More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ryan Holiday
Read between
October 11 - October 19, 2023
Our news is what rises, and what rises is what spreads, and what spreads is what makes us angry or makes us laugh. Our media diet is quickly transformed into junk food, fake stories engineered by people like me to be consumed and passed around. It is the refined and processed sugars of the information food pyramid—out of the ordinary, unnatural, and deliberately sweetened.
The reason paid subscription (and RSS) was abandoned was because in a subscription economy the users are in control. In the one-off model, the competition might be more vicious, but it is on the terms of the publisher. Having followers instead of subscribers—where readers have to check back on sites often and are barraged with a stream of refreshing content laden with ads—is much better for their bottom line.
When the blogger Andrew Sullivan switched his site to a subscription model a few years ago, his analysis of the situation was striking. He called subscription the “purest, simplest model for online journalism: you, us, and a meter. Period. No corporate ownership, no advertising demands, no pressure for pageviews . . . just a concept designed to make your reading experience as good as possible, and to lead us not into temptation.”
The great Daniel Boorstin called these things pseudo-events. Why does a movie have a premiere? So the celebrities will show up and the media will cover it. Why does a politician hold a press conference? For the attention. A quick run down the list of pseudo-events shows their indispensability to the news business: press releases, award ceremonies, red-carpet events, product launches, anniversaries, grand openings, “leaks,” the contrite celebrity interview after a scandal, the sex tape, the tell-all, the public statement, controversial advertisements, marches on Washington, press junkets, and
...more
These pseudo-events—put on for the sole purpose of generating headlines and media coverage—are real in the sense that they do exist, but they are fake in the sense that they are completely artificial. The event is not intended to accomplish anything itself but instead to introduce certain narratives into the media. If nobody covered them, it’d be like a tree falling in the woods. Pseudo-events are the media manipulator’s secret weapon.
As magician Ricky Jay once put it, “People respond to and are deceived by the same things they were a hundred years ago.”
The columnist and media critic Walter Lippmann once observed, “The reader expects the fountains of truth to bubble, but he enters into no contract, legal or moral, involving any risk or cost or trouble to himself. He will pay a nominal price when it suits him, will stop paying whenever it suits him, will turn to another paper when that suits him.” And he said that when a lot more people still did pay for newspapers (and they cost literally three cents). He concluded by saying that the “newspaper editor has to be re-elected every day.” That’s a lot of pressure on the shoulders of an editor or
...more
The headlines must work for the publisher, not the reader.
A status update that is met with no likes (or a clever tweet that isn’t retweeted) becomes the equivalent of a joke met with silence. It must be rethought and rewritten. And so we don’t show our true selves online, but a mask designed to conform to the opinions of those around us. —NEIL STRAUSS, WALL STREET JOURNAL
anything that pervasive presents opportunities for abuse.
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 creat...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Nobody is fooling anyone. That’s not the game—because sites don’t have any interest in what they post, as long as it delivers pageviews.
Pageview journalism treats people by what they appear to want—from data that is unrepresentative to say the least—and gives them this and only this until they have forgotten that there could be anything else. It takes the audience at their worst and makes them worse. And then, when criticized, publishers throw up their hands as if to say, “We wish people liked better stuff too,” as if they had nothing to do with it. Well, they do.
Actions are constrained by income, time, imperfect memory and calculating capacities, and other limited resources, and also by the available opportunities in the economy and elsewhere. . . . Different constraints are decisive for different situations, but the most fundamental constraint is limited time. —GARY BECKER, NOBEL PRIZE–WINNING ECONOMIST
Where there is little volition, there should be little bitterness or blame.
Only understanding, as I have learned, can be turned to advantage.
The way news is found online more or less determines what is found. The way the news must be presented—in order to meet the technical constraints of the medium and the demands of its readers—determines the news itself. It’s basically a cliché at this point, but that doesn’t ch...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Think about television. We’re all tired of the superficiality of cable news and its insistence on reducing important political issues into needless conflict between two annoying talking heads. But there’s a simple reason for this, as media critic Eric Alterman explained in Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy. TV is a visual medium, he said, so to ask the audience to think about something it cannot see would be suicide. If it were possible to put an abstract idea to film, producers would happily show that instead of pithy sound bites. But it isn’t, so conflict, talking heads, and
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
If a blogger isn’t willing or doesn’t have the time to get off their ass to visit the stores they write about, that’s their problem. It makes it that much easier to create my own version of reality. I will come to them with the story. I’ll meet them on their terms, but their story will be filled with my terms. They won’t take the time or show the interest to check with anyone else.
Blogs must—economically and structurally—distort the news in order for the format to work.
Those who have gone through the high school of reporterdom have acquired a new instinct by which they see and hear only that which can create a sensation, and accordingly their report becomes not only a careless one, but hopelessly distorted. —HUGO MUNSTERBERG, “THE CASE OF THE REPORTER,” MCCLURE’S, 1911
The world is boring, but the news is exciting.
If there is one special skill that journalists can claim, it is the ability to find the angle on any story. That the news is ever chosen over entertainment in the fight for attention is a testament to their skill.
To paraphrase Charles Horton Cooley, the products of our imagination become the solid facts of society.
Most crucially, that machine, whether it churns through social media or television appearances, doesn’t reward bipartisanship or deal making; it rewards the easily retweetable or sound bite–ready statement, the more outrageous the better. —IRIN CARMON, JEZEBEL
The headline of Jezebel’s piece: DOES AMERICAN APPAREL’S NEW NAIL POLISH CONTAIN HAZARDOUS MATERIAL? To settle Jezebel’s reckless conjecture: The answer is no, it didn’t. Unequivocally no (and remember, most headlines with questions in them can be answered that way).
The manipulators are indistinguishable from the publishers and bloggers.
We are the tools of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. —JOHN SWINTON, JOURNALIST, NEW YORK SUN (1880)
A system can tolerate a few bad actors. The problem is when those bad actors spawn replicants,
the best way to make your critics work for you is to make them irrationally angry. Blinded by rage or indignation, they spread your message to every ear and media outlet they can find.
This is what opponents of the alt-right seem to miss. They are trying to make you upset. They want you to be irrationally angry—it’s how they win.
Niche players and polarizing personalities are only ever going to be interesting to a small subgroup. While this might seem like a disadvantage, it’s actually a huge opportunity, because it allows them to leverage the dismissals, anger, mockery, and contempt of the population at large as proof of their credibility.
But as James Fenimore Cooper presciently observed in the nineteenth century, “If newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.”
The idea that the web is empowering is just a bunch of rattling, chattering talk. 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. Blogs are out to game you—to steal your time from you and sell it to advertisers—and they do this every day.
Ricky Van Veen pointed out in his excellent TEDx talk: They confirm what you want to be true and what you want to reflect your identity.
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.
Psychologists call this the “narcotizing dysfunction,” when people come to mistake the busyness of the media with real knowledge, and confuse spending time consuming that with doing something.
Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton wrote: 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
...more
This is the exact reaction that our current online system produces: apathy without self-awareness. To keep you so caught up and consumed with the bubble that you don’t even realize you’re in one.
“Talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness,” Kierkegaard once said.
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.
The link economy is designed to confirm and support, not to question or correct.
once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”
what William Zinsser called “impatient bird[s], perched on the thin edge of distraction.”
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.
Afghan warlords have a name for this strategy: ghabban, which means to demand protection from a threat that you create.
When the public has been primed to jump on and share salacious gossip on social media, even upstanding citizens are vulnerable.
Is it not obvious that society cannot continue indefinitely to get its news by this wasteful method? One large section of the community organized to circulate lies, and another large section of the community organized to refute the lies! We might as well send a million men out into the desert to dig holes, and then send another million to fill up the holes. —UPTON SINCLAIR, THE BRASS CHECK
