The Humanist Association of Connecticut

With the New Year upon us, we look forward to happier times, and Charles Dickens tells the tale in a unique way as only he could. Starring John Mills and a stellar cast of characters, the first directorial effort by David Lean, this great film from 1946 will keep the viewer on the edge of one's chair while we follow the story of "Pip" and his great expectations for his future.

Our book for January is The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired our Minds and the World by journalist Max Fisher.

From Amazon:
Building on years of international reporting, Max Fisher tells the gripping and galling inside story of how… social network [companies] preyed on psychological frailties to create the algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions and, increasingly, extreme actions. As Fisher demonstrates, the companies’ founding tenets, combined with a blinkered focus on maximizing engagement, have led to a destabilized world for everyone.

…Fisher tracks the ubiquity of hate speech and its spillover into violence, ills that first festered in far-off locales, to their dark culmination in America during the pandemic, the 2020 election, and the Capitol Insurrection. Through it all, the social-media giants refused to intervene in any meaningful way, claiming to champion free speech when in fact what they most prized were limitless profits. The result, as Fisher shows, is a cultural shift toward a world in which people are polarized not by beliefs based on facts, but by misinformation, outrage, and fear.

“The Chaos Machine is an authoritative and devastating account of the impacts of social media…The way the book connects the dots is utterly convincing and should obliterate any doubts about the significance of algorithmic intervention in human affairs.” – New York Times Book Review