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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ryan Holiday
Read between
August 26 - October 1, 2019
low-cost, click-heavy content that advertisers love. Like
process
bloggers know to default to what will spread and please the advertisers.
It’s a second nature known well by YouTubers, LOL makers, podcasters, bloggers, and tweeters.
In the world of the web, why should not paying attention preclude you from getting your say?
“narcotizing dysfunction,” when people come to mistake the busyness of the media with real knowledge, and confuse spending time consuming that with doing something.
The interested and informed citizen can congratulate himself on his lofty state of interest and information and neglect to see that he has abstained from decision and action. In short, he takes his secondary contact with the world of political reality, his reading and listening and thinking, as a vicarious performance…. He is concerned. He is informed. And he has all sorts of ideas as to what should be done. But, after he has gotten through his dinner and after he has listened to his favored radio programs and after he has read his second newspaper of the day, it is really time for bed. 5
This is the exact reaction that web content is designed to produce.
“Talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness,” Kierkegaard once said. Now you know why sharing, commenting, clicking, and participating are pushed so strongly by blogs and entertainment sites.
If the users stops for even a second, they may see what is really going on. And then the
business model would fall apart.
I knew this was an attempt to pretend there were two sides to the issue. But there weren’t two sides; there was simply the truth and an untruth.
A dubious accusation on a gossip blog nearly became a frighteningly nongossip story from the “most trusted name in news.”
Henry Blodget,
Both the blogs and the mainstream media are shirking their duty—and that makes them ripe for exploitation
This cycle has roots in two journalistic habits
For most of recent history, media outlets all used the same self-imposed editorial guidelines, so relying on one another’s work was natural.
1. If the outlet is legitimate, the stories it breaks are. 2. If the story is legitimate, the facts inside it are. 3. It can be assumed that if the subject of the story is legitimate, then what people are saying about it probably is too.
It’s a process known as the “delegation of trust.
The web has its own innovation on the delegation of trust, known as “link economy.”
the link economy he advocates is a breeding ground for manipulation.
The link economy encourages blogs to point their readers to other bloggers who are saying crazy things, to borrow from each other without verification, and to take more or less completed stories from other sites, add a layer of commentary, and turn it into something they call their own.
the media is no longer governed by a set of universal editorial and ethics standards.
The material one site pulls from another can hardly be trusted when it’s just as likely to have been written with low standards as with high ones.
The conditions on which the delegation of trust and the link economy need to operate properly no longer exist.
Wikipedia editors may have caught and quickly removed the student’s edit, but that didn’t automatically update the obituaries that had incorporated it.
The link economy is designed to confirm and support, not to question or correct.
In the link economy, the blue stamp of an html link seems like it will support weight.
I have rested my authority on a source and linked to it, and now the burden is on the reader to disprove the validity of that link. Bloggers know this and abuse it.
Blogs have long borrowed on the principle that links imply credibility.
Online links look like citations but rarely are.
People consume content online by scanning and skimming.
Only 44 percent of users on Google News click through to read the actual article.
Meaning: Nobody clicks links, even interesting ones.
If readers give sites just seconds for their headlines, how much effort will they expend weighing whether a blog meets the burden of proof?
May becomes is becomes has
This is recursion at work, officially sanctioned and very possible under the rules of the link economy.
it is far too easy for mistakes to pile on top of mistakes or for real reporting to be built on lies and manipulations—
The link economy encourages bloggers to repeat what “other people are saying” and link to it
Scientists, she says, replicate each other’s experiments in order to prove or disprove their findings. Conversely, journalists replicate one another’s conclusions and build on top of them—often when they are not correct.
The news has always been riddled with errors, because it is self-referential instead of self-critical.
Reporters look to one-up each other on the same subjects, often adding new scoops to existing stories.
Don’t be a perfectionist, he’s saying; join the link economy and delegate trust.
replication is expensive. But it is a known cost, one that should be paid up front by the people who intend to profit from the news. It
The old media system was a long way from perfect, but their costly business model, so derided by these web gurus, pushed for at least a semblance of scientific replication. It found independent confirmation wherever possible. It advocated editorial independence
If it was once about spreading the word, now it’s as much about stopping the spread of inaccurate and damaging words.
That person is often someone like me.
Once this arms race has begun, things can’t just go back to normal.
an endless loop of online manipulation that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
extortion via viral video.
