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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ryan Holiday
Read between
February 23 - July 14, 2024
quote from the brilliant cultural critic George W. S. Trow, who was an early influence of this book: There’s nothing fun about being right if what you’re right about is the triumph, or the temporary triumph, of the inevitably bad.
The constraints of blogging create artificial content, which is made real and impacts the outcome of real world events.
The economics of the internet created a twisted set of incentives that make traffic more important—and more profitable—than the truth.
Early-twentieth-century media critics were some of the first to describe how false news was easily propagated through the media system. A local newspaper would run an inaccurate item. With the advent of the telegraph, these stories could be and often were republished over the next week in newspapers across the country. As Max Sherover wrote in 1914 of newspapers, “The stories they have forwarded are obviously composed in large part of wild romancing. They snap up the most improbable reports and enlarge upon them with every detail that their fancy can suggest.”
There are thousands of content creators scouring the web looking for things to write about. They must write several times each day. This is no easy task, so bloggers search Twitter, Facebook, comments sections, press releases, rival blogs, and other sources to develop their material. Where else are they going to get it? There’s no time for investigative reporting.
Remember: Every person in the media ecosystem (with the exception of a few at the top layer) is under immense pressure to produce content under the tightest of deadlines. Yes, you have something to sell. But more than ever they desperately, desperately need to buy. The flimsiest of excuses is all it takes.
Media was once about protecting a name; on the web it is about building one.
The most powerful predictor of what spreads online is anger.
The web has only one currency, and you can use any word you want for it—valence, extremes, arousal, powerfulness, excitement—but it adds up to false perception. Which is great if you’re a publisher but not if you’re someone who cares about the people in Detroit or you’re someone who wants to find common ground with their neighbors. What thrives online is not the writing that reflects anything close to the reality in which you and I live. Nor does it allow for the kind of change that will create the world we wish to live in.
Bloggers aren’t interested in building up consistent, loyal readerships, whether it’s via paid subscription or even e-mail, because what they really need are the types of stories that will do hundreds of thousands or millions of pageviews. They need stories that will sell.
There is this naive belief that readers have: If news is important, I’ll hear about it. I would argue the opposite—it’s mostly the least important news that will find you. It’s the extreme stuff that cuts through the noise. It’s the boring information, the secret stuff that people don’t want you to know, that you’ll miss.
As a marketer, getting something “controversial” to blow up is easy, and it’s the tactic a media manipulator prefers to use over doing something “important.” With limited resources and the constraints of a tight medium, there are only a handful of options: sensationalism, extremism, sex, scandal, hatred. The media manipulator knows that bloggers know that these things sell—so that’s what we sell them.
Sites employ full-time data analysts to ensure that the absolute worst is brought out in the audience.
For some blog empires, the content-creation process is now a pageview-centric checklist that asks writers to think of everything except “Is what I am making any good?”
I’m fond of a line by Nicolas Chamfort, a French writer, who believed that popular public opinion was the absolute worst kind of opinion. “One can be certain,” he said, “that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be idiocy because it has been able to appeal to the majority.” To a marketer, it’s just as well, because idiocy is easier to create than anything else.
Blogs must—economically and structurally—distort the news in order for the format to work. As businesses, blogs can see the world through no other lens. The format is the problem. Or the perfect opportunity, depending on how you look at it.
Bloggers latch onto the most tenuous wisps of news on places like Facebook or Twitter and then apply their “abnormal keenness” to seeing what is not there. A writer for the Mediabistro blog 10,000 Words once advised new bloggers that they could find good material by scanning community bulletin boards on craigslist for “what people are complaining about these days.”2 I’m not a sociologist, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t qualify as representative news. Considering that anyone can post anything on craigslist, this gives me a pretty good idea of how to create some fake local news.
When I say it’s okay for you to make stuff up because everybody else is doing it, I’m not kidding. M. G. Siegler, once one of the dominant voices in tech blogging (TechCrunch, PandoDaily), is very blunt about this. According to him, most of what he and his competitors wrote is bullshit. “I won’t try to put some arbitrary label on it, like 80%,” he once admitted, “but it’s a lot. There’s more bullshit than there is 100% pure, legitimate information.”
Newspapers and local media used to have the budget to send a reporter to local town hall meetings—now they don’t. They used to be able to pay to have an overseas bureau to get news where it was happening. Now they wait for the official report to come in. The AP, for instance, has actually started to outsource some of its reporting to India and in some cases to actual robots. When you read a short story about how the market went up three hundred points due to strong job numbers from the White House, it might be that a computer wrote that story, not a human being.
Everything you consume online has been “optimized” to make you dependent on it. Content is engineered to be clicked, glanced at, or found—like a trap designed to bait, distract, and capture you.
The more an article feels like it is true, the more skeptical you should be about it. If you haven’t heard of the website before, it’s probably because it’s not legitimate. Be discerning. Be cynical. Don’t let “close enough” be your standard for truth and opinion. Insist on accuracy and on getting it right.
Of course they want to send updates to your phone and include you on e-mail alerts. No one is listening to you—they’re laughing at you. They’re glad you’re distracted. They’re happy you’re posting on social media, because it means you’re not showing up at city council meetings, because it means you’re not voting. It’s time that both sides face up to the incredible manipulation that’s happening to both parties (by that I mean people, not political parties). Twitter isn’t designed to help you get in and get out with the best information as quickly as possible—it’s supposed to suck you into
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It’s time we all came to terms with our compulsion: How is anyone going to make America or themselves great again, if we’re all glued to our devices and television screens? How can anyone maintain their sanity when everything you read, see, and hear is designed to make you stop whatever you’re doing and consume because the world is supposedly ending?
Apparently we live in a world where at even the highest and most sensitive level information is passed on without being vetted, where the final judgment of truth or falsity does not fall on the outlet reporting it or the person spreading it but on the readers themselves.
Nearly everyone involved in media and politics is shirking their duty—and that makes them ripe for exploitation (or in the case of American Apparel and CNN, a missile that can strike your company at any time). And yet most of the social media elite want this for our future.
as Gawker’s former “media reporter” said: “Gawker believes that publicly airing rumors out is usually the quickest way to get to the truth. . . . Let’s acknowledge that we can’t vouch for the veracity or truth of the rumors we’ll be sharing here—but maybe you can.”
Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, put it more bluntly: “Getting it right is expensive, getting it first is cheap.”* And by extension, since it doesn’t cost him anything to be wrong, he presumably doesn’t bother trying to avoid it. It’s not just less costly; it makes more money, because every time a blog has to correct itself, it gets another post out of it—more pageviews.
Bloggers don’t fabricate news, but they do suspend their disbelief, common sense, and responsibility in order to get to big stories first. The pressure to “get something up” is inherently at odds with the desire to “get things right.”
The link economy encourages bloggers to repeat what “other people are saying” and link to it instead of doing their own reporting and standing behind it. This changes the news from what has happened into what someone said the news is. Needless to say, these are not close to the same thing.
It’s a real golden age for journalists when they not only get traffic by posting jaw-dropping rumors, but then also get traffic the next day by shooting down the same rumors they created.
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!
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
the media is in some ways inherently a mechanism for systematically limiting what the public sees.
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.
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.
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 public 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
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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 “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 “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.
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.
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.
