Rabbit Hole

Thought some other channels I had heard about a podcast produced by the NYTimes called “Rabbit Hole” by Kevin Roose et al. Over the course of the last 3 days I’ve now finally found the time to listen to it from the very beginning. That may sound like much but the show consists of “only” 8 episodes with 30-40 minutes each.

Pretty much everyone who’s ever browsed the Wikipedia for some topic or another knows the concept of a rabbit hole: You start at one topic and then click deeper and deeper into the details or related topics and all of a sudden you have spent hours on something where you’ve had the answer to your original query within minutes.

“Rabbit Hole” focuses on this in darker setting though, interviewing people who got sucked into alt-right movements through YouTube and other algorithm-based content recommendation systems, PewDiePie’s conflict with the WSJ, and also QAnon. It’s basically a 4-hour-long tour through political conspiracy myths and how algorithms have increased their reach and power.

At times it got extremely dark and also gave AI a bit too much credit in my opinion, but other than that it’s a great show that I can absolutely recommend to anyone being online no matter where you live (the problems are the same pretty much everywhere but perhaps a bit emphasised in the US at the moment).