Traffic: How America got Facebookified in the 2010s

The best minds of a whole generation did what?

I eagerly read Ben Smith’s new book Traffic this weekend, thinking that it might offer some fresh insight for this week’s edition of The Connector about the ways the internet has changed the world of politics and media in the last decade or so. But as I sit here turning thoughts into pixels, looking over the various parts of the book that I’ve underlined, I’m mostly just filled with sadness at what could have been but wasn’t.

Back in the mid-1950s, Allen Ginsberg started his epic poem Howl with these words, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” Howl was a match thrown on the complacency of the Silent Generation that lit up a million minds and launched the era we now call the Long Sixties. Traffic, which Smith subtitled, “Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral,” could just as easily have started with the words of Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook engineer, who said in 2013, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” He added, “That sucks.”

And really, that’s all that Traffic is about: how to get people to come to your website and click on ads enough to sustain whatever else you’re trying to do. The book is centered on the rise and fall of two New York-based web entrepreneurs, Jonah Peretti and Nick Denton, who each sought to master the new read/write medium as early movers hoping to topple the slower-moving giants of legacy media. Ben gives each of them a full rendering: Peretti as a gangly nerd indifferent to money or business management but obsessed with figuring out how to make content go viral, and Denton as a darkly intimidating angry Brit determined to puncture the pieties of uptown society by gleefully exposing all its hypocrisies and peccadillos. Along the way, a few other new media players are shown in supporting roles, like uber-socialite Arianna Huffington, Democratic fatcat Ken Lerer (who bankrolled both the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed), the mysterious Matt Drudge and his vitriolic wingman Andrew Breitbart. A few other historically consequential figures, like Mark Zuckerberg, Bob Iger, Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel, and Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., hover in the background.

For a brief, hallucinatory period in the 2010s, both Peretti and Denton came close to touching the sun. That is, the sites they ran got millions, nay tens of millions, unique visitors—130 million a month at Buzzfeed by the end of 2013, Traffic says. But the way they did it, which Ben chronicles in a mostly deadpan, nonjudgmental way, was by pandering to people’s lowest instincts. I’m not going to bother to recount the whole trajectory here; it probably suffices to note that Traffic has a chapter titled “Dicks” that starts out, “The years of the dick pic were 2010 and 2011. That’s when the growing new media, hungrier and more sophisticated than ever in its approach to traffic, and still totally unconstrained by any of the old norms, triumphed by publishing the penis pictures that twenty-first-century men can’t seem to help themselves from sending to the objects of their desire.” (Sorry Mom!)

And this isn’t to say that errant dick pics, or similar vocalized thoughts or actions, aren’t important to any history of the 2010s in politics and media. Arguably Hillary Clinton might be president if it weren’t for Anthony Wiener’s prodigious production of underwear selfies. Certainly a lot of male power-brokers might still be sitting in their high perches at places like the Weinstein Company or the three big TV networks if it weren’t for the kind of pioneering feminist journalism that Anna Holmes, the founding editor of Jezebel, a Denton-property, unleashed. The best part of Traffic comes when Ben makes a very good case for the positive ways Jezebel altered the larger media ecosystem (after some early missteps), and if you want to save money on the book, you can read his New York Times oped about it here (gift link). But in retrospect the idea that whole companies not only gained power by posting the sex tapes of demi-celebrities but gained status for their leaders ought to be more than a bit embarrassing.

What Traffic really shows more than anything is how America got Facebookified in the 2010s, when everyone started to worship at the altar of unique visitors and similar metrics of “engagement.” Sites like Gawker and Buzzfeed exploded because they were especially good at producing content that got a lot of engagement inside Zuckerberg’s walled garden, and just about everyone bent themselves toward that new gravitational force. But Ben doesn’t dwell much on what this meant at any deep level, the way that media critic Shoshana Zuboff did with her seminal work The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. In fact, the phrase “surveillance capitalism” never appears in the book, if I’m not mistaken. Nor does capitalism itself, and the degree to which the American economy has become hyper-financialized since the late 1980s, make it to the surface level of Traffic’s narrative. But maybe this isn’t surprising, because the only functional difference between BuzzFeed or Gawker running roughshod over someone’s privacy and Google’s Street View cars photographing every address on the planet so they could be viewed on Google Maps is that Google stole our data at scale.

To Ben, the tectonic shifts in the politics of the last decade, from the youthful enthusiasm for Barack Obama to the white nationalist backlash that powered Donald Trump’s rise comes down basically to web market demographics. That is, the reason the mainstream media didn’t notice the forces of rightwing populism sooner is because they were too busy living in their own Twitter bubble to recognize that aging Baby Boomers were also taking to places like Facebook in huge number. Alas, what they wanted to share virally wasn’t videos of the Numa Numa boy dancing or Charlie-bit-my-finger mimics, but rumors about Hillary being a pedophile, Obama being a Muslim, and images of dark-skinned immigrants streaming over the southern border.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should note that I’ve known Ben since 2005, when he was writing a daily political blog for The New York Observer, the first stop on an illustrious career that led to similar roles at the NY Daily News, Politico, and then as founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, followed by a stint as The New York Times media columnist and now as co-founder of the international news platform Semafor. If there’s any journalist who has successfully navigated the rise of new media, it’s Ben. (Well, a few others come to mind, like Ezra Klein, who started out as an independent political blogger before breaking into mainstream media, and Josh Marshall, who went the opposite direction and left a traditional opinion magazine job to start Talking Points Memo, which has chugged along producing solid reporting without ever chasing giant piles of VC money or clicks.) I got to know Ben after he asked for advice about what to do about the commenters on his Observer blog; he thought they were getting out of hand and wanted to figure out how to move them elsewhere. I convinced him that the commenters were a net-plus for him, since they often added a layer of information that made his posts more valuable for everyone to read, in the old Dan Gillmor sense of “my readers are smarter than me” embrace of blogging. And so he kept his comments open.

Ben is an easy person to like, and because of that, he’s also hard to criticize. But I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Traffic helps explain how Ben could have imagined last summer that inviting America’s most popular TV racist, Tucker Carlson, for a keynote interview at a launch event for Semafor, might be a good idea. “Getting” Carlson for Semafor’s launch, I’m inferring, must have felt a bit like being the first to publish the Steele Dossier, Ben’s biggest coup at BuzzFeed and another dubious accomplishment. Dopamine is quite a drug. And in the morally arid world at the top of all the big American media enterprises, which are really first-and-foremost businesses, not public goods, being first or being on top really does Trump doing what’s right.

Riddled through Traffic are clues as to how chasing the dopamine high of going viral or the status accomplishment of being seen as on top seems to have clouded Ben’s editorial judgment. At his worst, he platformed a conservative writer named Benny Johnson because he imagined he’d bring in rightwing clicks, and then he defended Johnson despite all kinds of troubling warning signs like an obsession with race-baiting. On the other hand, he writes about resisting the temptation to chase leftwing clicks by embracing Bernie Sanders in 2016, a choice that he notes perplexed none other than Steve Bannon, who told Ben before Election Day that he didn’t understand why Buzzfeed hadn’t done more to ride Bernie’s energetic following the way that Breitbart had surfed the rise of the alt-right and Trumpism. “I told Bannon that we came from a different journalistic tradition, and that we valued it.”

What was that tradition? Ben doesn’t say, beyond waving his hands vaguely at “the impulse toward fairness and away from propaganda.” Really, is that really why Buzzfeed didn’t chase the Bern the way they chased every other trend? Or was there also fear of losing status? Ben never was a crusading journalist, and by the end of the book he mildly offers that he may have always been more of an institutionalist than he realized, ruing how “the power of the new social energy” that he, Peretti, Denton and many others tried to surf to success has “been to destroy any institution, from the media to the political establishment, that it touched.” He adds, “those of us who work in media, politics, and technology are largely concerned now with figuring out how to hold these failing institutions together or build new ones that are resistant to the forces we helped unleash.” Good luck with that.

Odds and Ends

—Lots of people are hankering for an early invite to BlueSky, Jack Dorsey’s new Twitter alternative, but as human rights lawyer Ashley Gjovik notes, there are serious questions about its terms of service, which gives Dorsey a perpetual and irrevocable right to all his users content, among other issues.

—My pal Marta Tellado, the CEO of Consumer Reports, has a smart oped in Gizmodo on what a “consumer-first approach to AI” might look like, starting with transparency, accuracy and fairness.

—“Is there a way for AI to do something other than sharpen the knife blade of capitalism?” That’s novelist Ted Chiang in The New Yorker, comparing AI to corporate consulting firm McKinsey, and arguing that “as it is currently deployed, AI often amounts to an effort to analyze a task that human being perform and figure out a way to replace the human being.”

—In the Guardian, Naomi Klein pours a lot of cold water on the hallucinations of today’s AI founders and cheerleaders. Read the whole thing.