Antisocial, page 10
As the prevailing style of social media clickbait mutated, Facebook would occasionally announce new tweaks to its News Feed algorithm, promising to disseminate “more high-quality content,” or to show its users “stories that are important to them.” But Facebook’s larger goal, which always went unstated, was not to spread high-quality content; it was to entice more users into spending more time on Facebook.
* * *
• • •
Continuing to scan my conference facebook alphabetically, the next name I recognized was Jonah Peretti. As an undergraduate, Peretti had written a paper called “Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution.” Using the clotted jargon of “Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory,” the paper decried the advertising industry for exacerbating “the accelerating rhythm of late capitalism.”
Ten years later, Peretti further accelerated the rhythm of late capitalism by founding BuzzFeed, a media company that combined advertising, entertainment, and journalism in novel and sometimes unscrupulous ways. BuzzFeed went on to earn billions of dollars in revenue, mostly by producing branded content targeted to millennials. Peretti, like Pariser, designed his site with virality centrally in mind. At the top of each BuzzFeed post were one or more “badges” (Cute, Ew, LOL, OMG), each corresponding to a different activating emotion. The goal of the content was to elicit a response—a share, a like, a hate-read, an indignant comment. Any response was a form of engagement, and engagement was the lifeblood of the viral internet.
BuzzFeed’s headline style, like Upworthy’s, was both mockable and highly effective. BuzzFeed did produce its own material, although much of it was native advertising—ads disguised as editorial content. The site’s signature form was the listicle (“10 Jokes That Prove Bathroom Humor Never Gets Old,” sponsored by Charmin). BuzzFeed’s headline writers, hoping to make their content ever more “sticky” and “infectious,” pioneered several ingenious audience-targeting strategies, including a kind of promiscuous narrowcasting. “24 Problems Anyone Can Relate To” would have had no natural constituency, but “24 Problems You’ll Only Understand If You’re Welsh” stood a good chance of going viral within Wales. And, publishing space on the internet being unlimited, there was no reason to stop at Wales; you could also publish “27 Devastating Problems Only People from Jersey Will Understand” and “29 Things Only People Who Work in Public Radio Will Understand” and “20 Things Only People with Glasses Will Understand.”*
A month before F.ounders, Peretti wrote a memo to his staff, hailing BuzzFeed’s staggering rate of growth. He noted, correctly, that social media had made information delivery more democratic.* But now that he was writing from the perspective of a capitalist and a techno-optimist, he failed to mention that social media had also accelerated the rhythm of daily life, making it more chaotic and bewildering. Suddenly, every piece of content—every article, every listicle, every image, every ad—seemed like just another piece of flotsam in a congested stream, one more distraction to wade past before finally succumbing to exhaustion and clicking on the headline about what happened to the poet when she was honest. (Spoiler: she learned to love herself.)
I closed my facebook and dropped it back inside the tote bag. The most basic tasks of a traditional news editor—such as deciding which stories to feature prominently, which ones to downplay, and which ones to forgo entirely—rested on the assumption that not all news was fit to print. This assumption, in turn, rested on a usefully vague definition of fitness, one that could account for many factors: salability and sensationalism and greed, to be sure, but also some version of the public interest. Now that editors no longer had a monopoly on informational gatekeeping—now that this power was passing, more and more, from humans to algorithms—fitness was coming to mean something more stark and Darwinian.* High-arousal posts beat low-arousal posts; the fittest content proliferated, and everything else was driven toward extinction. I found the whole situation discomfiting, but I couldn’t even fully articulate the problem, much less think of a solution. Maybe one of the f.ounders could help.
I wedged into the crowd shoulderfirst, accepted a glass of sparkling water and a small plate of shrimp dumplings, and looked for someone to talk to. I scanned the laminated badges on various clavicles, doing my best to parse the refrigerator-magnet start-up names (Struq, SHFT, PubNub) and predictably wacky job titles (iOS Ninja, Hacker-in-Residence). Each conversation began with a gentle Socratic inquiry by which I tried to arrive, after a few wrong turns, at an understanding of what a futurist or a hacker-in-residence did all day. In most cases, the answer amounted to buying or selling ads on Google or Facebook.
It soon became clear that this crowd did not contain the likes of Peretti and Pariser. They might have been taking preprandial power meetings or power naps; possibly they were on an even higher floor of the hotel, drinking higher-grade sparkling water. Here in the free-dumpling room, most of us seemed to be journalists, PR flacks, or midlevel office stiffs.
I networked. I don’t remember the details of each start-up’s burn rate or mobile onboarding flow; what I remember, above all, is the prevailing absence of self-deprecation. At other industry events I’d covered—a record-label party, a gala for a nonprofit—the midlevel Bartleby types exuded a whiff of humility, even if it was false humility. At F.ounders, everyone seemed to have internalized the promises that kept the young and avaricious flocking to Silicon Valley: You can do well by doing good. You are building the tools of human connection and social progress. All incentives are aligned. Two months later, when the satirical sitcom Silicon Valley included a montage of start-up founders pledging to “make the world a better place through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols,” I felt a twinge of déjà vu.
For the first few years of his career, Philip Roth’s books were wild yawps of rebellion—against his Jewishness, against the puritanical norms of northern New Jersey, against various forms of fatuous bullshit. But Roth also wrote, in 1986, “I’m never more of a Jew than I am in a church when the organ begins.” This was what it felt like to be a reluctant institutionalist. I was not so loyal to traditional media institutions that I failed to see their faults; but then the choir of digital evangelists would start to sing their hosannas, and I would get my back up. I didn’t know what a “more open and connected” internet would mean for the world. Neither did the disrupters, or anyone else. If I’d had faith in the predestined arc of history—if I’d trusted that the gleaming vehicle of technology would naturally self-correct, like a driverless car, even with the rest of us asleep at the wheel—then I might have been more content to watch as the car rushed forth, crashing through every gate in its path. But what I believed was both more liberating and more terrifying: technology, like the arc of history, can carry us in any direction.
CHAPTER SIX
Viral Guy
At dinner, the seating algorithm placed me next to Emerson Spartz, a twenty-seven-year-old with the saucer eyes and cuspidate chin of a cartoon fawn. According to the little black facebook, he was a “middle-school dropout,” a “New York Times bestselling author,” and the founder and CEO of Spartz Inc. based in Chicago.
I asked what his company made, or did, or was. “I’m passionate about virality,” he responded. I must have looked confused, because he said, “Let me bring that down from the thirty-thousand-foot level.” The appetizer course had not yet arrived. He checked the time on his cell phone, then cleared his throat.
“Every day, when I was a kid, my parents made me read four short biographies of very successful people,” he said. “I decided that I wanted to change the world, and I wanted to do it on a massive scale.” This was the beginning of what I would come to recognize as his standard pitch for Spartz, both the person and the company. Although he had an audience of one, he spoke in a distant and deliberate tone, using studied pauses and facial expressions, as if I were a conference hall or a camera lens.
“I looked at patterns,” he said. “I realized that if you could make ideas go viral, you could tip elections, start movements, revolutionize industries.” He told me that Spartz Inc. specialized in “fun stuff—entertainment, not hard news.” He called it a media company, but it sounded more like an aggregator and distributor of preexisting content. “The ability to spread a meme to millions of people,” he continued, was “the closest you can come to a human superpower.”
The concept of the meme was invented in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford. In his book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins argued that genes are “the fundamental unit” of natural selection, and that they exist to perpetuate themselves, not to perpetuate any organism or species. In one chapter, he wondered whether something analogous to natural selection might also occur in human culture—whether “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions,” might evolve the way plants and animals do. If so, this evolution would take place by means of a “unit of cultural transmission,” which Dawkins called the meme. “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs,” he wrote, “so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain.”* The survival of a meme, like the survival of a species, was not assured by some predetermined plan; it depended, quite simply, on the meme’s ability to self-replicate.
As the decades passed, the “leaping from brain to brain” became exponentially more scalable. In an endnote to the 1989 edition of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins wrote, “Computers are increasingly tied together. Many of them are literally wired up together in electronic mail exchange. . . . It is a perfect milieu for self-replicating programs to flourish.” He was talking about computer viruses. He couldn’t have predicted BuzzFeed, or ClickHole, or Pepe, or Pizzagate.
* * *
—
As far as I could tell, Emerson Spartz wasn’t using his memetic superpower either for good or for evil, exactly. He was using it mainly to monetize cat GIFs. He told me that his company oversaw about thirty active sites, each serving up procrastination fodder for adolescents of all ages: Memestache (“All the Funny Memes”), OMGFacts (“The World’s #1 Fact Source”),* GivesMeHope (“Chicken Soup for the Soul—the twenty-first-century, Twitter-style version”).* The content was mostly user generated and unvetted, and it just kept rolling in.
Spartz’s self-pitch normally lasted about fifteen minutes, but this took much longer, because I kept interrupting. I wasn’t trying to berate the guy; I was trying to understand his thinking, which seemed emblematic of the style of thinking that pervaded the rest of the room, if not the entire social media industry.
“Viral memes can certainly be powerful,” I said. “But what about the ones that don’t have much of an effect? Or the ones that change the world for the worse, not for the better?”
Spartz’s face went blank. “Can you rephrase your question in a more concrete way?” he said.
I brought up Kony 2012, a half-hour documentary about the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. “An amazing viral campaign,” Spartz said. “That’s exactly what I mean, about how sharing memes can lead to real-world positive change.” Within a few days of its release on YouTube, Kony 2012 had been viewed more than 100 million times—an enviable level of popularity even for a Taylor Swift video, much less for a morbid documentary about child soldiers. Its stated goal was to “make Kony famous,” and it achieved this goal, at least for a time. And yet the director of the film, Jason Russell, was not an expert on the Gordian geopolitics of East Africa.* His one simplistic demand—that the U.S. military capture or kill Kony—was controversial, to say the least. Moreover, it was never fulfilled. Despite the film’s popularity, Kony and his soldiers remained at large—possibly in the remote forests of the Central African Republic, though no one knew for sure. Should all this, I asked Spartz, be considered a success?
He shrugged. “To be honest, I didn’t follow too closely after the whole thing died down,” he said. “Even though I’m one of the most avid readers I know, I don’t usually read straight news. It’s conveyed in a very boring way, and you tend to see the same patterns repeated again and again.”
Still, he was happy to offer advice. “If I were running a more hard-news-oriented company and I wanted to inform people about Uganda,” he said, “first, I would look it up and find out exactly what’s going on there. Then I would find a few really poignant images or storylines, ones that create a lot of resonant emotion, and I would make those into a short video—under three minutes—with clear, simple words and statistics. Short, declarative sentences. And at the end I’d give people something they can do. Something to feel hopeful about.”
I asked Spartz if there was anyone he was hoping to meet while he was in town.
“I’m mostly here to meet potential investors,” he said. “I know I’m not supposed to just come out and say that, but it’s the truth.”
“Anyone you look up to, or want to get advice from?” I asked.
“The only people here who do what I do better than I do it are Eli and Jonah,” he said, referring to Pariser and Peretti. “I’d kill to be as good at virality as those guys.”
I wasn’t sure whether to interpret this as a statement of modesty or of raw ambition. Spartz had recently raised $8 million of venture-capital funding. As new-media companies like Upworthy and BuzzFeed evolved into established brands, he hoped to disrupt the disrupters. He didn’t see the old-media dinosaurs as his competitors—not because he felt unequal to the challenge, but because he assumed that the dinosaurs would soon collapse under their own weight.
The entree was served: conference chicken, a notch above wedding chicken and below gala chicken. Glancing down at my laminated badge for the first time, Spartz noticed that I worked at The New Yorker. “For instance, here’s how I would improve your product,” he said. “Way more images. That’s number one. Who has ever looked at a big long block of text and gone, ‘Ooh, exciting?’ I tell my employees all the time: Every paragraph they write should be super-short, no more than three sentences. And I mean short sentences. Periods are better than commas. Boredom is the enemy.”
I couldn’t deny that this sounded like an effective recipe for a certain kind of success. And yet, I sputtered, if maximizing clicks was the only goal, why would any magazine or newspaper need to employ fact-checkers—or reporters, for that matter? Why not simply recycle press releases, rewriting the boring quotes to make them snappier? Why not replace all Syria coverage with Kardashian coverage? Why not forget about words altogether and go into something more remunerative, like video, or mobile gaming, or strip mining?
Spartz cocked his head and waited for me to finish my rant. Clearly, in his eyes, I was revealing myself to be a Luddite. “It’s always possible to make a slippery-slope argument,” he said. “Those arguments don’t interest me. I’m interested in impact.” Art without an audience was mere solipsism, he said. “The ultimate barometer of quality is: if it gets shared, it’s quality. If someone wants to toil in obscurity, if that makes them happy, that’s fine. Not everybody has to change the world.”
Spartz left before dessert, which he called “a low return on investment, calorically.” On his way out, in lieu of a business card, he sent me an email. “Hi. Stay in touch!” the subject line read. The entire text of the email was “Viral guy.”
* * *
• • •
The Tuesday after F.ounders, at The New Yorker’s editorial meeting, I told my colleagues about Emerson Spartz. I knew that the internet had a way of making even the most innocuous enterprises seem novel or nefarious, so I did my best to check my biases. There was nothing surprising about an entrepreneur peddling frivolous entertainment. This was, after all, an older and more lucrative business than the one we were in, the artisanal bundling of literary journalism with wry single-panel cartoons. What interested me was not Spartz’s content per se but his method of spreading it, which did seem genuinely new.
In the second half of the twentieth century, when the bulk of popular information was spread through TV, a knack for persuasion in one domain (Roger Ailes, Nixon campaign adviser) could be transferred with insidious ease to another (Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News). In the Facebook era, the boundaries between domains were being blurred out of existence. Facebook is not only one of the world’s biggest video platforms; it’s also a gaming company, a dating service, a classified section, a photo vault, a newsstand, and a virtual-reality film studio. Content is content is content, all commingling in a single stream.
A quote on the front page of The Washington Post is more likely to be accurate than a quote on Page Six of the New York Post, or a quote in your ex-pastor’s Facebook post. A fact in the Harper’s Index is more likely to be true than a fact on OMGFacts. Moreover, some journalism aims to transcend mere trustworthiness, taking on the rarefied status of art. Traditional journalists noticed these distinctions, but the data showed that many consumers did not. Social networks weren’t helping; on the contrary, their designers downplayed such distinctions, in the interest of content neutrality.*
Many writers and filmmakers and photographers felt that their work had nothing to do with the content churned out by sites like Spartz’s. In some metaphysical sense, they were right. In terms of pure memetic Darwinism, though, the Facebook era had thrust The New Yorker and Spartz Inc. into the same ecosystem, if not into direct interspecific competition. The content on Facebook was as varied as the human imagination, yet all of it was propagated in the same way: by getting people to click and share links. Spartz’s pitch was that he could make users feel enough activating emotion that they would be likely to share the links he wanted them to share. In other words, his line about virality being a superpower was cheesy self-promotion, but it was also basically true. He was using this superpower to sell mildly amusing memes, but he could just as easily use it, in the future, to sell pasta or porn or populism. It wasn’t even a transferable skill; it was the same skill.
