by Ryan Holiday
What is the result of millions of blogs fighting to be heard over millions of other blogs—each hoping for a share of an increasingly shrinking attention span? What happens when people figure out that Reddit or Twitter can be used to get CNN to cover you? What happens when the incentives ripple through every part of the media system? What happens when the “truth” no longer really matters—not to readers or reporters?
These results are unreality. A netherworld between the fake and the real where each builds on the other and they cannot be told apart. This is what happens when the dominant cultural medium—the medium that feeds our other mediums—is so easily corrupted by people like me.
When the news is decided not by what is important but by what readers are clicking; when the cycle is so fast that the news cannot be anything else but consistently and regularly incomplete; when dubious scandals pressure politicians to resign and scuttle election bids or knock millions from the market caps of publicly traded companies; when the news frequently covers itself in stories about “how the story unfolded”—unreality is the only word for it. It is, as Daniel Boorstin, author of 1962’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, put it, a “thicket . . . which stands between us and the facts of life.”
A SLOW CREEP
Let’s start with a basic principle: Only the unexpected makes the news. This insight comes from Robert E. Park, the first sociologist to ever study newspapers. “For the news is always finally,” he wrote, “what Charles A. Dana described it to be, ‘something that will make people talk.’ ” Nick Denton told his writers the same thing nearly one hundred years later: “The job of journalism is to provide surprise.”* News is only news if it departs from the routine of daily life.
But what if most of what happens is expected? Most things do not depart from the routine. Most things are not worth talking about. But the news must be. And so the normal parts of life are omitted from the news by virtue of being normal. I don’t mean to say that the constant search for newness or the unexpected is what distorts the news. That would be unfair, because almost everything blogs do distorts the news. But this one basic need—fundamental to the very business of blogging—inherently puts our newsmakers at odds with reality. It can only show us a version of reality that serves their needs.
What’s known as news is not a summary of everything that has happened recently. It’s not even a summary of the most important things that have happened recently. The news, whether it’s found online or in print, is just the content that successfully navigated the media’s filters. Possibly with my help. Since the news informs our understanding of what is occurring around us, these filters create a constructed reality.
Picture a funnel. At the top we have everything that happens, then everything that happens that comes to be known by the media, then everything that is considered newsworthy, then what they ultimately decide to publish, and finally what spreads and is seen by the public.
The news funnel:
ALL THAT
HAPPENS
ALL THAT’S KNOWN BY THE MEDIA
ALL THAT IS NEWSWORTHY
ALL THAT IS PUBLISHED AS NEWS
ALL THAT SPREADS
In other words, the media is in some ways inherently a mechanism for systematically limiting what the public sees.
But we seem to think that the news is informing us! The internet is what technologists call an “experience technology.” The more it is used, the more trust users have in it. The longer a user engages with it, the more comfortable they get and the more they believe in the world it creates.
As we become immersed in blogs, our trust in the information we get from them increases. I saw an example of this very clearly in my own education: I watched “internet sources” go from strictly forbidden in school research to the status quo, and the citing of Wikipedia articles in papers from unacceptable to “okay, but only for really general background information.” Internet culture has done one thing with this trust: utterly abused it.
EMBRACING THE FAKE
In April 2011, Business Insider editor Henry Blodget put out an advisory to the PR world. He was drowning in elaborate story pitches and information about new services. He just couldn’t read them all, let alone write about them. So he proposed a solution: The publicists could write about the product launches of their own clients, and Blodget’s site would edit and publish them. “In short,” he concluded, “please stop sending us e-mails with story ideas and just contribute directly to Business Insider. You’ll get a lot more ink for yourself and your clients and you’ll save yourself a lot of wasted work” [emphasis mine].1 His post was seen more than ten thousand times, and each and every view, I can only assume, was followed by a marketer cumming all over their pants.
In Blodget’s overzealous drive to create traffic for his site, he didn’t mind misinforming. He didn’t care who wrote it, so long as it got page views. He was willing to let PR and marketing professionals and people like me write material about their own clients—which he would then pass off as real news and commentary to his readers.
He was early to this trend but hardly the only one to follow it. Today, with almost every major media outlet opening their platform up to self-interested contributors, when all the protections against conflicts of interest or even basic factual inaccuracies have disappeared, the vast majority of the information we find in the media is biased or manipulated. Worse, every major television channel seems to think that campaign surrogates—that is, naked shills for certain politicians—deserve airtime as a means of being balanced. It’s surreal and scary to watch real spin be created in real time, to watch what are supposed to be objective news outlets paying campaign operatives to come up with lies on behalf of candidates right in front of you. And part of the reason they allow this? The outraged response online from partisan websites is good for traffic and branding. The reason CNN lets Scottie Nell Hughes say dumb things is because those dumb things get lots of attention. It’s the same reason they let men and women embarrass themselves on reality television. But at least nobody thinks reality TV is news. We know that it is trash.
FROM THE FAKE, THE REAL
The process is simple: Create a pseudo-event, trade it up the chain, elicit real responses and action, and you have altered reality itself. I may understand the consequences of it now, but that doesn’t stop a part of me, even as I write this, from seeing this thirst as an opportunity to insert messages into the discussion online. You can’t count on people to restrain themselves from taking advantage of an absurd system—not with millions of dollars at stake. Not when the last line of defense—the fourth estate, known as the media—is involved in the cash grab too.
From here we get the defining feature of our world today: a blurred line between what is real and what is fake; what actually happens and what is staged; and, finally, between the important and the trivial.* There is no doubt in my mind that blogs and blogging culture were responsible for this final break. When blogs can openly proclaim that getting it first is better than getting it right; when a deliberately edited (fake) video can reach, and within hours require action by, the president of the United States; when the perception of a major city can be shaped by what photographs spread best in an online slideshow; and when someone like me can generate actual outrage over advertisements that don’t actually exist—the unreal becomes impossible to separate from the real.
“The news media is a giant mind, a giant, unquiet, overstimulated mind that won’t let itself rest—and won’t let the rest of us rest,” is how Gavin de Becker put it in Fear Less. That’s the problem. If fake news simply deceived, or if the glut of information only harmlessly distracted, that would be one thing. The problem with unreality and pseudo-events is not simply that they are unreal; it is that they don’t stay unreal. While they may themselves exist in some netherworld between real and fake, the domain in which they are consumed and acted on is undoubtedly real. In being reported, these counterfeit events are laundered and passed to the pu
blic as clean bills—to buy real things. The anxiety of the media becomes the anxiety of the world, and it becomes the weakness by which the powerful are able to control and direct us.
The news might be fake, but the decisions we make from it are not. As Walter Lippmann wrote, the news constitutes a sort of pseudo-environment, but our responses to that environment are not pseudo but actual behavior. In 1922, Lippmann warned us “about the worldwide spectacle of men”—government officials, bankers, executives, artists, ordinary people, and even other reporters—“acting upon their environment moved by stimuli from their pseudo-environment.”
That world is exactly what we have now. It’s a world where, in 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney leaked bogus information to an attention-hungry reporter for the New York Times, and then mentioned his own leak on Meet the Press to help convince us to invade Iraq.2 “There’s a story in the New York Times this morning, and I want to attribute the Times,” Cheney said, citing himself, using something he had planted in the press as proof that untrue information was now “public” and accepted fact. He used his own pseudo-event to create pseudo-news. It’s a world where Trump becomes president by getting the media to repeat his dystopian paranoia and negativity enough times that people start to really believe that things are terrible—they substitute objective reality for the narrative they hear online and on TV.
I used unreality to get free publicity. Cheney used his media manipulations to drive the public toward war. Trump used it to stir tensions with our neighbors and to slander entire races and regions. And no one was able to stop it. By the time they did the facts had been established, the fake made real by media chatter, and real wars had been waged. From the pseudo-environment came actual behavior.
Welcome to unreality, my friends. It’s fucking scary.
*Remember Bennett as well, trying “not to instruct, but to startle.”
*An actual TechCrunch headline: RUMORS OF APPLE RUMORS NOW LEADING TO RUMORS OF COUNTER-RUMORS.
XXI
HOW TO REA D A BLOG
AN UPDATE ON ACCOUNT OF ALL THE LIES
Truth is like a lizard; it leaves its tail in your fingers and runs away knowing full well that it will grow a new one in a twinkling.
—IVAN TURGENEV TO LEO TOLSTOY
WHEN YOU SEE A BLOG BEGIN WITH “ACCORDING to a tipster . . . ,” know that the tipster was someone like me tricking the blogger into writing what I wanted.
When you see “We’re hearing reports,” know that “reports” could mean anything from random mentions on Twitter to message-board posts, or worse.
When you see “leaked” or “official documents,” know that really means someone just e-mailed a blogger, and that the documents are almost certainly not official and are probably fake or fabricated for the purpose of making desired information public.
When you see “breaking” or “We’ll have more details as the story develops,” know that what you’re reading reached you too soon. There was no wait-and-see, no attempt at confirmation, no internal debate over whether the importance of the story necessitated abandoning caution. The protocol is going to press early, publishing before the basic facts are confirmed, and not caring whether it causes problems for people.
When you see “Updated” on a story or article, know that no one actually bothered to rework the story in light of the new facts—they just copied and pasted some shit at the bottom of the article.
When you see “Sources tell us . . . ,” know that these sources are not vetted, they are rarely corroborated, and they are desperate for attention.
When you see someone call themselves a “bestselling author,” know that they probably mean their self-published book was number one in a tiny category on Amazon for five minutes, and the same goes for every “top-ranked” podcast and “award-winning” website.
When you see a story tagged “EXCLUSIVE,” know that it means the blog and the source worked out an arrangement that included favorable coverage. Know that in many cases the source gave this exclusive to multiple sites at the same time or that the site is just taking ownership of a story they stole from a lesser-known site.
When you see “said in a press release,” know that it probably wasn’t even actually a release the company paid to officially put out over the wire. They just spammed a bunch of blogs and journalists via e-mail.
When you see “According to a report by,” know that the writer summarizing this report from another outlet has but the most basic ability in reading comprehension, little time to spend doing it, and every incentive to simplify and exaggerate.
When you see “We’ve reached out to so-and-so for comment,” know that the blogger sent an e-mail two minutes before hitting “publish” at 4:00 a.m., long after they’d written the story and closed their mind, making absolutely no effort to get to the truth before passing it off to you as the news.
When you see an attributed quote or a “said so-and-so,” know that the blogger didn’t actually talk to that person but probably just stole the quote from somewhere else, and per the rules of the link economy, they can claim it as their own so long as there is a tiny link to the original buried in the post somewhere.
When you see “which means” or “meaning that” or “will result in” or any other kind of interpretation or analysis, know that the blogger who did it likely has absolutely zero training or expertise in the field they are opining about. Nor did they have the time or motivation to learn. Nor do they mind being wildly, wildly off the mark, because there aren’t any consequences.
When you hear a friend say in conversation “I was reading that . . . ,” know that today the sad fact is that they probably just glanced at something on a blog.
RELYING ON ABANDONED SHELLS
The process for finding, creating, and consuming information has fundamentally changed with the advent of the web and the rise of blogging. However, the standards for what constitutes news are different, the vigor with which such information is vetted is different, the tone with which this news is conveyed is different, and the longevity of its value is different. Yet, almost without exception, the words we use to describe the news and the importance readers place on them remain the same.
In a world of no context and no standard, the connotations of the past retain their power, even if those things are fractions of what they once were. Blogs, to paraphrase Kierkegaard, left everything standing but cunningly emptied them of significance.
Words like “developing,” “exclusive,” and “sources” are incongruent with our long-held assumptions about what they mean or what’s behind them. Bloggers use these “substance words” (like Wikipedia’s weasel words) to give status to their flimsy stories. They use the language of Woodward and Bernstein but apply it to a media world that would make even Hearst queasy. They give us what George W. S. Trow called “abandoned shells.”
Why does this matter? We’ve been taught to believe what we read. That where there is smoke there must be fire, and that if someone takes the time to write down and publish something, they believe in what they are saying. The wisdom behind those beliefs is no longer true, yet the public marches on, armed with rules of thumb that make them targets for manipulation rather than protection.
I have taken advantage of that naïveté. And I’m not even the worst of the bunch. I’m no different from everyone else; I too am constantly tricked—by bloggers, by publishers, by politicians, and by marketers. I’m even tricked by my own monstrous creations.
THE AGE OF NO AUTHORITIES
And so fictions pass as realities. Everyone is selling and conning, and we hardly even know it. Our emotions are being triggered by simulations—unintentional or deliberate misrepresentations—of cues we’ve been taught were important. We read some story and it feels important, believing that the news is real and the principles of reporting took place, but it’s not.
Picture a movie poster for an independent film that wants to be received as artistic and deep. It probably features the laurel leaves i
con—for awards like “Best Picture,” “Critics’ Choice,” or “Official Selection.” These markers originally symbolized a handful of important film festivals. Then it became important for every city, even neighborhoods inside cities, to have their own film festival. There are also the significant differences in the “winners” and the few dozen or even hundreds of “selections.” The use of the festival laurels is to conjure up the implicit value associated with scarcity for the viewer despite the enormous gap between the connotation and the reality.
The laurel leaf illusion is a metaphor for the web. It underpins everything from the link economy—a link looks like a citation, yet it is not—to headlines that bait our clicks. It’s why trading up the chain works and it’s the reason why you could get your name in the press tomorrow through HARO.
What these people are trying to do is to find some, any, stamp of approval or signal of credibility. Blogs have a few minutes to write their posts, few resources, and little support, but because of the One-Off Problem they need to be heard over thousands of other sites. They desperately need something that says, “This is not like those other things,” even though it is. So they make up differentiators and misuse old ones.
“In the age of no-authority,” wrote Trow, “these are the authorities.” We live in a media world that desperately needs context and authority but can’t find any because we destroyed the old markers and haven’t created reliable new ones. As a result, we couch new things in old terms that are really just husks of what they once were. Skepticism will never be enough to combat this. Not even enough to be a starting point.
