The web's "original sin": Garrett Graff on tech's deadly embrace of the algorithm
For 25 years, America's adversaries have used online lies, hackers, and trolls to weaponize the web against the democracy, says the historian, journalist, and host of the 'Long Shadow' podcast.
A quarter century ago, as the world held its breath waiting to see if Y2K would bring a digital apocalypse or just another New Year's hangover, President Bill Clinton celebrated how technology had created a moment of shared global experience.
"That people all over the planet could experience the same events, at the same time, would have been impossible for anyone to imagine 1,000 years ago — even 100," he remarked with the kind of optimism that now feels quaint, if not downright foreign.
Fast-forward to today, and that shared experience Clinton described feels as distant as dial-up modems and the family phone line. We're living in an era where the internet — that tool that was supposed to democratize information and bring us all together — has fractured us into separate realities, representing the good, the bad, and even the hostile of humanity.
Few journalists are better positioned to tell the story of how the internet broke America than Garrett Graff. Over three acclaimed seasons of the Long Shadow podcast, he's explored September 11, the rise of far-right extremism, and America's gun violence epidemic. Now, with the fourth season, Graff turns his attention to perhaps the most complex story yet: how the internet broke us.
Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet isn't just another tech criticism podcast. Graff, a historian and journalist who lived through some of the moments he's documenting — he worked on Howard Dean's groundbreaking 2004 campaign and was the first blogger credentialed to cover a White House press briefing — brings both personal experience and rigorous reporting to a story that spans from the euphoria of early blogging to the algorithmic manipulation that now defines our online lives.
In this edition of Depth Perception, we speak with Graff about the challenge of turning internet history into a compelling narrative, the specific corporate decisions that led us astray, and whether there's any path back to the shared digital reality we briefly enjoyed. As he puts it, this is the story of how we went from "The Dress" — that last moment of innocent viral joy — to a world where going viral is something to be feared rather than celebrated. —Parker Molloy
Tell me about the new season of Long Shadow.
Every season on Long Shadow, we try to pick an issue in American life and explain how America got to now — sort of, “Why are we the way that we are?” When we started talking about this season last summer and fall, even before the election, we really wanted to focus on the internet and social media. [We wanted to talk about] the arc of how this tool that really came into American life in the last 25 years with so much hope and promise around it — the idea that it would democratize information, lift up voices that you're not used to, provide access to all the world's information at your fingertips — has instead turned into this tool that has not drawn us together, but is in fact actually driven us apart. How we ended up with an internet that is so polarizing, so filled with hate and misogyny and racism and flooded by conspiracies and misinformation and disinformation.
Long Shadow has covered 9/11, Waco, Columbine — discrete historical events. How do you approach telling the story of something as sprawling and ongoing as the internet breaking us?
One of the things that we tried really hard to do with [this] season that I think is important and hard to remember now is how much hope and promise the internet started with. I'm being a little bit fuzzy with the terms here — the internet of course dates back to the 1950s and ‘60s and ARPANET [Advanced Research Projects Agency Network] and all of that. But really [the internet came] into daily American life for the ordinary user with the invention of the World Wide Web in the 1990s and the rise of the dot-com boom, and then social media in the early 2000s.
We spend the first half of the season really trying to go back and paint the picture of those early years of blogging and social media and how exciting those years were. Even trying to explain to someone what BuzzFeed was at its peak in the early 2010s feels like ancient history now on the internet.
‘Long Shadow’ returns with ‘Breaking the Internet’
When was the last time you felt good about the internet? Today’s online landscape is a harrowing one. Back in the day, the web gave power to the people, and going online could actually be fun.
Chronicling innovations, revolutions, cyber attacks, and meltdowns, Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet untangles the web in a way you’ve never considered before. Across seven episodes, it retraces 30 years of web history — a tangle of GIFs, blogs, apps, and hashtags — to answer the bewildering question many ask when they go online today: “How did we get here?”
The first episode of Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet is out now! Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
You start with "The Dress" — what I’ve personally called "the last good day on the internet." You trace a line from The Dress — a fun question of was it blue-and-black or gold-and-white — to a world of non-stop death threats. How did we go from silly viral moments to genuine harm so seamlessly?
We spend a lot of time talking about the rise of the algorithms and the extent to which the modern age of virality has been driven and skewed and weaponized for engagement. And that engagement is a very different measure than quality. The way that these big social media sites like Facebook and Twitter developed and embraced algorithms to maximize engagement for business reasons — I mean really for profit purposes — is this original sin of what went wrong with the internet.
Bad actors — spammers on one end of the spectrum and nation-state adversaries like Russia on the other end — understood how to weaponize those algorithms against internet users and against the American people. And then you have these threads of things like the manosphere and Gamergate that manifested over years, again taking advantage of the algorithm to foster and spread and encourage hate and misogyny and racism and turn that fire hose of attention on people for negative reasons.
Long Shadow aims to make history relevant, but with internet history, we're talking about things that happened only 10 to 15 years ago that already feel ancient. How do you help listeners understand that this is history worth examining?
Part of this has to do with what time feels like at internet speed. In our previous seasons, we've started in the 1970s and come up to [the] present day. You can find the roots of the rise of the far right or gun violence in decisions made in the '70s and '80s. For the internet, it's just all so new, but it also has unfolded at a speed and intensity where even going back to talk about the 2016 election feels like another era.
A large chunk of our listeners have presumably never known an adult world without smartphones. So trying to go back and explain what the internet was like when I was in college, when it was a thing on your desktop hardwired into the wall — the huge breakthrough was you could be online anytime you were at your desk. You didn't have to do dial-up anymore, didn't have to tie up the family phone line. Even that was a really exciting breakthrough that was 25 years ago and yet today is literally unimaginable to a lot of people who are going to be listening to this podcast.
This is the first season where you've lived some of the history yourself. How has your own relationship with social media evolved while making the show?
We talk about in the season the breakthrough in online politics that Howard Dean's presidential campaign was in 2003-2004, and that was a campaign that I worked on right after college. So I was in the room for some of those really big groundbreaking moments of online politics.
When I arrived in Washington, [D.C.], my first journalism job was as a blogger. My first big journalism claim to fame was in March of 2005: I was the first blogger accredited to cover a White House press briefing. That was a big, weird moment for blogs.
I think my own relationship with social media is as complicated as anyone who is a journalist. I live in Vermont. I don't think I could have made my journalism career work here from 2015 to 2020 without [the] sort of the golden age of Twitter and the ability to maintain those relationships and that relationship to the news as it was unfolding.
The season mentions how the "once well-meaning web has mutated and been mutilated by powerful forces." How do you balance examining individual choices versus systemic forces without falling into either tech utopianism or fatalism?
You can trace a lot of where we are today to specific choices made by specific companies in specific moments, almost all of which have to do with the big companies from YouTube to Twitter to Facebook wanting to make money on these tools in ways other than through subscriptions. If you are not selling a subscription, you have to sell advertising, and the way to sell advertising is through maximizing engagement.
What we really try to do through the series is mark these moments and developments where companies made very specific product-based, profit choices that helped drive division and polarization and amplified hate and racism and misogyny because it's more profitable to do that than something else.
What's an example of one of those big moments?
We spend a lot of time talking about the Facebook News Feed and the way that over time it over-indexed on negative feelings because humans respond more strongly to negative feelings than positive ones. Disliking something on Facebook was more powerful in the algorithm than liking it. So the more people disliked something, the more it would spread online. I think that's a really important psychology to understand when we look at how our country has become more polarized and more hate-filled over these last 10, 15, 20 years.
“The way that these big social media sites like Facebook and Twitter developed and embraced algorithms to maximize engagement for business reasons… is this original sin of what went wrong with the internet.” —Garrett Graff
Everyone experiences the web differently. Tell me some of the stories told by people on Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet that stand out to you.
One of the things we really worked hard in this series to do was to remind people how promising and fun the web once was — so many people now only know the smartphone world, and see the web as inherently toxic. But that first decade of the 2000s, post-dot-com boom as what we used to call "Web 2.0" took off with social networking, blogging, and sites like Wikipedia, the sense that the web was going to change the world seemed all-but given.
There are a lot of dots to connect when writing a history of the internet. No spoilers, but what connections does the podcast make that surprised even you?
I think the thing that surprised me was how directly and specifically the change in the arc of social media was because of business-focused and profit-focused decisions by the social media companies themselves. I've always had the sense that was true, but diving into it for this project I was shocked to find how specifically the hate and misogyny of the web has been driven by big tech profit.
After spending months researching how we got into this fractured online reality, do you see any way back to the shared experience that Bill Clinton described, or are we permanently in separated information universes?
When it comes to the internet and at least the near-term future, I remain hopeful, but I don't think I'm optimistic about what the next couple of years look like for our country. I don't think there is a simple, easy fix where we're able to knit the country back together again and fix the information ecosystem online.
Whatever fix comes is going to come in a lot of really small actions and tweaks in a lot of different places from a lot of different people that make things a little bit better here and a little bit better there. And that's gonna be really, really hard to do. We ended the last season on gun violence on a semi-hopeful note because I think there's reason to believe our country is making progress on the edges around gun violence and gun policy. I don't think we right now have reason to believe that there's the same little bit of hope ahead in social media and our information ecosystem.
Further reading and listening from Garrett Graff
Long Shadow (Long Lead, 2021-2025)
Watergate: A New History (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2022)
The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 (Simon & Schuster, 2019)
Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself—While the Rest of Us Die (Simon & Schuster, 2017)
The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War (Black Bay Books, 2012)
The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007)