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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.
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.