Review:The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

Book Review of The Chaos Machine, The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher, By Robin L Harvey

Max Fisher set out to write the definitive book about the dangers social media has thrust upon the world. Its telling subtitle purports that it is an “Inside Story,” one that Fisher backs up with an impressive 32 pages of page note references. 

Fisher has amalgamated the thoughts and theories of many, including social media insiders, experts and academic researchers, along with interviews with whistleblowers and executives from social media. He writes social media platforms, by design, are driven by an irresponsible economic model to seek an ever-expanding and addicted user base and boost profits.

They do this, Fisher says, by preying on instincts and fears bred into humanity over thousands of years, to hook users with gambling and casino-like tricks that tap into our brains’ chemical wiring for responses to rewards. This never-ending quest for more user engagement, Fisher writes, promotes divisive, inflammatory posts, feeds and content, the more outrageous the better. And with the advent of AI algorithms, (the workings of which, Fisher says, cannot be fully explained by anyone) human interactions fuelled by moral outrage have spawned polarized opinions that can push users to destructive, unthinkable acts. 

Fisher concludes social media demonizes differences and creates echo chambers of anger and hate, then amplifies them at lightening speed. The author is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, investigative reporter and foreign correspondent with the New York Times who has covered the social-media beat for several years. Are readers to give his theories credence because of his reputation and the extensive notes at the back of the book? 

A good question. Fisher states in the book’s prologue he’s aimed to document a mission “to answer the question” … “what are the consequences of this technology?” Despite his research and the fact that he sheds much light on a pressing social issue, he fails. 

Fisher has synthesized an avalanche of disparate events to back up his ideas, drawing on his interpretation of the emergence of Q-Anon, racist and anti-Semitic content on YouTube, the Facebook origins of the anti-vax movement, swatting and other dangerous trends that arose on reddit and 4-Chan, and the portrayal and treatment of women in video games, as examples of social media evils.

Social media helped the rise of incel groups, like the one the perpetrator of the 2018 van attacks that killed 11 people and critically injured 15 others in Toronto in 2018 supported, he writes. His list includes the anti-refugee beliefs in Germany that sparked violent riots, the violence against Muslims in Sri Lanka that forced the government to shut down Facebook, and the murders of thousands after anti-Rohingya propaganda on Facebook in Myanmar. Social media was crucial in spawning the January sixth insurrection against American Capitol building, he writes.

Fisher threads these events with own interviews with experts, social media mouthpieces and whistleblowers, interwoven with his interpretations of social science, behaviour psychology, political science and economics. One of the book’s flaws is it often accepts theory as reality and fact and expects readers to go along. Often, he cherry-picks examples to back up his theories and lets personal bias overwhelm his approach.

His intense disdain for Donald Trump and the former president’s right-wing base is palpable, as is his snide contempt for Facebook and its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. This is evident in the number of references in his notes regarding the platform and Zuckerberg (almost 50) and more than most topics by far. At times, Fisher’s writing engages in the same divisiveness he ascribes to social media. 

His inflammatory language— describing social media engineers as having a “male geek misanthropic ideal” and “Asperger’s-like social ineptitude” … and creating a “digital culture built around nihilistic young men” described as “white, misogynistic geek males,” – goes far beyond commentary. His left-wing bias shows when he documents little about bad actors and events linked to the left. The reader may wonder if Fisher can be objective at all.

Sometimes he conflates correlation with causation – as when he cites research that showed Facebook users’ anti-refugee sentiment in Germany curtailed when Internet access went down. He stretches the conclusions of teen bullying studies, writing they show teens bullied because their morals had been corrupted. But the studies only looked at how bullying changed when potential teen leaders were identified and asked to model anti-bullying behaviour. They did not gauge morality.

Fisher makes a similar mistake when he cites a Stanford/ New York University economic study that split Facebook users into two groups: one that turned off their accounts and one hat did not. The group that did was found to be happier, though less informed. Yet Fisher fails to acknowledge that many other factors could influenced that change.

Researchers focused only on mood, news consumption, knowledge accuracy and views on politics. These two examples alone may make the reader question Fisher’s use of research. And though he poses his burning question about social media in the prologue, in its epilogue, Fisher turns trite when he describes social media as analogous to the computer Hal from the Stanley Kubrick film 2001. 

He decides society must “rip” social media’s “tentacles from the systems” governing every facet of our lives, or simply, “shut it down.” A drastic, unworkable solution with significant repercussions as witnessed when Facebook, in a pique about government regulation in Australia, shut its platform to the outrage of human-rights groups, users, and many governments worldwide. 

Yes, social media, as Fisher states, has reached much of the planet, and some substantial-sized groups of users have been spurred to acts of violent moral outage. But like most human behaviour, social media use falls along a continuum.

Sadly, Fisher puts little focus on what many see as the real machine causing humanity’s current chaos – the internet itself. The advent of the Internet has changed almost every human relationship and interaction, resulting in significant pitfalls and benefits for our societies, economies and governance. Social media is just one part of this sea change. 

There are legitimate concerns about interference in democracies by outside governments. But who is naive enough to think that any government or deep state that can, has not and will not try to manipulate social media to force power and politics to its favour?

The tech giants Fisher cites for irresponsible behaviour could not exist without the Internet, a chaos driver and disruptor often opaque in its operation, still evolves. As does social media. Shutting either off is no longer an option. When Fisher suggests this as an answer, his book is naive and disappointing.

The Chaos Machine, The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher, Little Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group, $37 – 389 pages