• Selected Writing
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Trevor Quirk
  • Selected Writing
  • Publication Record
  • About
WI020120_FF_DemTech_Bonnell_01.jpg

Bonnell’s experience validates the vague liberal concern that infectious ideas are spreading online. But this popular notion commits itself to a perfunctory metaphor—that ideas are pathogens passed from one mind to the next upon exposure. The YouTube user is not an independent moral agent but a helpless victim of the algorithm. The liberal complaint isn’t that YouTube is engaged in a kind of social engineering; it’s that the platform is engineering for a politically undesirable output. Bonnell’s approach to radicalization, so far, could not be further from this casual anti-­intellectualism.

I flew out to L.A. to spend some time with the streamer Steven Bonnell (AKA “Destiny”) and wrote about it for WIRED. (2020)

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