by Ryan Holiday
None of this is to say that these people—or other people who raise our ire—did nothing wrong. They usually did. In fact, almost all the people who have been publicly shamed have done “something abhorrent.” But even if it is something shameful, that doesn’t mean you should be shamed for it. We got rid of public shaming as a form of criminal punishment because it is cruel. We definitely shouldn’t be doing it to people without a trial. Lincoln lived long before the internet, but in one of his early speeches he made a warning that echoes to this day: “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” Especially something dumb somebody said or did when they were a kid!*
Most of what I’m saying here was said much more eloquently and persuasively in Monica Lewinsky’s TED talk, “The Price of Shame.” But initially I didn’t even watch it. Why would I? She’s a joke, I thought. Even when I saw it shared widely on Facebook by my friends, my first mental justification for watching it was thinking I might be able to make fun of it and TED in an article. In fact, it’s very good, and wise, and important. And I feel like a heel for having dismissed it out of hand.
As she says in the talk, her scandal was the first to be amplified and distributed through the internet. It was the initial glimpse of what human nature + digital tools does to the crowd. It is not a pretty sight—and surely was a horrific experience. The person who felt the consequences most painfully was the one who had done the least amount wrong, was the least culpable, and could least afford the cost. And today, from the seeds of that scandal, we now live in a world where, as she aptly summarizes, “public humiliation is a commodity and shame is an industry.”
It’s a wringer we’ve gone on to put so many people through, from Lehrer to Sacco to Amy Pascal to people whose names should have never been made public in the first place. Whatever their actual wrong-doings, we treated them like they weren’t human beings. We deliberately pretended that we weren’t human beings with our flaws too.
This is not how we solve things. It’s not how the world is improved.
It just feels good for a fleeting moment. And it makes a select handful of media and technology entrepreneurs wealthy while their goons feel important.
This is the shame of our public shamings.
DISAGREE WITH SOMETHING? JUST MAKE FUN OF IT
New Yorker critic David Denby came closest to properly defining snark in his book Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation. He didn’t succeed entirely, but “[s]nark attempts to steal someone’s mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her effectiveness [with] the nasty, insidious, rug-pulling, teasing insult, which makes reference to some generally understood shared prejudice or distaste” will do.
My test is a little simpler: You know you’re dealing with snark when you attempt to respond to a comment and realize that there is nothing you can say.* The remark doesn’t mean anything—though it still hurts—and the person saying it doesn’t care enough about what they said—or anything else, for that matter—that you can criticize them back. If I called you a douche, how would you defend yourself without making it worse? You couldn’t.
Snark is an incredibly effective weapon in enforcing norms and dismissing ideas you don’t like. Just make fun of someone until they can’t be taken seriously anymore. That’s the ethos of much of today’s media.
Yet a snark victim’s first instinct is to appeal to reason—to tell the crowd, “Hey, that’s not true! They’re making this up!” Or appeal to the humanity of the writer by contacting them personally to ask, “Why are you doing this to me?” I try to stop clients from doing this. I tell them, “I know this must hurt, but there’s nothing you can do. It’s like jujitsu: The energy you’d exert in your defense will be used against you to make the embarrassment worse.”
Snark is profitable and easy for blogs because they don’t care about anyone on the other side of it. It’s the perfect device for people who have nothing to say but who have to talk (blog) for a living. Snark is the grease of the wheels of the web. Discussing issues fairly would take time and cognitive bandwidth that blogs just don’t have. Snark is the style of choice because it’s click-friendly, cheap, and fast.
Bloggers love to hide snark in adjectives, to cut an entire person down with just a few words. You find it in nonsensical mock superlatives: Obama is the “compromiser in chief.” So-and-so is a perv. Jennifer Love Hewitt gains a few pounds and becomes Jennifer Love Chewitt. So-and-so is rapey. So-and-so is basic or an asshat or a goon or, as someone once wrote about me, they have a “punchable face.” What does any of this even mean? Why do bloggers say things like these? Lines such as these are intended not so much to wound as to prick. Not to humiliate but to befuddle. Not to make people laugh but to make them smirk or chuckle. To annihilate without effort.
You can see snark (and its problems) embodied in Nikki Finke, the notorious Hollywood blogger, and her annual tradition of “live-snarking” Hollywood award shows on the blog Deadline Hollywood. One year Finke’s live-snarking of the Academy Awards was filled with constant criticism that the show was “gay” because it had too much singing and dancing. Funny, right? The height of incisive comedy, to be sure. After repeatedly calling it the “gayest Oscars ever,” Finke turned around and railed against the Academy’s choice to recognize comedian Jerry Lewis with a humanitarian award because of his “antigay slurs”—jokes he’d told during his telethon that raised more than $60 million for muscular dystrophy. “Humanitarian my ass,” she wrote. Good one, Nikki.
The same goes for the Deadspin piece “What Does Mike Pence Think Happens at Restaurants?” which makes fun of the vice president’s decision to never dine alone with a woman other than his wife. I’ll admit I thought it was weird when I heard Pence refused to eat with a member of the opposite sex (I mean, who cares?), and I thought the headline was a funny take on it. Then I read the article, which includes this remarkable admission: “Full disclosure: I am making fun of myself here, too. My wife and I have been married for nine years, and in those nine years I have not shared a one-on-one meal with any other women except maybe my mother or sister.” So to get that straight, the writer is guilty of the same thing he’s mocking the vice president for!
This is snark in its purest form: just preposterously, self-righteously full of shit. In Finke’s case she had made her own gay jokes, but somehow she’s not only not a hypocrite, she’s superior to Lewis, even though the man actually gets off his ass and helps people. In the Deadspin piece, the writer claims his reasons were different—that he has never eaten alone with a woman other than his wife because (and I quote) he is an “asocial hermit,” but that’s sort of the whole point, even though his reason is actually weirder this doesn’t stop him from making fun of someone else. Bloggers love snark because it isn’t undermined by pathetic hypocrisy.* Snark is magical that way.
Think about how often people are labeled douchebags (or, more recently “bros”):
Your Daily Douchebag: John Mayer Edition (PerezHilton.com)
Meanwhile . . . McCain Locks Up the Notorious Douchebag Demographic (Huffington Post)
Are MGMT Douchebags? Does It Matter? (Huffington Post)
Bud Selig Is Bad for Baseball, a Douchebag (SB Nation)
Internet “Douchebag” Allthis Responds to Controversy (VentureBeat)
To be called a douche or a bro or any such label is to be branded with all the characteristics of what society has decided to hate but can’t define. It’s a way to dismiss someone entirely without doing any of the work or providing any of the reasons. It says, “You are a fool, and everyone thinks so.” It is the ultimate insult, because it deprives the recipient of the credentials of being taken seriously.
I’m not saying dueling was a good thing but at least there used to be a remedy if your honor was insulted or your dignity threatened. What are you supposed to do today? Just take it. Just let people slander and mock you—in front of millions of people!
The always controversial and often mocked Scott A
dams, creator of Dilbert, once said in an interview: “Ideas are society’s fuel. I drill a lot of wells; most of them are dry. Sometimes they produce. Sometimes the well catches on fire.” We have to be able to handle that—as adults—and forgive and forget the occasional stupid remark. We can’t turn everyone into a laughingstock, or pretty soon the only type of person left will be Donald Trump.*
Because you know who doesn’t mind snark or mockery? Who likes it? The answer is obvious: People with nothing to lose. People who need to be talked about, like attention-hungry reality stars. There is nothing that you could say that would hurt the cast of Jersey Shore or DJ Khaled or the Cash Me Outside girl. They need you to talk about them, to insult them, and to make fun of them or turn them into memes is to do that. They have no reputation to ruin, only notoriety to gain.
So the people who thrive under snark are exactly those who we wish would go away, and the people we value most as cultural contributors lurk in the back of the room, hoping not to get noticed and hurt. Everything in between may as well not exist. Snark encourages the fakeness and stupidity it is supposedly trying to rail against. In fact, I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Trump thrives in our new media world in part because he, like some superbug that has become immune to antibiotics, transcends snark and criticism. His rise might be due less to his media manipulation skills than to his unadulterated shamelessness. And so I want you to think about that the next time you lazily dismiss someone with a joke. It might work on them—but think about whom it doesn’t work on and whether the alternative is better.
THE COSTS OF SCANDAL HYSTERIA
A few years ago I was part of a high-profile multimillion-dollar lawsuit involving Dov Charney and Woody Allen. After being accused early on in a series of sexual harassment lawsuits, Dov and American Apparel ran two large billboards in New York City and Los Angeles featuring a satirical image of Woody Allen dressed as a Hasidic Jew with the words “The Highest Rabbi” in Yiddish. Allen sued the company for $10 million for wrongfully using his likeness.
You may remember hearing about it. But you probably didn’t know that the billboards—which ran for only a few weeks—were intended to be a statement against the kind of hysterical media-driven destruction talked about here. They were designed to reference the public crucifixion Allen had endured during a personal scandal years earlier. Ironically, this was totally lost because blogs and newspapers were too focused on the lawsuit’s big-name celebrity drama to discuss the intended message.
In response, I helped Dov write a long statement that was eventually turned into an editorial in the Guardian. It said, in part:
My intention was to call upon people to see beyond media and lawsuit-inspired scandal, and to consider people for their true value and for their contribution to society.
I feel that the comments of a former friend of Woody Allen, Harvard professor and famous civil rights lawyer Alan Dershowitz, apply to this particular phenomenon: “Well, let’s remember, we have had presidents . . . from Jefferson, to Roosevelt, to Kennedy, to Clinton, who have been great presidents. . . . I think we risk losing some of the best people who can run for public office by our obsessive focus on the private lives of public figures.”
I agree that the increasingly obsessive scrutinization of people’s personal lives and their perceived social improprieties has tragically overshadowed the great work of too many artists, scientists, entertainers, entrepreneurs, athletes, and politicians, including Woody Allen.1
Dov was no angel but I think he deserved better, at least when it came to the media coverage. The lawsuits against him were complicated and little intelligent reporting was ever done on them—reporting beyond the sensational claims in the legal documents (I don’t recall many articles following up when claims were dropped or recanted).*
In any case, blogs are our representatives in these degradation ceremonies. They level the accusations on behalf of the “outraged public.” Even if we are not angels in our lives, we ask: How dare you hold yourself up in front of us as a human being? If you don’t feel shame, then we will make you feel shame—or perhaps, you will feel shame so we don’t have to. The onlookers delight in the destruction and pain. Blogs lock onto targets for whatever frivolous reason, which makes sense, since they often have played a role in creating the victim’s celebrity in the first place, usually under equally frivolous pretenses.
It used to be that someone had to be a national hero before you got the privilege of the media and the public turning on you. You had to be a president or a millionaire or an artist. Now we tear people down just as we’ve begun to build them up. We do this to our fameballs. Our viral video stars. Our favorite new companies. Even random citizens who pop into the news because they did something interesting, unusual, or stupid. First we celebrate them; then we turn to snark, and then, finally, to merciless decimation. No wonder only morons and narcissists enter the public sphere.
It feels good to be a part of something—to tear down and berate. It’s not surprising to me that the media would want to assume this role. Consider how the ceaseless, staged, and artificial online news chase makes today’s generation of reporters feel. They attended an expensive grad school and live in New York City or San Francisco or Washington, D.C. The wondrous $200,000-a-year journalism job is not some myth to them; it was an opportunity dangled in front of them—and then taken away. Their life is nothing like that myth. Bloggers must write and film and publish an insurmountable amount of material per day, and only if they’re lucky will any of it be rewarded with a bonus or health insurance. Yet the people they cover are often rich and successful or, worse, idiotic and talentless reality television stars. It’s enough to make anyone bitter and angry. And indeed they are. They grind with the “rage of the creative underclass,” as New York magazine called it.
Philosopher Alain de Botton once pointed out that Greek tragedies, though popular entertainment in their day, had a purpose. Despite being gossipy, sometimes salacious, and often violent, they taught the audience to think about how easily an unfortunate situation could befall them, and to be humbled by the flaws of another person. Tragedies could be learned from. But the news of the twenty-first century, he writes, “with its lexicon of perverts and weirdos, failures and losers, lies at one end of the spectrum,” and “tragedy lies at the other.”
There is no intent to instruct in what we see on blogs. Just gawking. That is their true function. Their degradation is mere spectacle that blogs use to sublimate the general anxieties of their readers. To make us feel better by hurting others. To stress that the people we’re reading about are freaks, while we are normal.
And if we’re not getting anything out of it, and nobody learns anything from it, then I don’t see how you can call blogs anything other than a digital blood sport.
*Blakeley had been arrested recently for a domestic dispute, and the story had been covered up by his colleagues. I wanted people to know. He later pled guilty, but only to harassment.
*By the way, many passages in this book are adapted from writing I have done online as well. I’m not embarrassed about it. It’s my writing. I can do what I want with it. So can Jonah.
*Dear Critics: Please remember this sentence if you ever try to use old or deleted passages from this book against me in the future.
*I also like Goethe’s couple-hundred-year-old statement: “In recent times Germans have assumed that freedom of the press is nothing more than being free to cast scorn on one another in public.”
*It’s like the line from Walter Winchell: “Democracy is where everybody can kick everybody else’s ass. But you can’t kick mine.”
*In fact, I would argue the endless hounding and marginalization of someone like Scott Adams by certain controversy-loving websites is what turned him into a Trump supporter. I think there are a lot of people who got accused of being racist, sexist or any number of other things (when they were really just being dumb or intellectually lazy) who have ended up embracing that side of themselv
es now that they’ve been branded by it.
*Stranger still, now that Dov is starting over with a new company, the same outlets that once criticized him are publishing overblown puff pieces that mostly ignore the many horrible things they previously accused him of. Because that would get in the way of their new click-worthy narrative.
XX
WELCOME TO UNREALITY
The quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist can flourish only where the public is deprived of independent access to information. But where all news comes at second-hand, where all testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths and respond simply to opinions. The environment in which they act is not realities themselves but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses. The whole reference of thought comes to be what somebody asserts and not what actually is.
—WALTER LIPPMANN, LIBERTY AND THE NEWS
IN THIS BOOK I HAVE ILLUSTR ATED THE WAYS IN which bloggers, as they sit down at their computers, are prompted to speculate, rush, exaggerate, distort, and mislead—and how people like me encourage these impulses.
Blogs are assailed on all sides by the crushing economics of their business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more. These incentives are real, whether you’re the Huffington Post or some tiny blog. Taken individually, the resulting output is obvious: bad stories, incomplete stories, wrong stories, unimpor tant stories.
To me, many of these individual failings were my opportunities. I was able to get coverage for my clients out of it; I was able to advance ideas that I thought were worthwhile. But when I started to see what this process amounted to collectively—the cumulative effect of tens of thousands of such posts, written and uploaded day in and day out—my pride turned to fear. This is always a good question: What if everyone did what you were doing? What would that world look like? I started not to like the answer.