If there’s one thing political commentators love to talk about, it’s the “strange times that we’re living in” – though they rarely explain how these times came to be so weird. Since 8 November 2016, nearly every discussion on Trump’s rise to power has been riddled with vagueness: that it was impossible to have predicted; that the terrible tech companies and “trolls online” helped to spread the “fake news” that got us here. Explanations tend to consist of little more than gestures towards the internet or the Rust Belt and a shrug.
Andrew Marantz’s Antisocial: How Online Extremists Broke America is refreshingly free of such regurgitated theories. It tells the story of how right-wing figures on the internet deconstructed Western politics and media. It pinpoints the collision between ideology and technology that was approaching long before 2016 – and discusses the gatekeepers who were too late to stop it. But what makes Antisocial a truly valuable attempt at explaining this complex story is that Marantz, a staff writer at the New Yorker, spent years in the presence of some of the most high-profile figures of the alt-right and tech communities, and was committed to understanding their worlds.
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