For a book ostensibly concerned with change, Antisocial lacks a serious theory of how and why it happens. Antisocial's focus on how the national discourse has been distorted or corrupted by reactionary grifters and the digital platforms on which they have thrived comes at the expense of an analysis of the material conditions that gave rise to such platforms or made reactionary politics attractive to a certain subset of Americans in the first place. you can admire Marantz for being honest about his subjectivity and position-indeed, this is what is most interesting (and paradoxical) about the book.
Despite the fact that these ideas-a national vocabulary and national character-are central to Antisocial, Marantz never really bothers to explain what he means by them. But the conceptual framework Marantz uses to interpret all of this undermines the good reporting that Antisocial contains. This is not to impugn Marantz’s reporting: he is clearly a talented journalist, one able to win the trust of people he finds distasteful or absurd and to write about them in a way that reveals their anxieties, their contradictions, and their picayune spats and resentments. But the book is perhaps best read as an accidental memoir-a revealing glimpse into how staff writers at The New Yorker understand what’s happening in the world, rather than an especially insightful account of what’s actually happening in the world. Read Full Review >Īntisocial is on its face an attempt to document how the cynics and demagogues of the contemporary far-right exploited the myopia and self-absorbed utopianism of tech entrepreneurs to marshal political influence. Our words, after all, do matter, and Marantz makes a compelling argument that they matter more than we think. Marantz chronicles the outrageous behavior but then, mercifully, elevates the conversation. But they ultimately form a kind of meta-metaphor: a book about the Internet lets the reader decide whether to navigate away from the text, as in a hyperlink, to get to an ancillary point or return to it later.
The author’s liberal use of asterisks to indicate asides at the bottom of pages can seem distracting at first. He has a keen eye for detail and a deft ability to let readers discover and then ponder the movement’s ironies - and there are many - without hitting them over the head. Marantz is above all a storyteller, so his narratives are crucial. The effect is to inspire a larger contemplation of what the collapse of civil discourse means about our society. But the book goes beyond the individual magazine pieces by providing valuable connective tissue that Marantz uses to weave these stories together with history and context.
The repurposing of his New Yorker work at times gives the book a kludgy feel.
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