• Most people don’t understand how today’s information cycle really works. Many have no idea of how much their general worldview is influenced by the way news is generated online. What begins online ends offline.

  • Radio DJs and news anchors once filled their broadcasts with newspaper headlines; today they repeat what they read on blogs—certain blogs more than others. Stories from blogs also filter into real conversations and rumors that spread from person to person through word of mouth. In short, blogs are vehicles from which mass media reporters—and your most chatty and “informed” friends—discover and borrow the news. This hidden cycle gives birth to the memes that become our cultural references, the budding stars who become our celebrities, the thinkers who become our gurus, and the news that becomes our news.

  • It’s bloggers informing bloggers informing bloggers all the way down. This isn’t anecdotal observation. It is fact. In a media monitoring study done by Cision and George Washington University, 89 percent of journalists reported using blogs for their research for stories. Roughly half reported using Twitter to find and research stories, and more than two thirds use other social networks, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, in the same way.2 The more immediate the nature of their publishing mediums (blogs, then newspapers, then magazines), the more heavily a journalist will depend on sketchy online sources, like social media, for research.

  • Recklessness, laziness, however you want to categorize it, the attitude is openly tolerated and acknowledged. The majority of journalists surveyed admitted to knowing that their online sources were less reliable than traditional ones. Not a single journalist said they believed that the information gathered from social media was “a lot more reliable” than traditional media! Why? Because it suffers from a “lack of fact+checking, verification or reporting standards.”

  • Publishers and advertisers can’t differentiate between the types of impressions an ad does on a site. A perusing reader is no better than an accidental reader. An article that provides worthwhile advice is no more valuable than one instantly forgotten. So long as the page loads and the ads are seen, both sides are fulfilling their purpose. A click is a click.

  • The payment structure of blogging reflects this emphasis on speed over other variables, such as quality, accuracy, or how informative the content might be. Early on blogs tended to pay their writers a rate per post or a flat rate with a minimum number of posts required per day. Engadget, Slashfood, Autoblog, and other sites run by Weblogs, Inc. paid bloggers a reported five hundred dollars a month in 2005 for 125 posts—or four dollars a post, four per day.2 Gawker paid writers twelve dollars a post as late as 2008. And of course these rates don’t include the other duties bloggers are stuck with, such editing, responding to e+mails, and writing comments. Professional blogging is done in the boiler room, and it is brutal.

  • I remember working with the very popular multiplatinum rock band Linkin Park and realizing their account, which had done over one hundred million views, would earn them barely six figures—to be split among six guys, a manager, a lawyer, and a record label. These kinds of rates force channels big and small to churn out videos constantly to make money. Every view is only a penny in their pocket.

  • THE ADVICE THAT MIT MEDIA STUDIES PROFESSOR Henry Jenkins gives publishers and companies is blunt: “If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.” With social sharing comes traffic, and with traffic comes money. Something that isn’t shared isn’t worth anything.

  • The media is in the evil position of needing to go negative and play tricks with your psyche in order to drive you to share their material online. For instance, in studies where subjects are shown negative video footage (war, an airplane crash, an execution, a natural disaster), they become more aroused, can better recall what happened, pay more attention, and engage more cognitive resources to consume the media than nonnegative footage.5 That’s the kind of stuff that will make you hit “share this.” They push your buttons so you’ll press theirs.

  • Things must be negative but not too negative. Hopelessness, despair—these drive us to do nothing. Pity, empathy—those drive us to do something, like get up from our computers to act. But anger, fear, excitement, or laughter—these drive us to spread. They drive us to do something that makes us feel as if we are doing something, when in reality we are only contributing to what is probably a superficial and utterly meaningless conversation. Online games and apps operate on the same principles and exploit the same impulses: be consuming without frustrating, manipulative without revealing the strings.

  • As Chris Hedges, the philosopher and journalist, wrote, “In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion.”

  • As a manipulator, I certainly encourage and fuel this age. So do the content creators. CNBC doesn’t care how they come off as long as they can sell ads against the traffic it brings. And the audience says they’re okay with it too—voting clearly with their clicks. We’re all feeding that monster.

  • You must be logged in to comment, the site tells me. Not yet a member? Register now. When I click, a new page comes up with ads all across it. I fill out the form on the page, handing over my e+mail address, gender, and city, and hit Submit. Damn it, I didn’t type the CAPTCHA right, so the page reloads with another ad. Finally I get it right and get the confirmation page (another page, another ad). Now I check my e+mail. Welcome to Politico!, it tells me: Click this link to validate your account. (Now they can spam me later with e+mails with more ads!) Registration is now complete, it says: another page and another ad. I’m asked to log in, so I do. More pages, more ads, but now I can finally share my opinion with the author. I am “engaged.”

  • This is how it is everywhere. It might take as many as ten pageviews to leave a comment on a blog the first time. The Huffington Post makes a big show of asking users to rate its articles on a scale from one to ten. What happens when you do that? It shows you another page and another ad. Or when you see a mistake in an article and fill out the Send Corrections form? Well, first they’ll need your e+mail address, and then they ask if you want to receive daily e+mails from them. When you do this, you are the sucker. The site doesn’t care about your opinion; it cares that, by eliciting it, they score free pageviews. I just got tired of being toyed with and decided to use this system to my advantage.

  • As the character Philip Marlowe observed in Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye: Newspapers are owned and published by rich men. Rich men all belong to the same club. Sure, there’s competition—hard tough competition for circulation, for newsbeats, for exclusive stories. Just so long as it doesn’t damage the prestige and privilege and position of the owners.

  • This was incisive media criticism (in fiction, no less) that was later echoed with damning evidence by theorists such as Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian. A friend put it more bluntly: “Each generation of media has a different cock in its mouth.”

  • Think about how we consume blogs. It is not by subscription. The only viable subscription method for blogs, RSS, is dead. For some of you who still religiously use an RSS reader, it might feel strange to hear me speak about it in the past tense, but RSS has died.* And so has the concept of subscribing.

  • Just look at the top referring sources of traffic to major websites and blogs. Cumulatively, these referring sources almost always account for more visitors than the site’s direct traffic (i.e., people who typed in the URL). Though it varies from site to site, the biggest sources of traffic are, usually, in this order: Google, Facebook, Twitter. The viewers were sent directly to a specific article for a disposable purpose: they’re not subscribers; they are seekers or glancers. This is great news for a media manipulator, bad news for everyone else. The death of subscription means that instead of attempting to provide value to you, the longtime reader, blogs are constantly chasing Other Readers—the mythical reader out in viral land. Instead of providing quality day in and day out, writers chase big hits like a sexy scandal or a funny video meme. Bloggers aren’t interested in building up consistent, loyal readerships via RSS or paid able to make it. So today, as RSS buttons disappear from browsers and blogs, just know that this happened on purpose, so that readers could be deceived more easily.

  • Follow a story through Google News and you’ll see. The service begins by displaying twenty or so main news stories from which a reader may choose. I may read one article, or I may read five, but I likely will not read all, so each one vies for my attention—to scream, in so many words, “Pick Me! Pick Me! Pick Me!” Google News displays the story from a handful of outlets under each of those bold headlines. If the main headline is from CNN, the smaller headlines underneath may be from Fox News or the Washington Post or Wikipedia or TalkingPointsMemo. Each outlet’s headline screams “Pick Me! Pick Me!” and Google alludes to the rest of the iceberg lurking beneath under these chosen few: “All 522 news articles.” How does one stand out against five hundred other articles? Its scream of “No, Pick Me! Pick Me!” must be the loudest and most extreme.

  • In a retrospective of his last ten years of blogging, publisher Om Malik of GigaOM bragged that he’d written over eleven thousand posts and 2 million words in the last decade. Which, while translating into three posts a day, means the average post was just 215 words long. But that’s nothing compared to the ideal Gawker item. Nick Denton told a potential hire in 2008 that it was “one hundred words long. Two hundred, max. Any good idea,” he said, “can be expressed at that length.”

  • THE WORLD IS BORING, BUT THE NEWS IS EXCITING. IT’S a paradox of modern life. Journalists and bloggers are not magicians, but if you consider the material they’ve got to work with and the final product they crank out day in and day out, you must give them some credit. Shit becomes sugar.

  • Since bloggers must find an angle, they always do. Small news is made to look like big news. Nonexistent news is puffed up and made into news. The result is stories that look just like their legitimate counterparts, only their premise is wrong and says nothing. Such stories hook onto false pretenses, analyze a false subject, and inform falsely.

  • Today, I’m not impressed anymore. I am depressed. Because the corrupt system I helped build is no longer in anyone’s control. The manipulators are indistinguishable from the publishers and bloggers—the people we were supposed to be manipulating. Everyone is now a victim, including me and the companies I work for. And the costs are incredibly high.

  • YOU SIT DOWN TO YOUR COMPUTER TO WORK. FIVE minutes later you’re on your fifth YouTube video of talking babies. What happened? Do you just not have any self+control? Sorry, but self+control has got nothing to do with it. Not when the clip was deliberately made more attractive by subliminally embedded images guaranteed to catch your attention. Not when the length of the video was calibrated to be precisely as long as average viewers are statistically most likely to watch.Would you also be surprised to hear that the content of the video was designed around popular search terms? And that the title went through multiple iterations to see which got the most clicks? And what if the video you watch after this one (and the one after that and after that) had been recommended and optimized by YouTube with the deliberate intention of making online video take up as much time in your life as television does?

  • You see a link to a video in a YouTube search that makes it look like a hot girl is in it, so you click. You watch, but she’s nowhere to be found. Welcome to the art of “thumbnail cheating.” It’s a common tactic YouTube publishers use to make their videos more tantalizing than the competition.

  • That’s what web culture does to you. Psychologists call this the “narcotizing dysfunction,” when people come to mistake the busyness of the media with real knowledge, and confuse spending time consuming that with doing something. In 1948, long before the louder, faster, and busier world of Twitter and social media, Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton wrote:

  • The interested and informed citizen can congratulate himself on his lofty state of interest and information and neglect to see that he has abstained from decision and action. In short, he takes his secondary contact with the world of political reality, his reading and listening and thinking, as a vicarious performance…. He is concerned. He is informed. And he has all sorts of ideas as to what should be done. But, after he has gotten through his dinner and after he has listened to his favored radio programs and after he has read his second newspaper of the day, it is really time for bed.

  • This is the exact reaction that web content is designed to produce. To keep you so caught up and consumed with the bubble that you don’t even realize you’re in one. The more time kids spend online, studies show, the worse their grades are. According to Nielson, active social networkers are 26 percent more likely to give their opinion on politics and current events off+line, even though they are exactly the people whose opinions should matter the least.

  • “Talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness,” Kierkegaard once said. Now you know why sharing, commenting, clicking, and participating are pushed so strongly by blogs and entertainment sites. They don’t want silence. No wonder blogs auto refresh with new material every thirty seconds. Of course they want to send updates to your mobile phone and include you on e+mail alerts. If the users stops for even a second, they may see what is really going on. And then the business model would fall apart.

  • People consume content online by scanning and skimming. To use the bird metaphor again, they are what William Zinsser called “impatient bird[s], perched on the thin edge of distraction.” Only 44 percent of users on Google News click through to real the actual article. Meaning: Nobody clicks links, even interesting ones. Or if they do they’re not exactly rigorous in pouring over it to make sure it proves the point in the last article they read.

  • Alarmist? Maybe. But I have seen hundreds of millions of dollars of market cap evaporate on the news of some bogus blog post. When the blog Engadget posted a fake e+mail announcing a supposed delay in the release of a new iPhone and Apple operating system, it knocked more than $4 billion off Apple’s stock price. The 2008 election was nearly derailed when the same “citizen reporter,” on separate occasions, tricked both Obama and a campaigning Bill Clinton into saying something vulnerable and honest by misrepresenting herself. The sixty+one+year+old woman later admitted that the two figures had “had no idea [she] was a journalist,” nor that she was recording them with a hidden device. Then, angered by the lack of compensation from the Huffington Post for her “scoops,” she resigned by publishing private e+mails between herself and Arianna Huffington—just to get one last blast of attention at someone else’s expense.

  • If I had been advising Adams, I would have told him that you lived by the sword of online attention, and now you may have to die by it. In other words, I would tell him to bend over and take it. And then I’d apologize. I’d tell him the whole system is broken and evil, and I’m sorry it’s attacking him. But there’s nothing that can be done.

  • At the risk of sounding like a public service announcement: This can happen to you too. After building Assange up, blogs destroyed him, not because he did anything wrong (although he very well may have; let me stress again that this has nothing to do with his guilt or innocence), but because his ascendancy made them feel angry and small, and now they had ammunition to act on those feelings. Assange learned what it feels like when anyone can leak heinous allegations that the media propagates before verifying. He got to experience personally what he had, through WikiLeaks, helped do to many others.

  • You used to have to be a national hero before you got the privilege of the media and the public turning on you. You had to be a president or a millionaire or an artist. Now we tear people down just as we’ve begun to build them up. We do this to our fameballs. Our viral video stars. Our favorite new companies. Even random citizens who pop into the news because they did something interesting, unusual, or stupid. First we celebrate them, then we turn to snark, and then, finally, to merciless decimation. No wonder only morons and narcissists enter the public sphere.

  • And if we’re not getting anything out of it, and nobody learns anything from it, then I don’t see how you can call blogs anything other than a digital blood sport.

  • And so fictions pass as realities. Everyone is selling and conning, and we hardly even know it. Our emotions are being triggered by simulations—unintentional or deliberate misrepresentations—of cues we’ve been taught were important. We read some story and it feels important, believing that the news is real and the principles of reporting took place, but it’s not.

  • Fake news. I don’t mean fake news in the Fox News sense. I mean the fake news that clogs up most newspapers and most news websites, for that matter. The new initiative will go nowhere. The new policy isn’t new at all…. The product isn’t revolutionary. And journalists pretend that these official statements and company press releases actually constitute news…. Fake news, manufactured, hyped, rehashed, retracted—until at the end of the week you know no more than at the beginning. You really might as well wait for a weekly like the Economist to tell you what the net position is at the end of the week.

  • Well, television is no longer the main stage of culture. The Internet is. Blogs are. YouTube is. Twitter is. And their demands control our culture exactly as television once did. Only the Internet worships a different god: Traffic. It lives and dies by clicks, because that’s what drives ad revenue and influence. The central question for the Internet is not, Is this entertaining? but, Will this get attention? Will it spread?

  • Readers hold equally exhausting assumptions of their own. The current system of delegated trust and deferred responsibility exists because readers have tacitly accepted the burden that blogs have abdicated. We’ve assumed it was our duty to sort through the muck and garbage to find the occasional gem, to do their fact+checking for them, to correct their mistakes and call ourselves contributors, when actually we’re cogs. We never asked the critical question: If we have to do all the work, what are we paying you guys for?

  • When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information? Most readers have abandoned even pretending to consider this. I imagine it’s because they’re afraid of the answer: There isn’t a thing we can do with it. There is no practical purpose in our lives for most of what blogs produce other than distraction. When readers decide to start demanding quality over quantity, the economics of Internet content will change. Manipulation and marketing will immediately become more difficult.

  • You cannot have your news instantly and have it done well. You cannot have your news reduced to 140 characters or less without losing large parts of it. You cannot manipulate the news but not expect it to be manipulated against you. You cannot have your news for free; you can only obscure the costs. If, as a culture, we can learn this lesson, and if we can learn to love the hard work, we will save ourselves much trouble and collateral damage. We must remember: There is no easy way.

  • Every new invention brings new problems with it. This is true for every medium and every communication method in history. For instance, in only the last thousand years of Latin were spaces inserted between words—a direct result of the spreading of books and scrolls that drowned people in so much text that they couldn’t read. Blogs have created their own problems. We too are drowning in information that bleeds together into an endless blur. Someone has to stand up and say the emperor has no clothes—the words have no spaces between them, and godammit, that’s ridiculous—because only after the problem is identified and the new ideal articulated can creative solutions can be found.

  • Part of writing this book was about a controlled burn of the plays and scams I had created and used along with the best of them. They have become constant dangers to me and the people I care about—to culture itself, in some ways. I not only want to render the tricks useless by exposing how they work, but I want to opt out of doing them myself. I want to force everyone else to opt out as well. Hopefully clearing this ominous pile of debris will make it easier to start fresh.