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The Inside Story of How Silicon Valley Rewired Our Brains — Offline with Jon Favreau

Sep 2022 🇺🇸 Crooked Media

Two days before The Chaos Machine published, Max Fisher joined Jon Favreau's Offline podcast for a long-form conversation about what his interviews with researchers, psychologists, whistleblowers, and Silicon Valley executives suggested about social media's effects on attention, culture, and politics. Fisher walks through the arc his book traces — from the creation of the Facebook newsfeed to the 2016 U.S. election — and argues that the pattern of harms he documented abroad is linked to the platforms' structural, engagement-maximizing design rather than to isolated bad actors. The discussion focuses on how ranking systems that reward outrage are associated with shifts in what users see, share, and believe. TechKids Foundation includes this episode as Fisher's most extended launch-week interview aimed at a general audience.

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CITATION

Fisher, Max, interviewed by Jon Favreau. "The Inside Story of How Silicon Valley Rewired Our Brains." Offline with Jon Favreau, Crooked Media, September 4, 2022. https://crooked.com/podcast/the-inside-story-of-how-silicon-valley-rewired-our-brains/

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