Somebody Told Me
One Man’s Unexpected Journey Down the Rabbit Hole of Lies, Trolls and Conspiracies
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
'Shocking, timely and - as you’d expect from Danny Wallace - very funny' - Adam Kay
'Thrilling, thought-provoking, funny and wise. Danny has an incredible knack for taking the bizarre fringes and rabbit holes of humanity and making them compulsively laugh-out-loud readable.' - Danny Robins, journalist, presenter of Uncanny and writer of 2:22 A Ghost Story
'Danny Wallace lightens this dark topic about lies and propaganda with his trademark humour and gets the balance just right' – BBC, Books to Read in 2024
Have you been keeping your eye on your grandma lately? Have you been calling her enough? You sure she’s not spending too much time on YouTube? Is she talking fondly of dictators? Has she suddenly started quietly muttering in the Aldi queue about the “Jewish Space Lasers” she’s heard are setting wildfires around the world to make sure everyone believes in climate change? When was the moment the world began to believe anything?
Danny Wallace, million-copy bestselling author of Yes Man and Join Me, has fallen down the modern rabbit hole of lies, conspiracies and disinformation. Along the way, he encounters families torn apart by accusations and fake news, journalists putting themselves on the frontline of the disinformation war, reformed conspiracy theorists, influencers who see profit in stoking paranoia, and the shadowy nameless, faceless trolls on the other side of our screens. He discovers how disinformation and well-told lies can ruin a year or a whole life, how they can affect our family, our street, our community. How they can spread across a country, a continent, even the world. How they take hold of our imaginations and make us feel both helpless and powerful.
And Danny asks: can you do anything to stop it – even with the truth on your side?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this hilarious chronicle of the present-day reign of misinformation, British comedian and broadcaster Wallace (Yes Man) recaps his encounters with people who spread, believe, or are otherwise affected by conspiracy theories. They include a husband distressed at his wife's QAnon addiction; a man who thinks that a plan to bring walkability back to his town's center is a plot to imprison the population; and Alex Jones, who once insisted that the U.S. government tried to assassinate him via tornado. Later chapters probe Russia's Internet Research Agency and its efforts to spread misinformation, AI girlfriends who spout propaganda, and Wallace's own conspiracy theorizing when he started to speculate that stilted emails sent to his father were part of a Chinese spy op. Wallace spotlights nutty theories on everything from 5G to Princess Kate, dissecting with fine comic irony the hucksterism that underlies many of them. (Paraphrasing comedian-turned-conspiracy guru Russell Brand, he writes: "They want to control you. You should be very worried. They need your data. By the way, use the code BRAND and enter your personal details on this external website.") At times Wallace is too dismissive of the conspiratorial mindset, ignoring the role real-life government chicanery plays in prompting dark forebodings about cover-ups. Still, it's an entertaining survey of what's addling public discourse.
