by Ryan Holiday
It is now almost cliché for people to say, “If the news is important, it will find me.” This belief itself relies on abandoned shells. It depends on the assumption that the important news will break through the noise while the trivial will be lost. It could not be more wrong. As I discovered in my media manipulations, the information that finds us online—what spreads—is the worst kind. It raised itself above the din not through its value, importance, or accuracy but through the opposite, through slickness, titillation, and polarity.
I made a lot of money and had a great time playing with the words that make up the news. I exploited the laziness behind the news and people’s reading habits. But from the abuse of abandoned shells came another one.
Our knowledge and understanding is the final empty, hollow shell. What we think we know turns out to be based on nothing, or worse than nothing—misdirection and embellishment. Our facts aren’t facts; they are opinions dressed up like facts. Our opinions aren’t opinions; they are emotions that feel like opinions. Our information isn’t information; it’s just hastily assembled symbols.
There is no way that is a good thing, no matter how much I gained from it personally.
CONCLUSION
SO . . . WHERE TO FROM HERE?
THE NARR ATOR OF ROBERT PENN WARREN’S ALL The King’s Men, a brilliant, powerful media manipulator, says that his story
is the story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way. The change did not happen all at once. Many things happened and that man did not know when he had any responsibility for them and when he did not.
In a way that is also my story. I saw the world one way and then I saw it another way and it led to this book, and then years later I see it a slightly different way again. Where does my responsibility begin and end? What guilt do I share? How fair was I to the people I implicated? These are questions that can’t be answered but should be asked.
I remember when I was finishing this book for the first time. I felt like I had to get it out as soon as possible. I was afraid that the year or so it had taken me to write it had been too long, that if the book didn’t get out soon, it would be too late. I’d miss my window and no one would hear me.
It’s strange now to have looked at the pages once again and seen that, if anything, I was early. Things were bad then but they were going to get much worse. Things had to get much worse before people would really listen. They might not fully listen now, today, but now ordinary people are primed to understand how bad things are. They’ve seen the consequences of the current system first hand. They are inclined to believe, finally, that something is very wrong.
If only they could have seen it years ago. For instance, the quote I am about to give you—it feels very current but in fact it’s from early 2011.
Fake news. I don’t mean fake news in the Fox News sense. I mean the fake news that clogs up most newspapers and most news websites, for that matter. The new initiative will go nowhere. The new policy isn’t new at all. . . . The product isn’t revolutionary. And journalists pretend that these official statements and company press releases actually constitute news. . . . Fake news, manufactured, hyped, rehashed, retracted—until at the end of the week you know no more than at the beginning. You really might as well wait for a weekly like the Economist to tell you what the net position is at the end of the week.1
The extra irony there is that the person who said it is Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, one of the people I’ve spent a good portion of this book railing against.
In an interview with the Atlantic magazine, Denton claimed he was on a “jihad” inside Gawker “against fake news.” In the years since, it’s something that’s become rather common—journalists complaining about fake news. I find that to be a little like Kim Kardashian complaining about how fake reality TV shows are. Not that there is any question about a media jihad. As I have shown in this book, there is one, only it is a war with you, against you. It’s me against them, against you. By proxy we fight countless battles for your attention, and we’ll go to any length to get it. And yet, even as Denton was saying that and I was writing about it, almost no one knew that another war was going on—a secret war to hold media like Gawker legally accountable for its actions.
More than twenty-five years ago, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argued that the needs of television, then our culture’s chief mode of communicating ideas, had come to determine the very culture it was supposed to represent. The particular way that television stages the world, he wrote, becomes the model for how the world itself is to be staged.
Entertainment powered television, and so everything that television touched—from war to politics to art—would inevitably be turned into entertainment. TV had to create a fake world to fit its needs, and we, the audience, watched that fake world on TV, imitated it, and it became the new reality in which we lived. The dominant cultural medium, Postman understood, determines culture itself.
Well, television is no longer the main stage of culture. The internet is. Blogs are. YouTube is. Twitter is. And their demands control our culture exactly as television once did. Only the internet worships a different god: traffic. It lives and dies by clicks, because that’s what drives ad revenue and influence. The central question for the internet is not, Is this entertaining? but, Will this get attention? Will it spread?
You’ve seen the economics behind the spread of news online. It’s not a pretty picture (although if it were, it’d be a slideshow). Rather than turn the world into entertainment, these forces reduce it to conflict, controversy, and crap. Blogs have no choice but to turn the world against itself for a few more pageviews, turning you against the world so you’ll read them. They produce a web of mis-, dis-, and un-information so complete that few people—even the system’s purveyors—are able to tell fact from fiction, rumor from reality. This is what makes it possible for manipulators like me to make our living.
I came across a line that put my feelings well: “One cannot feel more helpless than in a place and time when slander settles everything.”* So that’s how I felt during this book. Helpless.
HELP & HOPE
In 2012 it didn’t look like anyone was going to do anything about it. I deliberately ended this book then without much in the way of solutions—because I didn’t think there were any. Apparently I was not as creative or intelligent as the billionaire Peter Thiel (few are), who was at that point quietly funding a legal battle against Gawker. In 2007 the site had outed him as gay against his wishes, and after speaking to many other victims of Gawker’s publishing philosophy, he decided to put them out of business. The secret war culminated in a $100+ million verdict in 2016 that put Gawker Media into bankruptcy and eventually led to Gawker being shuttered (the sister sites were sold off). Their crime? They had published clips from an illegally recorded sex tape of Hulk Hogan. Despite repeated opportunities to remove it, to settle, and to apologize, the site refused. It was their undoing.
To think, the site whose editor once justified his unfair reporting to one of my clients as just “professional wrestling” was destroyed by a professional wrestler who refused to buy that excuse.
Journalists and First Amendment supporters decried the ruling, arguing that it would have a chilling effect. We should be so lucky! is what I say. Journalists should think twice before publishing a sex tape that arrives to their offices in an unmarked envelope. Journalists should do actual research before running stories (Gawker would have clearly seen that Hogan had said many times that the tape was recorded without his consent). The public does not have the right to know every single thing people do in their private bedrooms. There is such a thing as “the line” in civilized society.
We used to believe this. We didn’t always submit to the rule of an abusive media system, as though those who control it were in charge and not us or our laws. In other countries, libel and defamation laws require a “conspicuous retracti
on” by the publisher if the claim is proven. A lame update at the bottom of a blog wouldn’t cut it there and shouldn’t cut it anymore anywhere. Colonial newspapers at various points in British history were required to post a security bond in order to enter the publishing business. It was intended to secure payments in the event of a libel action and to ensure some responsibility by the press. It gave the public (and the state) some recourse against publishers who often had few assets to pay for the damage they could potentially inflict. In 1890 future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis published an article titled “The Right to Privacy” for the Harvard Law Review, which argued that the advent of photography and the proliferation of national and international newspapers required better legal protections for average citizens. It wasn’t fair, essentially, that technology allowed lies to damage reputations faster than the truth could fix them. So there is precedent for these types of protections—which blogs show us we desperately need once again. We have simply forgotten about them.
I think we’ve noticed since the Gawker ruling that there has been a kind of chilling effect on the media. Perhaps publishers have learned that actions have consequences—that freedom of speech is not necessarily freedom from responsibility. That there is a difference between aggressive reporting and recklessness and bullying. Hopefully this lawsuit, if only in a small way, has changed the incentives of the media system and proves that an individual can have an impact on how things work.
OTHER SOLUTIONS
I wish there was an easy solution to all of this. It would help me answer my critics and the defensive bloggers who will invariably whine: “Well, what are we supposed to do about it?” Or, “Okay, wise guy, tell us how to fix it.” Well, I don’t know the answer. My job was to prove that something was massively, massively wrong and to come clean about my role in it. To prove that we’ve all been feeding the monster. What exactly to do about it will be the work of those who come after me.
If I saw bright spots or green sprouts, I would have pointed them out. If there were solutions, I would give them to you. But currently I don’t see any. In fact, I object to using the word “solution” at all. To seek a solution implies and confirms that this problem needs to even exist. It takes for granted the bad assumptions at the root of blogs—assumptions that are deeply mistaken.
Take the frantic chase for pageviews, for example. This wrongly assumes that the traffic blogs generate is worth anything. It isn’t. Sites sell only a fraction of their inventory each month, essentially giving the rest away for fractions of a penny, yet they attempt to grow their traffic above all else. When I wrote the conclusion the first time, the trend was for sites to auto-refresh as a way to generate extra pageviews. More recently the trend has been something called “infinite scroll,” which has the same effect. Free pageviews! The advertisers who paid for those impressions were robbed, and the blogs that charged for them are no more than crooks.
Meanwhile, smaller sites that have built core audiences on trust and loyalty sell out their ad space months in advance. They have less total inventory, but they sell all of theirs at higher prices and are more profitable, sustainable businesses. Blogs scramble for a few thousand extra page views, and manipulate their readers to do so, because they value the wrong metrics and the wrong revenue stream. They follow short-term and short-sighted incentives.
But incentives can be changed, just as the New York Times showed in switching from the one-off to a subscription model under Adolph Ochs. In order to survive as a quality publication, the New York Times is redefining its economics once again. The recent implementation of their controversial paywall (which limited readers first to twenty free articles a month and then to ten before requiring them to pay for more access) is a lesson in great incentives. According to economist Tyler Cowen, it means that “the new NYT incentive is to have more than twenty must-read articles each month.”2 The Wall Street Journal and other publications have harder paywalls—and guess what? Subscriptions are increasing. How absurd that under the current model—the one that most publishers are sticking with and believe in—there is no imperative to produce these must-read articles, only must-clicks. The New York Times recently announced they once again make more total revenue from subscriptions than from advertising. A deep-pocketed donor just agreed to subsidize on $1 million worth of New York Times subscriptions for students. This is all very good news. Whether it will be replicated, or whether it can be, is another question. Would you pay for most of the crap that is created online? I wouldn’t.
As Ed Wallace, the Businessweek writer, reminds us: “The first job of the journalist is to ask, ‘Is this information true?’ ” Bloggers refuse to accept this mantle. Instead of getting us the truth, they focus on one thing, and one thing only: getting their publisher pageviews. I don’t care that finding the truth can be expensive, that iterative news is faster, or that it’s too hard not to play the pageview game. Find another business if you don’t like it. Because your profession’s true purpose is to serve the best interests of your readers—doing anything else is to misread your own long-term interests. Advertisers pay you to get to readers, so screwing the readers is a bad idea.
Readers hold equally exhausting assumptions of their own. The current system of delegated trust and deferred responsibility exists because readers have tacitly accepted the burden that blogs have abdicated. We’ve assumed it was our duty to sort through the muck and garbage to find the occasional gem, to do their fact-checking for them, to correct their mistakes and call ourselves contributors, when actually we’re cogs. We never asked the critical question: If we have to do all the work, what are we paying you guys for?
When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information? Most readers have abandoned even pretending to consider this. I imagine it’s because they’re afraid of the answer: There isn’t a thing we can do with it. There is no practical purpose in our lives for most of what blogs produce other than distraction. When readers decide to start demanding quality over quantity, the economics of internet content will change. Manipulation and marketing will immediately become more difficult. My decision to spend less time online is not a selfish one, though it did make my life better. It’s voting with my wallet. If more people do the same, it will have impact.
I also won’t deny that marketers—myself foremost among them—are part of the problem too. Nobody forced me to do what I did. I was a bad actor, and I created many of the loopholes I now criticize. Both I and my clients profited greatly from the manipulations I confessed here: Millions of books were sold, celebrity was created, and brands were reinvigorated and built. But we also paid very heavily for those gains with currency like dignity, respect, and trust. Deep down I suspect that the losses may not have been worth the cost. Marketers need to understand this. American Apparel is no longer in business. The strategies I talked about in this book were good for notoriety but ultimately mattered very little in the long term.
Don’t forget that! Especially the young people reading this book—the type I hear from who come up to me and say it inspired them to get into marketing. I’m flattered and horrified. I want to remind them that if you chase the kind of attention I chased, and use the tactics I have used, there will be blowback. Consider that seriously.
A NEW AWARENESS
We must rid ourselves of the false beliefs that caused so much of this. Publicity does not come easily, profits do not come easily, and knowledge does not come easily. The delusion that they could was what fed the monster most heartily. It is what propelled us past so many of the warning signs that this was simply not working.
You cannot have your news instantly and have it done well. You cannot have your news reduced to 140 characters or less without losing large parts of it. You cannot manipulate the news but not expect it to be manipulated against you. You cannot have your news for free; you can only obscure the costs. If, as a culture, we can learn this lesson, and if we can learn to love the hard work, we
will save ourselves much trouble and collateral damage. We must remember: There is no easy way.
To borrow from Budd Schulberg’s description of a media manipulator in his classic novel The Harder They Fall, too many of us, whether we’re in media or marketing or just sharing stories on our social accounts, are indulging “in the illusions that we can deal in filth without becoming the thing we touch.”
The current system cannot stand without these faulty assumptions. My contribution was to expose the problem, because once seen for all its contradictions and selfishness, it begins to fall apart. What is known can’t jerk us around unwittingly. Before anything can be resolved, the implicit must be made into the explicit.
This may seem simplistic. But I have repeatedly used the metaphor of a feedback loop or arms race in this book—a company hires an online hitman like me, and so their rival does too; a blog tricks their readers with an exaggerated story, and their next post must deceive their skeptical audience more boldly. Opting out of this cycle, choosing not to feed the monster, is not some thankless favor I am asking for. It has massive and immediate implications for the rest of the chain.
Every new invention brings new problems with it. This is true for every medium and every communication method in history. For instance, only in the last thousand years of Latin were spaces inserted between words—a direct result of the spreading of books and scrolls that drowned people in so much text that they couldn’t read. Blogs have created their own problems. We too are drowning in information that bleeds together into an endless blur. Someone has to stand up and say the emperor has no clothes—the words have no spaces between them, and goddamn it, that’s ridiculous—because only after the problem is identified and the new ideal articulated can creative solutions be found.
Part of writing this book was about a controlled burn of the plays and scams I had created and used along with the best of them. They have become constant dangers to me and the people I care about—to culture itself, in some ways. I not only want to render the tricks useless by exposing how they work, but I want to opt out of doing them myself. I want to force everyone else to opt out as well. Hopefully clearing this ominous pile of debris will make it easier to start fresh.