Includes bibliographical references and index.

Part 1. DeploraBall. This is America ; Pride ; The contrarian question ; To change how we talk is to change who we are
Interlude: Movable type
Part 2. A human superpower. The gleaming vehicle ; Viral guy ; Basically my nightmare ; Eating the world ; Brainwreck politics ; The Sailer strategy ; The invisible primary
Part 3. Too big to ignore. Beyond good and evil ; A filter for quality ; Attention is influence ; Reductio ; The media matrix ; Fitness and unfitness ; The transplant ; Poise is a club ; "Meta post script"
Interlude: Trust nothing
Part 4. The swamp. The news of the future ; The narrative of public life ; Very professional and very good ; Success and empire ; The bright day that brings forth the adder
Interlude: The past is absolute
Part 5. The American berserk. The emptiness ; The mountain
Part 6. A night for freedom. Common sense

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 advance their corrosive agenda. Antisocial ranges broadly -- from the first mass-printed books to the trending hashtags of the present; from secret gatherings of neo-Fascists to the White House press briefing room -- and traces how the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and then how it becomes reality. Combining the keen narrative detail of Bill Buford's Among the Thugs and the sweep of George Packer's The Unwinding, Antisocial reveals how the boundaries between technology, media, and politics have been erased, resulting in a deeply broken informational landscape -- the landscape in which we all now live. Marantz shows how alienated young people are led down the rabbit hole of online radicalization, and how fringe ideas spread -- from anonymous corners of social media to cable TV to the President's Twitter feed. Marantz also sits with the creators of social media as they start to reckon with the forces they've unleashed. Will they be able to solve the communication crisis they helped bring about, or are their interventions too little too late?