Long Shadow Returns With a New Season: Breaking the Internet
The internet, mankind’s greatest invention, promised to unite people across the globe. This is the story of how — driven by profits and power — it tore the world apart instead.
When was the last time you felt good about the internet? In Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet, Pulitzer-finalist journalist, historian, and Watergate: A New History author Garrett M. Graff retraces 30 years of web history — a tangle of GIFs, blogs, apps, and hashtags — to answer the bewildering question many ask when they go online today: “How did we get here?”
Chronicling innovations, revolutions, cyber attacks, and meltdowns, this limited series podcast untangles the web in a way you’ve never considered before.
“The transformation that the internet has brought to our civic life and media landscape is the biggest story of our time," says Graff. "While many people focus on the change in how we use tech, thinking about computers at work and smartphones everywhere, it’s really how tech has changed what we think and what we feel that has most altered our everyday lives.”
Featuring memes and moments you know — like when the world became transfixed by the color of a dress — and others you don’t, but should — like how people sent death threats to the woman who posted that meme online — Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet both scales the heights of internet virality and plumbs the depths of social media's depravity.
Across seven episodes it curates fascinating first-person accounts to explore how a megaphone that gave everyone a voice online became an amplifier of lies, hoaxes, and conspiracies; how websites that brought friends together became rallying points for hate groups; and how a tool with the power to fuel democracy became a weapon aimed at the very heart of it.
Winner of the RFK Human Rights Journalism Award and nominated for both the Peabody Award and an IDA Documentary Award, Long Shadow has been hailed as “rigorous, authoritative and an electrifying listen” by the Financial Times. The podcast has averaged 4.8 stars from more than 1,900 listener reviews and became the No. 1 history show on Apple Podcasts within weeks of its 2021 launch. Long Shadow's second season, Rise of the American Far Right, was named Best Podcast in the 2024 Edward R. Murrow Awards, and both its first and third season, in Guns We Trust, won the Signal Award for Best History Podcast.
Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet premieres June 24, 2025, and is distributed by PRX. The new season is available free across all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Pocket Casts, Overcast, and iHeart.