The origin story of the Age of Disinformation: the candid inside tale
of two online media rivals, Jonah Peretti of HuffPost and BuzzFeed and
Nick Denton of Gawker Media, whose delirious pursuit of attention at
scale helped release the dark forces that would overtake the internet
and American society.
If attention is the new oil, Ben Smith's Traffic is the story of the
time between the first gusher and the impact of climate change. The
curtain opens in Soho in the early 2000s, after the first dotcom crash
but before Google, Apple, and Facebook exploded, when it seemed that New
York City rather than Silicon Valley might become tech's center of
gravity. There, within a few square blocks, Nick Denton's merry band of
nihilists at his growing Gawker empire and Jonah Peretti's sunnier crew
at HuffPost and BuzzFeed were building the foundations of viral
internet media. It was tech's age of innocence: the old establishment
might have been discredited by the Iraq War, but digital news would
facilitate the spread of truth. After all, didn't progressive activists
online get Barack Obama elected?
Ben Smith, who would go on to earn a controversial reputation as
BuzzFeed's editor-in-chief, was there to see it, and he chronicles it
all with marvelous lucidity scored with dark wit, sparing no one--and
certainly not himself. Smith tells a nuanced story: yes, Denton's
ideology of radical transparency was problematic, but at least he had
an ideology. Jonah Peretti survived long after Denton's Gawker perished
because his focus on clicks was relentlessly content-agnostic. But
unintended consequences began to snowball.
Traffic explores one of the great ironies of our time: the internet,
which was going to help the left remake the world in its image, has
become the motive force of right populism. People like Steve Bannon and
Andrew Breitbart and Gavin McInnes and Chris Poole, the creator of
4chan, all seemed like minor characters in the narrative in which Nick
and Jonah and crew were the stars. By 2020, any reasonable observer
might wonder if the opposite wasn't the case. To understand how we got
here, Traffic is essential and enthralling reading.
