In Max Fisher’s authoritative and devastating account of the impacts of social media, “The Chaos Machine,” he repeatedly invokes Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The 1968 movie, in which a supercomputer coldly kills astronauts on a ship bound for Jupiter, was in Fisher’s thoughts as he researched the book. Its stark, ambiguous aesthetic is perfectly poised between the utopian and the dystopian. And as a story about trying to fix a wayward technology as it hurtles out of control, it is beautifully apt.
The cinematic opening to Fisher’s book cuts from the shining halls of Facebook’s headquarters to a view of Earth from contemplative heights. We see “far-off despots, wars and upheavals. … A sudden riot, a radical new group, widespread belief in some oddball conspiracy.” The way the book connects these dots is utterly convincing and should obliterate any doubts about the significance of algorithmic intervention in human affairs.
Fisher, a journalist who has reported on horrific violence in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, offers firsthand accounts from each side of a global conflict, focusing on the role Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube play in fomenting genocidal hate. Alongside descriptions of stomach-churning brutality, he details the viral disinformation that feeds it, the invented accusations, often against minorities, of espionage, murder, rape and pedophilia. But he’s careful not to assume causality where there may be mere correlation. The book explores deeply the question of whether specific features of social media are truly responsible for conjuring mass fear and anger.
The enjoyment of moral outrage is one of the key sentiments Fisher sees being exploited by algorithms devised by Google (for YouTube) and Meta (for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp), which discovered they could monetize this impulse by having their algorithms promote hyperpartisanship. Divisiveness drives engagement, which in turn drives advertising revenues. Fisher details the evolution of behavioral technologies that belie the many denials by company representatives that their platforms are inherently or intentionally manipulative.
These denials also don’t stand up against the stated intentions of company founders. In 2017, Mark Zuckerberg wrote an essay claiming that the tech industry would be responsible for humanity’s “next step.” Facebook, he said, would provide the “social infrastructure” of a new stage in human relations. Peter Thiel, a founder of the companies PayPal and Palantir, expressed unambiguously antidemocratic leanings as early as 2009, saying that society couldn’t be entrusted to “the unthinking demos.” He and his Silicon Valley peers, Fisher writes, saw society as “a set of engineering problems waiting to be solved.”
The story of these outsize protagonists is one of hubris and ignorance. Fisher traces the tech culture from which they emerged to the Gamergate scandal and to some of the more toxic forums on 4chan and Reddit, where extremist incels and neo-Nazis, among others, got their first inklings of power and forged the alt-right movement. In a culture with a high tolerance for crude simplification, the tech billionaires are cloaked in the most clichéd myths of genius: the white male nerd displaying, to use Thiel’s phrase, an “Asperger’s-like social ineptitude” that is so often associated in popular culture (at the expense of any real understanding of the autism spectrum) with savantlike gifts.
But the mythologies mask deep failings. In the opening scene of the book, when Fisher is ushered through Facebook’s “steel and glass playground,” he is carrying leaked documents that outline the platform’s policies on speech. There’s no orderly or comprehensive list, only disconnected PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets, scattered responses to complex geopolitical matters, outsourced guidebooks with contradictory rules. This is what Facebook’s moderators are equipped with. One of the tech industry’s biggest open secrets, Fisher writes, is that “no one quite knows how the algorithms that govern social media actually work.”
Fisher doesn’t dwell on the fact that this combination of hubris and ignorance already existed in the behavioral sciences the platforms have recklessly employed. He mentions Zuckerberg’s astoundingly naïve view that “there is a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about.” In Fisher’s rigorous quest to understand how social media might have “rewired our minds,” he interviews many psychologists about their academic studies, and discovers insights that will fascinate readers. But he doesn’t treat with skepticism the ultimate premises of a science that both created the malign effects of social media and presents itself as their potential solution.
For as long as psychology has existed as an applied science it has served two purposes: medical applications, for psychological ills; and military applications, in the field of psychological operations. But psychologists have increasingly embraced the role of social engineers. Social psychology exploits predictable forms of irrationality to “nudge” subjects in particular directions, whether online, at work or in public policy. Positive psychology focuses on well-being and resilience, with the aim of remedying perceived social ills by promoting strengths and virtues. Both branches of psychology have treated humans as manipulable components of societies. And the most important studies of social media’s effects have taken place within these fields.
But basic causal mechanisms still remain opaque. The laws of human behavior are often speculative, derived from unprovable hypotheses. Fisher’s exposition reflects this. Stories meant to show that morality is an instinctual drive that evolved in primitive human societies, one that correlated with known “neural pathways,” can sometimes seem as awkwardly unrealistic as the “Dawn of Man” sequence in “2001.” They also leave many important causal questions unresolved.
In Myanmar, where social media conspiracies drummed up support for the military’s ruthless campaign against the Rohingya, Fisher acknowledges that “no algorithm could generate hatred this severe out of nothing.” There are of course facts on the ground that determine the algorithm’s effects, the local susceptibility to disinformation, the explosiveness of the divisions. And this highlights an important point: Millions of people use social media without succumbing to conspiracy theories or allowing moral outrage to escalate into violence.
Human judgment and morality, in other words, aren’t reducible to instinctual drives that can be manipulated. So we need to ask not just what makes some people susceptible to manipulation, but also what in the mind’s “wiring” protects others, even in lives saturated with social media. The answer will presumably include education, and will span the range from individual critical thinking skills to the overall quality of the information environment.
But this kind of understanding won’t be satisfying to those who want to single-handedly transform humankind. At the end of “2001,” Kubrick leaves us with the strange, ambiguous image of a glowing fetuslike creature floating over Earth. Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, said in a 1999 speech that this image had always haunted him and had led him to believe he had a mission: “That mission was, and is, to build with you a science of positive psychology.”
The lesson of Fisher’s book is surely that we don’t need more celestial inspirations for ambitious projects of human transformation. Rather, we need to make individual members of societies resistant to such efforts. We have the means to do so if the political will is strong enough, and if our political system hasn’t yet been wrecked by the chaos machine.
