The HBS hosts chat with Caleb Cain about his experience being radicalized by the Alt-Right internet.
In June 2019, the New York Times featured a story about Caleb Cain, entitled “The Making of a YouTube Radical.” That piece was meant to highlight the subtle, severe, and devastating IRL effects of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which has been proven many times over to promote what (in internet slang) is called “red-pilling”—that is, the conversion of users to far-right beliefs. Today, we’re talking to Caleb Cain, a person who has been down the alt-right rabbit hole and somehow found his way back out of it, and we want to introduce our listeners to a first-person account of how right-wing radicalization actually happens on the internet, how it is sustained, and how it might be combatted.
[Note: Some of the following information and links are what brought Caleb down the alt-right rabbit hole. We do not endorse these views but we think that this content is important for studying and understanding how one falls down this rabbit hole.]
- Four Way Soul Food Restaurant
- The Whiskey Ball
- The series Stranger Things and the villain Vecna
- Our episodes on social media, conspiracy theories, and algorithms
- Caleb’s first video on his YouTube Channel Faraday Speaks
- The band The Dead Kennedys
- Interviews with Noam Chomsky, like this for example
- The filmaker Michael Moore
- If you, like Caleb, experience social anxiety or depression, you can start to find help here or here
- God is in the Neurons, a video by Athene.
- Stefan Molyneux
- Anarcho-Capitalism
- Benito Mussolini as socialist
- The difference between Conservative and Reactionary
- Luddism
- Natalie Wynn of Contrapoints
- The murder of Michael Brown
- The Unite the Right Riot in Charlottesville
- “Very fine people on both sides”
- Destiny (Steven Bonnell)
- The alt-right personality Lauren Southern
- Contrapoints on Baltimore
- Tupac Shakur
- Biggie Smalls, The Notorious B.I.G.
- BreadTube
- The Mercer Family
- YouTube’s algorithm
- The attention economy
- Our episode on utopia
- Leigh coins the term “perv-modernism”!
- Techo-Capitalism
- Jean-François Lyotard The Postmodern Condition
- The philosopher Rick Roderick
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