Antisocial, page 13
After college, DeBaise wanted to write. But she needed a stable job with a decent salary, so she ended up applying to a lot of tech start-ups. “I was willing to sort of put my journalism practice on the back burner,” she said. “But since I’ve come here I’ve found that a lot of those skills—attention to detail, an affinity for research—have actually come into play. I was surprised, in a pleasant way.” That morning, she had posted half a dozen lists to Dose, including “33 Photos of People Taken Seconds Before They Die. #10 Is from My Nightmares” and “No Matter How Much You Stare, You Won’t Be Able to Guess What These Photos Really Are Of.” While writing Dose headlines, she admitted, “there is a part of Syracuse University Chelsea that’s, like, ‘I don’t know if this is the way I should write it.’ But then another part of me is, like, ‘Actually, there’s pretty definitive evidence that this version will get a better response.’ So is the goal for people to look at it and be, like, ‘Wow, that girl wrote a really articulate headline’? At some point, you have to check your ego.”
When we spoke, DeBaise was reading In Persuasion Nation, a book of dystopian short stories by George Saunders, in which the oppressive force is not a totalitarian government but the all-seeing eye of targeted advertising. One story, “My Flamboyant Grandson,” takes place in Midtown Manhattan in the not-so-distant future. As the narrator and his grandson walk up Broadway, devices implanted in the sidewalk mine digital information from strips in their shoes. Eye-level screens show them “images reflective of the Personal Preferences we’d stated,” imploring them to visit a nearby Burger King. DeBaise only opened the book outside the office, she told me, because she sometimes burst into tears while reading it.
“You know the quote from Spider-Man—‘With great power comes great responsibility’?” she said. “Well, a tremendous amount of media attention means a lot of power. We’re lucky that Emerson is inherently a good person, because if you had someone that smart who wasn’t? Lord knows what would happen.”*
CHAPTER NINE
Brainwreck Politics
On the plane back to New York, I started to write my piece about Emerson Spartz. I tried not to be too harsh. He was still young. Maybe he’d change one day. Besides, I was well aware that my cautionary tale about new media would be published in a bastion of old media, and I didn’t want it to seem more vindictive than necessary.
Writers generally don’t pick their own headlines, but they’re allowed to make suggestions. I proposed calling my piece “TL;DR,” an internet initialism for “too long; didn’t read.” Some people around the office didn’t know what it meant, which indicated that some of our readers wouldn’t, either. Instead, we settled on “The Virologist.”
Above a New Yorker headline is a word or phrase, in small type, called the rubric. A piece reported in São Paolo might use the rubric Letter from Brazil; if the piece was reported in various points throughout the Amazon, the rubric might be Our Far-flung Correspondents. A lot of rubrics are Annals of Something-or-other—Annals of Science, Annals of Crime, Annals of the Former World, Annals of Annals. Pieces about journalism often run under the rubric The Wayward Press; The Publishing World is for pieces about publishing. But Emerson Spartz wasn’t a pressman or a publisher. What was he? We considered Annals of Entertainment, or Annals of Technology, or Annals of Marketing. None seemed quite right. Annals of Virality? Too cute. We ended up with Annals of Media, which, it turned out, had never been used before.
During the editing process, I spent several hours in the fact-checking department, corroborating statistics and tweaking phrases to avoid potential ambiguity. Was it really fair to say that Dose’s algorithmic model “leaves almost no room for curatorial discretion”? We removed the sentence, just to be safe. Behind us as we worked was a parody poster that one of the fact-checkers had mocked up in PhotoShop and tacked to the wall. In bold red type, it proclaimed, TRUE IS BETTER THAN DONE.
* * *
—
For the first few decades of its existence, The New Yorker contained no photographs and no table of contents. Many pieces of writing had no headline or byline at the top—just a rubric followed by an opening sentence. The writer’s name appeared at the end of the piece if it appeared at all. Sometimes, you didn’t know whether you were starting to read a piece of fiction, reportage, criticism, or humor; you just had to figure it out as you went. These austere design choices could be interpreted as signs of the editors’ respect for their readers, or their disdain, or both. A consumer product has to be user friendly; an art object reserves the right to be inexplicable or stubbornly useless. The New Yorker aspired to be both a consumer product and an art object. (This was much easier to pull off, solvency-wise, in the 1960s and ’70s, when magazines were flush with advertising revenue.)
The design, both in print and online, remains relatively minimalist—staid typefaces, no pull quotes—but, in the era of the Google-Facebook duopoly, aloofness is no longer a viable growth strategy. The New Yorker has a social media team, which has succeeded at drawing in many new subscribers. Still, the team can only do so much with the material they’re given. In the virality industry, pieces may vary in length, style, and quality, so long as they deliver a sharp and immediate dose of activating emotion. But a nuanced New Yorker piece—a good one, in other words—doesn’t always evoke a discrete emotion right away. Some New Yorker pieces are hard to finish. Some pieces, after you finish them, lodge quietly in your brain and unfurl there over a period of hours, or days, or weeks. Some pieces inspire more questions than answers; some leave you reeling at the vast and specific strangeness of the world; some make you feel indignant and impotent and ambivalent all at once. These mental states may be conducive to human flourishing, but most of them are deactivating emotions, and deactivating emotions don’t tend toward virality.
In the early days of newyorker.com, print headlines and web headlines were one and the same. By the time my piece about Spartz came out, The New Yorker had started to experiment with its own relatively simple form of A/B testing. Now print pieces had one title in the magazine and another title on the internet.* When the Spartz piece appeared online, it was called “King of Clickbait.” This was slightly harsher than the tone I was hoping to strike, but it worked. For about a day, it was the most popular piece on the site, until it was displaced by a slideshow of the most-read New Yorker pieces of the past year. The whole situation was ironic in five or six distinct ways, and yet I tried to see it through a lens of techno-optimism. At least people were reading my piece! Or clicking on it, anyway.
* * *
• • •
The day I left Chicago, Spartz was scheduled to have lunch with Bernie Marcus, the cofounder of Home Depot and one of the two hundred richest people in the country. “He wants advice about virality,” Spartz told me. “Like everyone, he’s got messages he wants to spread. You’re starting to see how the superpower can be applied to anything, right?”
Marcus was a budget hawk, a die-hard Zionist, and a right-wing megadonor. Once, on a conference call with conservative activists, he said that retailers who do not promote Republican candidates “should be shot.” “I assume he wants to push an agenda that I’m personally not super excited about,” Spartz said. Still, he never considered turning down the meeting. His job was to make effective tools. How people used those tools was none of his concern. “You don’t just network with people who share your beliefs,” he told me. “That’s a good way to end up with a small mind.”*
In 2016, Bernie Marcus donated $7 million to pro-Trump Super PACs. One of them, a PAC called Make America Number 1, paid more than $5 million to Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting firm that used online microtargeting to boost voter turnout for Trump, inhibit voter turnout for Clinton, and help nationalist memes go viral on Facebook. “The traditional model where fifty million people receive the same blanket advert is being replaced by extremely individualistic targeting,” Alexander Nix, then the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, said a couple of weeks before the election. Nix was not the only entrepreneur trying to enhance the old art of political propaganda with the new tools of social media. As long as these entrepreneurs stayed within the bounds of campaign-finance law, nothing about their work was illegal, or even particularly surprising.
After the election, Brad Parscale, the digital director of the Trump campaign, sat for an interview with 60 Minutes. “I understood early that Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win,” Parscale said. He explained to the reporter, Lesley Stahl, how his digital team had helped Trump achieve this goal. A simple campaign ad might be spun out into thousands of variations, which could then be tested against each other. On a laptop, Parscale showed Stahl an ad in which Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” quote was superimposed over a photo: a few of the upstanding Americans Clinton was ostensibly defaming. In one iteration of the ad, the upstanding Americans were older white women; in another, they were uniformed police officers; in yet another, they were a diverse group of millennials. Facebook users would see whichever version they were most likely to find persuasive, based on the personal preferences they’d stated (and some they hadn’t stated). In another TV interview, with Frontline, Parscale sounded even more overtly Spartzian. As opposed to traditional campaign advisers, who still market tested their slogans “anecdotally,” Parscale said, “We used data and machine learning to learn which ads worked better.” You don’t have to guess. You put a hundred slogans out there, then look at the data.
While the main campaign operated out of Trump Tower in New York, Parscale assembled a digital team of more than a hundred in San Antonio. They worked in a rented office next to a ten-lane highway. Cambridge Analytica sent Parscale advice and analysis. He also got help directly from the source. “Facebook employees would show up for work every day in our offices,” he said on 60 Minutes. “I asked each one of them, by email, ‘I wanna know every single secret button, click, technology you have.’”* On the day of his inauguration, Donald Trump filed the paperwork for his 2020 reelection campaign. The following year, he announced who would run it: Brad Parscale.
Obviously, Emerson Spartz did not cause Donald Trump to rise to power. But the conditions that made Spartz’s success possible—the attention market’s slide into raw Darwinism, the widespread conflation of quality with popularity, the coarsening of the national vocabulary—were among the main conditions that made a Trump presidency possible. In 2017, on YouTube, I watched Spartz deliver a new version of his self-pitch, in the form of a TEDx Talk. It started out the same as the old version. “If you could make things go viral, that was like having a superpower,” he said. “You could tip elections, overthrow dictators, start movements, revolutionize industries. And it worked. And this happened.” On a screen behind him, he displayed a collage of images, none of which mentioned the tipped American election of 2016. Rather, they were screenshots representing Emerson Spartz’s achievements in business: his face on CNBC, his photo in Forbes, an article about him in The New Yorker. He’d chosen to highlight the print headline, “The Virologist,” which was ambiguous enough to seem laudatory. And he’d cropped the image so that the article’s subtitle—“How a young entrepreneur built an empire by repackaging memes”—ended with the word “empire.”*
CHAPTER TEN
The Sailer Strategy
For a long time—for a period, to be precise, that began in the 1960s and ended abruptly on November 8, 2016—Washington insiders from both parties tacitly agreed on a set of commonsense assumptions. For example: it’s impossible for an openly racist candidate to win a national election. Presidential candidates could make appeals to white racists—indeed, all of them did so—but only delicately, using dog whistles. Ronald Reagan denied that his “states’ rights” speech had anything to do with race. By the time of the 1980 general election, he was all sunny, inclusive optimism. Bill Clinton, speaking before Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in 1992, denounced the rapper Sister Souljah, comparing her to David Duke. And yet, seconds later, Clinton said, “We can’t get anywhere in this country pointing the finger at one another across racial lines.” During the primary election in 2000, campaign operatives who seemed to be working on behalf of George W. Bush spread rumors that Bush’s opponent, John McCain, had “fathered an illegitimate black child.” In the general election, though, Bush campaigned as a compassionate conservative with a centrist approach to immigration. “El sueño americano es para todos,” he said at a campaign rally in Philadelphia. The American dream is for everyone. We are a country of immigrants. We are at war with terrorism, not with Islam. This, too, was part of the bipartisan consensus: all candidates must speak in magnanimous platitudes about melting pots and universal goodwill. To do otherwise, everyone assumed, would be unpresidential, un-American, unthinkable—would be, more to the point, a self-defeating electoral strategy.
In the 2012 election, Mitt Romney flirted with the angry nativist fringe of his party before tacking back to the center. He snuck into Trump Tower through a back entrance to seek the endorsement of Donald Trump, who was by then a full-blown Twitter conspiracist. After winning his party’s nomination, Romney ran, more plausibly, as a bland moderate. It didn’t work.
When the election was over, Reince Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee, convened a panel of GOP strategists to explain Romney’s loss and to chart a way forward. In a hundred-page report, the strategists emphasized that the party had no choice but to tack toward the center, especially on issues of race and pluralism. “Many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country,” the report said. The GOP needed to cast out the hard-liners and “champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.”*
A dozen years earlier, Steve Sailer, a prolific opinion columnist with a small but passionate online audience, had reached the opposite conclusion. Sailer, then a forty-one-year-old living in Southern California, had retired early from a successful career in marketing in order to write full time. When the venerable conservative magazines would publish his work, he wrote for them; when they wouldn’t, which was more often the case, he posted his columns on his own blog. On November 28, 2000, while the Bush and Gore campaigns were still arguing over hanging chads in Florida, Sailer wrote a blog post. Citing exit-poll data, he demonstrated that if Bush had increased his share of the white vote by just 3 percent—if 57 percent of white Americans had voted for him, rather than 54 percent—he would have won in a landslide. Sailer then expanded his hypothetical: what if, in order to win those additional white votes, Bush had embraced a platform so caustic, so openly hostile to racial minorities, that he lost every nonwhite vote? “Incredibly,” Sailer found, “he still would have won.”
By Sailer’s lights, this meant that Republicans should drop their disingenuous platitudes and campaign openly as a white-identity party. Then, once they were in power, they could enact prowhite policies—deporting undocumented immigrants, reducing immigration quotas, retracting birthright citizenship—thus maintaining a white majority that could deliver future elections to the GOP. He knew the mainstream counterarguments, which all seemed to boil down to the same thing: White people shouldn’t organize in their own interest, because that would be racist, and racism is bad. That argument didn’t matter to Sailer. He maintained that a prowhite campaign strategy would work, and that it was the best way to save the country from ruin. By 2012, he had been making this argument so vociferously for so long that, in ultra-right-wing circles, it was called the Sailer Strategy.
The American dream is for everyone. This was the sort of gauzy logic that Sailer loved to tear apart. On the contrary, he argued, the American dream is only for Americans; moreover, politicians should enforce strict rules about who was allowed to become an American, revising those rules, if necessary, to privilege immigrants from certain regions over others. “An immigration policy, by its very nature, is about discriminating, about selecting whom we should admit and whom we should keep out,” he wrote. Without such policies, he strongly believed, the United States would cease to be an Anglo-Christian nation, which would lead to poverty, crime, and internecine struggle. “But intelligence is discrimination, so intelligence is racist,” he continued sarcastically. “In contrast, suicidal stupidity isn’t racist. So it’s better.” This was a worldview he called “citizenism,” distinguishing himself from the paleoconservatives, radical traditionalists, white nationalists, and white separatists with whom he had subtle doctrinal differences.
Many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not want them in the country. Well, Sailer felt no particular animus toward any individual, unless the individual had done something to earn it, and yet some minority groups—say, undocumented gang members—would be right to think that he didn’t want them in his country. Nor, frankly, did Sailer take for granted that all men were created equal, that European Americans and African Americans were born, on average, with identical levels of intelligence and work ethic and proclivity to violence. He didn’t take it on faith that racial groups differed intrinsically in these ways; he was just posing the question, following the facts wherever they happened to lead.
