Antisocial, page 11
“The guy who started this company—how old is he again?” a story editor asked.
“Twenty-seven.”
“Jesus. I can’t tell whether I want to smack him or hire him.”
David Remnick, the editor of the magazine, sighed theatrically. “I love the Youngs, I really do,” he said. “But you guys are going to destroy everything, aren’t you?”
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• • •
I flew to Chicago in late May, met Spartz outside his downtown office, and walked across the Loop with him to another tech conference. He’d been invited to give a speech. “A lot of it is going to be redundant for you,” he said. The event, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, was called the Millennial Impact Conference, and participants had been asked to discuss how young people could “build movements to create change.” This was not Spartz’s specialty. “I basically have only one speech,” he told me. “It’s about how to make things go viral. I have personal preferences about how I would want those principles to be applied,* but in practice they can be used for pretty much anything.”
We ran into Jimmy Odom, a thirty-three-year-old businessman with shoulder-length dreadlocks. In the relatively small pond of Chicago’s start-up scene, Spartz was a big fish, and Odom took the opportunity to ask him a few specific questions about business strategy. Then, turning to me, he described Spartz as “inspiring” and “legitimately awesome.”
“Why won’t you accept my friend request?” Odom asked him.
“I literally can’t even see it,” Spartz said, grinning apologetically. “Facebook puts a cap on how many friends you can have”—five thousand—“and I’m at the limit.”
Spartz was young, but he’d already been in the virality business for more than half his life. In 1999, when he was twelve, he built MuggleNet, which became the most popular Harry Potter fan site in the world. He appeared on CNN and Fox News, and J. K. Rowling invited him to her palatial estate in Scotland. He eventually outgrew Rowling—when I asked whether he’d read The Casual Vacancy, Rowling’s post-Potter adult novel, he rolled his eyes—but he remained fixated on the increasingly competitive goal of commanding young people’s attention online. “As I became less motivated by my passion for the books, I got obsessed with the entrepreneurial side of it, the game of maximizing patterns and seeing how big my reach could get,” he said.
Web development is a low-overhead enterprise, especially when you live with your parents. MuggleNet made hundreds of thousands of dollars, and Spartz funneled his earnings into Spartz Inc. building a new site every few weeks. When internet culture became fascinated with “fails”—news bloopers, embarrassing autocorrects—he built sites like As Failed on TV and SmartphOWNED. When the data showed that heartwarming stories were starting to draw more visitors, he let his old sites languish and built GivesMeHope, a repository for uplifting anecdotes (all anonymous and unverified). Eventually, most of these sites stopped attracting many new visitors. The sites stayed online, but dormant—crammed with dead links and still-active ads—like junk satellites orbiting the Earth.
Spartz took the stage, wearing a cordless microphone in addition to his daily uniform (heathered T-shirt, dark jeans, tidy mop top). A screen behind him displayed his first slide, in jaunty type: “Hi! I’m Emerson Spartz. I want to change the world.”
When he was growing up, Spartz said, his parents made him read “four short biographies of successful people every single day. Imagine for a second what happens to your brain when you’re twelve and this is how you’re spending your time.” He used his hands to pantomime his mind being blown. “The ability to make things go viral felt like the closest that we could get to having a human superpower.”
He offered practical tips: “Use lists whenever possible. Lists just hijack the brain’s neural circuitry”; “Facebook is the viral home of the internet. Facebook should be eighty percent of your effort, if you’re focused on social media.”* Behind me, two women in their fifties took notes on legal pads. In summary, Spartz said, “The more awesome you are, the more emotion you create, the more viral it is.” One of the women whispered, “Really impressive.”
I met Spartz in the greenroom. “I’m giving advice that works, but it’s no problem for me to give it away,” he said. “This stuff is so basic, if you don’t already know it, you’re way too far behind to catch up.” He took off the cordless mic and left without stopping to see the exhibition upstairs, a retrospective by the contemporary “post-medium” artist Isa Genzken. “People have hoity-toity reasons for preferring one kind of entertainment to another,” he said later. “To me, it doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at cat photos that inspire you or so-called ‘high art’ that inspires you.”
I made plans to meet Spartz back at his office, then walked upstairs. The exhibition space was beautiful, brightly lit, and intentionally disorienting, full of room-size installations that warped my sense of scale and proportion. I spent several minutes staring at a huge sculpture made of baby dolls wearing helmets, translucent plastic chairs suspended at odd angles, and two beach umbrellas emblazoned with the Coca-Cola logo. “These works,” a curator’s statement read, “incorporate photographs, kitschy souvenirs, pop culture cast-offs, cheap household products, and high-end design objects, obliterating any hierarchy of value between them.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Basically My Nightmare
The Spartz Inc. headquarters looked like the set of a reality show about an effortfully chill start-up: bright-red walls, a hammock, a refrigerator full of free snacks, an aquarium full of sea monkeys. There were games everywhere—Xbox, Blokus, Ping-Pong—but I never saw anyone playing them. Emerson Spartz and his three dozen employees sat at undivided workstations; the layout was ostensibly nonhierarchical, but in practice the desks closest to Spartz were occupied by the most highly valued employees. Next to Spartz was his chief financial officer, who had an MBA and described himself as the company’s oldest employee “by a hundred years.” (He was thirty-six.) Other workstations were for data scientists and developers; in a distant corner of the office sat the “content producers,” five recent college grads who put together the company’s blog posts.
There were no office phones, and nobody talked much. Instead, they chatted constantly on an IM platform called HipChat. For hours at a time, the only sounds were the chugging of the building’s ventilation system, Top 40 hits played at low volume, and the occasional chortle in response to a GIF. When something had to be discussed face-to-face, staffers arranged to meet in one of several glass-walled conference rooms, each of which was named for a region of Westeros, the fictional land depicted in Game of Thrones. Because I wasn’t on their HipChat, I had no advance notice before a meeting was about to happen; I simply saw people in various parts of the room stand up in unison, unplug their laptops, and carry them silently toward King’s Landing or Casterly Rock.
On my first full day in the office, the company was in the process of revamping its flagship site. In the morning, it was called Brainwreck.com (“The #2 Most Addicting Site”). By the afternoon, it had been relaunched as Dose.com (“Your Daily Dose of Amazing”). The new design, Spartz explained, had a more “premium” feel, with cleaner lines and more muted colors. The name Brainwreck sounded destructive, but Dose was more ambiguous—either a dose of Vicodin or a dose of vitamins—which allowed for more flexibility. Readers might not trust a site called Brainwreck Travel or Brainwreck Politics, but Dose could, in theory, expand in almost any direction.
For now, it was a simple aggregation site devoted to funny or interesting photos. Around the office, posts on Dose were called “lists”—as in, “The list about albino animals is crushing it right now.” They were collections of images arranged to tell a story (“This Dad Decided to Embarrass His Son in the Most Elaborate Way Possible. LOL”), make an argument (“Bacon-Wrapped Onion Rings Are Perfect for Appetizers, Burgers, and Life”), or present variations on a theme (“The 21 Most Unusual Horses That Make Even Unicorns Seem Basic”). A teenager absentmindedly clicking links on Reddit or Facebook would probably, at some point, end up on a site like Dose; Spartz’s goal was to make the site sticky enough to hold visitors’ attention for a few minutes before they wandered away to look at something else.*
Spartz, in his speeches, sometimes referred to himself as a “growth hacker.” In practice, though, he was more like a day trader, investing in memes that appeared to have momentum. “Exactly where we find our source material took a lot of experimentation to get right,” he said. “But the core of it is simple: taking stuff that’s already going viral and repackaging it.” His proprietary algorithm scoured the internet for images and stories that seemed to be generating a lot of activating emotion (at least, according to the relevant metrics).* The content producers then acted as arbitrageurs, adapting those images and stories into lists on Dose. Sometimes this required a bit of reassembly; other times, it was as simple as copying the source material in full, without bothering to rearrange any images or correct any typos, and then reposting it on Dose under a catchier headline.
One of Spartz’s mantras was “Originality is overrated.” “If you want to build a successful virus, you can start by trying to engineer the DNA from scratch,” he told me. “Or, much more efficient: you take a virus that you already know is potent, mutate it a tiny bit, and expose it to a new cluster of people.” Long before Kony 2012, Joseph Kony was old news to the few Americans who followed African politics closely. Only by exposing Kony’s outrageous crimes to the rest of the American population was the meme able to grow into an epidemic.*
* * *
• • •
Spartz’s headline-testing algorithm worked much like Upworthy’s. “People call it A/B testing,” he said. “But it’s more like A/B/C/D/E testing. Why test only two variants when you could test five, or twenty-five?” At first, a Dose post appeared under as many as two dozen different headlines, distributed at random. One person’s Facebook feed might include a link to “You Won’t Believe What This Guy Did with an Abandoned Factory”; another person, looking at her own Facebook feed from the other side of the room, might see “At First It Looks Like an Old Empty Factory. But Go Inside and . . . WHOA.” Spartz’s algorithm measured which headline was attracting clicks most quickly; after a statistically significant threshold was reached, the “winning” headline automatically replaced all the others. “I’m really, really good at writing headlines,” Spartz told me. “But any human’s intuition can only be so good. If you can build a machine that can solve the problem better than you can, then you really understand the problem.”
Almost every time I glanced at his screen, he was studying one of several data-analytics programs, which broke down his sites’ traffic into dozens of metrics. He commissioned more detailed reports from his in-house data scientists, segmenting his visitors according to as many metrics as possible—age, sex, location, income.* The more he came to know about who was visiting his site, the more effectively he would be able to market to them through Facebook’s microtargeting tools. In the meantime, he could always fall back on what might be called macrotargeting: packaging links in ways that were likely to induce a spike of activating emotion in almost everyone who saw them. All publishers, even those without much money or technological sophistication, could learn how to macrotarget. It was a sledgehammer, not a scalpel, but it seemed to work remarkably well.
* * *
—
When I asked Spartz how many of his editorial decisions were based on maximizing traffic, he gave me an impatient look. What else would they be based on? “Analytics is so baked into everything we do that I can’t even imagine having a separate discussion about it,” he said.
Once more, I tried to check my biases. Spartz was not a Ugandan warlord or an ocean-polluting tycoon or a neofascist. He was just an awkward young man trying to make a buck on the internet. Facebook had laid out clear incentives, and Spartz was doing his best to follow them. And he was merely a midlevel amplifier; hundreds of other businesses, both smaller and larger than his, were engaged in more or less the same hustle.
Then again, wasn’t this precisely the problem? For now, Spartz was A/B testing headlines about abandoned factories, siphoning market share from other procrastination sites. But if he ever felt like diversifying, it was easy to see how he might be able to disrupt, say, a legacy travel magazine. Instead of paying to send a world-class photographer to a far-flung locale, Dose Travel could send a drone, or use screenshots from Google Earth. Instead of hiring a travel journalist to write an original narrative, Spartz could write an automated script to paraphrase Wikipedia, or he could hire a contractor on Mechanical Turk to make something up. The Dose Travel piece would be less good, in some metaphysical sense, but that didn’t necessarily mean that it would get less traffic.
Or Spartz could launch Dose Politics, using a similar approach. Instead of the antiquated journalistic model, wherein the content of a publication represented the thoughts and feelings of the individuals who made it, Spartz could crowdsource questions of newsworthiness and taste and decency, allowing them to be settled by the open internet. Would the audience be more likely to click on “We Are a Nation of Immigrants, Instagram’s Snuggliest Labradoodle Reminds Us” or “17 Patriotic Americans Whose Lives Were Destroyed by Open Borders. #9 is Basically My Nightmare”? The only way to know for sure would be to run an A/B test and find out.
In 2014, there were governmental regulations, imperfect though they may have been, preventing pharmaceutical companies from filling their gelcaps with sawdust, or public-school teachers from filling their lesson plans with Holocaust denialism. Media was different. For many good reasons, starting with the First Amendment, the information market was relatively unregulated. And yet everyone knew the bromides, no less true for being trite, about how a democracy can’t function without a well-informed electorate.* In the near future, what was to prevent large swaths of the internet—including the parts of the internet that used to be called newspapers and magazines—from looking more and more like Dose? What was insulating the American press from a full-speed race to the bottom? Nothing, as far as I could tell, other than tradition and inertia and the capricious whims of the market.*
The techno-utopians of Silicon Valley assumed that all would be for the best in a postgatekeeper world. This was possible, of course, but there was no way to be certain. Already, social-media-optimized content mills were outcompeting sober policy journals and threadbare alt-weeklies. Pulitzer Prize–winning reporters, unable to earn a living wage, kept fleeing journalism for jobs in PR or social media marketing. Even an alarmist like myself didn’t presume that the Spartzification of the entire media ecosystem would happen overnight. Could it happen within five years? Fifteen? I tried telling myself that I was indulging in slippery-slope thinking, but this did nothing to allay my fear that we were already slipping.
* * *
• • •
When Emerson Spartz was a child in La Porte, Indiana, he had the highest batting average on his Little League team. “I quickly started seeing patterns,” he told me. He wasn’t very fast, but he noticed that Little League catchers were so bad at throwing to second base that almost any runner could advance. “I started stealing pretty much every time,” he said. “It worked extremely well, but that wasn’t what the coach cared about, apparently.” The coach told him to stop; when Spartz kept stealing, the coach punished him by batting him eighth. “I gave him a statistical explanation of why it made no sense to put your best hitter at the bottom of the order,” Spartz said. “You can imagine how that went over.”
He was a precocious student who chafed at classroom structure. A few weeks into seventh grade, he asked his parents if he could be homeschooled. His mother, Maggi, was the breadwinner, working at a local philanthropic foundation. His father, Tom, became Emerson’s teacher.
One Sunday, I rented a car and drove Emerson and his wife, Gaby, from Chicago to La Porte, where his parents still live. We headed east on Interstate 90 for just over an hour, passed a few cornfields, and then pulled into a driveway. Tom Spartz, a voluble man with a double chin, spoke in passionate bursts that sounded like fortune-cookie aphorisms spliced together. As he welcomed us into the house, I asked about his role in his son’s intellectual growth. He said, “I don’t care what expectations you have, all of the great—we’ll call them ‘developers’—were just continually shaking with energy. You want to keep ’em moving, keep ’em loose, keep ’em testing. I saw this stuff coming long ago. When you see the momentum, you’ll be laughing at how obvious it all was.”
After Emerson started being homeschooled, his brother Dylan joined him. Tom showed me the den, which he had used as the boys’ classroom, filling it with whiteboards and inspirational posters. Now that the boys were grown, the den was just a den. On a weight-lifting bench, Tom had arranged a two-foot stack of the “short biographies of successful people” that Emerson often mentioned. They turned out to be extremely short: a single-sided page each, photocopied from a small right-leaning newspaper called Investor’s Business Daily. Each page distilled a life of setbacks and accomplishments into a pull-quote moral. (Karl Malone: “Practice makes perfect.” Mel Blanc: “Never give up.”) Apart from the mini-biographies and enough algebra to satisfy state requirements, Tom’s pedagogy was flexible and self-directed. The boys listened to motivational audiobooks by Tony Robbins and watched documentaries by Ken Burns. They learned arithmetic in part through “Kroger math”—on trips to the supermarket, as Tom added items to the cart, Emerson and Dylan kept a running tally of the total price.
