The Lavin Agency Speakers Bureau

A speakers bureau that represents the best original thinkers,
writers, and doers for speaking engagements.

Andrew Marantz

Our digital lives shape our democracy—here's how we can leverage that to create a better world.

New Yorker Staff Writer | Author of Antisocial

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Inside the Bizarre World of Internet Trolls and Propagandists

Are AI, social media, and the internet moving us towards a better future, or a worse one? Andrew Marantz says that we’re the ones shaping the future, not the internet: “People make hashtags trend or not trend; we need to stop waiting for the internet to shape some inevitable future and get to work.” An acclaimed New Yorker writer and TED speaker, Andrew has dedicated his career to fighting back against the spread of hate and misinformation and giving ordinary people the tools to shape and save our democracy. In his eye-opening, practical talks, Andrew draws from his book Antisocial—a New York Times Editors’ Choice—to show us how to live better digital and political lives, where our online and real-world communities don’t tear us apart but bring us together.

“Andrew Marantz is so humane and lucid and absorbing.”— Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

New Yorker writer and acclaimed author Andrew Marantz wants us to be smart about how to use our digital platforms to strengthen our democracy and shape a better world—and he’s teaching us how. He tackles our urgent concerns about politics, social media, technology, and censorship, and uses his expertise to discover how people change their minds and how to have better conversations.

Andrew’s book Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation is a deeply immersive chronicle of how Silicon Valley set out to create a free and democratic internet—and how alt-right propagandists have used it to propel their hateful beliefs. The book is both an exploration of human behavior—how we may not even necessarily believe the things we’re sharing online—and a call for social media companies to optimize their platforms to reward creativity and kindness over emotional engagement.

Antisocial was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a New York Times Notable Book, included on Fast Company’s list of books on technology you should read, and was called “funny and scary, antic and illuminating…a must-read” by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert.

Andrew is also a contributor to Radiolab and The New Yorker Radio Hour and has written for Harper’s, Mother Jones, the New York Times, and many other outlets. He holds an undergraduate degree in religion from Brown University and a master’s degree in literary nonfiction from New York University.

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Speech Topics

Politics & Society

Are We Still a Democracy?Answering the Biggest Question of Our Age

Is the United States still a democracy, or has it already succumbed to authoritarianism? This may be the biggest question of our time; yet we can’t even agree on how to ask it coherently, much less how to answer it. In this talk, Andrew Marantz draws on years of immersion—deep familiarity with the academic literature, interviews with experts of all stripes, and, most crucially, on-the-ground reporting from the regimes, both abroad and at home, where democracy is most rapidly disappearing—to bring clarity to the question, and to give listeners a hopeful but grounded way of answering it.

Yes, Americans are currently living under a form of authoritarianism. And no, it won’t last forever. It might not even last another year.

In a Hollywood disaster movie, the American experiment would end with a climactic spectacle—the dictator ripping up the Constitution and declaring martial law. In real life, though, there isn’t one decisive moment. Democracy doesn’t die in darkness, or with tanks in the streets; democracy slips away in plain sight, just slowly enough that it can start to feel almost normal. Life goes on, and it still feels like life.

This is how we lose democracies in the 21st century: not an abrupt descent into fascist dystopia but a more subtle, ambiguous process. Andrew has seen it, up close, enough times to know what it looks like, and how it can end—often, much sooner than you think. This is a hopeful yet urgent talk for audiences of all backgrounds on the biggest question of our time.

Politics & Society

Antisocial MediaHow Social Media is Hijacking Modern Conversation

How much of your life is online? Not just your social life, but your news, entertainment, and how you form your worldview? The free and democratic internet was a beautiful dream—but now, it’s increasingly corrupted by conspiracists, contorted by propagandists and twisted into a nightmare full of trolls and the toxic alt-right. New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz traces how the unthinkable becomes reality: how alienated young people are easy prey, led down the rabbit hole of online radicalization; and how fringe ideas spread from festering in anonymous corners of the web, to being broadcast on cable TV.

What can we do to keep away “the gate crashers”—the white supremacists, conspiracists, and nihilist trolls who expertly use the internet to advance their poisonous agenda? Will we be able to solve the communication crisis caused by incredible advancements in technology and social media, or will our interventions be too little, too late? Marantz reveals exactly how the erasure of boundaries between technology, politics and media has resulted in the disturbing, deeply broken informational landscape we all inhabit now—and what we can do about it.