The science of the Nudge

The lesson of Fisher's book is surely that we don't need more celestial inspirations for ambitious projects of human transformation

THE CHAOS MACHINE: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World 

Author: Max Fisher

Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

Pages: 389

Price: $29

In Max Fisher’s authoritative and devastating account of the impacts of social media, he repeatedly invokes Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. The 1968 movie, in which a supercomputer coldly kills astronauts on a ship bound for Jupiter, was in Fisher’s thoughts as he researched the book. Its stark, ambiguous aesthetic is perfectly poised between the utopian and the dystopian. And as a story about trying to fix a wayward technology as it hurtles out of