Antisocial

For several years, Andrew Marantz, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has been embedded in the worlds of social-media entrepreneurs and the gate crashers—conspiracists, white supremacists, and nihilist trolls who have become experts at using social media to advance their agenda. In these divergent realms he discovers that optimism and idealism still exist among the former; that dark cynicism is rampant among the latter; and that both are fighting for control over an instrument that neither fully understands.