"Talia Lavin is every skinhead's worst nightmare: a loud and unapologetic Jewish woman, acerbic, smart, and profoundly antiracist, with the investigative chops to expose the tactics and ideologies of online hatemongers. Culture Warlords is the story of how Lavin, a frequent target of extremist trolls (including those at Fox News), dove into a byzantine online culture of hate and learned the intricacies of how white supremacy proliferates online. Within...
"For several years, Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer, has been embedded in two worlds. The first is the world of social-media entrepreneurs, who, acting out of naïvete and reckless ambition, upended all traditional means of receiving and transmitting information. The second is the world of the people he calls "the gate crashers" -- the conspiracists, white supremacists, and nihilist trolls who have become experts at using social media to...
"Mindf*ck goes deep inside Cambridge Analytica's "American operations," which were driven by Steve Bannon's vision to remake America and fueled by mysterious billionaire Robert Mercer's money, as it weaponized and wielded the massive store of data it had harvested on individuals--in excess of 87 million--to disunite the United States and set Americans against each other. Bannon had long sensed that deep within America's soul lurked an explosive tension....
UPDATED FOR THE 2016 ELECTION The book Politico calls "Moneyball for politics" shows how cutting-edge social science and analytics are reshaping the modern political campaign. Renegade thinkers are crashing the gates of a venerable American institution, shoving aside its so-called wise men and replacing them with a radical new data-driven order. We've seen it in sports, and now in The Victory Lab,journalist...
Aaron Swartz was a programming prodigy who helped shape the digital landscape of today. He helped develop the internet protocol RSS and was a co-founder of Reddit. Chronicling his pioneering efforts crusading for open access and free speech and the resulting legal nightmare and tragedy that ensued, the documentary is a dynamic and moving portrait of a brilliant tech millionaire who renounced the values of Silicon Valley startup culture and used technology...
"In February of 2013, Richard Stengel, the former editor-in-chief of Time, joined the Obama administration as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Within days, two shocking events made world-wide headlines: ISIS executed American journalist James Foley on a graphic video seen by tens of millions, and Vladimir Putin's "little green men"--Russian special forces--invaded Crimea, amid a blizzard of Russian denials and false...
"Despite all the attention paid to it, the problem of online disinformation is only getting worse. Social media may well play a role in the 2020 presidential election and other major political events. But that doesn't begin to describe what future propaganda will look like. As Samuel Woolley shows, we will soon be navigating new technologies such as human-like automated voice systems, machine learning, "deepfake" AI-edited videos and images, interactive...
"If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine respectable journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook. Of course, none of that was part of the plan. In Antisocial Media, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from...
Job outsourcing. Perpetual busy signals at government agencies. Slashed paychecks. Stolen elections. A war without end, fatally mismanaged. Ordinary Americans on both the Right and Left are tired of being disenfranchised by corrupt politicians of both parties and are organizing to change the status quo. Author Sirota takes us far from the national media spotlight into the trenches where real change is happening--from the headquarters of the most powerful...
"How seemingly innocuous technologies are unsettling the balance of power by putting it in the hands of the masses--and what a world without "big" will mean for all of us. In The End of Big, Internet pioneer and Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Nicco Mele draws on nearly twenty years of experience to explore the consequences of revolutionary technology. Our ability to connect instantly, constantly, and globally is altering the exercise of power with...
The internet has transformed the ways we think and act, and by consequence, our politics. The most impactful recent political movements on the far left and right started with massive online collectives of teenagers. Strangely, both movements began on the same website: an anime imageboard called 4chan.org. It Came from Something Awful is the fascinating and bizarre story of 4chan and its profound effect on youth counterculture. Dale Beran has observed...
"In his too-short life, Aaron Swartz reshaped the Internet, questioned our assumptions about intellectual property, and touched all of us in ways that we may not even realize. His tragic suicide in 2013 at the age of twenty-six after being aggressively prosecuted for copyright infringement shocked the nation and the world. Here for the first time in print is revealed the quintessential Aaron Swartz: besides being a technical genius and a passionate...
Drawing on interviews with tech and policy leaders, the first chief technology officer of the United States--inspired by private sector trailblazers--examines how open government can establish a new paradigm for the twenty-first century.
Examines how a growing culture of narcissism is behind the fragmented political landscapes of today, drawing on the works of classic philosophers to explain the essential role of truth and humility in democracy.
"How hackers interfere in our democratic processes -- using Facebook, data mining, micro-targeting, the alt-right, psy-ops and more -- and what we need to do to save democracy for the digital age"--
Media accounts to the contrary, the Alt-Right didn't just burst out of nowhere in 2016. They have been building their network quietly for years, using bulletin boards and social media to spread a toxic hybrid of technological utopianism, reactionary philosophy, and racial hatred. Wendling traces the rise of the movement and the evolution of its ideas, and he introduces us to some of its key figures. Exploring links between Alt-Right rhetoric and hate...
Is social media destroying democracy? Are Russian propaganda or "Fake news" entrepreneurs on Facebook undermining our sense of a shared reality? A conventional wisdom has emerged since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that new technologies and their manipulation by foreign actors played a decisive role in his victory and are responsible for the sense of a "post-truth" moment in which disinformation and propaganda thrives. Network Propaganda challenges...
"Starting in the early 1960s, there was fear in America about the proliferation of computer database and networking technologies. People worried that these systems were going to be used by both corporations and governments for surveillance and control. Indeed, the dominant cultural view at the time was that computers were tools of repression, not liberation -- and that included the ARPANET, the military research network that would grow into the Internet...