‘By the time I landed in Myanmar, the soldiers were already throwing babies in fires,’ Max Fisher writes of his visit to the country in 2017. Houses burned. Rockets slammed into the walls of longhouses. A few years before, media restrictions had been lifted and Myanmar had hurtled into the digital age. While soldiers rampaged across the countryside, Facebook swirled with stories of Rohingya committing acts of cannibalism and smuggling weapons into Myanmar, accompanied by graphic images of bestiality and calls for beheadings. Each was shared tens of thousands of times, ‘pumping the national bloodstream with conspiracies and ultranationalist rage,’ Fisher states. From digital freedom to genocide: how did we get there? Untangling those threads is what Fisher sets out to do in The Chaos Machine.
