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

by Ryan Holiday

Today, we have a complex relationship with secrecy insomuch as we live in a world that no longer values it. Transparency carries now in the modern mind the weight of moral imperative. This two-handed truism sits at the foundation of Gawker’s mission and cult-heroism: the full exposure of open (and closed) secrets. It has become a perversion of Nixon’s line about the cover-up being worse than the crime where today it’s automatically a sin if you keep it a secret. Thiel’s plot against Gawker was wrong, it would be argued, and the obvious proof of this was that he tried to hide what he was doing for so long. Nick Denton would call Thiel a hypocrite for not meeting him in the open. “Wouldn’t the libertarian solution,” he told me, “have been to make his own counterargument? To meet speech with speech. It’s not like Thiel was lacking in outlets, or the money to make new outlets if he felt his voice was not loud enough.” It might be the libertarian way, but it certainly wouldn’t have been any kind of solution. What would Gawker have done had Peter Thiel taken it on in a war of words instead of secretly plotting its undoing? It would have torn him apart. When people who don’t like what you’re doing know that you’re trying to do it, they are more likely to be able to stop you. It’s that simple.