Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue

by Ryan Holiday

Conspiracy entails determined, coordinated action, done in secret—always in secret—that aims to disrupt the status quo or accomplish some aim.

The result is a different kind of book from my other work, but given this extraordinary story, I had little choice.

What Denton did, in effect, was turn writing, social commentary, and journalism into a video game. Writing wasn’t a craft you mastered. It was a delivery mechanism.

It should be said that there is not a word of that proof in the article, not even anonymously sourced.

“When personal gossip attains the dignity of print, and crowds the space available for matters of real interest to the community,” future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, in a piece which formed the basis for what we now know as the “right to privacy,” it “destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence.”

There must have been a way that Gawker reminded Thiel of the self-righteous people he had been railing against since he was a conservative polemicist in college: the people who claim the moral high ground, who claim to be about freedom of choice, but who bully everyone who doesn’t choose their way of freedom.

the gravest threat Gawker posed—why it seemed to him to be a form of terrorism—was the tendency for its trenchant, snarky reporting to become reductive and to cause collateral damage.

Which is riskier: to act or to ignore?

In fact, almost no one had ever challenged the American media, period, and won.

Both take a quiet thrill in doing the things you aren’t supposed to do.

mimetic desire holds that people have no idea what they want, or what they value, so are drawn to what other people want.

And then you have to be prepared to talk about it at the expert level for hours on end.

The professional son understands what every father wants—a progeny worth his time, someone to invest in, someone who can further his legacy.

Rooted in every conspiracy is often shared loneliness, a smoldering frustration or bitterness. Of not being listened to. Of the world not understanding.

Rich Cohen once wrote that “one definition of evil is to fail to recognize the humanity in the other: to see a person as an object or tool, something to be put to use.”

This compartmentalization is key to a conspiracy. Not everyone can be in charge.

A start-up is, in Peter’s definition, “a small group of people that you’ve convinced of a truth that nobody else believes in.”

You don’t want to be the first to act, you want to be the last man standing.

Peter seems to have a preternatural ability to sense which lever to pull, what angle is the best approach, and it’s almost always something radically different from what your average person would select.

“Given the same amount of intelligence, timidity will do one thousand times more damage in war than audacity” is the dictum from Clausewitz.

a little boldness will make much more progress than timidity will ever protect.

This is slow business. It’s not glamorous. It’s expensive. There’s no visible sign of momentum. It’s not even obvious to anyone else, including your opponent, what is at stake. But what this option trades in immediate gratification and public validation, it receives in the potential for long-term effectiveness.

It has been the great collective self-deception of Silicon Valley, and perhaps of our age, that a person can engage in aggressive “disruption” of existing industries while pretending that they are not at least similar to the ruthless capitalist barons of the previous century, that there is not a drop of Carnegie or Rockefeller or Vanderbilt DNA in the whole business.

The start-up CEO can tell himself that he is a good guy, because from his vantage point he is.

One of the informal mottos of the libertarian community is “Don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff.” But that is explicitly what conspiracies do, and fundamentally what Thiel’s conspiracy had committed to do.

Peter had selected himself to go after Gawker, to be the hammer of justice as he saw it, and in so doing he, too, was committing to hurt people and to take risks with the livelihoods of people he had recruited.

choose your enemies wisely, he had been told, because you become just like them—but

It’s a story of success not unlike Denton’s and Thiel’s—but the blue-collar version and with a different ending.

The Secret

A Gawker writer would defend a similar story a few years later by saying, “Stories don’t need an upside. Not everyone has to feel good about the truth. If it’s true, you publish.” These people had come to believe that “truth” was the governing criterion, and that the right to publish these stories was absolute. As far as their experience was concerned, they were correct: There had never been serious consequences. They had called every bluff. They had published what every other media outlet would have deemed unpublishable and not only got away with it—the audience loved them for it.

Gawker had the air of a wildly overconfident champion. They had bested every opponent, rejected every convention and condescending person who said it was wrong. Its writers and editors had felt the satisfaction of proving a jeering crowd wrong, and drank to the dregs an elixir that made them think they were both unbeatable and the underdog at the same time.

He doesn’t know that his microphone is picking up the audio of all of it, that he is creating another tape that will haunt him just like the first one.

After the initial bump of media attention, the rush of excitement from the unexpected success, Graham says that the founders enter a phase where the novelty begins to wear off, and they quickly descend from their early euphoria into what he calls the “trough of sorrow.” A start-up launches with its investments, gets a few press hits, and then smacks right into reality. Many companies never make it out of this ditch.

This is going to be harder than they thought. It always is.

And so the essential trait of the successful man is not only perseverance but almost a perverse expectation of how difficult it is going to be. It is having redundancies on top of redundancies, so you can absorb the losses you eventually incur.

One must not just steel one’s heart but also one’s spirit so that there is no such thing as an obstacle—just information.

The earlier you spot and anticipate setbacks, the less demora...

We want things to be easy. We want them to be clean....

“You take two steps forward and one backwards but as long as you’re progressing that’s what matters,” said Mr. A.

Gawker’s confidence, as it had been since its beginnings as a company, tended to bleed over into contempt.

Few ever make it out of the trough of sorrow—in business, in life, in conspiracy.

Both A.J. and Denton would one day be marched into court chained to the words they had spoken in the depositions they had so confidently conducted.

Forshadowing

But the past is no indicator of the future—ask the fattened Thanksgiving turkey or the proverbial man stacking straws on a camel’s back.

Peter had learned from his early experiences with Gawker and the media that those with unconventional beliefs should probably keep most of what they think to themselves.

cho0se

The concealment of intentions is critical to countless worthwhile and perfectly legitimate enterprises, not only in business or defense but also in journalism.

In fact, the journalist’s right to secrecy is enshrined in law, and nowhere is it more protected than in New York City.

“The truest way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others” is La Rochefoucauld’s maxim.

Secrets are how real work is done.

There’s an entire chapter in his book Zero to One called “Secrets.”