Byrne's Reviews > Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue

In 2007, a Gawker writer outed Peter Thiel as gay. In 2016, after losing a $140 million lawsuit funded by Thiel, Gawker shut down. Conspiracy is the story of how we got from A to B.

Disclosure: Gawker has tried to get more than one of my friends fired, so I didn’t shed any tears when justice was served. High-fives may have been exchanged.

The central thesis of Conspiracy is that we need more conspiracies. It's clear that nobody is willing to labor for nearly a decade in silence in order to achieve a goal. The closest we have to that is stealth mode, or maybe grad school, but one is temporary and the other appears to be permanent.

If you think of it in terms of an investment—and every decision in life can and should be modeled this way—a conspiracy has negative carry but returns skewed to the upside. Most people, and nearly all organizations, can’t tolerate this, so we have fewer than the optimal number of conspiracies.

This argument is counterintuitive, but not obviously wrong. And it's a good heuristic that when an argument is easy to dismiss but turns out to be hard to argue with, you should default to strongly believing it. If nothing else, when you find out you're wrong you do so in a way that leaves you better-informed than the conformists.

One question people asked a lot in the aftermath of Gawker's shutdown was: do we want to live in a society where a vindictive billionaire can spend years and tens of millions of dollars to ruin someone’s life? A better question is: do we want to live in a society where a blogger can spend fifteen minutes to do the same thing?

Wealth, we can all agree, has some randomness to it. If Mark Zuckerberg had taken the VC money in Boston instead of moving to the Bay, Thiel would be a lot less rich (but, between Founder’s Fund and Palantir, still very, very rich). But blogging influence is even more random. Did A.J. Daulerio pyramid up his social capital from a series of bold, contrarian bets, or did he just kind of stumble into possession of the megaphone? In investing, if you make a huge mistake your next mistake is smaller because you have a smaller bankroll. But a blogger can reset his bankroll by writing another post.

A friend of mine compares the free speech debate to the gun control debate: when they wrote the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers could never have imagined that a high-powered Assault Press like Gawker could end up in the hands of a civilian.

Gawker was simply a misuse of freedom of speech. It wasn't strictly necessary that they be destroyed, but it was a good thing. The Internet used to make society more diverse, by letting people with obscure interests congregate. It still does some of that. But sites like Gawker make the world more homogeneous, by singling out and attacking weirdos. It takes years to develop a subculture, but only minutes to whip up a mob, so Gawker contributed to the Internet's current entropic state: maximum tension, minimum agency.

And speaking of agency: Thiel and Denton are clearly, in the words of Eric Weinstein, "high-agency people." They have a vision and execute on it. That trait is in limited supply, and tends to be selected-against in high-status education and the early stages of high-status jobs. In a sense, Denton was a class traitor, by using his Nietzschean will-to-power to build an institution that mostly swatted other unique people aside.

(This book owes a lot to Girard.)

I found the style... okay.

The style of the book is 48 Laws of Power cover band. We have lots of references to ancient philosophy, ancient war, more recent war, Margaret Thatcher. You know: the cultural currency of someone torn between his love of reading and his desire to be a bro. It came as no surprise when I googled and found out that the author was a protege of Robert Greene. He has absorbed the Greene voice. If you liked The 48 Laws, you'll probably get a kick out of this book.

I recommend Conspiracy to anyone who wants to see bold plans being executed well. It's unique in that the author has access to both the protagonist and the antagonist. As to which one was which, I defer to you.