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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ryan Holiday
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October 11 - October 19, 2023
A man much smarter than I am once described a “racket” as something that “is not what it seems to the majority of the people,” where only a small group of insiders know what’s really going on and they operate for the benefit of a few and at the expense of basically everyone else.
There is no other definition for the modern media system. Its very business model rests on exploiting the difference between perception and reality—pretending that it produces the “quality” news we once classified as journalism without adhering to any of the standards or practices that define it.
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.
“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something,” Upton Sinclair once said, “when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
The economics of the internet are exploited to change public perception—and sell product.
Your attention and your credulity are being stolen.
It is not news that sells papers, but papers that sell news. —BILL BONNER, MOBS, MESSIAHS, AND MARKETS
We’re a country governed by public opinion, and public opinion is largely governed by the press, so isn’t it critical to understand what governs the press?
traffic is what they sell to advertisers,
Change reality through the coverage.
Political blogs need things to cover; traffic increases during election Reality (election far away) does not align with this Political blogs create candidates early, gravitating toward the absurd and controversial; election cycle starts earlier The person they cover, by virtue of coverage, becomes actual candidate (or president) Blogs profit (literally); the public loses
The economics of the internet created a twisted set of incentives that make traffic more important—and more profitable—than the truth.
And what is predictable can be anticipated, redirected, accelerated, or controlled—however
It’s a simple illusion: Create the perception that the meme already exists and all the reporter (or the music supervisor or celebrity stylist) is doing is popularizing it. They rarely bother to look past the first impressions.
People like getting pissed off
Not only is the web susceptible to spreading false information, but it can also be the source of it.
When all it takes is one story to propel a blog from the dredges of the internet to mainstream notoriety, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that sites will do anything to get their shot, even if it means manufacturing or stealing scoops (and deceiving readers and advertisers in the process). Established press doesn’t have this problem. They aren’t anxious for name recognition, because they already have it. Instead of bending the rules (and the truth) to get it, their main concern for their business model is to protect their reputations. This is a critical difference. Media was once about
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And desperation, as a media manipulator knows, is the greatest quality you can hope for in a potential victim.
Is there any easier way to legitimize an idea than to have it repeated?
Most corruption is not obvious.
The problem of journalism, says Edward Jay Epstein in his book Between Fact and Fiction, is simple. Journalists are rarely in a position to establish the truth of an issue themselves, since they didn’t witness it personally. They are “entirely dependent on self-interested ‘sources’” to supply their facts. Every part of the news-making process is defined by this relationship; everything is colored by this reality.
Study the top stories at Digg or MSN.com and you’ll notice a pattern: the top stories all polarize people. If you make it threaten people’s 3 Bs—behavior, belief, or belongings—you get a huge virus-like dispersion. —TIM FERRISS, #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
You and we know that it is generally just the best and most valuable things that do not find their echo immediately. —KURT WOLFF, PUBLISHER OF FRANZ KAFKA
“if something is a total bummer, people don’t share it.”
Simple narratives like the haunting ruins of a city spread and live, while complicated ones like a city filled with real people who desperately need help don’t.
My point here is not sociological so much as it is practical. Let me explain how this ends up affecting companies and public figures. Say someone accuses you of something horrible—obviously those salacious allegations make for good copy. The problem is that the truth—your response—is often much less interesting than the accusations. Getting caught stepping out on a spouse might generate headlines. The fact that the marriage was long over, that you were both just waiting for the paperwork to be finished and, in fact, the spouse has moved on too—that’s starting to involve a lot of variables.
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This is something I have to explain to clients in crisis PR situations all the time. I say, “Look, if your response isn’t more interesting than the allegations, no one is going to care. You might as well not bother.” So a lot of times people end up having to take a lot of untrue crap because they don’t have much recourse with a media that cares more about what spreads than what is accurate. Or, worse, you get an escalation: Someone accuses someone of something. The person has to respond that it’s all made up and the person is only doing it because “[insert a different lie],” and it just goes
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just as extreme negativity is one effective technique, so is cloying and saccharine positivity.
filtering and exclusively delivering only a small sliver of reality—one
The press, Martin Amis once noted, “is more vicious than the populace.” It’s also more positive and gushy—as Upworthy is—than normal people. Why? Because it’s paid to be.
“the most powerful predictor of virality is how much anger an article evokes”
I will say it again: The most powerful predictor of what spreads online is anger.
Again, extremes in any direction have a large impact on how something will spread, but certain emotions do better than others. For instance, an equal shift in the positivity of an article is the equivalent of spending about 1.2 hours as the lead story. It’s a significant but clear difference. The angrier an article makes the reader, the better. But happy works too.
The researchers found that while sadness is an extreme emotion, it is a wholly unviral one. Sadness, like what one might feel to see a stray dog shivering for warmth or a homeless man begging for money, is typically a low-arousal emotion. Sadness depresses our impulse for social sharing.
“People get viral content wrong,” Eli Pariser, the founder of Upworthy, told Businessweek. “They imagine that the reason people share stuff is to have a laugh. But a huge part of sharing is being passionate about something, about shedding light on what really matters.”
No smart marketer is ever going to push a story with the stink of reasonableness, complexity, or mixed emotions. We want to rile people up. We want to provoke you into talking.
The problem is that facts are rarely clearly good or bad. They just are. The truth is often boring and complicated.
Navigating this quandary forces marketers and publishers to conspire to distort this information into something that will register on the emotional spectrum of the audience. To turn it into something that spreads and to drive clicks. Behind the scenes I work to crank up the valence of articles, relying on scandal, c...
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in studies where subjects are shown negative video footage (war, an airplane crash, an execution, a natural disaster), they become more aroused, can better recall what happened, pay more attention, and engage more cognitive resources to consume the media than nonnegative footage.
Things must be negative but not too negative. Hopelessness, despair—these drive us to do nothing. Pity, empathy—those drive us to do something, like get up from our computers to act. But anger, fear, excitement, laughter, and outrage—these drive us to spread. They drive us to do something that makes us feel as if we are doing something, when in reality we are only contributing to what is probably a superficial and utterly meaningless conversation.
It’s almost as if the insatiable media appetite for stories that will make people angry and outraged has created a market for anger and outrage. It’s almost as if that’s why we’re so divided and upset. Oh wait, that is why!
As Chris Hedges, the philosopher and journalist, wrote, “In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion.”
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.
I am not surprised when anonymous scribblers write and publish falsehoods, or make criticism on matters which they know nothing about or which they are incapable of comprehending. It is their trade. They live by it. —GENERAL WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN
Nobody involved actually cares what any of these people think or are feeling—not even a little bit. They just care about the reaction and the attention.
Orwell reminded us in 1984: “The weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism.”
As Juvenal joked, “What’s infamy matter if you can keep your fortune?”
As the character Philip Marlowe observed in Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye: Newspapers are owned and published by rich men. Rich men all belong to the same club. Sure, there’s competition—hard tough competition for circulation, for newsbeats, for exclusive stories. Just so long as it doesn’t damage the prestige and privilege and position of the owners.
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. That’s the stuff you have to subscribe to, that you pay for, that you have to chase.
Whereas subscriptions are about trust, single-use traffic is all immediacy and impulse—even if the news has to be distorted to trigger it.
