The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Notes on Ben Smith's "Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral"

Ben Smith has given us an explanation for why the press was so terrible for the past 15 years, and for that, I guess, we should all be grateful. It also serves as a memoir. To his credit, he is clear-eyed about a number of important things—sometimes not in the right ways, but not unreflective.

But he has done a weak apology. He has done a no-growth. And he has made it abundantly clear that he does not understand the intersectional nature of the multiplicity of his offenses. I’ve written on this blog that I believe Ben Smith is an Israeli asset, and this review will demonstrate why I think so.

I am probably not alone at this point in finding the cutesy language of Internet “virality” sickening. You can only hear the phrase, “we’re for the people who love the Internet!” so many times. But it’s a useful book in the sense that it speaks for its moment, and it’s probably all we’re going to get, at least until, inshallah, we start waterboarding these people.

Traffic feels, among other things, incredibly dated. It is an apologia for the New York blogging scene of the oughts, and a sort of dual biography of Jonah Peretti and Nick Denton—always referred to here as “Nick” and “Jonah.” There’s no point in dwelling on the endlessly parsed differences between Denton and Peretti’s approaches to content, because the angels on the head of that pin have stopped dancing.

I should think any lefty would recoil in horror today, given what Facebook and Twitter have become, at Smith recounting the heady days when he was the top blogger at Politico, and he developed what he considered the important reportorial innovation of doing his work by Tweet. The whole concept of journalism in this era, from the Twitter focus to describing Buzzfeed as the site for people who are bored at work, might be described as journalism for people who hate to read. Say what you will about Dimes Square, at least they read books.

The account here of the Obama years, when everyone believed in the “transformative power of social media” and similar cult-like nostrums is the part that has aged most poorly—even the cynical Nick Denton appears to have ascribed to the belief, untrue at the time and demonstrably so now, that “information wants to be free.” As these editors and activists marvel at their ability to generate—they would say enable—a protest anywhere in the world, any national security analyst would tell you the ability of a Chinese-venture-fund-backed company to do that is actually pretty dangerous. Peretti seems vaguely aware of the political implications of all this, but precisely backward:

The people who really saw the danger in virality, he liked to remark, were the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, who had discovered that they could stop a social movement from starting without totally wiping it out—just by deleting some of its content, enough to stop it from achieving escape velocity.

He seems not to have considered that other countries, with assets in these companies, or the Chinese, through their backing of some of them, might actually, in fact, be doing exactly this.

Peretti is rendered here as one of those innocently autistic figures, like Sam Bankman-Fried, who probably don’t even know they’re fronts, adult babies of a type God surely loves more than the rest of us. He gets famous with the Adbusters set, and invited to speak with Katie Couric, because he put the word “sweatshop” on a pair of Nike sneakers, and this seems to have convinced investors he was a viral marketing savant. At least that’s what we’re supposed to believe.

I’m trying not to be too harsh here, the impression one gets is of Peretti treating the Internet as a game he can learn and then win. Some of his experiments in understanding web traffic have developed basically into industry standards—raw traffic versus uniques, views versus engagement, the importance of homepage management, the uncomfortable fact that the clicks from titty slideshows underwrite most of the good content, these sorts of things. There is an endearing earnestness in Peretti’s assumption that he is learning something about human nature in all this, too.

But there are all sorts of mistaken assumptions in that. To imagine you know something about people by looking at them through their behavior on Facebook or Google is the height of folly. It’s a bit like a zookeeper imagining he’s an ecologist. There’s the operant conditioning problem, of the platforms themselves having an impact on the people using them, and there’s the role of the platforms themselves.

Here is a guy who, we are told, sees himself as catching a wave of social media’s power—Smith’s cover is Hokusai’s Great Wave in cursors—riding into the future, but he doesn’t seem to evince much criticism of the social media companies themselves. Can one surf without noticing the water? Again, this is assuming he his naive rather than in cahoots—I’m being generous.

As many other investors and CEOs from this period would readily tell you, trying to build a business in this way is like trying to shoot pool in an earthquake. There was no stable content strategy at any point for online news, because any business model could be rendered unviable more or less at the whim of a single developer at Google or Facebook, and this happened to a long string of publishers. Many noticed, but few spoke out, that depending on these Delphic pronouncements from the news feed people at Facebook or the search people at Google was going to be disastrous.

So the ones that succeeded had close relationships with the search people at Google and the news feed people at Facebook, as indeed Buzzfeed appears to have had—Smith describes one moment in 2011 when Google briefly crushed their traffic, and Google turned the firehose back on for them, and several meetings between Perretti and the news feed people at Facebook—that relationship in particular seems to have been very close. The assumption you have to make, if it all depends on this, is that success or failure is not the work of the invisible hand, or natural selection, but unnatural selection. I looked up one of the news feed chiefs named in here, Adam Mosseri, and he is an Israeli citizen. The SPAC that swept up Buzzfeed in 2021 is run by a South African who invests heavily in the Israeli tech industry. Smith mentions neither of these things.

If you look at these businesses all in pure economic terms, it looks like a weird set of nested payouts. The absurd overvaluations of these companies were typical of the times, but still, the idea that Buzzfeed—Buzzfeed!—could be worth $1.7 billion is the sort of nonsense, thank God, it will be harder to take seriously in the years to come. Buzzfeed’s investors included, at various times, many of the Chinese-aligned scoundrels that have in recent years, and are likely to continue to, have problems—SoftBank, Andreessen-Horowitz. The idea that venture capitalists are some special species is belied by this anecdote about Will Porteous:

…when he called up the site and immediately fell down a rabbit hole of silly, warmly nostalgic posts about the International House of Pancakes, he felt he’d found an addicting new kind of media.

What a deeply stupid sentence.

And if you think about the incestuous relationships between these media companies, it starts to look even weirder. HuffPo, similarly to The American Conservative, was started by a woman with a history on the right who turned against the Iraq War, but she did it by supposedly turning into a liberal, and Ken Lerer seems to have preferred that sort of branding. What ends up happening is her publication is eventually swallowed by Buzzfeed, one with a much more pronounced neocon bent. Interesting.

The whole world described in the opening chapters, of Drudge, HuffPo, Gawker and what eventually became Buzzfeed, is just so weirdly intertwined. There is basically no point in which this business has not been somewhat feudal. For a long time the swinging dick of traffic was Matt Drudge, and his stepin fetchit sidekick Andrew Breitbart, the latter working, also, for the Huffington Post (one of my questions is what happened to the chapter about Matt Drudge in Breitbart’s memoir?). This caused journalists to write their headlines and stories to match Drudge’s strange and unnatural proclivities. I don’t mean this as a bad thing, necessarily—I think UFOs are cool, but when it comes to public sense-making this seems less than ideal.

Anyway, Benjamin Netanyahu arrives to pluck Breitbart himself from obscurity (Smith doesn’t mention Breitbart’s chairman has claimed it was started in Jerusalem) and turn his rosy face into the primal scream of the Likud-aligned American right—the one rule: never write about Israel without rendering due homage to Jewish Wakanda—and Smith finds all this problematic for reasons that are hard to understand aside from him just finding it a bit icky.

Steve Bannon, one of the figures in all of this, has been a bad boy in the last few years—well-served, I suppose, by the Seinfeld royalties—but he has the innocent mind of an Irish pugilist. I’m very amused by the conversation related here, where Smith visits him in his office, and Bannon can’t understand why Smith hasn’t gone all-in for Bernie Sanders at Buzzfeed, who was activating the same youthful energy that Trump was on the right. Smith says it’s his scruples, but I have some doubts. It’s good to know he thinks he has some.

Some of the other major stories of the 2010s are related here in a way that doesn’t really make sense. The Anthony Weiner sexting scandal, for instance, which sort of put Breitbart on the map. What we’re supposed to believe about this is he mistakenly posted his dong on his Twitter account. But clearly the story was swirling before this moment. Smith does not really think through what this implies:

Halfway through, though, [Breitbart’s] business partner reminded him of another email: a Texas man had emailed a week earlier, saying he had compromising photographs of the New York congressman.

There’s clearly more going on here. It doesn’t strike me as out of the question that he actually was hacked, and that the post provided a pretext to begin to cover the story. Anyway, after the Israelis start Breitbart, the Russians start putting in money through the Mercers, and that’s where the weird far-right stuff starts. I think that’s basically the story, Rebekah Mercer was Milo Yiannopoulos’s patron.

In a bit referring to around 2014, Smith reveals Buzzfeed’s main source of traffic is Facebook, their servers are with Amazon, and their analytics are from Google. This is the fundamental model of dozens of media companies, and there is nothing special about it. There’s quite a bit of self-serving logic in assuming what he’s doing is much different from the right-wing shit-content networks he accuses of bubbling up and taking over. The difference is prestige, not skill or genius.

Ben Smith got his start under Seth Lipsky of the New York Sun, one of those minor New York papers that’s passed around like an impolite metaphor by various strong partisans of Israel. The two big Buzzfeed scoops Smith cites in here are one at the very beginning—John McCain’s endorsement of Mitt Romney—and his own biggest one: the publication of the Steele Dossier. They both seem fairly Israeli—Smith’s pals at the Free Beacon worked with McCain, and the Steele Dossier was first funded by Paul Singer, and Buzzfeed was tipped off to it by someone in McCain world, David Kramer. Smith is of mixed minds about his own decision to publish it, and presents his own critics fairly.

I think the real scandal of the Steele Dossier is that Smith spilled the beans. Many Israeli influence operations rely on information of similarly shoddy quality, and it would have worked rather well, had he not published, for Jake Tapper to breathlessly trumpet it as a secret analyzed and attested to be credible by nameless members of the “intelligence community,” like so much other reporting in the Trump era (I have always been curious what coterie of compromised spooks is responsible for Natasha Bertrand’s care and feeding, for instance). Clearly Tapper was upset that Smith had done so.

I have a few other quibbles with the Steele Dossier chapter—he calls the DNC leaks a “WikiLeaks hack-and-dump operation,” when if you look at Guccifer 2.0 it’s more accurate to say the Israelis were using Wikileaks as a cut-out—but there are parts of it that are pretty good. He credits the Steele Dossier for setting off a kind of liberal conspiracism embodied by Louise Mensch (he says she has a “tony brand of conservatism,” which is not how I would put it). The anecdote about her blowing into the office like a hurricane and claiming she “might be dead by the end of the month” is very funny. But Smith admits that the Steele Dossier was the moment he was seduced by the ethos and methods of Nick Denton.

Nick Denton is a much more sinister figure than most in media will admit, certainly not now that many of Gawker’s sharper writers have moved on to more established publications. The building in Budapest where their “office” was located was controlled by the Russians, and just before they were driven out of business by Peter Thiel, a stake was bought by a Russian oligarch. Neither of these facts made the cut for Smith.

One of Smith’s annoying habits is his clumsy stabs at British-isms—he refers to the Tabard Inn as “tatty” twice—and one presumes his deference toward Denton has something to do with his accent. Smith writes that Denton could plausibly claim to be a member of the British establishment through his father, which is a stretch.

The true genius of Nick Denton is his realization of how cheaply creative talent could be bought. If, in recent years, the bottom has fallen out of the “creative economy” thanks to the tech platforms, it’s a slide that starts with the line in here—“his idea of hors d’oeurves was White Castle hamburgers.”

You look at these early Gawker hires, and it’s so clear this is a right-wing thing. Jessica Coen, fresh off thanking Rupert Murdoch for backing The O.C. Foster Kamer, hired from Utah. ValleyWag’s Nick Douglas, published by HarperCollins and a graduate of Grove City. Denton himself wrote for the Telegraph. Arianna Huffington, in what should be considered a knowing wink, long before Fox bought TMZ, christens Denton at a party described here “the Rupert Murdoch of the blogosphere.” Denton innovates further by putting a coked-up Italian party-boy in charge of the dick-pic posting, A.J. Daulerio, who mobster Jason Calacanis invests in after he leaves the company.

Huffington, at least, was a principled opponent of the Iraq War, and she trumpeted their coverage out of proportion to how well it did traffic-wise. I think critically covering foolish wars is one of the most important things a journalistic enterprise can do, and it seems fairly significant that all these future media luminaries are skeptical of her perspective here—Jessica Coen, Perretti.

It’s hard to overstate the degree to which the “woke turn” is actually a function of tech and basically this community of people, rather than the universities, which have always tilted that way. It’s these people inflicting their sense of guilt and neurosis on the rest of the country. This scene was almost entirely white, and more or less the only people who come out of this book looking good are the black women. It’s interesting to revisit a section from Jonah Peretti’s pre-stardom essay on “capitalism and schizophrenia” in light of how his company works:

Identity formation is inextricably linked to the urge to consume, and therefore the acceleration of capitalism necessitates an increase in the rate at which individuals assume and shed identities. The internet is one of many late capitalist phenomena that allow for more flexible, rapid, and profitable mechanisms of identity formation.

The story of Jonah Perretti is him realizing, actually, this is a pretty good way to make a buck. Thanks, Deleuze and Guattari! Smith calls this a “radically new and abstract way of thinking about media—to focus on its psychological effect rather than on what it was actually about,” and suggests they “learned through trial and error” that “social media was organized in large part around identities,” which is to say, they and the companies they were close to organized it that way. Hence the feel-good listicles, which one must think of as a kind of emotional narcotic. There are, uh, obvious drawbacks to applying this approach to news.

It turns out the scope of human emotion also includes anger and outrage, and while that can be a problem, they can also be angry for good reasons. Smith accepts the conventional wisdom about Facebook enabling the rise of Donald Trump, which is a convenient excuse that journalists like to use because Mark Zuckerberg fucked them in 2018 with his grandiose recommitment to making the world “less lonely.” In this time Smith talks about working with a Rupert Murdoch lieutenant to try to get Facebook to pay them for content. This is, of course, something the entire industry should do, not just two publishers with heavy Chinese-Israeli ties.

As with a lot of these things, it’s hard to make sense of this time period without talking about the role of the Israelis. The 2016 election was among many other things a proxy fight between the Mossad and Likud Israeli factions, and the troubling thing about applying that lens is it implies the gangsters turned out to be more powerful. All of the biggest scandals of the last nine years—the Steele Dossier, the DNC hack, the Hunter Biden laptop, have their origins with the Israelis. I don’t have an answer to this problem, but I will tell you there is every reason to consider it foreign interference, and it is untenable.

The coda of this book mentions Baked Alaska, with a lot of chin-stroking about the role of this style of media in encouraging the rise of right-wing populism, he uses some line about them being just offstage, watching. But this is not remotely credible. If you look at the origins of these companies, and Smith himself, one might even ask what it is about right-wing populism they really object to. Is it the right-wing part? Arianna Huffington, Ben Smith, Nick Denton, all came from the right. Are we to believe Gawker has some sort of principled objection to populism? This is just a posture, a cringe. The classless looking down their noses at those they consider low-class, it’s not any more complicated than that. And Gawker’s crusading writers who are very concerned about vast right-wing conspiracies ought to consider that they were part of one.