Joining us on the communicators is andrew marantz. He is a writer for the new yorker magazine, also the author of the book antisocial online extremists, techno utopians, and the hijacking of the american conversation. Andrew marantz, thank you for joining us. Andrew absolutely, thank you for having me. If i understand it correctly, the book grew out of reporting that you do for the new yorker. Can you explain that work and how it led to the genesis of the book . Andrew yes, so around 2014, 2015, i was writing for the new yorker. And you know, its a magazine that allows people to kind of roam and be generalists and sort of 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 really political in my mind at that time. It was just sort of what happens when the trusted systems of information break down and people no longer know whats true or whats important vs. Irrelevant or how to spend their time . And so, i was looking at this as a tech story, as a business story. I was looking at click bait farms and how they get you to click on things and sort of 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 trump came down the escalator, and then i suddenly thought, you know, all these forces ive been sort of looking at about how informational architecture online is changing us, thats a political story, as well. So then from there, it was kind of off to the races. Host so you kind of generally group your book into two groups of people, if i understand it correctly. And correct me if im wrong. You have a group called the big swinging brains, and then you have the gate crashers. Explain the groups and how they interact with each other to the topic that youre trying to address in this book. Andrew yeah, so thats exactly right. So the subtitle is online extremists, techno utopians, and the hijacking of the american conversation. The idea is there were two groups, these kind of strange bed fellows who are wittingly or unwittingly collaborating to hijack the conversation that were all a part of. Those two groups, as you say, the big swinging brains, my kind of derisive title for them, those would be the techno utopians, the Silicon Valley disrupters, the people who were so blithely, recklessly optimistic about a future that they couldnt yet envision, that they thought, well just disrupt everything and have every hierarchy that 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 these people i call the gate crashers, which are nihilists, trolls, liars, bigots, propagandaists. The internet did not invent racism, and misogyny, and lies, but made it much more viral and sort of demolished the known informational ecosystems that existed heretofore, which gave the gate crashers this unprecedented amout of power. Unprecedented amount of power. To me, this is a huge part of the story of how we ended up where we are now 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 s election. You opened the book talking to a group of people attending an event called the deplorable. Deploraball. Talk about those parties, the people you met, and how that relates to the term gate crashers or at least the big idea of a gate crasher. Andrew a lot of what i wanted to do, because of the kind of narrative new yorker style of reporting i like to do, i didnt want to just sort of opine or, you know, offer my analysis, although i did do a bunch of that. I wanted to really embed myself and be a fly on the wall for a long, long time. And so i really spent three years just fully embedded with both the people who were running these Silicon Valley platforms, particularly reddit, but also mostly with the people who were actively trying to dismantle and destroy the roots of our common democratic understanding. And so, often it led me to events as you say, like the deploreball, which was an inauguration weekend party. These are all the people who, donaldey say, had memed trump into the presidency and they were selfconsciously taking on the moniker that Hillary Clinton had tried to admonish them with, which is basket of deplorables. They were owning that and sort of celebrating it and kind of turning it around as they did with the phrase fake news or so many other phrases. These were people who really did and said a lot of pretty odious things. And people who i frankly at 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 just had so much influence on their own, they had so much power, that influence itself was sort of part of the story that i felt that we in the mainstream were sort of missing and ignoring. And so i felt i had to embed and explain what they were doing, if only so that the rest of society could understand what they were doing and start to inoculate itself against it, because it was happening whether we looked at it or not. Host a couple of names to that point you just mentioned. If you could just briefly explain who these gentlemen are and the influence they have. Gavin mcginnis is one of those names. Mike sernavich is another. Who are those names and what part did they play in your book . Andrew they, you know, their andrew the only part i would quibble with is the term gentlemen. At core, i think its important to point out, they and the dozens of other people in my book, they are essentially propagandists. I call them metamedia insurgents. They are not properly speaking political thinkers, although Gavin Mcginnis had a consultant gig on fox news for a long time. Sorry, a correspondence gig on fox news for a long time. Mike was a lawyer. These are all smart people. Theyre not ignoramuses. And are very candy wellspoken. That is part of their power. In some sense, thats part of but they also theyre not sort of straightforward political analysts who are working at some think tank. Their main skill is propagating ideas and memes and talking points and propelling them into the mainstream. So these things that would start as fringe, you know, mike sernavich came up as a pickup artist and misogynist blogger. Gavin founded the proud boys, which sort of gets into violent altercations. These are things that should remain on the fringe, but the fact is, they havent, and a big part of the reason for that 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, and the new information ecosystem allows them to do that. They have taken the lunatic fringe, as we once called it, and made it no longer the fringe. Host one of the lines in your book, you write, the disrupters had gleaned through cultural osmosis that free speech was a value worth protecting. Beyond that, they were not expected to think through the underlying principles. Instead, they released their products into the world and then waited to see what would happen. Could you expand on that . Andrew so their disrupters is standing in for the big swinging brains, the people who are founding these social Media Companies. So in 2004, 2005, around when facebook and reddit and twitter and all these companies were coming into existence, there was just this feeling in the air, this sort of cultural osmosis, consensus, that the more free speech, the better. And well put it all out there and the marketplace of ideas will sort of take care of the rest, almost automatically. There was never any real reason to believe that other than kind of unexamined faith. Basically. And that faith got so entrenched of technolibertarian axiom of the internet that it really wasnt questioned that much. It wasnt just a few guys in hoodies in california who believed this. You would hear it on the on the cover of magazines, you would see it. It was really sort of a surround sound thing. So when that all sort of came crashing down, it was basically too little, too late. We had already kind of built this system in this very unexamined way. Now posttrump, the conversation really split open, and the public is now very, very critical of these companies, as i think it should have been all along. But the fact is, theyve been built around this fundamental structure. And, you know, they can be tweaked at the edges. But the basic way the algorithms are built, which is around emotional engagement and around the kind of unfettered marketplace of ideas, thats not going away. I should be clear, none of this is an antifree speech argument. I want to be very clear. 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 stifle speech. Basically what im saying is that, when you take free speech absolutism, as an axiomatic faith, when you just assume because it is speech it is good, you are going to be very blind to the ways in which speech can harm us. We all know that unfettered speech can harm us. That does not mean that you censor it, but it does mean that you set up systems to deal with that. Host in your book you talk with some of these people in these companies. Give an example of how they wrestle with this issue and what kind of justification they come to, or at least what conclusions they come to in dealing with this issue. Andrew i think the most interesting one and the one i spent the most time on was reddit. I talked to people from facebook and twitter, but reddit is actually a social network thats much bigger than twitter in terms of traffic. It was the fourth or fifth biggest site in the country when i was there. And like all the other sites, it was founded on this idea of full freedom, never take anything down. Only deal with only take anything down when its a clear violation of u. S. Law, which is very, very few things. And the founders made it in that image. They left for about 10 years. They 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. You know, you start this party. You let anyone come in. You dont card them. You leave the lights off, let people do whatever they want. Then suddenly, you come back and people are throwing couches out the window and wreaking havoc. What the founders who came back as leaders of the company decided to do was rather than just let the party rage on and continue to be fully laissezfaire about it, they decided to really take it in hand, and they let me sit in the room and watch as they turned into gatekeepers in realtime. They were alumni of the university of virginia. And they would, after charlottesville, systematically, go through and find all the people on their platform who had been using it to organize white supremacist violence and get rid of them. The founders quote was nuke em, if theyre on the platform, i want them gone, which is a total 180 from live and let live. He said to me, i like the idea of unchallenged free speech in theory, but in practice, there are just people who are not good for the world, and i brought them into this platform, i can take them out. I watched them as they went subreddit reddit by and just deleted them. It felt arbitrary and messy, but it also felt better than doing nothing, i guess. Host your book also recounts that when they did that, there was retaliation on the reddit site themselves. They had inculcated this spirit of free speech. Andrew so everyone on not everyone, but a lot of people on reddit, wherever you take anything away from them, they say this is inhumane, this suppresses our free speech rights. We might as well live in north korea. I dont think this is a very nuanced way of thinking about it. Reddit is not a government. Its a private company. It can do what it wants. But they had created this established precedent that you can do and say whatever you want and essentially youll never be challenged. So when they did start to challenge things and these are really, really gross things. Things like, one sub reddit called fat people hate or hate fat people. Thats the most safe for tv one. But even taking away that stuff was still very controversial. Because they had set up such a precedent of anything goes. Host the ideas of types of content, you write this. For a certain kind of reader, discovering these altright sites felt like stumbling onto an intellectual vanguard. You could post something because you believe it, because you wouldnt believe it. Could you expand on that . Andrew there is this kind of clandestine, subversive thrill to discovering something on the internet that feels like something youre not supposed to discover, something dangerous. The metaphor is the red pill. This is an image that comes from the movie, the matrix, where the blue pill allows you to wake up and forget the reality youve glimpsed and think it was all a dream. And the red pill lets you see the real truth. Which has been hidden from you all along. This is a very attractive trope that goes back to platos cave and alice in wonderland. So many other things. 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. And thats a fun feeling, and a fun mental space to live in if you can keep it under control. The problem is that a lot of times, the red pill is being used to show people the truth that the jews are running the world or that women are actually oppressing men, or you know, any number of other things. And those things arent true. But if youre joining a society of people who is 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. And i spent a lot of time with a few people who had gotten tangled up with that and a few who had actually worked their way out of that, which was startling to see. Host we will go into that in a moment but to that idea, and i think its mike sernavich or someone else, in some cases, you write that they view themselves as journalists. Can you kind of expand on that . Andrew oh, yeah. There was a whole range of people who sometimes, just as a troll, would say im a worldfamous journalist. And they would do it sometimes to get 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, youre writing a book about us. Well, you know, im writing a book, too. He just published a book last week. 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 journalists. I would argue that they werent very good ones. But, you know, i spent a lot of time with a young man who i met at the deploreball and who went on stage at that event and sort of said, you know, hold my drink and listen to what im about to say. I was trying to frankly not give him 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 that 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 familiar, it makes breitbart look like the london review of books or thing. 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 so i said, yeah, i gotta track this and see where it goes. So i got on a megabus with him from new york to d. C. And i watched him go down there. Instead of kind of studying up for the job and learning about how the white house worked and which undersecretary of which part of the government, he took a nap and then watched king of the hill on his laptop and then arrived in d. C. And just sort of started to wing it. And essentially, he didnt need to do any homework, because he wasnt there to ask probing questions or do the real work of journalism. He was there as a troll. He was there as a kind of Performance Art to freak everyone out and to desecrate the norms of what happens in spaces like that. And it worked. So, you know, on one level, he wasnt doing real journalism. He wasnt wellinformed. He wasnt telling the truth. On another level, you know, he had a press pass that got him into the White House Press room, so in that sense, he was a journalist. And, you know, thats part of the point of this stuff. Its supposed to kind of scramble everything and upend everything we thought we knew. Thats kind of part of the goal of the Trump Administration and of the altright. The author of antisocial online extremists, techno utopians, and the hijacking of the american conversation, joining us on this edition of the communicators. You mentioned altright. You use another term, altlight. What is that . Andrew well, these terms are all disputed. And a lot of people mean Different Things by them when they say them. The key distinction between the altright and the altlight is the altright is the really hardcore antisemitic, openly white nationalist, bigoted group. And then the altlight is the people who might share some of those commitments, but theyre not antisemitic. In fact, some of them are jewish. Theyre not openly white nationalists. They call themselves civic nationalists. And some of them are people of color or are married people of color or are gay. So, you know, like any world, you know, 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 still find i found a guy who actually was married to a jewish woman before he went down to some nazi turns in his mind. And he had a black brother who was adopted, so theres always more strangeness to this stuff than it first appears. But the most basic distinction is, the altright and the altlight were divided over what they call the jewish question, the jq. And that turned into a cleavage point where they started to separate. And even though they claimed to be free speech absolutists and they claimed that anyone should be able to speak their mind on any topic, in practice, they started feuding, they started holding competing rallies. The deploreball, which we mentioned, actually the hardcore altright people like Richard Spencer were precluded from getting inside that party. And so, he kind of just loitered around outside. Trying to recruit people. So it was very messy and kind of full of squabbling. But it also spoke to just how many ways there are to mess with the national discourse. You know, theres a whole range. And for some people, it was more of just a game. For other people, it was really a hardcore ideological exercise. And that confusion, that slippage also worked to their advantage, because there were a lot of dog whistles, layers of irony, and a lot of ways to get them wrong, if you arent really paying attention. Host are we as a society more sophisticated about this speech and could that lessen the impact, do you think . Andrew in some ways, i think were more sophisticated. But in other ways, i dont think weve really gotten to the bottom of it. I think there are certain framings that people are less likely to fall for now, certain types of false information, certain types of dog whistles. But the fact that the internet is constantly evolving, as soon as one trope gets discovered, theyll be on to the next one. 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 good examples and i think that well be able to learn for 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 are the underlying structures that are always going to incentivize and produce the kind of behavior that theyre known for. Its not as if there 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 weve built is actually just fundamentally on the wrong axis. Host is there then a remedy . Andrew there are a few remedies, but theyre hard. I mean, facebooks you know, i talk about facebook because its the biggest one. But all these social Media Companies are centrally built around emotional engagement. Meaning that all they can measure is whether you click on something, whether you share something, how long you spend scrolling past something, behaviors. And the way they make things go viral, 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, things that are reactive, 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, these things that get your blood boiling. Thats not everything on the internet, obviously. My work is on the internet. This clip will be on the internet. Everything is the internet. But the fact is, the way these feeds are built, theyre built to incentivize things that spike your heart rate and get your skin response going. Now, the companies could change that. They could change that tomorrow. The question is whether they would lose too much money and whether their shareholders wouldnt be happy. So theres a problem here thats around capitalism. There is a problem here around stubbornness. A lot of these founders dont want to reckon with the notion that what they built might be causing harm in the world. So as i say, these are deep structural problems. But the fact is, you know, we have a lot of deep structural problems, like the climate crisis, or the opioid crisis, and the response that we have to take to those is to get to work, digging ourselves out. We cant just throw up our hand and say, free speech or, you know, in the case of climate, you know, freedom of enterprise and lets just let the market sort it out. I think the more skeptical and appropriate view would be, well, while the market has failed to sort this out, we as a society have to come up with a better solution. You talk about politics. Is the current structure in the federal government, particularly congress, interested in dealing with this type of speech and are they capable of doing so, do you think . Andrew congress, i think, makes is making more and more noise about regulating this stuff, for a long time, for a decade or more, these companies basically a long time, for a decade or more, these companies basically got a free pass. I think the free pass era is over. You know, obviously Elizabeth Warren talks a lot about breaking up some of these companies. Sanders has talked about that too. Some of the other democrats, i think, will follow suit eventually in the senate and in the house. Some legislation, i think, could be useful. I mean i do think that, you , know, facebook is too big. But thats just my opinion. I also just dont think though that any particular set of regulatory measures would be enough to address the problems im focused on, in terms of how what kinds of behaviors and frankly ideological patterns are incentivized by these systems. Theres really no way to address that through regulation. I think its a combination. You know antitrust stuff could , be useful. All kinds of fcc stuff could be useful, but i dont think were going to regulate our way out of the problem. That doesnt mean we shouldnt try to do what we can, but i think its actually even deeper than that. Andrew marantz writes for the new yorker and author of antisocial. Thanks for your time and thank you for joining us on the communicators. Andrew thank you so much. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] announcer 1 cspan has unfiltered coverage of white house, the Supreme Court and Public Policy events from president ial primary events through the impeachment process and now the federal response to the coronavirus. You can watch all of cspans Public Affairs programming on television, online, or the free cspan radio app. You can watch through our social media feeds. 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