CONSPIRACY TALES FROM A MEDIA MANIPULATOR
It’s a compelling story Ryan Holiday tells: the destruction of the Gawker media empire as an act of revenge by PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, through a proxy legal war fronted by Hulk Hogan.
In 2007, British entrepreneur Nick Denton’s Gawker Media, in its Silicon Valley gossip-rag blog Valleywag, had outed entrepreneur-investor Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, in a post titled ‘Peter Thiel is totally gay, people’. Thiel called Valleywag Silicon Valley’s Al Qaeda.
Fast forward to 2012. Gawker published an extract from a leaked tape of former wrestler Hulk Hogan having sex with a friend’s wife. They ignored a cease-and-desist order from Hogan, and even a court order to remove the video. Hogan was furious. Thiel had found his protagonist, but the world didn’t know it.
Hogan sued Gawker for violation of privacy, and, in 2016, won $140 million in damages, including $10 million personally from Denton. Gawker went bankrupt. Months later, Thiel revealed that he had paid $10 million to finance Hogan’s lawsuit against Denton and Gawker, calling it one of the greater philanthropic things he had done, and saying it was less about revenge than deterrence.
What makes Conspiracy fascinating is not just the extraordinary access that the author had to both Denton and Thiel, but his storytelling talent, his ability to sell you this as a decadelong plot masterminded by Thiel. For Ryan Holiday is a master manipulator, who’s even written a book called Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, rewritten in 2017 for the post-truth era of Donald Trump and fake news.
And it was that book which I read first, and it left me shaken, disturbed and, as a media person, feeling a little dirty all over. TMIL is a guide to media manipulation, narrated by a practitioner. Holiday tells you how media is gamed. How to turn any fiction into a release that’s picked up by a local blog and then ‘traded up the chain’ to national media. How it’s just about the page views.
A fake story based on one anonymous ‘source’ with a defamatory charge about someone gets 30,000 page views; the denial (“Senator denies molesting intern at party”) gets another 30,000, and a follow-up apology after a legal notice gets 20,000 more. Total: 80,000 page views, and the author gets a cut. Unlike Hogan and Thiel, most don’t sue.
TMIL has fascinating chapters like “Just make stuff up: Everyone else is doing it”. Holiday explains why there are no mistakes on the web, only updates—just post whatever now, get page views, and correct or update it later for more page views.
The book is rich with real stories of media being gamed and manipulated, often by Holiday himself. Gawker features very often.
You can use this book for good or for evil, he says. Well, so can you use a book on how to hack a bank, or get rid of a human body. I’d urge you to read these books in the same sequence I did—TMIL first, then Conspiracy. Or, if you want to pick one, TMIL alone.
And over the way, did you wonder what ‘conspiracy’ there was? Oh, that was clickbait. There was really no decade-long conspiracy.
Holiday explains why there are no mistakes on the web, only updates— just post whatever now, get page views, and correct or update it later