Antisocial, page 12
Tom shuffled through the pile of biographies, picked out a page about the novelist Pearl S. Buck, and skimmed it. “It shows that she was away from her normal world, and all of a sudden she’s writing about the East,” he said. “It’s like, wow, can you imagine?” I asked Tom if he had encouraged the boys to read Buck’s novels. He shook his head and said, “You lay out a hook, but you don’t put it in the fish’s mouth.”
On the drive back to Chicago, Emerson delivered a rapt soliloquy about artificial intelligence. “We’ll soon get to a point where AI fully surpasses us,” he said. “Self-driving cars will take over from humans, who suck at driving, relatively speaking. Drones will take pictures in war zones instead of endangering human photographers. The benefits will be enormous. When you think about what asymptotic growth looks like, there’s no way humans are going to be able to keep up.” I interrupted him to ask whether I should stay on the highway or merge into the exit lane. He hesitated briefly.
“We could just google it,” his wife said from the backseat.
“No, Gaby, I know exactly where we are,” he said curtly, and told me not to turn.
A Katy Perry song was playing on the radio. “Art is that which science has not yet explained,” he said. “Imagine that the vocals are mediocre in an otherwise amazing song. What if you could have forty people record different vocals, and then test it by asking thousands of people, ‘Which one is best?’ To me, that’s a trickle in an ocean of possible ways you could improve every song on the radio.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Eating the World
Tech-world dogma holds that a start-up is only as smart as its founder. Thus it’s incumbent on all founders—as a matter of job security, not just ego boosting—to convince the world, or at least their board of directors, of their brilliance. Spartz was constantly dispensing life hacks, business aphorisms, and statistics he’d memorized from pop-psychology paperbacks. Walking with him through downtown Chicago, he shared tips on how to become a more efficient pedestrian. As we sat for lunch at a restaurant, he started quoting from Never Eat Alone, a book about “the power of relationships” by “master networker” Keith Ferrazzi. (A minute later, a man took a seat at our table, and I realized that this had been Spartz’s oblique way of telling me that he’d invited someone to join us.)
Tech is a big industry dominated by a small and relatively stagnant social hierarchy. At the top are a few men—Peter, Reid, Mark, Marc, Elon—whose quirks are easy enough to emulate. Spartz was not in that top tier, but he was desperate to join it one day. He took an interest in the handful of iconoclastic ideas—Moore’s Law, Metcalfe’s Law, the singularity, the simulation hypothesis—that preoccupied nearly every member of Silicon Valley’s A-list and almost no one else. He read the books and blogs that the A-listers recommended. Like them, he adopted a signature daily uniform. Originality is overrated.
“I keep hearing people around town talking about this young man as a Steve Jobs kind of guy,” Gary Holdren, a Chicago venture capitalist and one of Spartz’s chief funders, told me. “I think his stuff is indicative of where digital media is headed.” Equally indicative was Spartz’s sales patter. Just as Lee Atwater said explicitly what other political strategists were canny enough to conceal, Spartz talked in public the way other tech CEOs talked in private.
In Liar’s Poker, his 1989 Wall Street memoir, Michael Lewis described a newly ascendant, egregiously conceited type of alpha-male bond broker. This type had a name: they called each other Big Swinging Dicks. “Everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick,” Lewis wrote, “even the women.”
A quarter century later, the A-list entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley occupied an analogous place in the American power structure, but their self-presentation was less aggressive. Instead of “Greed is good,” their aspirational bromides were “Think different” and “Don’t be evil.” Instead of Dionysian feats of consumption—Porsches and cocaine binges and morning cheeseburgers—they drove electric cars and subsisted on seaweed and Soylent. They didn’t deny themselves the pleasures of good old-fashioned capital, but they were equally covetous of social and intellectual capital. Their fondest wish was to be considered luminaries, Renaissance men,* the smartest guys in the room. They were Big Swinging Brains.
They spoke with alacrity and unbridled confidence, making brash assertions that were contrarian in familiar ways, each offering expert opinions on more topics than it was possible for one person to be an expert in. Were they luminaries? To be a truly original thinker, it seemed to me, one had to be comfortable plumbing the outer bounds of one’s knowledge, even pondering the unknowable. But Big Swinging Brains were often loath to admit that their knowledge had limits; they would sooner pivot to a topic they knew about, or at least knew how to talk about. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” A BSB was more likely to summarize two opposing sides of a debate and then, without pausing for breath, explain which side was right, or, even better, why both sides were wrong.
Like any powerful group with a well-defined set of interests, the Silicon Valley overlords tended to be receptive to ideas that aligned with those interests and hostile to ideas that challenged them. Ideas that were fundamentally incompatible with their life choices—for example, the notion that the whole enterprise of technocratic capitalism might turn out to be at best a lark and at worst a catastrophe—they considered laughable, unthinkable, far outside the Overton window.*
* * *
—
According to the prevailing vocabulary of the techno-utopians, everything could be quantified, A/B tested, refined in the crucible of the market. “Take political campaigns,” Spartz told me. “Compared to growth hackers, the people running political messaging are in the Stone Age. If the smartest people decided to take over politics and start winning elections, it’d be child’s play.” For one thing, he said, hackers had the advantage of objectivity. “If I were running a political campaign, I wouldn’t be sitting around in my office—‘Well, if we framed the debate in this way, I bet it would resonate,’” he said. “You don’t have to guess. You put a hundred slogans out there, then look at the data. Which ones are people sharing? Then, once you find the best one, you just”—he made a fist and pounded it against his flat palm—“ram it into people’s skulls.”
The film industry was also ripe for disruption. “The way they do testing now is they get a few people in a room and give them a questionnaire: ‘Did you like the ending?’” he said. “That’s about one millionth of the amount of testing they should be doing. Literally.”
“But what if the director is an artist?” I asked. “What if the audience wants Ending A, but the director says, ‘I still want Ending B’?”
Spartz scoffed. “Hollywood is filled with those people,” he said. “That’s why they’re so far behind.”
I asked him to name the most beautiful book he’d ever read.
“Can you rephrase that question more clearly?” he asked.
I couldn’t.
“A beautiful book?” he said. “I don’t even know what that means. Impactful, sure.”
He was proud to make a living on the internet, he said, because it was the closest humanity had yet come to creating a pure meritocracy. “At the thirty-thousand-foot level, the internet is a giant machine that gives people what they want,” Spartz said. “How can you do better than that? It exposes people to the best stuff in the world.”
I made the obvious rejoinder: it also exposes people to the worst stuff in the world.
“Well, that would be your subjective judgment,” he said, pique rising in his voice. “That’s you paternalistically deciding what’s bad for people. Besides, businesses exist to serve the market. You can have whatever personal values you want, but businesses that don’t provide what the customers want don’t remain businesses. Literally, never.”
Once, in Casterly Rock, Spartz told me, “The future of media is an ever-increasing degree of personalization. My CNN won’t look like your CNN. So we want Dose eventually to be tailored to each user.” On a whiteboard behind him were the phrases “old media,” “Tribune,” and “$100 M.” He continued, “You shouldn’t have to choose what you want, because we will be able to get enough data to know what you want better than you do.”
I was reminded of Chris Cox, who grew up a few miles away from where we were sitting, in a prosperous Chicago suburb called Winnetka. Cox, one of the top product managers at Facebook, was often described as Mark Zuckerberg’s heir apparent. In 2006, he’d helped lead Facebook away from its original product—static personal profiles—and toward its dynamic News Feed, which would be algorithmically personalized for each user. In 2010, The Wall Street Journal ran an adulatory profile of Cox, who “envisions a world where social design can improve many more aspects of life online.” The reporter quoted Cox spinning out the details of his hypothetical utopia. “You turn on the TV, and you see what your mom and friends are watching, and they can record stuff for you,” Cox said. “Instead of 999 channels, you will see 999 recommendations from your friends. The music store will look like that, as will the newspaper. It would just be good if we could all be connected through these currently anonymous devices.”*
In the accompanying photo, Cox sat in a yellow armchair in Facebook’s headquarters. Behind him was a poster that said in bold red type, DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT.
* * *
—
“There is much to discover on the Facebook, the online community for college students,” a Washington Post reporter wrote in the paper’s Style section in late 2004. She did warn, however, that “it’s all a little fake—the ‘friends’; the profiles that can be tailored to what others find appealing; the ‘groups’ that exist only in cyberspace.” A few weeks later, Mark Zuckerberg, looking for investors, visited the office of The Washington Post and met with Donald Graham, the paper’s publisher and CEO. They agreed on a verbal deal: the Post would pay $6 million for 10 percent of the company. Zuckerberg later called Graham in tears—a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm had offered a more generous investment, and he was tempted to take it. Graham, impressed by the young man’s display of rectitude, gave him his blessing to renege on the deal. Three years later, Graham joined Facebook’s board of directors. “Facebook has completely transformed how people interact,” he said in a press release. “Mark’s sense of what Facebook can do is quite remarkable.”
In 2007, a Washington Post columnist lamented the rapid ascent of “Amazon.com,” which was “so smart in the way they cater to human weakness, bad judgment, poor taste.” In 2008, another Washington Post columnist wrote, “I loathe Amazon even though I know it is the future and will prevail.” In 2013, with revenue in decline, Donald Graham sold The Washington Post, which his family had owned and overseen for eighty years, to Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, soon to be the richest person in the world.
By that time, it no longer made sense to think of business and tech and media as separate entities. Business was tech, and tech was taking over everything: movies, TV, travel, journalism.* Whether the nerd princelings of Silicon Valley understood themselves to be gatekeepers or not, it was becoming increasingly clear that their smallest impromptu decisions were having enormous downstream effects on how billions of people spoke and thought and, ultimately, acted in the world. To change how we talk is to change who we are.
I wondered whether they found this power burdensome, and if so, whether they found the burden humbling, or overwhelming—the way I would feel overwhelmed if I woke up to discover that I had somehow been put in charge of the energy grid, or some other key piece of infrastructure that I didn’t fully understand. Maybe BSBs were constitutionally incapable of feeling overwhelmed. In any case, there was no law that said you had to understand a piece of social infrastructure in order to own it, or to break it.
* * *
—
Business was tech and tech was media. Content was content was content, and coders controlled the sluices through which all content flowed. The luminaries of Silicon Valley didn’t hesitate to offer their bold opinions on almost every subject; and yet, when it came to basic questions about the future of media, their rhetoric turned fuzzy. Businesses should give customers what they want. Media companies should meet audiences where they are. Journalism should be objective and thorough. These truisms seemed unobjectionable enough until they came into conflict with one another, which happened all the time. What if your customers claimed to want rigorous, dispassionate journalism, but their browsing habits revealed that they actually wanted hot takes and salacious hate-reads? What if, in order to meet customers where they were, you had to bowdlerize your writing, or give up on writing altogether and pivot to video? What if quality and popularity were sometimes correlated negatively, or not at all?
In early 2016, I was invited to a lunch discussion in an executive boardroom. At the head of the table, a Big Swinging Brain—one of the Biggest—talked for more than an hour without touching his sandwich. He dilated on a wide array of topics (state health-care exchanges, the future of the trucking industry, the panic of 1873), displaying uncanny recall and mental acuity. He acknowledged dilemmas and contradictions in his thinking; he even pointed out awkward conflicts between what he found preferable economically and what might be preferable civically, even morally. I began to wonder whether I’d underestimated the BSBs. Maybe I should learn to stop worrying and love my overlords.
Then I asked him a question about the importance of good journalism and good art, the corrosive effects of bad journalism and bad art, and the best way to forestall the Spartzification of the internet. It seemed clear—not just to me, but to anyone who was paying attention—that things were drifting in an unnerving direction. How would humanity avoid a clickbait death spiral?
“I don’t think there’s an answer to that,” he said, his tone suddenly turning flinty. Apparently I had revealed myself to be a Luddite. “If I were in the media business, I would focus on making a product that people actually want. Because that’s how business works.”
I couldn’t imagine him being so flippantly fatalistic about any other civilizational hazard that the free market had failed to address. The Renaissance men of Silicon Valley were known for spending an unusual amount of time and money addressing thorny existential problems, such as the achievement gap in American public schools and the excess of carbon in the atmosphere. They even invested millions of dollars in problems that hadn’t come into existence yet, such as hostile AI.* In 2016, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the nonprofit founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, announced its intention to “help cure, prevent, and manage all disease in our children’s lifetime”; several well-capitalized bioengineering start-ups, including a $1.5 billion initiative at Google, went even further, resolving to cure death. But somehow the BSBs balked at the problem of addictive, low-quality clickbait. They had taken control of the media industry, then moved fast and broken it; now they claimed no responsibility for fixing it. When the prospect of a clickbait death spiral came up, they tended to affect an odd sanguinity. They didn’t quite deny the existence of the problem—they just did their best to ignore it, or to reframe it as either trivial or inevitable.*
In the eighteenth century, the philosopher David Hume identified a common slippage that came to be called the is-ought fallacy. An interlocutor starts by observing the way something is, then gradually transitions to an argument about the way it ought to be, as if one followed from the other. Techno-libertarians often explained how the media economy worked (The market doesn’t support what the market doesn’t support), as if this also accounted for how the media economy ought to work (If Facebook isn’t good, then why is it so successful?). Old-school media gatekeepers sometimes made the opposite argument, a kind of ought-is fallacy: What we publish is good enough that it ought to be popular; therefore it is destined to become popular. Sadly, even when the premises were true, the conclusion was often wishful thinking.
* * *
• • •
Several times, in Chicago, I asked Spartz if I could talk to his content producers. He discouraged me, first subtly and then explicitly. “They don’t have as much personal discretion as you might think,” he said. “What we do is pretty algorithmic.”
Finally, he relented and let me speak to Chelsea DeBaise. Her name rang a bell. Earlier, in a meeting with his chief data scientist, I’d watched Spartz as he squinted over a spreadsheet. It ranked all five content producers by how well their posts were doing—open rates, share rates, and on and on. DeBaise was at the bottom of the list.
“Chelsea’s clearly underperforming, but I can’t figure out why,” the data scientist said.
“Weird,” Spartz said. “It’s not like she’s a worse writer. Is she deviating from the sourcing criteria?”
“I’ll keep an eye on it,” the data scientist said.
DeBaise met me in Casterly Rock, wearing a baseball cap advertising Van Gogh Vodka. She’d only been working at Spartz Inc. for a few weeks; before that she’d been a student at Syracuse University, where she majored in writing and contributed to the school newspaper. Her best story, she said, was a feature about local poverty, for which she spent several days reporting in homeless shelters around Syracuse. “Stories like that—heavily reported, with one-on-one interviews—there is a lot of value in that,” she said. “But then you have to think about impact. A Dose story I did in an hour would shatter that one, in terms of reach.”
