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In “Traffic,” journalist Ben Smith chronicles the nerdy genius, motivated egos and experimentation of the infectious Internet media pioneers.
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By Virginie Heffernan
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TRAFFIC: Genius and ghost in the multimillion-dollar race to go viral, through Ben Smith
On February 13, 2014, a BuzzFeed quiz about boredom in paintings bounced off the web: “What state do you belong to?”
The “real” to promise a solid response based on data.
You how the questionnaires worked. Select a holiday hymn (“YMCA”), a quality in a dream spouse (“ravenous”) and voila: your non-secular home. These quizzes were very entertaining, and at first other people shared them like joints or flares.
But this specific test had a bug. Too many other people were given Wyoming, more than actually lived in Wyoming, and this turn of occasion was so exciting that other people rushed to protest on Facebook. So, according to Ben Smith in his gripping and suspenseful book, “Traffic: Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral,” the BuzzFeed team spotted everything that replaced media:
Well, not forever. It’s Ben Smith, after all. Man of the media, ironist by nature and profession. Co-founder of Semafor, former New York Times media columnist, former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. Uncovering the history of Gawker, HuffPost and BuzzFeed, the new media corporations he claims conspired to invent virality, Smith largely resists the temptation to pretend that everything in his delight replaced the global forever. It’s for the hagiographies of Silicon Valley, Jezebels, dweebs, drug addicts and crazy butterflies of Silicon Alley, the fictional tech zone of New York that stretches, in theory, from Flatiron to Dumbo.
But even if Smith refuses to canonize his protagonists, Nick Denton (the founder of Gawker Media) and Jonah Peretti (co-founder of HuffPost and BuzzFeed), they stumble upon the strange eureka moment that a more serious publisher might have called the one who adjusts the world. Sometimes Smith even becomes that serious editor: “We were inventing virtual media,” he writes of BuzzFeed.
When the quiz became BuzzFeed’s most successful post, Peretti, then the company’s leading executive, pinged a Facebook staff member, who explained that the platform had a new set of rules for selling posts: Facebook now pushes content that attracted a maximum number of engagements AND a comment had 4 times the weight of a “like. “Lazy and disconcerting clicks were yesterday’s measures; The platform was looking for chattering comment sections. A cortisol-laden post that had hordes of answering machines screaming “Wyoming!”?Facebook criticized everyone. Two years later, the same thing would happen with messages that caused users to shout “Trump!”
Smith portrays Denton and Peretti as rivals, but they don’t play exactly the same game. With Gawker, which launched in 2002, Denton sought to blow up the mainstream media with blogs that polished the most sensible hats into a “faster, truer editing of reality. “He mastered the “soda,” according to Smith; other people kept a Gawker tab open all day and searched for updates compulsively.
At HuffPost, which started as The Huffington Post in 2005 and then BuzzFeed, which joined the scene in 2006, Peretti was leading and redirecting the waves of online influence (traffic) he had learned to manipulate as a graduate student at M. I. T. He also conducted ethical experiments, looking at whether all this traffic deserves or can be put at the service of “activism, politics, business, or simply pleasure. “
Denton came to New York from San Francisco in 2002 with an air of what Smith calls “casual cruelty” and the confidence to “blog the future. “Teaming up with journalist Elizabeth Spiers, Denton swept away shrewd writers like Jessica Coen and Emily Gould. and tasked them with cheering on the rich and noticed on their new platform, Gawker. For years, the site battered its enemies with sporting and bloodthirsty power only to find itself defeated in the 2010s through two formidable forces: right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, and love.
Thiel, who, according to Smith’s account, despised Denton for once calling him “strange” and “paranoid,” secretly funded a lawsuit over Gawker’s publication of a celebrity sex tape that bankrupted the online site. But in Smith’s amusing tale, what tired the Project Gawker drummer was that Denton fell in love with Derrence Washington, now her husband. Romance, Smith suggests, has toned down its flavor and private spiciness for pure sarcasm.
Peretti, meanwhile, teamed up with Arianna Huffington, Andrew Breitbart and Kenneth Lerer to launch The Huffington Post, which was first conceived as a progressive choice of The Drudge Report. Fresh off the M. I. T. Media Lab, Peretti unleashed his magic to create traffic to power a hodgepodge online page to box in workplace glory. It was sold to A. O. L. for $315 million in 2011.
Peretti then jumped full-time to the other company he had helped start, BuzzFeed, just as Smith took over as editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. By the time the Wyoming quiz reached its peak of virality, Peretti was in close contact with Facebook while Smith, who had come to BuzzFeed from Politico, was thinking about how to drive traffic to political news.
The confrontation between BuzzFeed and Gawker is most productive understood as a contest of attitudes. BuzzFeed in its early days was all about Disney princesses, cute animals, and poisonous positivity, while Gawker relied on tabloid-style exposés and nastiness. Politico recorded a much-discussed “snark vs. smarm” war. And unlike literary battles beyond New York, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, anyone?, can be decisively won. By the numbers, Gawker would scoff, Buzzfeed would coo, and the winner would be the post that attracted the most clicks, views, likes, shares, comments, and of course, complaints.
Anna Holmes, founder of Jezebel, Gawker Media’s women’s website, is featured in “Traffic,” but deserves her own biography. Not only did it create a behemoth, starting in 2007, but it eventually garnered over 37 million views per month, occasionally surpassing Gawker. himself, but she unapologetically attacked false allies like “The Daily Show” and sexism at work, adding disturbing Photoshopped images of women’s bodies. With Jezebel, and despite Denton’s initial misunderstanding, Holmes and her team invented a ruthless spatial taste that has become the language of fashionable American feminism.
Regardless, Smith was given his own flavor of viral fame in 2017, when he controversially chose to publish the so-called Steele dossier, which documents alleged collusion with Russian agents through Donald Trump’s presidential crusade in 2016 and is replete with obscene main points about Trump’s escapades in Russia. Smith stands by his resolve to publish it. But when his claims were not confirmed, he wrung his hands. Can viral political content ever become valuable political content, and vice versa?
Anxiety about this consultation haunts Smith, and this ethical seriousness is what elevates “Traffic” above other startup adventure stories. The ultimate cinematic betrayal of “Traffic” turns out not to have been committed through Peretti’s trafficking apparatus or Denton’s cruelty factory, but through the characters who play Igors for his Frankensteins. These come with Peretti’s Huffington Post co-founder, Breitbart, who then created the far-right online page Breitbart. com; Benny Johnson, whom Smith hired at BuzzFeed and then fired (for significant plagiarism) and now works for the young conservative organization Turning Point USA; and a far-right specialist known as Baked Alaska, who left a job at BuzzFeed to work as a “tour director” for right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos and was convicted of a misdemeanor in the Jan. 6 uprising. (On April 20, Peretti announced that BuzzFeed would close its news division, as part of a broader downsizing of the company. )
What did those Silicon Alley pioneers invent regardless?One way to “measure culture,” Smith writes. He goes on to describe “culture” as “the volume of outrage or the good fortune of a joke. “Indignation and laughter.
This fashionable conception of culture pushes in my brain along with Matthew Arnold’s seductive perception that culture is good looks and intelligence: “softness and light. “The stampede is alternately productive and abrasive.
Virginia Heffernan writes articles for Wired. Su most recent book is “Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. “
TRAFFIC: Genius and ghost in the multimillion-dollar race to go viral | By Ben Smith | 343 pages | Penguin Press | $30
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