#andrew marantz

[sawasawako-archived]

...Twitter was never meant to be the gold standard. People talked about Twitter as if it were a real-time heat map of the national conversation; yet the platform was not an objective reflection of the thoughts and opinions of all Americans, or even of the less than 20 percent of Americans who had active Twitter accounts. What Twitter actually reflected was engagement: which memes were, at any given moment; generating the most activating emotion. This meant that the platform overrepresented controversy, which wasn’t a novel problem. It also meant—and this part is new—that trolls and other macrotargeters could gin up pseudoscandals almost whenever they wanted. Both techno-utopians who built the social networks and the gate-crashers who exploited them liked to assert that social media was a democratizing force. However, even when social media did give voice to the voiceless, the amplitude was never distributed equally. In a perfect democracy, every person gets one vote. In a world of trending topics and algorithmic feedback loops, equal representation isn’t just impossible; it’s not even the goal.

Andrew Marantz, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation

[maaarine]

Andrew Marantz:

“The guys who are building the internet, and they are guys, they’re not reading a lot in the humanities.

They’re not asking these deep philosophical questions. They’re picking up from cultural osmosis.

'Oh, free speech is good and historical progress is inevitable. I’ll just throw these tools out there, and we’ll be good.’

‘I’ll make speech as free as possible, there will be a marketplace of ideas, markets move things forward through competition.’

You’ll notice that they didn’t say they were going to change the world for the better. That was just supposed to happen.

It seems like they just think: forward. We’re just going to go forward and it will all be great. Is there a cliff there? A wall? Where are we going?”

Kara Swisher:

“Talk about the tech to utopia route. It was a very left, hippie — not left exactly. I call them ‘libertarian light.’

It’s a version of libertarianism that is so shallow that I can’t even begin to — they just don’t understand what they’re saying.”

Andrew Marantz:

“Michael Lewis has this thing in Liar’s Poker, the “big swinging dicks” in the finance world.

I call these guys “big swinging brains.” Because they want to be the big brain in the room.

And some of them are very big brains. But the way they use their brains is not flexible, not ironic, not constantly turning in on itself and asking itself: am I doing the right thing?

The way they use their brains is to press forward. If there’s something, I’ll break it, I’ll make a tool, I’ll disrupt it. 

But you don’t always have to build a new tool, that’s not always going to help.

[The idea that] it will be better, because it’s in the future, and the future is better. I don’t know that they’ve really let go of that.”

Kara Swisher:

“There’s just no change in that. Looking up from their computer desk is not available to them as a skill.

And self-reflection is utterly unavailable. And victimization is their new thing, it’s constant.”

Source: Recode Decode: "Antisocial" author Andrew Marantz on how the far right hijacked the internet

[slaybook]

Troll Call

– Max Read

Max Read vs. Andrew Marantz

[thedigitalhuman]

How ‘the Internet broke America’ with The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz – TechCrunch

When Elizabeth Warren took on Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook earlier this week, it was a low moment for what New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz calls “techno-utopianism.” That the progressive, populist Massachusetts Senator and leading Democratic Presidential candidate wants to #BreakUpBigTech is not s…

When Elizabeth Warren took on Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook earlier this week, it was a low moment for what New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz calls “techno-utopianism.”

That the progressive, populist Massachusetts Senator and leading Democratic Presidential candidate wants to #BreakUpBigTech is not surprising. But Warren’s choice to spotlight regulating and trust-busting Facebook was nonetheless noteworthy, because of what it represents on a philosophical level. Warren, along with like-minded political leaders, social activists, and tech critics, has begun to offer the first massively popular alternative to the massively popular wave of aggressive optimism and “genius” ambition that characterized tech culture for the past decade or two.

“No,” Warren and others seem to say, “your vision is not necessarily making the world a better place.” This is a major buzzkill for tech leaders who have made (positive) world-changing their number one calling card — more than profits, popularity, skyscrapers like San Francisco’s striking Salesforce Tower, or any other measure.

Enter Marantz, a longtime New Yorker staff writer and Brooklyn, N.Y. resident who has recently trained his attention on tech culture, following around iconic figures on both sides of what he sees as the divide of our time — not between tech greats whose successes make us all better and those who would stop them, but between the alternative figures on the “new right” and the self-understood liberals of Silicon Valley who, according to Marantz, have both contributed to “hijacking the American conversation.”

Digital Human, Series 18, Episode 2: Uncomfortable

[sawasawako-archived]

...white supremacy is not so superficial a problem that it can be solved by getting rid of a few bad apples. You can’t eradicate crime by sending people to jail. You can’t fix the opiate crisis by bombing poppy fields. It’s tempting, but far too facile, to imagine that the way to end racism is to identify the racists, to shame them on Twitter, to punch them in the streets. That may, in some cases, be clarifying; it may produce a temporary victory, or a moment of catharsis; but it doesn’t address the roots of the affliction. What we need, and urgently, is a new moral vocabulary.

In the meantime, what should social networks do about the surfeit of hazardous memes floating around the internet? Let’s say you’re hosting a party in a warehouse. You can’t eradicate all pathogens from the air. You don’t know how many of your guests are sick, and you don’t want to stand outside the front door holding a thermometer and a stethoscope. The best you can do is plan for contingencies. You can ventilate the room, and put Purell on the tables, and install a carbon monoxide detector. If some idiot is going around sneezing in people’s faces, you can ask him to stop, or you can kick him out of the party. You won’t eradicate all disease, but you can keep it from reaching an epidemic threshold.

Some types of people seem to be particularly susceptible to extremist online propaganda: people with weak real-world social ties; people with unstable senses of self; people with too much verbal intelligence and not enough emotional intelligence; people who prize idiosyncrasy over logical consistency, or flashy contrarianism over humble moral dignity. Still, there is no formula that can predict exactly who will succumb to fascism and who will not. People act the way they do for a million contingent reasons. Nature matters and nurture matters. Some people seem strong but turn out to be weak; some people bear opaque trauma, invisible even to themselves; some people are desperately lonely; some people just want to watch the world burn. We would like to imagine that, in the current year, the United States has developed a moral vocabulary that is robust and widespread enough to inoculate almost all of us against raw bigotry and malign propaganda. We would like to imagine that, but it would be wishful thinking.

— Andrew Marantz, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation

[sawasawako-archived]

A quote on the front page of The Washington Post is more likely to be accurate than a quote on Page Six of the New York Post, or a quote in your ex-pastor’s Facebook post. A fact in the Harper’s Index is more likely to be true than a fact on OMGFacts. Moreover, some journalism aims to transcend mere trustworthiness, taking on the rarefied status of art. Traditional journalists noticed these distinctions, but the data showed that many consumers did not. Social networks weren’t helping; on the contrary, their designers downplayed such distinctions, in the interest of content neutrality.

Many writers and filmmakers and photographers felt that their work had nothing to do with the content churned out by sites like Spartz’s. In some metaphysical sense, they were right. In terms of pure memetic Darwinism, though, the Facebook era had thrust The New Yorker and Spartz Inc. into the same ecosystem, if not into direct interspecific competition. The content on Facebook was as varied as the human imagination, yet all of it was propagated in the same way: by getting people to click and share links... [Spartz’s] line about virality being a superpower was cheesy self-promotion, but it was also basically true. He was using this superpower to sell mildly amusing memes, but he could just as easily use it, in the future, to sell pasta or porn or populism. It wasn’t even a transferable skill; it was the same skill.

Andrew Marantz, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation

[sawasawako-archived]

Neutrality has never been a universal good, even in the simplest of times. In unusual times—say, when the press has been drafted, without its consent or comprehension, into a dirty culture war—neutrality might not always be possible. Some questions aren’t really questions at all. Should Muslim Americans be treated as real Americans? Should women be welcome in the workplace? Are there children locked in the basement of Comet Ping Pong? To treat these as legitimate topics of debate is to be not neutral but complicit. Sometimes, even for a journalist, there is no such thing as not picking a side.

Andrew Marantz, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation

[diivdeep]

Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?

New interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI.