Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

by Ryan Holiday

  SNARK IS HOLLOW AND EMPTY

  Unsurprisingly, many bloggers defend snark. According to Adam Sternbergh in New York magazine, the standard criticism of snark is wrong, because snark is actually a good thing. “When no one—from politicians to pundits—says what he actually means,” he wrote, “irony becomes a logical self-inoculation. Similarly, snark, irony’s brat, flourishes in an age of doublespeak and idiocy that’s too rarely called out elsewhere. Snark is not a honk of blasé detachment; it’s a clarion call of frustrated outrage.”

  To call this “snark is actually good” interpretation generous would be an understatement. Of course the snarky are dissatisfied and disillusioned—who isn’t? The mistake is to assume blogs are crying for change or proposing a solution. There is no admirable “call of frustrated outrage”; it is just shouting for the sake of getting clicks and raising their profile. It’s a cheap way to write without thinking while still sounding clever. The contention is ridiculous, that the real reason bloggers make fun of everything is because they hope it will change things.

  Snark is intrinsically destructive. It breaks things; it does not build. No politician has ever responded to a joke about his inconsistent policy positions or demagoguery—and certainly not one about his weight or receding hairline—by saying, “You know what? They’re right! I’m going to be different now!”

  If snark was really about change, then bloggers would need to actually believe in what they were saying beneath the humor. It wouldn’t change from day to day—we would expect to find consistency in their criticisms, like we do with brilliant satirists like Jon Stewart. But we don’t.

  An example from my personal experience: After years of joking that Dov Charney was a rapist, a failed businessman, an idiot, a monster, a stock manipulator, and a million other things, Gawker nevertheless invited him and American Apparel to their first annual Fleshbot Awards to be given the honor of Sexiest Advertiser. Tucker Max, who Gawker had accused of equally defamatory things, was invited too. Why would they invite and reward the people they regularly mock so much? I think part of it is that Gawker believes we’re all so addicted to feeding the monster that we’ll endure any awkward indignity just to get a little more attention. Tucker told them to go fuck themselves, which made me proud.

  I did attend to accept the award on Dov’s behalf (purely for reconnaissance purposes). I was shocked to find out how smart and friendly in person the bloggers who had said these horrible things were. Then it hit me: They hadn’t meant anything they wrote. It had all been a game. If Dov hadn’t been a convenient target, they’d have just said the same stuff about someone else. Gawker even e-mailed me afterward to ask if we’d sponsor next year’s show, as if to say, “We’re happy to pick on someone else if you’ll be our friend.”

  WHAT’S THE POINT?

  The argument breaks down anyway, even if it wasn’t hypocritical. The proper response to fakeness is not to ineffectually lob rocks at palace windows but to coherently and ceaselessly articulate the problems with the dominant institutions. To stand for and not simply against. But bloggers of this generation, of my generation, are not those types of people. They are not leaders. They lack the strength and energy to do anything about “the age of doublespeak and idiocy.” All that is left is derision.

  Snark offers an outlet for their frustration. Instead of channeling their energy toward productive means, snark dissipates it by throwing itself against anything powerful or successful. If you are big enough to absorb the blows, they think, you deserve them.

  For the outsiders without access, snark is their only refuge. And bloggers are outsiders by choice. (Part of Deadspin’s tagline is actually, “Sports News without Access….”) They can only mock, scorn, lie, and disrupt. They cannot serve their readers, expose corruption, or support causes. Bloggers are disaffected and angry, and their medium enables it.

  As an astute college journalist at Columbia University, who saw through the faux bravery of blogging and the supposed boldness and social value in jabbing from the sidelines, observed:

  Snark is not the response of “the masses” to the inane doublespeak of politicians. It’s a defense mechanism for writers who, having nothing to say, are absolutely terrified of being criticized or derided. Snarky writing reflects a primal fear—the fear of being laughed at. Snarky writers don’t want to be mocked, so they strike first by mocking everyone in sight.1

  There is a reason that the weak are drawn to snark while the strong simply say what they mean. Snark makes the speaker feel a strength they know deep down they do not possess. It shields their insecurity and makes the writer feel like they are in control. Snark is the ideal intellectual position. It can criticize, but it cannot be criticized.

  Consider Nikki Finke again, who by all accounts is an incredibly vain and perpetually sensitive person. She demands studio heads pay her the proper respect (under the implied threat of bad coverage), and she’s filed numerous civil lawsuits for the most trivial of offenses (E*TRADE for $7.5 million for recording a phone call without the “This call may be recorded” warning; a car dealership over the terms of her extended warranty; the Hollywood Reporter for supposedly stealing her story ideas; and according to her rival and colleague Sharon Waxman, a hotel for giving her food poisoning). She rarely leaves her home and abstains from essentially all public appearances. She deliberately made sure that there is only one photo of her available online—and it’s very old. It is clear that Finke is a deeply insecure and miserable person.

  When we give her a podium, this is the baggage that comes along with it. And every so often it falls on an unsuspecting person or group like the pile of self-loathing and jealous bricks that it is. Could one of the producers of the “gayest Oscars ever” respond by saying that Finke’s attack clearly came from such a place? No, because then they would be “whiny,” “humorless,” or “old.” God forbid they make a typo in their reply—because then it is all over.

  In my experience, it doesn’t end with Nikki Finke. Sports bloggers are clearly jealous of the athletic abilities and fame of the professionals they cover; Pitchfork album reviews are a sad attempt by the writers to show how many big words they know; Gawker writers bitterly lament that some people get to be socialites and celebrities while they have to work for a living. None of this can be used as a response by people like me, of course—“Hey! This guy is a human too, he messes up, he’s a hypocrite!” “They’re just jealous” is too trite to work as an explanation (even when it’s true), and so the snark stands. To respond is merely to expose the jugular once more—to show that you’re human and vulnerable and easily rattled.

  This is why blogs love to call people douchebags*:

  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)

  Andrew Breitbart: Death of a Douche (Rolling Stone blog)

  To be called a douche is to be branded with all the characteristics of what society deigns 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 it. It is the ultimate insult, because it deprives the recipient of the credentials of being taken seriously.

  Roger Ebert calls snarking “cultural vandalism.” He’s right. Snark makes culture impossible, or rather, it makes the conditions that make culture possible impossible. Earnestness, honesty, vulnerability: These are the targets of snark. “Snark functions as a device to punish human spontaneity, eccentricity, nonconformity, and simple error. Everyone is being snarked into line,” he wrote. Yet even Ebert couldn’t resist the temptation to snark over the tragic death of Jackass star Ryan Dunn. On Twitter, which cries out for snide one-liners, Ebert wrote: “Friend
s don’t let jackasses drink and drive.” He apologized shortly afterward, but I doubt that make Dunn’s family or friends feel any better.

  His remark illustrates the cycle beautifully. For his snarky joke, Ebert was gleefully punished by the angry online horde, who rushed to hurt his feelings in return. (They ignored that Ebert was a recovering alcoholic and may have gotten carried away.) Hackers had his Facebook fan page temporarily deleted, and the second comment atop the apology he was essentially extorted to give still says, “Glad your Facebook page is gone!…just like your career.” And the snarker is snarked.

  As Scott Adams said later 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.” What Jezebel did with their fury and snark was eliminate the freedom of that process. They didn’t simply attack Adams by demanding that papers stop publishing his comics but pulled the ultimate grim trigger: They turned him into a laughingstock.

  If controversial ideas are the victims of snark, who benefits from it? Who doesn’t mind snark? 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. They need you to talk about them, to insult them, and to make fun of them 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.

  I once saw snark as an opportunity to advance narratives in the media cheaply. But I have been burned by it enough, seen enough of its victims’ shell-shocked faces, to know that it is not worth it.

  * Gawker held a user poll (see: pseudo-events) for the Douche of the Decade in 2010. It turned out that I had worked for or advised three of the ten finalists. Apparently I have a thing for douchebags and didn’t even know it.

  XXII

  THE 21ST-CENTURY DEGRADATION CEREMONY

  BLOGS AS MACHINES OF HATRED AND PUNISHMENT

  SOCIOLOGIST GERALD CROMER ONCE NOTED THAT the decline of public executions coincided almost exactly with the rise of the mass newspaper. Oscar Wilde said it better: “In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.”

  If only they knew what was coming next:

  Online lynch mobs. Attack blogs. Smear campaigns. Snark. Cyberbullying. Distributed denial of service attempts. Internet meltdowns. Anonymous tipsters. Blog wars. Trolls. Trial by comment section.

  It is clear to me that the online media cycle is not a process for developing truth but for performing a kind of cultural catharsis. Blogs, I understood from Wilde and Cromer, served the hidden function of dispensing public punishments. Think of the Salem witch trials: They weren’t court proceedings but ceremonies. In that light, the events three hundred years ago suddenly feel very real and current: Oh, they were doing with trumped-up evidence and the gallows what we do with speculation and sensationalism. Ours is just a more civilized way to tear someone to pieces.

  My experience with digital lynch mobs is unique. I get frantic calls from sensitive millionaires and billionaires who want me to fend one off. Occasionally they ask that I discreetly direct this mob toward one of their enemies. I am not afraid to say I have done both. I feel I can honestly look myself in the mirror and say the people I protected deserved my efforts—and so did the people I set my sights on. But it is a power I don’t relish using, because once I start, I don’t stop.

  Ask the blogger we went after during Tucker’s movie campaign. The ad I ran, which the blog MediaElites later called “one of the most despicable personal attacks” they’d ever seen, read in part: “Tucker Max Facts #47: Domestic violence is not funny. Unless Gawker editor Richard Blakeley gets arrested for it.”* The New York Post once caught wind of a campaign of mine against an enemy after my e-mail account was hacked. They were so appalled that they ran a full-page article about it in their Sunday addition: “Charney [really, me] Wages Bizarre Cyber Battle.” This article, along with the press I’d bagged to embarrass our target, hangs on my wall like a hunting trophy.

  THE DEGRADATION CEREMONY

  These acts of ritualized destruction are known by anthropologists as “degradation ceremonies.” Their purpose is to allow the public to single out and denounce one of its members. To lower their status or expel them from the group. To collectively take out our anger at them by stripping them of their dignity. It is a we-versus-you scenario with deep biological roots. By the end of it the disgraced person’s status is cemented as “not one of us.” Everything about them is torn down and rewritten.

  The burning passion behind such ceremonies, William Hazlitt wrote in his classic essay “On the Pleasure of Hating,” “carries us back to the feuds, the heart-burnings, the havoc, the dismay, the wrongs, and the revenge of a barbarous age and people.” You nudge blogs toward those dangerous instincts. They love the excitement of hunting and the rush of the kill without any of the danger. In the throes of such hatred, he writes, “the wild beast resumes its sway within us.”

  Ask controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange what it feels like to be the sacrificial victim. In less than a year he went from intriguing web hero to ominous pariah, from a revolutionary to a fool. Assange did not suddenly become an awful, evil, and flawed person overnight. He had not changed. But tempers had. Times had. So when a set of very suspect allegations of sexual misconduct came to light, it was the perfect opportunity for a little of that ol’ time ritualized destruction.

  Over a span of just two weeks, Gawker’s headlines on Assange went from cute—“What Happened to WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange’s Weird Hair?”—to cutthroat—“Are WikiLeaks Activists Finally Realizing Their Founder Is a Megalomaniac?” Shortly thereafter they launched WikileakiLeaks.org, a semiserious site that asked anonymous users to send in embarrassing information about Assange and the inner workings of the WikiLeaks organization. The only reason: “WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Accused then Immediately Un-Accused of Rape.” (Note: “Un-Accused.” Or don’t. Blogs sure didn’t.)

  Before Gawker decided to go the negative route with the Assange story, they tested another direction. Writing the day after the allegations surfaced: “Is WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange a Nerdy Sex God?” In other words, it wasn’t the allegations that suddenly marked a point of no return; they were just a convenient cover. Blogs needed an exciting new angle about someone they’d already covered a lot. In Gawker’s process you can see what happened writ large across popular culture—a brief consideration of the possible narratives before settling on one of complete destruction: Nothing personal, Julian, but you fit the bill.*

  I have no idea whether Assange is guilty or not. But neither do the people who decided to roast him alive for it. I do think there were plenty of reasons to have proceeded cautiously with the story. There’s a long history of government agencies using scandals to discredit enemies, and we do know that Assange had angered nearly every powerful government in the world (some government officials talked of assassination and/or trying him for treason). Having been behind one or two of these kinds of attacks myself, my instinct is to suspect that there may be someone like me out there working the mob. In fact, many blogs initially suspected the same thing. But that didn’t stop them once the ceremony started.

  Most important, almost all the “evidence” blogs used in interpretations of Assange’s character to convince themselves of his guilt was available and known before the charges came to light. What were labeled as quirks and endearing, rebellious qualities just weeks before suddenly became “creepy.” His celebrated need for secrecy was now “disingenuous” and “paranoid.” His noble mission for transparency was no longer about freedom but about his own “enormous ego.”
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  Again, Assange hadn’t changed. Someone had just reframed him. The role blogs needed him to play had shifted. So Assange became a different person, according to the coverage. He was turned into a caricature of himself. As a result, any redeeming value of his work was utterly irrelevant. That is, the very same work that supposedly made him worth talking about in the first place.

  At the risk of sounding like a public service announcement: This can happen to you too. After building Assange up, blogs destroyed him, not because he did anything wrong (although he very well may have; let me stress again that this has nothing to do with his guilt or innocence), but because his ascendancy made them feel angry and small, and now they had ammunition to act on those feelings. Assange learned what it feels like when anyone can leak heinous allegations that the media propagates before verifying. He got to experience personally what he had, through WikiLeaks, helped do to many others.

  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 wrongfully accused in a series of sensationalized (and later disproved) 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 endured during a personal scandal years earlier. Ironically, this was totally because blogs and newspapers were too focused on the lawsuit’s big-name celebrity drama to discuss the intended message.