32 min
Numlock Sunday: Max Fisher on The Chaos Machine The Numlock Podcast
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- News
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week in another special podcast edition of the newsletter, I spoke to Max Fisher, author of the new book The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World.
It’s a fascinating book that looks at the science — the neurology, the social science, the psychology — of what social media usage does to us. It’s riveting and provocative and will definitely change the way you view social media apps.
The book can be found wherever books are sold, online and IRL and at independent bookstores. Max is on Twitter at @max_fisher
This interview has been condensed and edited.
You are the author of a new book called The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World. I thought this was a really interesting topic for you, because normally you're a national security reporter. You cover a lot of different international events. I was really struck by why you were drawn to social media, but the more that I learned about it, the more it made sense. Do you want to talk about how you fell into this?
Like you said, my background for years has been international reporting, so reporting on global politics and conflicts and wars. I did not think of social media as a story that was for me, or something that I frankly paid a lot of attention to. I thought these are just websites, it's just apps on your phone. How significant can it really be other than as a tech or business story? And that started to change for me, the way that I think it did for a lot of us, after the 2016 election, where there was kind of this sense that social media had something to do with Trump's election, but nobody was really quite sure what it was. It was with the platforms, they're very polarizing and there's a lot of misinformation on them. There are all of these weird, crazy groups and online subcultures on them that all seem to be converging on Trumpism.
I, like most people, still thought, well, these platforms are just reflections of what's already happening in the world, or at most their experience, like any website that you would read or any publication you would read, and maybe there's just a little extra amount of misinformation or garbage in them than other places.
That really started to more significantly change for me about a year after Trump's election when I went to Myanmar to report on the genocide there, which of course was this horrible and very sudden explosion of just complete societal violence between the majority Buddhist group and the Muslim minority.
When I was there, I had the same experience that everyone who was reporting on the genocide there at the time had, which is that social media seemed to be just everywhere in the story. I don't just mean everywhere in that everyone you would talk to would be citing things back to social media, things they'd seen there, groups they organized there, social media being involved, although that was also a big part of it. But also in the sense that it was just very clear, although in this way that was really hard to define, that social media was playing a much more active role in what was happening.
A lot of the hate speech and a lot of the incitement and this general sense of a societal movement to destroy an entire minority population was something that had emerged on the platforms, and in the way that people were using the platforms. They were experiencing on Facebook, especially, but also WhatsApp and Twitter, that it was pulling something out in them that had not been there just a few years before when social media had been completely absent from the country. Due to sanctions before like 2016, you couldn't get a cell phone, you couldn't get social media. And then all of a sudden social media was everywhere and then society took this huge shift.
Shortly after I was there, even the United Nations had concluded that social media had played such an enormous role, that one of th
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week in another special podcast edition of the newsletter, I spoke to Max Fisher, author of the new book The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World.
It’s a fascinating book that looks at the science — the neurology, the social science, the psychology — of what social media usage does to us. It’s riveting and provocative and will definitely change the way you view social media apps.
The book can be found wherever books are sold, online and IRL and at independent bookstores. Max is on Twitter at @max_fisher
This interview has been condensed and edited.
You are the author of a new book called The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World. I thought this was a really interesting topic for you, because normally you're a national security reporter. You cover a lot of different international events. I was really struck by why you were drawn to social media, but the more that I learned about it, the more it made sense. Do you want to talk about how you fell into this?
Like you said, my background for years has been international reporting, so reporting on global politics and conflicts and wars. I did not think of social media as a story that was for me, or something that I frankly paid a lot of attention to. I thought these are just websites, it's just apps on your phone. How significant can it really be other than as a tech or business story? And that started to change for me, the way that I think it did for a lot of us, after the 2016 election, where there was kind of this sense that social media had something to do with Trump's election, but nobody was really quite sure what it was. It was with the platforms, they're very polarizing and there's a lot of misinformation on them. There are all of these weird, crazy groups and online subcultures on them that all seem to be converging on Trumpism.
I, like most people, still thought, well, these platforms are just reflections of what's already happening in the world, or at most their experience, like any website that you would read or any publication you would read, and maybe there's just a little extra amount of misinformation or garbage in them than other places.
That really started to more significantly change for me about a year after Trump's election when I went to Myanmar to report on the genocide there, which of course was this horrible and very sudden explosion of just complete societal violence between the majority Buddhist group and the Muslim minority.
When I was there, I had the same experience that everyone who was reporting on the genocide there at the time had, which is that social media seemed to be just everywhere in the story. I don't just mean everywhere in that everyone you would talk to would be citing things back to social media, things they'd seen there, groups they organized there, social media being involved, although that was also a big part of it. But also in the sense that it was just very clear, although in this way that was really hard to define, that social media was playing a much more active role in what was happening.
A lot of the hate speech and a lot of the incitement and this general sense of a societal movement to destroy an entire minority population was something that had emerged on the platforms, and in the way that people were using the platforms. They were experiencing on Facebook, especially, but also WhatsApp and Twitter, that it was pulling something out in them that had not been there just a few years before when social media had been completely absent from the country. Due to sanctions before like 2016, you couldn't get a cell phone, you couldn't get social media. And then all of a sudden social media was everywhere and then society took this huge shift.
Shortly after I was there, even the United Nations had concluded that social media had played such an enormous role, that one of th
32 min