On the page, Buttigieg calls the technology behind social media platforms “amoral”.

“In catering to those cravings,” he writes, “the algorithms themselves became radicalizing.” And when the pandemic hit last winter, “across America, like a compromised immune system, distrust itself proved a dangerous preexisting condition.” Amoral v immoral “The feel was one of community-building,” Buttigieg adds, but it only took “two election cycles for malicious actors … to weaponize” these platforms, revealing the “instantaneous preferences of our least conscious selves”. Social media “at first seemed like a benevolent force in political organizing”, Buttigieg writes, anatomizing a misconception bolstered by the success of Obama’s brilliant first campaign. In 1997, Wired magazine gushed: “Where conventional politics is suffused with ideology, the digital world is obsessed with facts … the Digital Nation points the way toward a more rational, less dogmatic approach to politics.” He reminds us of early, utopian predictions about its promise “of democratizing knowledge” which now sound absurd. In Trust: America’s Best Chance, Buttigieg is particularly good on the history of the internet.

A list of Buttigieg’s recent favorites can be found at the bottom of this piece. He also discussed his remarkably diverse reading tastes, which range from the speeches of Gabriel García Márquez to a novel, Godric, by the theologian Frederick Buechner and set in the 11th century. I couldn’t have done it without him.”īy phone from South Bend, where he served two terms as mayor, Buttigieg discussed the dangers of the internet and where and how he writes – on a Mac in an extra bedroom converted into a study. As always, Bob was exacting and supportive. “It was a very different kind of writing: a little more frantic,” Buttigieg told the Guardian, in his first interview about his life as an author. Editor Bob Weil was enthusiastic, therefore, when Buttigieg agreed to come down from the campaign trail by spending three months sequestered at home, writing through the pandemic. The book offers further proof, were it needed, that the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, also a former presidential candidate, has the most interesting political mind since Barack Obama.īuttigieg’s first book, Shortest Way Home, was a hit, selling nearly 150,000 copies as its author ran strongly in the Democratic primary.

Shortest way home pete buttigieg