I SAID IN THE INTRODUCTION THAT I WAS NOT THE only media manipulator out there. I’m definitely not—I don’t even think I was particularly exceptional. These interviews that I have included in the appendix should provide proof of that. Conducted over the last several years, they are straight-from-the-source explanations from manipulators of all political and business persuasions. I e-mailed them questions and they answered. No editing, no bias. Just their honest and often shocking truth.
New York Observer, October 2016*
I SHOULD OPEN THIS PIECE BY SAYING THAT I DON’T agree with Mike Cernovich. I’m not saying that to disavow his views out of political correctness, I’m just saying it because it’s true. Politically, we do not agree. We’ve had words a few times on Twitter and when I went to contact him for this interview, I actually discovered that I’d blocked him and forgotten about it. But deciding to interview him for this column had nothing to do with agreeing with Mike and a lot more to do with curiosity.
How does a self-published author of self-improvement books and former lawyer build a Twitter audience that can do as many as 100 million impressions in a month? How does someone with no direct affiliation with any political party create a hashtag that was used by the Republican nominee for president and the Green Party nominee? Why did the New Yorker decide to profile him and why does their headline call him a “Troll for Trump”? Is he actually a troll or has he just figured out the media better than many “professionals” and is now using it for his own agenda?
Instead of speculating about these questions or judging from afar, I prefer just to ask. Why not? You don’t get infected when you interact with someone you disagree with—or have at times found obnoxious or offensive. In fact, you can usually learn something. Specifically: what makes them tick and how they do what they do (the latter being the most important).
With that, I’d like to present my interview with the notorious Mike Cernovich, whose alt-right videos, tweets, blog posts and books have made him a new breed of media figure. He’s not an official cable news campaign surrogate, he’s not a pundit, but he’s more than just a troll. He has a real audience. What he produces can have real impact—not always directly, but when filtered through the media system it reaches people who are totally unaware of the source or the way in which news can spread. Nor is he the only one of his kind—on all sides of the spectrum, there are individuals like Mike, shaping what we read, setting the Overton Window in our political debate, stirring things up and laughing (and profiting) as we freak out about it. Which is why you should study how and why he does what he does.
Tell us a bit about who you are and how you see yourself. Are you an author? A political operator? An agitator? An activist? A pundit? A troll? A marketer? All of the above? How did your unique position as a media figure and public personality come to be?
My identity is based around being a writer. I can’t not write. It’s a compulsion. Every day I write about whatever is on my mind, and that’s what complicates the story.
People who read Gorilla Mindset can’t believe some of the political stuff or edgy Tweets I write. There’s no unifying brand about me other than I’m a writer who shares my thoughts. Sometimes my thoughts are designed to help people, and other times my thoughts are designed to change the political system and challenge those who need a good fight.
Before a long road trip in the late 90s, I stopped by Barnes & Noble. At the time I was “depressed” or “lost” in that existential, angsty sort of way. I found How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie in the audiobook section. That book changed my life. I thought to myself, “I’d always like to write a book that will change someone’s life.”
Many who have read Gorilla Mindset find my Twitter too much. The same is true of my podcast, which is inspirational and aspirational and positive.
What is your story or the story of anyone else? You likely help your friends while also feeling jealous of others. There’s resentment, hope, fear, anger, and a desire to make a difference on the world.
None of us are good or evil, and that frustrates us because we want to see others as wearing a white hat or black hat. My hat is grey.
The only difference between me and my critics is that I don’t lie to the world about who I am. People are complicated and often seemingly hypocritical. Embrace the diversity of your mind. Peter Thiel lays out the applicable first principle in his must-read book Zero to One. “If you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.”
The big knock against the media is that it’s controlled by powerful elites, that it is corporatized or fake. How does a single individual like yourself—with no direct affiliation to any organization or outlet—manage to have an impact? Whether people agree with you or not, I think there is interest in knowing how you’ve managed to create a large platform and have a monthly reach in the nine figures.
You work in marketing and publishing. What do you tell writers? You tell them to find their own value proposition through differentiation. How do you stand out? Be different.
Most media is the same. If you read WaPo, then you don’t need to read the New York Times. If you read BuzzFeed, you don’t need to read Vox or Gawker or Vice. You’re going to be served up the same generic slop.
If 90% of mainstream media went away, no one would notice. You’d have fewer sites to visit, but you’d still read the same stories. You’d read the story one time rather than re-worded 100 times by 100 “writers.”
Individual writers do not stand out. They have bylines as “prestigious” publications, but no one goes to those websites for the writer. Most writers today are commodities. They are fungible. There’s a surplus of 24-year old English majors who all think and write the same.
One of America’s only original thinkers is Naval [Ravikant]. He observed, “The internet commoditized the distribution of facts. The ‘news’ media responded by pivoting wholesale into opinions and entertainment.”
He is almost exactly right, with this caveat.
Commentary is a commodity because everyone is following the same script. The left and right each have their own scripts. I follow my own script.
When people come to my Twitter or read my blog, they see a direct challenge to the dominant narrative. I currently have a near-monopoly on “anti-media.”
If I went away, people would notice, just as people would notice if Tim Ferriss, you, Scott Adams, or James Altucher quit writing.
If a random guy or girl who writes for Business Insider or the Daily Beast stopped writing, would anyone notice? Maybe for a day or two, if they happened to be friends.
One of the things I’ve written about in the past is this concept of how stories are traded up the chain. They start on Twitter or Reddit or a random blog and then make their way to bigger and bigger outlets until eventually it’s a national story or a known fact. Have stories or hashtags you’ve started followed that trajectory? Can you give us some examples? Is it something you consciously think about or try to do?
What I do on Twitter could be understood [as] the latest iteration of your groundbreaking work in Trust Me, I’m Lying. You created a news cycle by feeding stories to bloggers desperate for page views. Your methods differed from mine but the principle is the same.
What is a news cycle and how do we control them? I obsess over that question daily, and one lesson learned is that a trending hashtag is newsworthy in itself.
I learned that lesson from the dishonest left. If five people on Twitter post some hashtag opposing “white male patriarchy,” then BuzzFeed writes it up as, “The Internet Totally Exploded on Evil White Men Today!”
Look at the Tweets cited in that “news” story, and you’ll often see the top tweet getting 100 RTs—which is for me an ordinary Tweet.
I thus realized that to create news we had to create hashtags that would trend worldwide on Twitter. Me and my readers and viewers created several. Both Jill Stein and Donald Trump have posted to hashtags we started, including #WheresHillary.
Here are some more examples: http://www.dangerandplay.com/2016/03/28/the-future-of-news-social-media-and-the-new-news-cycle/.
When you say that “Conflict is attention” and “Attention is influence” what do you mean by that? As a media strategy, what does that look like? That one seeks out ideas that are likely to provoke strong emotions? Does it help to believe those things or does that matter? That one should take a combative approach instead of a measured one? How does pure attention lead to action and influence?
Allow Dana White to explain: “If you take four street corners, and on one they are playing baseball, on another they are playing basketball and on the other, street hockey. On the fourth corner, a fight breaks out. Where does the crowd go? They all go to the fight.”
We all love drama. It’s human nature. Sport, politics, reality TV. Those all meet the same human need. You helped write a book with laws about dramas and spectacles.
I create compelling spectacles using conflict.
Right now the media has a 6% approval rating, and journalists have been caught in several hoaxes. Rather than criticize the New York Times, a big company, I call out the journalist by name. Some call this “bullying,” which is laughable. How can someone with a massive platform at the New York Times be a helpless victim? The real victims are people the media lies about, like Justine Sacco.
I certainly see controversy as an underrated strategy. Most people are afraid of it—brands don’t want to get complaints, public figures are afraid of backlash or complicated issues, etc—and so the people that can push through controversy often reap big gains very quickly. Trump has certainly been an example of it—for most of the election, he was anti-fragile. The controversies almost made him stronger. But I’m curious, do you think there are limits to these strategies? Do you worry that there is some vulnerability in your own approach—that at some point it could stop making you stronger and suddenly lead to a reversal (not unlike what happened with the Trump tapes)? Is there stuff that you regret or wouldn’t do again?
I have developed a code of honor. I don’t go after “civilians” or nobodies.
You are a soldier. You have a big platform, you write for a living, you are in the game. Heck you even called me an idiot or something on Twitter, an unprovoked attack. I thought it was funny and we went back-and-forth. I didn’t feel like you “bullied” me, because you didn’t. However I will not write about nobodies. A recent example is Ken Bone. The media humiliated that poor man by publishing his porn-watching habits. Why? Do they have no decency?
I find it fascinating that people criticize me for being “too mean” to famous people and people with huge platforms. Meanwhile those same people use their platforms to attack people like Ken Bone and Justine Sacco.
The media is full of bullies. Anyone who has a problem with me should search their own Twitter history. They did join the Justine Sacco hate mob? Have they tried getting people fired over a Tweet? Did they link to articles discussing Ken Bone’s porn habits? If so, they can keep their mouths shut about me. (Or not, they are of course free to criticize me. But [there] had better be a way they do so not from a high horse—they are right on the battlefield with me.)
[Ed note: I followed up with Mike about the second part of the question and this was his extended answer]
“Vulnerability” is an interesting concept with a lot of layers. The glib answer is that I’m an anti-fragile author of Gorilla Mindset and MAGA Mindset, and thus all negative attention could convert into new readers. That ignores deeper issues.
Social shaming has been used throughout human history because it works. It took me a long time to be able to laugh at the attacks, but I will be honest—It feels pretty crappy when what seems like the entire internet is lying about you. Most people are vulnerable to these attacks, and it takes time to learn how to reframe them as a positive. (For every hater, there are 10 people paying attention who don’t comment, just as most of us never write positive letters when we receive a good customer experience. We as people tend to speak up mostly to complain.)
As a lawyer defamation lawsuits concern me. I live in California, however, which has strong anti-SLAPP protections. We need a nationwide anti-SLAPP law to protect free speech, and I will not live in a state lacking an anti-SLAPP law.
My articles are fact-checked due to lawsuit risk, and I’ve passed on some good stories (which turned out to be true) as I wasn’t able to fact-check them.
I am socially vulnerable as well. There have been articles written about people who “like” my Tweets. The media does this to socially isolate me. Most “respectable” people are afraid to associate with me openly, as they don’t want to deal with the fallout from having the online hate mobs, unleashed by the bullying media, that results from being my friend.
Right now my reputation and relationship to readers are my main focus. As Warren Buffett said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” I don’t spread hoaxes. People may not *agree* with what I write, but it’s earnest and sincere—and in the case of Hillary Clinton’s health, usually on target.
As social media and crowd-funding and self-publishing allows writers to go direct to the readers, it doesn’t matter to me what the “media elite” think about me. I don’t like them, they don’t like me, and besides—media coverage doesn’t sell books. Blogs, Twitter, You-Tube, and podcasts sell books. I am accountable to my readers.
“The people” love me, despite or perhaps because of hoaxing media attacks on me. The best way to take me out would be to send me a hoax story. Despite the conspiracy theories about me, I fact-check what people send to avoid being hoaxed (or sued).
Also, as my profile has grown, people see my tactics change. A little empathy goes a long way. Because of my reach, I can make someone e-famous for a few minutes or longer. Unless someone seeks me out (in which case I assume they want the attention), I avoid people who may not want attention.
I may seem mean online, but I am mean to people who work in the media—the same people who are mean to others for a living. They simply call themselves “journalists” and dismiss all critics as “trolls.” Journalism is trolling, full stop.
Those who give attention to others deserve to have attention brought on them. I will continue doing “journalism on journalists” and have some exciting ventures along those lines planned in 2017.
You’re a big fan of Twitter and of live video on places like Face-book and Periscope. I think most technologists have started to see Twitter as a flawed or stagnant platform, and they maybe think live video is up and coming but not arrived yet. Do you agree? Disagree? What’s your take on these platforms?
Live video is the future of journalism. Soon we will have drones with GoPros on them doing “reality journalism.” The RNC and DNC both banned drones or else I’d have done that.
Marc Andreessen has said that being “too soon” is as bad as being “too late.” Live media is too soon, which is why Twitter is losing money.
Twitter lacks business focus. Twitter is not a social media platform. It’s part talk radio, part live news coverage, part political commentary. Twitter needs to be streamlined with those business focuses in mind.
What’s your media diet look like? Is there anything you’ve learned making the sausage (so to speak) that has changed what you will and won’t eat?
Most of what the liberal media does is outright hoaxing. We’ve gone from a world where journalists are biased to a world where journalists fabricate stories, as Sabrina Erdely and Rolling Stone did.
Independent voices from both sides appeal to me. If you don’t lie about the facts, your views won’t offend me. It’s America, people disagree, no big deal.
My trip to the RNC and DNC sickened me. We’ve all seen Twitter pundits like Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat hold course about what Americans think. They don’t leave Twitter.
It’s hilarious to me that those who accuse people of being “basement dwelling trolls” never leave their neighborhoods to attend a Trump or Clinton rally. They were nowhere to be found during the many massive protests at the DNC.
I have a lot of respect for Michael Tracey, who is a liberal. He tells the truth (as he sees it) about everyone. He isn’t a shill for the establishment.
Jim Hoft of The Gateway Pundit does a great job of collecting news from across the web. Stefan Molyneux has a great commentary show where he presents a view that contradicts the dominant narrative.
Traditional media hates Breitbart, but I attended the RNC and DNC. Breitbart had reporters in the field providing coverage. Where were the New York Times and other “legitimate” publications? They were inside the media tents drinking hot chocolate and sucking up to each other.
It may also come as a surprise to many to learn that I respect Glenn Greenwald, even though he’d likely disavow me or call me odious or something.
There is a shortage of real journalism. Most of [what] the “conservative media” does is churnalism—jabbering about what the “liberal media” wrote.
New York Observer, June 2015*
A MAN TRICKS THE ENTIRE MEDIA ESTABLISHMENT and millions of people into thinking that something unhealthy is actually good for them with a deliberately misleading study. Worse, they now think it’s the secret to being healthy. He’s a bad person, right?
But what if it was actually an attempt to illustrate the woeful prevalence of junk science and how easily it can be propagated through culture? If the man was a computer hacker who revealed a back door, we might marvel at his mastery and cleverness. If he was a whistleblower, we’d admire his courage.
Some people might be conflicted at the story of John Bohannon, who recently revealed that he’d helped dupe millions of people into believing that chocolate was healthy. He created a fake organization, orchestrated a study to show that chocolate was correlated with weight loss, published it in an open access journal, put out a fake press release, and traded it up the chain until the news appeared in several major media outlets. Now, finally, he’s exposed the inner-workings of this stunt (his piece on i09 has been read more than 835,000 times).
I think John is a hero. I think he’s made the world better (or at least more aware) by what he’s done. The only people with anything to be embarrassed about are the ones who got caught sleeping on the job. You see, it’s journalists who are supposed to protect us against these types of manipulations. They’re supposed to weed out the bad studies from the good. They’re supposed to realize that Ship Your Enemies Glitter stunts are blatant money grabs or when self-interested sources should be excluded or qualified. They should see that someone like Charles C. Johnson is exploiting the political dialog.
Yet instead of learning from something like these, outlets like the Daily Mail are rushing to cover their ass. They deny they ever fell for it. And even if they didn’t—they can’t see how much their business models and the model of almost all journalism today needlessly exposes them to such risks. Because they don’t care. They don’t want to be better or know the truth. The truth would be bad for business.
As John recently told The Washington Post, although there is plenty of blame to go around there’s one group who deserves it more than any others. “It’s the reporters. The reporters and ultimately the editors . . . People who are on the health science beat need to treat [what they write] like science, and that has to come from the editors. You need to talk to a source who has real scientific expertise.”
It’s clear that reporters, not only in the health space, but everywhere, have stopped caring. Well, maybe a few readers do care. To help with that, I’ve reached out to John to get a little more information on how his brilliant stunt worked and what else people should know.
So tell us how you managed to fool not only hundreds of thousands of people and media outlets, but fooled them with something that is on its face, ridiculous?
Well, did it really seem ridiculous that chocolate can help you lose weight? Compared to the diet headlines you can read every day, it seemed like a fairly normal claim. And that’s the problem! Somehow we’ve all decided that the science of nutrition doesn’t matter.
What gave you the idea—any inspirations you can tell us about? Did you actually think you could pull it off? Was it exhilarating, scary, did you feel guilty? Tell us your thought process.
I got a call out of the blue in December from Peter Onneken, a German television reporter. It was all his brilliant idea: Do a really bad but authentic scientific study of chocolate and weight loss, then build a media campaign around it. I was skeptical that any of my journalist colleagues would take the bait. But take it they did.
Was there one outlet or channel that you feel like did more to propagate the narrative than any others?
A huge thank you must go out to the Daily Mail. They even tried to weasel out of it. One of their PR people sent me and NPR an email implying that they hadn’t in fact taken the bait, since we accidentally used a screen shot of the wrong Daily Mail story. (It was one of their other stories about the miraculous health benefits of eating chocolate, if you can believe it.) They were clearly hoping that we would just quietly remove the screen shot and let them off the hook. To my knowledge, they have printed no retraction, correction, or clarification. Here is their story: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3018945/New-study-reveals-eating-chocolate-doesn-t-affect-Body-Mass-Index-help-LOSE-weight.html.
Some people might say that what you did was unfair or potentially harmful (this is a criticism I got with my stunts). Have [you] heard that at all? I believe you did everyone a favor by pointing out an obvious flaw in the system—it’s up to the reporters responsible to make changes around this information. What do you think?
It is true that these kinds of investigations pose an ethical dilemma. We must weigh the possible benefits against the possible harms. In this case, it is the risk of making some people eat a chocolate bar and embarrassing some bad journalists versus promoting skepticism about diet claims and showing that scientific studies can get misleading results when they don’t understand statistics. I’ll leave it to your readers to decide for themselves.
With that in mind, what do you think the solution is? What do we have to change?
The next time you read a news story that seems to be giving you clear diet advice to lose weight, you should get angry and write to the editor. We have a better understanding of why stars sometimes blow up than why people become obese. This is hard science, not “lifestyle” fodder.
You did this with something that I do think is relatively harmless and you did come clean. Do you think that the same tactics or manipulation could be used more nefariously? Is that what’s happening?
I think all of the diet-nutrition-fitness media is corrupt. It’s bad science and worse journalism, all driven by companies selling rubbish. Oh sorry, you weren’t talking about mainstream media?
Now that you’ve come clean and revealed the bogus facts behind the story—do you think the original narrative is going to die or keep going like some sort of zombie? Have you seen the corrections you were hoping for?
I’ve seen one and only one real correction.
New York Observer, May 2015*
I’M NOT SURE WHEN I FIRST BECAME AWARE OF Charles C. Johnson. It may have been from a few tweets he directed at me. It might have been from one of the numerous controversial profiles of him in the New York Times, Politico, Gawker and other places. I do specifically recall being tagged in a tweet for a $500 bounty he’d put on anyone who could get an advertiser to pull out of Al Sharpton’s TV show.
It was exactly the kind of political divisiveness that I have tried to cut out of my life over the last few years, so I mostly ignored it. It’s also the kind of stunt that has made Charles wildly popular in some conservative circles. He’s aggressive, he’s unorthodox, he knows which buttons to press. With the collapse of traditional media, he’s figured out how to drive media narratives better than just about anyone. In this way, he is very much the heir to the legacy of Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe.
For some people, that’s an honor. Others consider it a damning insult. To some, Charles is a toxic troll, abusing the system. To an equal number of people, he’s a maverick and a truth teller.
I can see it both ways. It’s complicated and here’s why: Charles cites my book Trust Me, I’m Lying as one of his most significant influences. In other words, I may want [to] disavow what he does, but I cannot avoid admitting that he is partially a reflection of myself. It’s an unusual position for an author to be in—to see his own book used in ways he’d rather not have it be used. In fact, in this instance I’m seeing it used in precisely the ways I warned against. At the same time, it’d be hard to argue that Charles C. Johnson is doing anything that your average publicist, blogger, pundit or strategist doesn’t do—the only real difference is degree.
When Charles tweeted about my book last week, I decided to act. Why not email him and talk? Clearly we share some common ground, why not connect? Having already spoken to left-wing activists who manipulate the media and the people behind #Gamer-Gate, why not learn from someone equally controversial? We ended up chatting on the phone for about thirty minutes last week discussing everything from the Overton Window to the towns of central California. It was pleasant, provocative and challenging. I came away impressed in a lot of ways. I followed up over email with the questions below. Some of the views he expressed I strongly disagree with. In other answers, I think he nails it. But that is the nature of a figure like Charles—smart, but undeniably frustrating in the ways he uses it.
I hope that Charles’s honest and amoral tactics help reveal even more about the media system (sorry, racket) to you, the public. Only when we know how our news really gets made, can we gauge our appetite for consuming it.
So we’ve never met, never really spoken, but it occurred to me that I had rather strong opinions about you. Yet, if I really dig into my own views here, I have to admit those opinions come almost entirely from sources I don’t trust or respect much. Do you find that that is fairly common with people who interact with you?
You’d be surprised at the sorts of people I interact with on a day-to-day basis. I’m friendly with dozens of journalists, multiple billion-aires, law enforcement, and thousands of everyday researchers. This is how I like it. In Shakespeare the fool was the one who was allowed to tell the truth. I don’t mind it if I’m made fun of or mocked so long as all the right people know that I’m right. I simply don’t believe that most of the media has any real power at all and that it’s only a matter of time before it all implodes.
There was a concerted effort by various publications and blogs to demonize me in 2014, especially after I exposed the Rolling Stone scandal and Jackie [Ed note: Last name has been deleted], the lying girl behind it. These include BuzzFeed, Gawker, Jezebel, Deadspin, etc., who just made things up about me. Normally this negative attention would have bothered me but I don’t really respect all of these sites so I understood what they were doing. They saw a competitor so they reacted negatively. Andy Warhol once said that he doesn’t read criticism but measures it in inches. I’m much the same way.
I think a lot of the dislike for me isn’t real but a social signaling thing that’s used by reporters to vainly assure themselves that I’m not onto something.
Tell me, how do you describe what it is that you do? What’s your livelihood? How does it work? What place do you see yourself fitting in our current media culture?
I like to tell people I do research and that I’m building a private intelligence network. I own two companies—one is a news company and the other a research firm. The two operate synergistically. I make money from clients, from speaking gigs, from donors, from traffic, and from a hundred or so other sources. I like to use Twitter because that’s where the self-appointed cognoscenti create public opinion, i.e. the media or the political class. Jesse James robbed banks because that’s where the money is. I mess with Twitter because that’s where the people who need to be messed with are. In so doing I combine celebrity culture, nerd culture, and heavy research. It’s essentially #GamerGate applied to everything in the cultural space. I really enjoy having people from all over the world work with me to change the narrative and ultimately to change the world.
David Carr (who I did respect), wrote in his column about you that your style of journalism “says everything about the corrosive, underreported news era we are living through.” I agree we live in a corrosive media era, but I would argue that we’re anything but “underreported.” What would you say to the idea that we have far too much media and that at some point, it’s become this giant beast that needs to be constantly fed?
I spoke to David for 4 hours and explained to him very politely what I was doing and why it was important and in keeping with the journalistic icons we hold dear. He couldn’t write the column that I may actually be brilliant so he had to slime me. He kept insisting that I was like the ghost from Ghostbusters 2 and then he said I was juvenile or something. It was kind of sad. I wrote about the story.
I think there was something very revealing about the Times and our media where great reporters like Ray Hernandez and Nicholas Wade don’t get the media attention they deserve and ultimately leave the Times while recovering crack addicts like Carr—with no technical chops whatsoever—are lionized as the voice of the internet. It’s very strange. I don’t agree that there is such a thing as too much information and I’m a tad bit disappointed that there’s not even more information available. I suppose the human brain is only capable of so much.
Is there anything you’ve published that you regret? I’ve argued in the past that iterative journalism is a real problem—this reporting live, in real time, as everything happens—but you clearly operate your Twitter feed in a sort of stream of consciousness reporting style. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you don’t.
I regret publishing the wrong photo of Jackie for an hour [Ed note: last name deleted]. Other than that, I don’t regret anything I’ve published. I think there are higher standards for me than there are for massive media conglomerates, which is odd, because I have a millionth [of] their resources. Still, I’m profitable and they are not so maybe it doesn’t really matter.
I can’t think of anything I’ve gotten wrong. Sometimes I’ll be right years later, like I was with U.S. Senator Menendez. Sometimes I’ll be proven right in real time as I was with Sony not being hacked by North Korea or Elizabeth O’Bagy, a Syria analyst, manufacturing her credentials to lie us into war. Of course in the media these days it doesn’t much matter if you are right. It matters if you can persuade people you are right. This is kind of a fascinating feature of our time. You have to become a celebrity before people start to listen. I wish this weren’t so but it is.
Who is the least trustworthy person in journalism?
Shane Smith of Vice is a serial con artist who lied about being a wartime correspondent. The notion that his company is worth a billion-plus dollars is laughable. (I wrote about it at the Daily Caller.) Anderson Cooper is a close second. The more you dig in on Cooper the more you’ll find out he’s made up things in his past, too.
What is the easiest loophole to exploit in our current system?
The newsroom can never know as much information as the crowd or private network can. There’s a certain necessary occupational arrogance that comes with assuming that a few thousand people can know all the news that’s fit to print. I’m a bit more suspicious. There’s a huge bias toward breaking news. If you can break new news while everyone else is following your lead you can control the future. People are tired of the right-wing and left-wing ghettos.
If you wanted to pass a totally false story through the media, how would you do it? If you wanted to take someone down, how would you do it? Can you spot when that is happening or being done by other people?
Well, Rolling Stone and NBC News are the experts on fake stories and I had a hand in exposing both of these organizations. I have only one rule—which is that I don’t do anything fake. I start with the unguarded moment. Most people have moments where they aren’t “on,” where they reveal their true selves. Oftentimes it’s in decisions they make or don’t make. I focus on the “who” behind the headlines. I look at their finances, at their spouses, I go through the public records, and then begin working the phones. I try to learn about how people actually are. There is often a huge disconnect between the public profile and the private self. This is where much of my work gets its power.
The media typically operates in packs on Twitter. They’ll be friends that promote one another’s work and advance one another’s career. I use Twitter to monitor this group activity. I map out the relationships. I also have spies on various listservs and I pay people for information, whether that’s in the form of more information, nice dinners, or cash, I leave up to the seller. Usually you’ll notice the attack on someone happens all at once. If you can find the origin point you can map the entire relationship network.
Traffic to your site is relatively small. You have a sizable number of Twitter followers, though not near other news figures and bloggers. Yet you seem to exert an immense amount of influence over certain news stories—often through the same media outlets that probably wish they didn’t have to follow your lead. Is this trading up the chain? How does this work?
I measure traffic to dollar spent rather than just traffic. In that comparison I’m actually doing very, very well. I’ve never seen traffic [as] the be all and end all of influence. And everyone knows that people lie about traffic figures all the time. The traffic numbers are designed to get the attention of advertisers but there are ways to make money independent of traffic numbers. On Twitter I’m told that I have one of the most viewed but least followed accounts. This is one of the hidden variables that determines how popular an account is.
I understand how Twitter works a lot more than my critics who don’t seem to know what open protocols are. Trading up the chain is important but what’s more important is to control the mind of your critics, to live in their heads. I think I’ve figured out how to do that repeatedly and this is actually a very lucrative trick. I’m not interested in spending my brain cells on how to create an ad that you’ll click on to sell you hair products. That’s not my comparative advantage. Of course I don’t much mind ads because they provide another revenue stream.
I’ll be honest: I just don’t get some of the things you seem to have very passionately latched on to. What does it matter if Obama is gay? Do you care? What do the pictures in Michael Brown’s Instagram account matter? To an outsider, it seems that you often focus on issues of race, gender and so forth as a wedge. What would you say to that?
I’m interested in taboos. One of the successes of the Obama years was how he made certain inquiry into his past forbidden. I suspect part of that was the fascination that many people had with the novelty of a black president. In essence, the media gave a monopoly to enterprising journalists. As time [goes] on that monopoly has begun to crack. I’ll publish more things when Obama is out of office. He is easily one of the most fascinating cons ever perpetrated on the public. However you feel about his politics—and I’m not a fan—there’s a lot that isn’t known about him and should be.
First thing Obama did when he went to Occidental is join the gay club on campus. This was in 1979. His mentor at Occidental was Larry Goldyn, a very prominent gay man. He lived with gay men in New York. None of the women he is reported to have dated—and there are only two—describes having had a sexual relationship with Obama. He has told several contradictory stories about how he met his wife. Large chunks of his first book have been discredited. I’m fascinated by all of this Obama past. I don’t care if he sleeps with men but I do think it’s interesting that in 2015 we can’t have a black, gay president. Why not? I suspect we’ve had other gay presidents in the past and yet Obama seems to be off limits because we want to believe the narrative about his family life even though we know Michelle Obama once tried to divorce him.
The reason I published Michael Brown’s Instagram and Twitter feed is that it directly contradicts the media narrative that he was a gentle giant. He was anything but. I helped end that narrative rather quickly. I don’t believe in publishing conventional material because that’s not where my comparative advantage is. Most people in the media all do the same thing and then wonder why they are paid so little. The answer is that they’ve made themselves redundant.
Race is the biggest taboo in America because our regime is grounded on the idea that we’re all naturally equal and that anyone can achieve the American dream. And yet we observe that blacks, on average, still do poorer than other ethnic groups. At a certain point I stopped believing the cultural argument as serious. Why, for example, do Asian-Americans and Jews consistently out earn whites? I started learning more about the differences that exist in IQ between racial groups and about how genetically we are actually quite different from one another. I learned about the MAO-A gene and its theoretical effects on violence. It’s my view that as we become a more information based society and that people reap bigger and bigger gains according to their IQ that this inequality will increase, rather than decrease. This development will have all kinds of interesting effects on our politics and society as time goes on.
People actually find it cathartic to violate certain taboos. I try to give them the truth that explodes those taboos. I suspect this is why they keep coming back. That, and they love solving puzzles and exploring and finding out the truth for themselves.
In that vein, is there anything that is off limits? Anything that should be off limits? I hate getting asked “where do you draw the line” because the line is often private, and usually varies from case to case. But do you struggle with this?
I do have limits but I’m not prepared to discuss them at this time. I do struggle with it but not as often as you would think.
You were upfront with me about your having autism. How does that impact what you do?
I’m not sure and I’m not sure I’m the best person to say. I have always been told that I have high IQ and low empathy but it’s hard to say what effect this has on my work or on me.
When I wrote Trust Me, I’m Lying, it was because I hated where I saw political and cultural discourse going. I basically wanted no part of it. Yet, you seem to have read the book and seen what I’ve seen, and love it. You take this world like a fish to water, don’t you?
Yes, I think it’s a manual for living in the 21st century. I no longer believe in persuading people but in using taboos and playing with them to get issues highlighted that would otherwise be ignored. I think there’s nothing wrong with it if it’s done for the right reasons.
What do you wish more people knew about you? What do you wish they knew about what you do?
I think there’s this view about me in certain circles that has more to do with status signaling than it does any real contempt or insight. I wish some people knew how deliberative I am and how I regard this as a chess game. It isn’t so personal.
Finally—why are you even talking to me? I know why I’m talking to you: Because why not? There’s no reason that people, especially if they disagree with each other based on what they’ve read online—shouldn’t connect and have a conversation together.
I tend to be friendly to people who approach me and assume good faith on my part. I like to talk to people and I like to learn new things.
New York Observer, February 2015*
I FIRST HEARD OF PETER YOUNG WHEN A REPORTER at the Daily Dot asked me if I was somehow involved in 2013’s “Ex-Vegans” stunt in which dozens of former vegans were exposed for having eaten meat. After dominating the media cycle for several days, the surprise left hook of the campaign landed: All the traffic and inbound links were redirected to footage of appalling slaughterhouse conditions. Hundreds of thousands of people were unwittingly exposed to the very unpleasantness that media attempts to shield from them.
I’m not a vegan, and I had nothing to do with the campaign—but I do have a lot of respect for its brilliance and execution and for the fact that it reveals a salient fact about our times. Today’s media system is a bit like an emperor with no clothes. Peter Young resembles nothing so much as Mathew Carpenter, the man who recently turned a stunt about shipping glitter to your enemies into $100,000. They both understand intuitively how the media works and have used it repeatedly to advance their interests. While they did what they did for very different reasons, I learned that they’d both read my book, Trust Me, I’m Lying, and it had influenced their actions.
I thought I would interview Mr. Young because he recently ran another campaign of media manipulation, in this case intended to reveal and expose problems with the TSA watch list (a system which he is intimately familiar with since he is, in fact, on it). In less than eight hours, his blog—which he had constructed entirely for the purposes of getting attention—was picked up by places like Boing Boing, Techdirt and Forbes. And now he’s ready to explain exactly what he does to advance his ideology and how it works in today’s online-driven culture. He assures me the answers below and the stories on his site are 100 percent true. I’ll leave it to you whether or not you want to trust him.
So tell us, are you really on the TSA watch list and how did that happen?
In 1998, I was charged with Animal Enterprise Terrorism for my role in freeing foxes and mink from fur farms. This amounted to cutting fences and opening cages at six farms. Under the weight of an 82-year maximum sentence, I became a fugitive for seven years, lived under several aliases, and was arrested at a Starbucks in 2005. I served two years in prison.
Because of the “terrorist” label, in the years since I’ve had my house raided by the FBI twice, been named as suspect in several animal liberations, found laptops with dead batteries fully charged when removed from storage a year later (do the math), had my garbage stolen by the authorities, and learned a woman who took me on [a] trip to Moab was working for the FBI.
Of it all, the TSA attention is among the least intrusive.
Now, how does that differ from what was reported in the media and what you put up on your blog? Is there any part of the record you can clear up for us?
Before my anonymity as “the jetsetting terrorist” was compromised by Forbes, I described the crime that put me on the TSA’s watch list as an “activist-related property crime.” Animals are considered property in the eyes of the law, so this was accurate. As for the rest: It wouldn’t be possible to untangle all the misinformation reported in the media and elsewhere over the years. I can’t complain. I probably planted half of it anyway.
[Editor Note: From what Mr. Young told me when he originally reached out, he created the blog, uploaded the posts, then backdated them so it seemed older and more organic. And until this article was published, no outlet doubted the intentions/legitimacy of the blog.]
Tell us how and why you decided to make this something the media would pounce on? What did you do? How did it work? How much traffic /attention did it get?
The Jetsetting Terrorist was launched with the stated goal of going mainstream within two weeks. It took about eight hours. The specific end-goal was The Alex Jones Show. While culturally considered fringe, he has a larger platform than most websites and TV shows. And he hates the TSA. (Spoiler alert: Alex has yet to call me.)
My blueprint—straight from your Trust Me, I’m Lying playbook—was as follows:
• Set up an anonymous burner email account.• Identify people (leftist/libertarian-leaning celebrities and public figures) with large Twitter followings, get their personal email addresses.
• Email them a link to the site and a two-line email about how this is the best site ever and how “surprised” I am they haven’t tweeted it yet. Pretty simple.
• Trade it up the chain until hitting something big.
• Leverage my anonymity to offer Alex Jones the exclusive on my identity reveal, for an interview.
Why Twitter? Better credibility-to-ease-of-penetration ratio. Here’s what I mean:
Writing a blog post is a time investment. Bloggers are selective of what they dedicate a post to. A prolific blogger might post once or twice a day. A Tweet is copy, paste, done. A prolific Twitter user might post on Twitter 20-plus times a day. But for the purpose of leveraging mentions to receive larger mentions, they are the same: A single tweet has a unique URL that can be sent to larger platforms needing some social proof before running a story. In short, baiting John Cusack into tweeting a link is lower-effort, higher-yield than coverage on a low-level libertarian blog.
I didn’t have to go far. Within a few hours of going live, I (anonymously) sent a link to Sean Bonner. Sean and I had spoken at the same conference once and met afterwards. I was a fan of his email newsletter, and he had a decent Twitter following. More importantly: He was a former contributor to Boing Boing.
As a major driver of virality, Boing Boing was a prized target. Going through a current contributor was like storming the gates. Going through a former contributor was sneaking in the back door. Sean tweeted it within minutes. With the anonymous burner account, I sent a link to the tweet to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing. A few hours later, it was on Boing Boing.
From there I set up 10 more burner accounts and carpet-bombed the internet with this email:
This is on the front page of Boing Boing right now but they just did a weak copy/paste job. Would like to see ____ cover this properly.
A white hipster writes hilarious stories about TSA encounters, and flying while on the terrorist watch list. Too good.
The author is anonymous, but worth a try.
I sent this to exactly 103 journalists. I tweaked it slightly to appeal to specific targets. My approach was not scattershot. The majority of emails were sent to journalists who had previously covered the TSA or other civil liberties issues. If done right, you’re adding value to the journalist. It is an equitable exchange.
Immediately thereafter, Forbes contacted me for an interview. In a follow up email, the reporter stated she had done a reverse-lookup of my cell number and determined my real identity. The story—outing me as “the jetsetting terrorist”—ran the following week, bringing attention to both the TSA and the bigger issue of classifying a broad segment of the population as “terrorists.”
Creating the site and content took three days. And it was methodically crafted to maximize virality.
The elements were:
Anonymity: Mystique is powerful.
It’s never been done: With so much talk about the TSA, no one had gone quite as public with their experiences on the TSA’s terrorist watch list.
Awesome content: There’s no shortcut here. I have a background as a writer, and while I wrote with haste, I put care into maximizing the impact of the prose. A collection of generic and poorly written TSA stories would have gone nowhere.
Riding the wave of an ongoing conversation: Controversy over the TSA was a regular part of the public debate. There was a pent up demand for a new angle on an increasingly stale subject.
Solid tagline: “I’m a convicted terrorist. I travel a lot. And the TSA won’t leave me alone. This is my diary of traveling as a marked man.” I spent a lot of time crafting that.
Going hipster: The original “about me” sidebar read “How a jet-setting hipster became a jetsetting hipster terrorist.” While subtle, portraying myself as a “hipster” was in all likelihood the determining factor in making this viral. When you get “terrorist,” “jetsetter,” and “hipster” in one place, it’s too absurd to not spread. You’re clicking that link. (This was, by the way, the only part I changed when my identity was revealed. Calling myself a “hipster” just isn’t accurate. And no one uses that word self-referentially.)
A powerful narrative: There are 1,000 ways to tell the same story. I put effort into maximizing chances of this getting picked up by utilizing timeless literary narratives, accentuating the underdog effect, the reluctant hero, and (subtle) revenge themes.
Niching down: The original plan was “The Hipster Terrorist”—anonymous (and 100 percent true) stories from a convicted “terrorist” documenting the humorous side-effects of life under the “terrorist” label. From stories about awkward dinner-table conversation when meeting a girlfriend’s parents, to the baristas at the Star-bucks I frequent googling my name (hilarity ensues). While this would be a great blog (and a book I’ll probably write soon), it lacked any timely discussion to piggyback on. Niching down to the TSA was clearly the right move.
Hipster jetsetting terrorist
To clover.hope Clover
This was on the front page of Boing Boing over the weekend, but they just did a weak copy/paste job. Would like to see Jezebel cover this properly. He’s getting tons of internet love right now, but no one is highlighting what an entitled, pompous douchebag this guy is.
A white hipster writing stories about verbally abusing the TSA (including women) because he’s on the “terrorist watch list”.
Before this, you manipulated the media with a stunt to drive attention to conditions in slaughterhouses and factory farms. Why do you feel justified in essentially tricking or circumventing the news process in order to get your message across? Is this something you think more advocates should do?
The game plan for The Vegan Sellout List was this:
• Launch a site that allowed people to anonymously submit the names and photos of former vegans, and the story behind their rise and fall from veganism.
• Pre-populate the list with 100 former vegans who have a platform (from celebrities to ex-vegans with high-traffic blogs).
• Email all 100 with a link to their entry on the site, and bait them into mentioning it in a blog post or Tweet.
• Concurrently, generate buzz in the vegan blogosphere.
• Parlay all of this to successively bigger blogs, until it hit a huge site that generated serious traffic.
• Pull a bait-and-switch, forcing visitors to watch a video of slaughterhouse footage before entering.
“The Vegan Sellout List” was what the internet craved: Offensive, provocative, shameless, and impossible not to have an opinion on. From launch the goal was Gawker. We would consider it a success if we hit Gawker. (We spent a considerable amount of time trying to identify writers at Gawker who were former vegans to provoke coverage by making it personal, without success. Gawker ran the story in under three weeks anyway.)
Our plan worked a little too well. We’d given ourselves a two-month window to build a buzz before getting it mainstream. It hit top-tier outlets like Fox News in under three weeks. When the traffic explosion hit, we weren’t prepared. It came so fast and at such volume, it crashed the server. The aborted plan was to utilize a plugin to compel a video view before entering, and with a crashed server the only remaining option was a URL redirect. We sent hundreds of thousands of people to a third-party site that autoplayed a graphic video titled “Meet Your Meat.”
In the end, the results were massive: At least 200,000 people baited into getting their first glimpse inside a slaughterhouse. The Vegan Sellout List was vindicated by the results it achieved.
I have friends working for nonprofits who travel in vans to college campuses all year asking people to watch two minutes of slaughterhouse footage. On a good day, they reach 200 people. This is important and noble work. But consider that the Vegan Sellout List may have sent over 1,000 times as many people to the same footage for three days work. Even if only 10 percent of visitors watched the video, this is an incredible return on my time investment.
Everyone doing advocacy work owes it to their message to get acquainted with the concept of leverage, and ways to increase the impact of each unit of effort exponentially. As I asserted in my original statement on this stunt: Before this stunt, most vegans believed the temperature in Hell would have to hit 32 degrees before FoxNews. com would ever send tens (or hundreds) of thousands of their readers directly to graphic slaughterhouse footage. Regarding why these methods are justified: While the lines are increasingly blurred, I apply two different ethical equations to bloggers vs. journalists.
Bloggers: On the internet, being vocally “offended” is the new “look at me I’m cool.” It’s like being 12 and putting a playing card in your bike spokes. I’ve met many of the bigger bloggers in the vegan space. Most of them are awesome people. A few of the more drama-centric ones are clearly acting out their own demons. Like, they couldn’t get a date in high school (or now), and it’s payback time. (To be fair, this is my take on a large swath of the internet, and is not vegan-specific.) This is exactly the type of person The Vegan Sellout List was designed to agitate for traffic. If you’ve built a career around creating—or spreading—fake drama, then you’re fair game.
Regarding larger online media, it’s a more delicate equation. However in this instance it was simple: If they consider a list of former vegans to be “news,” they’ve forfeited all journalistic integrity and have left themselves wide, wide open. They’re for-profit businesses. I have a message. We’re both dealing in the traffic economy. In this instance, I just happen to beat them at their own game.
What have you learned about the media and its inner-workings from your campaign?
The unspoken conspiracy that you speak of, that exists between journalists and those seeking publicity is very real. If you have a story that provokes—real or not—they have the time. Give them the promise of traffic and a little plausible denial and you’re in. I’ve received tremendous insights from Trust Me, I’m Lying and your Creative Live course. I got to work on The Jetsetting Terrorist the day after finishing the latter. Your point that there is a harmony of interests between journalists and those who wish to hack the media is very powerful, and has proven true.
I’ve also learned that a big part of your playbook (i.e. manufacturing controversy to generate publicity) is given a nitro boost when executed in the activist realm.
I have to be careful here because it’s clear whose side I’m usually on, but there’s a small segment who are attracted to social movements because . . . let’s just say they have an emotional agenda. To use your term, they’re “rage profiteers,” reveling in the drama economy. And I’ve been the hidden hand instigating them for a greater good more times than I would admit. The best case study in this (which I had nothing to do with) was the recent “controversy” around a vegan cookbook titled Thug Kitchen. If you ever do a Trust Me, I’m Lying update, you have to get this in there. Thug Kitchen was an anonymous vegan blog, where vegan recipes were written in cartoonish “thug” language. It was funny, the blog became popular, and the (anonymous) authors got a book deal.
Weeks before the book’s release, the authors revealed their identity. Surprise: They were two attractive white people from Los Angeles. Within days, several small anarchist blogs were buzzing in outrage accusing the authors of “cultural appropriation” and “digital blackface” and calling for a boycott. They announced (and eventually delivered) protests at book signings. This went up the chain like wildfire, and hit Vice just before the book’s release. That was four months ago. It’s been the best-selling vegan cookbook on Amazon ever since.
I have no knowledge of whether this controversy was real or manufactured. But if the latter, it followed a recipe that couldn’t fail:
• Take a target appetizing to leftist and politically radical bloggers (attractive, white, sporty vegans).
• Assign to them some perceived misconduct that fits into one of the top three categories of internet scandal (in this instance: racism).
• Seed excitable elements of the blogosphere with the fake scandal.
If I were the invisible puppet master orchestrating this, I would know that only 0.02 percent of people will be genuinely offended by the Thug Kitchen authors being white. But another 60 percent will feign outrage to look cool. And just about everyone else will quietly nod their heads in agreement for fear of being labeled racists themselves.
And what do the authors care? They get six-figures in free publicity. The anarchists get their flavor-of-the-week drama. Win-win.
Why should we believe you? This is a question I get a lot myself—to which my answer is: Why should I lie? Lying was keeping it a secret—but I am curious to hear your thoughts. Obviously some people would say you undermine the credibility of the cause with these tactics.
My response is: What’s in it for me? I don’t have clients (cows in slaughterhouses don’t pay), and I don’t take credit (I was outed in both instances we’re discussing. This would be a longer interview if we got into the stunts I haven’t been caught for). If anyone has a point they think defeats the message that animals are exploited (or that the TSA targets people based on their politics), then by all means lay your evidence on the table.
But attacking a message’s delivery device and suggesting it undermines the message itself is the work of someone who lacks an argument. Credibility is everything, particularly when you’re the bearer of a message people don’t want to hear. Much different than artists, whose position I envy. When you’re an artist, there is virtually nothing that can harm your reputation.
Most media tends to be good media. With advocacy, it’s much more delicate. You have to honor the facts at all costs. The Vegan Sellout List utilized deception of intent, not deception of facts. It was exactly what it purported to be (until the link-redirect): A directory of ex-vegans. The Jetsetting Terrorist was exactly what it claimed: A collection of true stories about a convicted terrorist being harassed by the TSA. I employ Trojan horses, not deception.
Very little I would admit to.
Despite a compelling interview given by my female co-conspirator, it’s looking increasingly unlikely the No. 2 women’s magazine will ever run their “How a one-night stand with a radical vegan turned me into an animal rights activist” story. If it does surface, that was all us. While tasteless, a “sex confessional” is just about the only angle to get a message of substance into a publication like that. On the more frivolous front, an anonymous hip-hop project that will make License To Ill–era Beastie Boys controversy look amateur. And on the advocacy front, the stakes are too high to reveal my hand. But I will continue to provoke thought into our relationship with animals by any means necessary.
New York Observer, January 2015*
LAST WEEK, THE WEB WAS BOTH OUTRAGED AND IN love with a controversial new start-up called ShipYourEnemiesGlitter. com. The premise was both inspired and insane—for $9.99 you could ship a benign glitter bomb to any friend or enemy anywhere in the world. Time.com covered it, and so did Fast Company, the Telegraph, Huffington Post, TechCrunch (note: the Observer declined to cover it because it seemed suspicious). Then after claiming six figures’ worth of orders and more than a million pageviews, the founder begged users to stop inundating him with requests and put the whole thing up for auction, where it netted $85,000.
So what the hell was all that? Well, over the weekend, I got a rather unexpected email from Mathew Carpenter, the founder himself. It turns out that he had read my book Trust Me, I’m Lying and some of my Betabeat columns on trading up the chain and media sourcing. This partially inspired his unusual experiment to test his marketing skills, have some fun and see how the media really works. By accident, he revealed two very clear things to us all: how great the demand for weird, funny start-ups actually is and how desperate and derivative the online media is these days. In fact, he told many reporters exactly what he was doing but they chose not to print it—for fear it would ruin their story or make them look bad.
In what is now the Observer’s second big exclusive on a media stunt that fooled nearly everyone in media, I was able to ask Mathew some questions about what happened, what he saw and what he learned and how this stunt came to be. I hope his answers provide some insight for readers on how the news works these days—but more importantly I hope it chastises increasingly lazy reporters. Oh and I hope everyone gives Mathew some credit, because this whole thing was absolutely brilliant from top to bottom.
What made you decide to do it and why did you think you could pull this off?
I run a lot of websites that earn recurring income with very little work. My New Year’s resolution was to work on more side projects to keep me occupied whilst improving my marketing & development skills. I read your book about 8 months ago and experimented with a few different ideas before hitting a success with this website.
It sounds like you traded this up the chain, as I call it, going from one media outlet to the other until it became a major story. Which outlets/platform did you target first and how did it go from there? Who delivered the most punch/traffic?
Lately I’ve found that the media (here in Australia particularly) has become extremely lazy with sourcing. 90% get their stories from aggregation websites which is what I initially targeted. I knew that if the story blew up on websites such as Reddit & Product Hunt that it would be a success. The media attributed the success to being the most upvoted Product of the Day on Product Hunt, however in terms of referral traffic Product Hunt came in 21st.
Was there any outlet who asked you tough questions or you felt really wanted to see if there was substance to this story? Who was the worst in terms of rubber stamping and just repeating whatever they saw elsewhere?
The publication that put in the most effort, in my opinion, was Fast Company, who wrote about the website in the most detail and asked the best questions. There were a few outlets that (a) didn’t bother asking questions and just referenced already published articles and (b) didn’t wait for me to reply to their answers and just went live anyway. I’m looking at you, News Corp.
A couple of the reporters picked up on your SEO background. You have to tell us, what do you think being linked to and mentioned on essentially every media outlet is going to do for your rankings in search engines?
For Ship Your Enemies Glitter it’s going to mean that no competitor is going to outrank the website for whatever keywords the new owner wants to rank for. It was tempting not to 301 the entire site to my main business website but that would have cost me the $100,000, haha. I was name-dropping my other websites hoping for some link juice to them but they were either not mentioned, not linked to, or non-followed links.
Obviously you were pretty cynical about the media from the beginning, and had explored some of this before, but what did experiencing this make you think? What would you advise people learn from this, either for their own media habits or someone launching a product that they want to get attention for?
I mean, it really reinforced to me how little fact checking and verification goes into a story. For example, many outlets reported I was a student at a local University which isn’t true and I have no idea how they came to that conclusion. It also showed to me the sort of manipulation that some journalists put into a story. Another example was that there was one who asked for proof of the millions of visitors the website received. I provided screenshots of Google Analytics which is about the most accurate traffic tracking software out there, however they refused to accept it and published that I couldn’t provide third party proof of the numbers.
Finally, what’s next for you?
The great thing about this project, no matter how messy my place has gotten from the glitter is that I’ve met a lot of really smart & creative people from it so hopefully I get to work with them on something cool moving forward.
New York Observer, June 2015*
MADDOX IS THE FIR STWRITER IR EMEMBER reading on the web. If you came of age during the first blogging boom, you probably had a similar experience. His writing and his style was influential for a generation of writers, humorists and web entrepreneurs. Since launching in 1997, he’s seen hundreds of millions of visitors, developed some of the web’s most classic memes, and sold a metric ton of t-shirts. Most of all, he’s always been ahead of the curve in terms of online business models and calling out bullshit trends in culture from “extreme” marketing to the swine flu craze.
After a few years of sporadic content, Maddox is back in a big way. More recently, he’s built a massively popular podcast, a YouTube channel and regularly taken the media to task for offensive stories on Robin Williams’s death, BuzzFeed’s nasty habit of stealing content, and media’s propensity to pseudo-outrage.
If you had told me as a teenager, when my friends had Maddox stickers on their cars and we all eagerly AIM-chatted each other his pieces, that I’d be interviewing him over a decade later or that he’d occasionally link to my own writing, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. But here we are. To continue our series of interviews with influential and insightful voices on the inner-workings of today’s new media, I reached out to ask Maddox his thoughts on media manipulation, some of his least favorite websites, and outrage porn.
So you were one of the biggest and earliest critics of BuzzFeed—not just for the annoying listicles and nostalgia trolling but also for the content they steal from creators like you. A few years and millions of dollars in funding later what do you think of them now?
They’re even worse. I was just reading the gripes of BuzzFeed employees I know personally, who were complaining that they weren’t given credit for writing, producing or directing any of their videos. Since I wrote my original piece about BuzzFeed, many of my friends have found employment at their Los Angeles offices, where they produce much of their video content. Not only does the site take credit for material from other websites, BuzzFeed doesn’t even credit their own staff for the content they legitimately created. These credits aren’t insignificant either, as many of my friends have cobbled together careers based on their credits on small web projects. When BuzzFeed publishes content, the creator is, for all intents and purposes, BuzzFeed corporation. As a friend very aptly pointed out, The Onion doesn’t credit individual writers, but they are a satirical news organization whereas BuzzFeed is not. The Onion’s entire reason for existing is satire with a strong editorial point of view, while BuzzFeed’s reason for existing is . . . to generate ad revenue and to trick you into clicking their content. One does it out of necessity to its voice, the other out of ignorance, greed or malice.
There was the famous screenshot you took last year after Robin Williams’s death with ABC running the tasteless footage of his home. Ultimately, you targeted the CEO and they had to apologize and stop. Do you think if you hadn’t said anything, would anyone have cared? Of course, a bunch of other outlets also stole your scoop after. I’m guessing you don’t think very highly of the whole establishment?
If I hadn’t posted that juxtaposition of real-time helicopter footage on the same page as his family’s request for peace during their grief, it’s possible that someone else may have noticed the same thing, possibly even from ABC News. However if it were the latter, there’s a tremendous amount of internal pressure not to run problems like this up the corporate ladder. Chiefly, the fact that your boss has an ego and a boss of his or her own; pointing out a mistake like this could embarrass him or her and ultimately cost you your job, or at the very least, a raise or promotion. Would you risk it? Nah, better look the other way. You have bills to pay and mouths to feed. Why rock the boat? Let that asshole Maddox do it.
You and I talked about some of the sanctimonious coverage of the celeb nude leaks and then the Spider Man/Woman cover. Do you think these people actually care? Or do you think that pretending to be mad—that getting upset and getting other people upset—is a quick way to get traffic?
There are three reasons at play that, when combined, create a Captain-Planet-esque superhero of shitty motives for outrage: The first reason is that the righteous indignation feels good. We live in an age of relative peace where we don’t have a “big devil” like communism or fascism to point to as the source of all our problems. They need a cause that isn’t religious since believing in things isn’t cool anymore, so finding an enemy that they feel just in hating and blaming makes them feel needed. Second, there is the money motive. It’s very lucrative to get those clicks coming to your website. Outrage is big business. And third, as cynical as I am, I can’t totally dismiss the possibility that some of these people might actually care. However, their well-intentioned idiocy is often myopic, causing more harm than good.
Why does the media have to refer to every scandal as a BLANK-gate? What would you rather they do?
It’s a lazy communication device used by journalists as shorthand for “this is a scandal.” I’d rather they call it just that: a scandal. Though #GamerScandal doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. I think it’s irksome because it bothers us as writers to know that some lazy journalist thought they were being clever by using the suffix to get the headline. It’s a race to the bottom to see who can coin the word used to describe the scandal of the hour, with no regard for the breadth, scope or context of the issue. For example, the suffix was used to label both “Pardongate,” the controversy surrounding Bill Clinton’s pardoning of 140 people, and “Nipplegate,” when Justin Timberlake exposed Janet Jackson’s breast during the Super Bowl halftime show. Though the latter gave rise to the possibly more annoying “wardrobe malfunction.”
Tell us about your media diet. What do you read? Who do you trust? Who should people stay away from? What is the worst outlet in your eyes?
My favorite news portal is Google News. It shows headlines from a number of different news outlets for popular stories, so you can see at a glance which organizations are trying to spin the narrative. For example, when the GOP-led report on the Benghazi scandal (Benghazi-gate for short) was released, right-wing websites like Fox News wrote headlines like, “GOP lawmakers, Benghazi survivors fume over House report” whereas left-leaning news organizations bristled at the findings, using words like “debunked” to describe the scandal. I take the “truth is usually somewhere in the middle” approach and try to read both left-and right-leaning news websites. Though if I’m short on time, I’m partial to BBC or NPR. The dryer and more boring the news, usually the better. Remove the profit motive from the news, be it corporate or outrage-based, and you’ll get better news.
Your stance early on about not taking advertising on your site—because it would change how and what you wrote—was very influential to me. Not just for my own writing, but it helped me to see the subtle but significant warping effect that a business model can have on a medium (which I wrote a lot about in my book). Clearly, history has validated your views there—a huge part of the reason that internet culture is so awful is because of CPM advertising. How has that policy been for you? Clearly, it cost you a lot but are you happy with the choice? What about now with your videos, which are ad-supplemented in some ways?
The choice to publish in a medium that is funded by advertising, such as YouTube or podcasting, weighed heavily on me. I rationalized the decision by upholding my promise to always keep my written website ad-free to have an outlet to express myself that would always be free of corporate interests and the self-censorship that ensues. Having dipped my toe in ad-funded mediums, I appreciate the freedom I have to say what I want so much more. I’m constantly worried about what I can or can’t say when someone is paying the bills. Not having a profit motive to get people to click on my website has allowed me to be more honest as a writer. I don’t have to write a listicle to get people to click because I don’t make money from that traffic. Frankly, the more traffic that comes to my website, the more I have to pay out of pocket to serve those readers. Success punishes me.
The ad-free model has benefited me in another way: if I praise something, people trust me because they know I don’t advertise and have no reason to laud something I didn’t truly believe in. It’s a very powerful form of trust that money literally can’t buy. I feel comfortable with my decision. It’s a form of asceticism that has put me in dire straits financially at times, but the sacrifice has led to a greater appreciation for what I do.
What do you think of podcasting as a medium? It’s having a moment here and you’ve jumped on it in a big way. I remember you tried a radio show with Sirius, what 10 years ago now? Where do you see this going? What opportunities does it afford you?
Despite the Apple-related etymology of the name, podcasting is an excellent medium and the new home of talk radio. I first started listening to talk when I was 12-years-old, so I was saddened to see the demise of all the talk radio giants. When the last great AM and FM talk stations crumbled, the baton was passed to podcasting, starting with Adam Carolla. He was one of the first to make the successful transition to the new medium and has flourished. My brief stint with Sirius was fun, but didn’t last long because there were probably too many cooks in the kitchen.
The cost of entry into podcasting is almost trivial, but the medium is starting to get saturated and the path to success more difficult. That’s mostly a good thing, because the podcasts that do succeed are usually the best ones, made by the right people—the type of people who persist and create art, even when nobody is listening, because they love doing it. It has democratized broadcasting, and done it in a way that’s free from the specter of advertising. At least in the beginning. The future is bright.
This is not a media question at all, but I was genuinely surprised to learn when we hung out last year that you ride a bike. I just never saw Maddox on a bike. What else don’t we know?
I actually don’t eat a ton of red meat (steak). Though I try to get Korean or American BBQ at least once a month. I’ll never give up my bike though. Still the fastest way around town during traffic, guaranteed. I still recommend your episode to people as a “best of” for new listeners. Yours is the only guest-problem to make it to the top-10 list. We still reference your problem all the time. Would love to have you on again. Thanks for these interview questions, that was fun. I wanted to say this up top but didn’t want to sound like a circle jerk, but I really appreciate your writing and think that it’s insightful and well-written. We think alike on a lot of things, and there are few writers I’d say that about.
*http://observer.com/2016/10/exclusive-interview-how-this-right-wing-troll-reaches-100m-people-a-month/.
*http://observer.com/2015/06/behind-the-scenes-with-the-journalist-who-fooled-millions-about-chocolate/.
*http://observer.com/2015/05/exclusive-digital-darth-vader-charles-johnson-on-manipulating-politics-and-media/.
*http://observer.com/2015/02/exclusive-how-this-left-wing-activist-manipulates-the-media-to-spread-his-message/
*http://observer.com/2015/01/exclusive-how-this-man-got-the-media-to-fall-for-shipyourenemiesglitter-stunt/.
*http://observer.com/2015/06/exclusive-interview-maddox-talks-buzzfeed-podcasts-and-media-manipulation/.