Silicon States

by Lucie Greene

  In almost every aspect of society, we are comfortable with regional regulation. We accept that some drugs are not permitted in the UK. Some food ingredients are more regulated or taxed in one country than another. But the internet is “borderless,” aligned with the air and the ocean. And therefore should not be constrained.

  Gawker founder Nick Denton believes Silicon Valley won’t always be so celebrated. “I actually think it has a high volatility,” he says. “When Silicon Valley’s on the up, the coverage is breathless and reverential, and when Silicon Valley falls on its face . . . Remember the press coverage after 2000 [the bursting of the tech startup bubble]—it was not generous. There were tech heroes like Carly Fiorina or Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos; women seem to get this more than men, being built up and being knocked down later. It corrects itself rather violently, so the whole process is unhelpful. These people should not have been elevated to the extent that they were, nor are they such terrible human beings that they deserve the humiliation that is visited upon them if they disappoint.” (This was evident in the media coverage of Zuckerberg’s 2018 Congress appearance.)

  Matthew Belloni, executive editor of the Hollywood Reporter, gave a talk at TEDxHollywood about the shifting notions of power, influence, and damages in the digital media realm with the rise of Silicon Valley media giants. To an audience of techies, local execs, and me, he pointed to the mistrust of media in our current climate. “At the same time, people are consuming media like they never have before, they’re just consuming it in different ways,” he explained. “Everything under the sun is media and we’re looking to it more than we ever have before.”

  Belloni talked about a new paradigm, pointing to the instance of country singer Blake Shelton suing In Touch Weekly for defamation when it ran a cover falsely claiming he was going to rehab. “What’s interesting to me is that defamation law is premised on the need for a mechanism for individuals to stand up to the ‘powerful media.’ Because for many, many years there has been a powerful media and people had little recourse to respond to that. These days, I would argue that’s not the case. Blake Shelton has 17.9 million Twitter followers, most of whom he has been informing repeatedly that this is not true. In Touch Weekly has 194,000 Twitter followers. In print, In Touch Weekly has a circulation of less than 400,000. So Blake Shelton’s message, denying what this outlet is saying, is reaching an audience probably fifteen to twenty times as big. Question: where are the damages?”

  To Belloni, notions of power are being completely upturned in this space. “For all that is made about the ubiquity of social media and power of the digital media environment, individuals have much more power now than they did pre–social media. Anyone’s message can, on their Facebook or Twitter or Medium or anywhere else, become as powerful as anything said in The New York Times. Should the laws reflect that?” In a world where the lines between what is journalism, what is marketing, and what is privacy are so distorted, do we need to find new ways to define right, wrong, and fair? Because it’s increasingly nuanced and complex. Or blurred altogether.

  There’s no doubt that the “power” of traditional media, like that of the government, is being eroded by Silicon Valley and its economic headwinds. Yet, its critics continue to lampoon media and entertainment brands, reasoning not only unfair treatment but their brainwashing influence. Donald Trump has often tweeted against Saturday Night Live’s satirical depiction of him—in particular by Alec Baldwin—while also claiming an unfair landscape. SNL has around ten million live viewers, Trump has 18.3 million Twitter followers (dependent on how many fake followers he does or doesn’t have). Trump is also shutting down critical journalists in news conferences and has held only one press conference after over a year in office. (Though again, as with The New York Times’s increased readership, Trump’s public criticism of SNL seems to have prompted a ratings high for the show.)

  Belloni also discussed Hulk Hogan’s infamous trial against Gawker Media. Hogan was funded by Peter Thiel and won thanks to those limitless legal resources for a case that might normally have had a very different outcome (more on this later). When a billionaire tech icon like Thiel can affect the course of justice by funding a lawsuit to shut down a media brand, where’s the power? Not with the media. Increasingly so.

  The current state of publishing and media is reflected in the wide gamut of websites which run from pop-up-dominated sites where unwanted images, videos, and slogans appear like a rash you can’t get rid of; or worse, that still the page and movement, from the Guardian to Wikipedia, which has gone for a schoolmarmish approach—“If you use it, if you like it, then why not pay for it? It’s only fair. Make a contribution”—right through to the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal which have instant paywalls. More recently the Guardian has taken this begging further: “Unlike many news organizations, we haven’t put up a paywall—we want to keep journalism as open as we can. The Guardian’s independent investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But the revenue we get from advertising is falling, so we increasingly need our readers to fund us. If everyone who loves our reporting, who likes it, helps fund it, our future would be much more secure. Support the Guardian for as little as £1.” Between the constant headlines about layoffs, not to mention seeing millimeter-thick magazines in CVS, it paints a sad tale.

  Events, summits, and conferences have become a cash cow for media organizations. Editors are wheeled out. Stale coffee, stale pastries, and stale wine served for a few hundred dollars a ticket. Or, in the era of rising ad blocking, many have set up creative branded content “shops” which offer brand advertorials that look and feel like editorial but come priced like ads. For example, The New York Times has created T Brand Studios, a branded-content suite that puts branded video documentary content and features alongside traditional content. It’s labeled accordingly, but subtly, and the lines are increasingly blurred. Now movies, feature journalism, and podcasts are all being offered in branded form to clients, sitting alongside regular editorial content, as a new revenue stream. Branded “experiential” content has become the latest avenue, seeking to appeal to experience-loving millennials. Media companies such as Refinery29 have started creating ticketed immersive experiences, which combine genuine installations by artists with brand “activations” for companies from Dyson hairdryers (standing in a room of blowing hair devices) to Casper mattresses (jumping on a pile of pillows) to Juicy Couture (standing in a full-size snowglobe). All are mandatorily selfie and Instagram designed.

  All this, even before the automation of journalism en masse begins in earnest—in other words, algorithms generating the news stories. This has already been occurring in basic sports reporting. Increasingly, says Richard Hill, a Geneva-based technology consultant, there’s “not even a human being involved. There’s no value added and that’s very dangerous because it’s eliminating, basically, investigative journalism. A lot of automated feeds are produced off of the official information that you get from the government or the company.

  “There’s no more revenue models for the traditional press because the only way you get money is from advertising and online media, but all the advertising is controlled by Google,” says Hill. “I see my local newspaper, which has a nice website, they have advertising and they’re trying to get money out of that, but you know it’s pathetic in the print edition, the number of advertising pages has just dropped.”

  Denton and many others believe that part of the reason for its shifting fortunes is media’s own lack of diversity. It’s lost touch with the audience. “Everywhere the media has been looked at as being a national institution, the fourth estate, some mechanism for the dissemination of news and the arbitration of differences. That role has now been lost or superseded,” says Denton. “The media is seen by a very large number of people as being not one media, but general liberal media, which is part of, not even the whole of, the elite, progressive viewpoint—an urban, cosmopolitan, internationalist min
dset that is probably shared by 5 percent or 10 percent of the population.”

  The lack of diversity in the media could be viewed as having less to do with self-selecting white privilege and nepotism than with its dwindling position. In many instances, only independently wealthy people can afford to be in journalism anymore. The average salary of a reporter is $43,640. Many millennial twenty-somethings trying to make it in media are having their rents supplemented by their parents. According to a 2016 study by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, as many as 53 percent of American twenty-somethings in creative careers receive financial help from parents.

  Even obtaining a job in journalism, as with TV and many of the creative arts, requires being able to work for free as an intern, ad nauseam (and be cheery about it), live in an urban center, and then work for low wages. It is true that certain segments of the media, especially book and magazine publishing, are overly peopled by the white, liberal elite. But that’s also true of Silicon Valley, the de facto new media curating our stories.

  And this new media is about as elite, white, and privileged as you can get.

  The Valley Wag

  Nick Denton arrives at Sant Ambroeus, a little Italian place with red leather banquettes and wood paneling in the Nolita neighborhood of New York City. It’s just days after the presidential election in 2016; the timing is fortuitous for me, given tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s connection to President Trump and support of his ascent to power. And it’s not that much farther—a few months—from the infamous lawsuit that saw Gawker shuttered, and Denton personally bankrupted. Denton walks in as I order coffee.

  Denton, a Brit, is an Oxford graduate. In 2002 he founded Gizmodo, a site that covers consumer technology. He created Gawker the same year and eventually Gawker Media housed a group of popular websites, including pop-feminist Jezebel, sports-centered Deadspin, and auto site Jalopnik. His early career was spent reporting on Silicon Valley for the Financial Times, where he grew frustrated by the overly fawning coverage of tech entrepreneurs. Denton also founded Valleywag, a blog owned by Gawker Media and edited by Denton for a time, which was, in its day, the Page Six of Silicon Valley, chronicling tech founders, companies, and venture capitalists. It famously exposed that Google founder Larry Page and then high-ranking Google employee Marissa Mayer had dated in the late 2000s, and that Eric Schmidt was in an open marriage. Denton broke such stories as Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff’s attempt to detain a Wall Street Journal reporter, claiming that reporters were sitting on this story. Some of its more antagonistic headlines chastised Peter Thiel, among other tech luminaries. Of all people, Denton has a unique vantage point on Silicon Valley’s relationship with media and in particular on Peter Thiel’s relationship to media.

  Peter Thiel and Donald Trump are aligned in their distaste for the traditional media, and both use platforms to express their opinions. Thiel achieved revenge against Denton’s Gawker Media by funding the Hulk Hogan lawsuit against the company. This, Thiel revealed, was in retaliation for his being outed as gay by the publication several years before. Gawker Media was forcibly sold after the judge awarded Hogan $140 million in damages. Denton declared personal bankruptcy.

  But Denton’s connections to Silicon Valley go wider than the Hulk Hogan case. As founder of Gawker and editor of Valleywag 2006–2007, he was privy to the resurgence of Silicon Valley, its characters and companies, after the dot-com bubble to the birth of what it is now. He continues to watch tech closely.

  Denton sips his coffee. He is remarkably sanguine, even disconnected in his comments, given the circumstances. He seems to have intellectualized the whole Hogan lawsuit as a parable, almost. (Ironically, in 2018, Thiel made overtures to buy what was left of Gawker, a move that could either amuse or enrage Denton.)

  Denton believes the filter bubble and echo chamber goes wider than we as consumers really understand. It’s not just about our newsfeed, he thinks, it’s about all the information we receive online. “If you think about the news business, the incentives for news organizations and writers are determined by the Facebook algorithm. They give us little hints of how it works now and again, but really, not that much more,” he explains. “You have more and more of our daily lives, and more and more of our professions and economic activities, governed by terms and conditions, and the algorithms of these platforms.”

  Look closer, and tech companies’ relationship with media criticism has always been thin-skinned, certainly in comparison to industries such as the financial sector that are frequently critiqued in broadsheets or tabloids.

  “That’s why Valleywag existed,” Denton says of his now-defunct website. “It’s a one-industry town, Silicon Valley, and it’s a relatively new industry. It’s not like New York and to a lesser extent Los Angeles, where there is a relatively full ecosystem of media, with magazines that do puff profiles and nice photographs of celebrities and ask softball questions, and plenty of journalists that give good reviews to movies in exchange for invites to parties and screenings and stuff like that. There’s also a gossipy press, a radical press, and to a greater or lesser degree there are other voices. In Silicon Valley they could never really hack it.”

  Many Silicon Valley companies, with effectively gated-community campuses, use access as the primary carrot for control. In attempting to secure interviews and access for this book, presumably because it was a) not entirely about one tech brand (and would not celebrate it), and b) obviously going to be somewhat critical, and c) because the volume of requests they receive is overwhelming, I was flat-out rejected by the cornerstone companies. Or ignored. I was also an unknown quantity, outside what would likely be their usual roster of known tech journalists.

  Denton’s access, even back then, was similarly constrained: “Certainly if you’re a journalist in Silicon Valley and you criticize, you’re likely to lose access, and Silicon Valley is run by twenty people; ten venture capitalists and ten others who are prominent in the big five tech companies,” says Denton. “There isn’t a huge amount of alternate access. They keep strong, powerful control of their employees; NDAs and confidentiality agreements all over the place. There was a brief moment of freedom when the internet came along and this was a tech-savvy group of employees who would leak. And I think the companies have put a lid on that to a large extent.”

  Even outside of the Hogan case, there were always consequences if you ran against Silicon Valley egos. “We had consequences back then. We were never banned from Facebook, but we were barred from Apple events just after our iPhone 4 story that was probably one of the biggest,” he explains. “That was back in 2010.” (Gizmodo acquired a prototype iPhone 4 and revealed details ahead of the official launch.)

  Press interviews for products are now pre-planned and carefully orchestrated. Op-eds are placed in prestigious newspapers, sidestepping the questions of an interviewer.

  Denton points out that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos stands apart from the rest of this crowd. “In the media, he is regarded the most favorably because he supports The Washington Post, allows them to do independent journalism, and has criticized people like Peter Thiel for being overly sensitive. He seems like a new tycoon that the existing media establishment can be OK with.”

  Silicon Valley’s unwillingness to engage in meaningful critical dialogue could be seen as unwise, but Denton thinks it is actually key to its continued success. “How can anyone say it’s unwise, when the five most valuable tech companies in America all adhere to some version of this policy?”

  But these are isolationist policies that disconnect the companies from objective feedback, criticism, and debate. These brands are all about remaining popular and relevant to consumers. Silicon Valley’s tone-deafness and lack of empathy is well storied, and has led to massive PR gaffs. Letting a critical voice in, and being genuinely open to it, might make them look more human.

  Truth and Narrative

  To Silicon Valley the media is simply a tool for amplifying the mes
sage about their companies and the narrative of wonder attached to what they do. This stems, in part, from the abstractness of technology—they need it explained and deified by the press. Without the story, they’re nothing. But they also want to control the story.

  These are information businesses, after all. They’re conceptual businesses, they’re not steel mills. Lots of things hinge on their narrative. “Oftentimes people don’t understand the product, so how the story is told is completely critical to hiring employees, to getting the right number of investors, to getting customers to sign up,” says Denton. “Everything depends on it, even more than it does in the analog world. If there’s any disruption in that story, a leak, a critical voice internally, it can be very disruptive.” As a result, Silicon Valley cares more about maintaining a pristine image than most companies—oil or gas we buy as essential commodities without need for consistent consumer buy-in.

  The media has become a powerful promulgator of the narratives employed by Silicon Valley. It’s also been used to imbue them with emotions that foster attachment from consumers and places them in a moral framework. These companies foster the image that they are not just platforms. They are sentient, moral beings that do amazing things.

  But creating this image has complicated results, especially when it comes to tensions arising from their role as stakeholders in news, and as the new guardians of media. By rendering these companies moral, human, and superior, we’re attaching a moral framework to what they do, rather than a business framework. We are more connected and loyal to them for this reason (which is good for them), but then we also feel more betrayed when they behave like corporations or act cynically. It’s a double-edged sword. This does vary within the group. Consider Amazon as opposed to Facebook. Amazon has never oversold itself as a moral being, or anything other than an incredibly good retailer. We’re not shocked that it uses robots and is ruthless as a business operator. It’s so efficient, and seamless, and despite all the headlines about its treatment of factory workers and its undermining of local businesses, it’s everyone’s not-so-guilty pleasure. Facebook has told us for years that it is solving world problems and connecting the world. As such, we feel much more affronted, and violated, when negative stories come out about it.