort of cultural osmosis consensus that the more free speech the better, and 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 kind of unexamined faith basically. That faith got so entrenched as a technolibertarian axiom of the internet and upper society that it really wasnt question that much. It wasnt just a few guys in hoodies in california they believed this. You would hear it on the cover of magazines you see, and hear it from politicians giving speeches. It was sort of a surroundsound thing. When that all came crashing down, it was basically too little, too late. We had built the System Industry unexamined way. Post trump, the conversation really split open and the public is now very, very critical of these companies, as i think it should been all along. The fact is they have been built around the fundamental structure and they can be tweaked at the edges but the basic way the algorithms are built which is rather emotional engagement around the unfettered marketplace of ideas, thats not going away. I should be clear none of this is an antifreespeech argument. I want to be very clear this is the First Amendment is sacred to me. Im a journalist. There is no call anywhere close to anything for the government to come in and cycle speech. Basically what saying is when you take freespeech absolutism as an axiomatic faith, when you assume because it speech it must be good, youre going to be very blind to the ways in which speech can harm us. I think we all know unfettered speech can harm us. That doesnt mean you censor it but it does mean you to set up systems to try to deal with that very real fact. Host in your book you talk with several of these people in these companies. Give an example of how the wrestle with this issue and what justification they come to or at least what conclusions they come to in keeping with this issue. Guest the most interesting one and the most one i spent time on was ready. I talked to people from facebook and twitter but read it is a social network that much bigger than twitter in terms of traffic. It was the fourth or fifth biggest site in the country when i was there. Like all the other side it was founded on the site of full freedom, never take anything down. Only deal with, or take anything down when its a clear violation of u. S. Law, which is very, very few things. The founders made in the image. They let for about ten years. They went and found other companies. When he came back one of the images i compare two is like an open Warehouse Party that it just turned to chaos. You start this party. You let anyone come in. You dont cart them. You leave the lights off and let people do whatever you want. Settle you come back and people are throwing couches at the window and wreaking havoc. What the founders came back as leaders of the company decided to do was rather then just let the party rage on and continue to be fully laissezfaire about it, they decided to really take in hand. Do let me sit in the room and watched as they turned into gatekeepers in realtime. They were alumni at the university of virginia, and they would come after charlottesville, systematically go through and find all the people on the platform would 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 down. Which is a total 180 from 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 just not good for the world, and i brought them into this platform, i can take them out. I watched them as he went through seven reddit by sub reddit and pressed the delete button. It felt weird but felt better than doing nothing i guess to your book recounts would did that there was some retaliation on the reddit site itself. Guest yes. They are inculcated the spirit of free speech over all, 31, not if one but a lot of people on reddit whenever you take anything away from the basic this is inhumane, this suppresses our freespeech rights. We might as well live in north korea. I dont think this is nuanced way of thinking about. Reddit is a private company can do it want but they had created this established precedent that you can do and say whatever you want and essentially you will never be challenged. When did it start to challenge things, and these are really gross things. Things like a sub reddit called that people hate rico to hate fat people. Thats the most safe for tv one, but even taking way that stop was to very controversial because it set up such a president of anything goes. Host you write this, a certain kind of reader discovering these altright sites public summit on to a countercultural intellectual vanguard. You could post something because you bleed or because you didnt believe it and you wanted to see the wood. Could you expand on that . Guest there is this kind of clandestine subversive thrill to discover something under net that feels like something youre not supposed discover come something dangerous point the metaphor people use is the red pill. This is an image that comes in the movie movie the matrix where the blue pill allows you to wake up and forget the reality you have glimpsed and think of all the green. The red pill like to see the real truth which is been hidden from all along. This is a very, very attractive trophy goes back to late escape and alice in wonderland. 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 chosen few who understand the truth. Thats a fine feeling and its 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 quoteunquote is been used to show people the truth that the jews are running the world or that women are actually oppressing men, or any number of other things. Those things are not true but if you are joining a society of people who was kind of repeatedly banging into your head the notion that this counterintuitive truth is, in fact, the real reality, a lot of people get sucked into that. I spent a lot of time with a few people who had would gotten tad up in that and a few people who would work their way out of that, which was startling to see. Host will go into that in the second but to the idea i think trent over someone else, in some cases you write to give himself people as journalist. Can you expand on that . Guest there was a whole range of people who sometimes just as a troll would say im a worldfamous journalist and they would do it sometime to get a rise out of me because i was in bed with them for so long. I would hang out and get drinks and they would always say youre writing a book about us. Well, im writing a book too. He just published a book last week and there was this kind of flattening of all status hierarchies which they found very amusing. But in point of fact, a lot of them did act as journalist. I would argue they were not forget ones but i spent a lot of time with a young man who i met at the deploraball and do u went on stage at that event and sort of said hold my drink listen to what im about to say. I was trying to frankly not given that much attention because he clearly wanted so much attention and i didnt want to promote him, but he went on stage and made the announcement he was about to be Given White House press credentials and he was going to be the White House Correspondent for a publication called the gateway pundit. Now, the gateway pundit if your viewers are not like, it makes breitbart look like the london review of books or something. Its not a good publication. And yet we now live in a time line where the gateway pundit gets a White House Correspondent. And so i said, yeah, i got a track this and see where it goes. So i got on a mega bus with them from new york to d. C. And i watched him go down there. Instead of standing up for the job and learning all about how the white house works and he was in which undersecretary which part of government, he took a nap and then watched to avail on his laptop and then arrived in d. C. And just sort of started to wing it. Essentially he didnt need to do any homework because he wasnt there to ask probing questions to the real work of journalism. He was there as a troll, as a Performance Art to freak everyone out and to desecrate the norms of what happens in spaces like that. It worked. On one level he wasnt doing real journalism. He wasnt well informed. He wasnt telling the truth. On another level he had a press pass they cut them into the White House Press room, so in that sense he was a journalist. Thats part of the point of this stuff. Its supposed to scramble everything and i think everything without we knew. Thats part of the goal of the Trump Administration and of the altright. Host this is the author of antisocial online extremists, technoutopians, and the hijacking of the american conversation. Andrew marantz joining us on this edition of the communicative. You mentioned altright and use another term alt like to get what is . Guest these terms all disputed and a lot of people mean Different Things by them when they say them. The key distinction to altright and the old light, altright is really hardcore antisomatic openly white nationalist, bigoted group and then the altlight is the people who might share some of those commitments but they are not antisemitic. Fact some of them are jewish theyre not openly white nationalist. They call themselves civic nationalist and some of them are people of color or married to people of color or arcade. Like any world, the further you burrow into it, the more it surprises you. A lot of people came from new york or california who i was tracking who are the kind of master propagandists of this world. Even within the hardcore altright, really hardcore antisemitic close to neonazi segments of the movement you find a guy ice was talking was married to a jewish woman before he went down some nazi turns in his mind, and yet a a black brother who was adopted. Theres always more strangeness to the stuff than first appears, but the most basic distinction is the altright and the altlight were divided over what the call the jewish question, the gq, and that turned into a cleavage point where the star to separate and even though they claim to be freespeech absolutist as were talked about earlier, they claim anyone should be able to speak them on any topic, in practice they started feuding, started holding competing rallies. The deploraball, the hardcore antisemitic altright people like Richard Spencer were precluded from getting inside that party, and so he can just loitered around outside trying to recruit people. It was very messy and kind of full of squabbling, but it also spoke to just how many ways that are to mess with the national discourse. Theres a whole range, for some people is more than just again. For other people it was really a hardcore ideological exercise, and the confusion, that slippage also work to their advantage because the a lot of dog whistles, a lot of layers of irony and a lot of ways to get them wrong, if you werent paying attention. Host that we as a society more sophisticated about the speec