#max read

[transpondster]

At Gawker, They Battled a Billionaire. 10 Years Later, the Scars Are Still Healing

Their weaponized wit made enemies, minted stars and helped define the internet as we know it. A decade after Peter Thiel engineered the site’s spectacular collapse, Nick Denton’s diaspora is still shaping media — and haunted by what happened.

[Cord] Jefferson and [Max] Read had sold a scripted series to Apple titled Scraper that was based on the inner workings of Gawker, and the quartet, along with a handful of, as [Emma] Carmichael puts it, “very accomplished, amazing screenwriters and playwrights on Broadway,” were producing scripts for the first season. 

Scraper was not a hagiography. Carmichael, who became Gawker’s managing editor in her early 20s, describes the show as “Industry meets Succession,” with characters based on the characters who worked there. “We were telling the story honestly,” says Jefferson. “It was a morally queasy place, and that makes for interesting television.” 

Jefferson and Read say they went into the deal knowing that there was no love lost between Apple and Gawker, the website co-founded by British journalist, blogger and entrepreneur Nick Denton that published a series of blogs in addition to its flagship. In 2010, one of those blogs, Gizmodo, which covered the tech industry, infuriated Steve Jobs when it obtained and published photos of an iPhone 4 prototype that an engineer had left in a restaurant. The next year, another Gawker-owned site, Valleywag, outed Tim Cook in a story headlined, “Meet Tim Cook, the Most Powerful Gay Man in Silicon Valley.”

“Max and I had been concerned about that when we sold the project to Apple,” says Jefferson, but the executives developing the project “told us there was a very protective firewall between the TV side and the tech side.”

But a month before the writers room wrapped with scripts for the first season’s eight episodes, Jefferson recalls, “an executive called me and said word had reached Tim Cook that we were doing a show set in a world similar to Gawker, and he had put the kibosh on it personally.”

Jefferson and his 3 Arts Entertainment manager Jermaine Johnson (who also represents Read and Carmichael) say they heard about but never saw an email in which Cook allegedly referred to Gawker as rife with “vile human beings.” (Cook did not respond to requests for comment.)

In August, when Jefferson — who was nominated that July for the Emmy he won for his writing on the HBO miniseries Watchmen — informed the writers room of Scraper‘s fate, Carmichael says, “I wish I had a screenshot because the playwrights and Hollywood people were, jaws on the floor, gasping, ‘What?’ And all the Gawker people were like, ‘This happens all the time.’ “

Of course, Cook was not the first tech titan to exact revenge on Gawker....

Nor was he the last.

[luxe-pauvre]

The social industry doesn’t just eat our time with endless stimulus and algorithmic scrolling; it eats our time by creating and promoting people who exist only to be explained to, people to whom the world has been created anew every morning, people for whom every settled sociological, scientific, and political argument of modernity must be rehashed, rewritten, and re-accounted, this time with their participation. These people, with their just-asking questions and vapid open letters, are dullards and bores, pettifoggers and casuists, cowards and dissemblers, time-wasters of the worst sort. But Seymour’s book suggests something worse about us, their Twitter and Facebook interlocutors: That we want to waste our time. That, however much we might complain, we find satisfaction in endless, circular argument. That we get some kind of fulfillment from tedious debates about “free speech” and “cancel culture.” That we seek oblivion in discourse. In the machine-flow atemporality of social media, this seems like no great crime. If time is an infinite resource, why not spend a few decades of it with a couple New York Times op-ed columnists, rebuilding all of Western thought from first principles? But political and economic and immunological crises pile on one another in succession, over the background roar of ecological collapse. Time is not infinite. None of us can afford to spend what is left of it dallying with the stupid and bland.

Max Read, Going Postal: A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive

[luxe-pauvre]

[Richard] Seymour is cautious here. As he points out, we’ve only just set aside prophecies of inevitable, internet-borne emancipation, and we should be careful not to make the same confident mistake in reverse, with moralizing, panicked screeds about inescapable algorithmic radicalization. What is scarier, anyway, than the idea that we’re trapped on a collision course with TikTok totalitarianism is Seymour’s insistence that we’re not “trapped” at all—that, in fact, “we are part of the machine, and we find our satisfactions in it, however destructive they may be.” Whatever dark future we hurtle toward, we are copilots on the journey. It’s for this reason that slavish devotion to the social or biological “incentives” of the platforms is an insufficient explanation of our “scripturience.” If we are compelled to write, it is because of “something in us that is waiting to be addicted”—a lack, a desire, a deficiency that we seek to address. Is it a longing for connection? A yearning for fame? If so, posting is a poor strategy: you are as likely to lose friends as you are to make them, and online celebrity is only ever 240 characters away from online infamy. So why do we keep participating in an activity that acts against our interests and gives us no particular pleasure? “Is self destruction, in some perverse way, the yield?” Seymour wonders. In other words: get in, loser, we’re going beyond the pleasure principle. What if the urge lurking behind our compulsive participation in the Twittering Machine is not the behavioralist pursuit of maximized pleasure, but the Freudian death drive—our latent instinct toward inorganic oblivion, destruction, self-obliteration, “the ratio”? What if we post self-sabotaging things because we want to sabotage ourselves? What if the reason we tweet is because we wish we were dead? On the one hand, that sounds like Freudian mumbo jumbo. On the other hand, speaking as a frequent user of social media, that . . . seems about right to me. What the Twittering Machine offers is not death, precisely, but oblivion—an escape from consciousness into numb atemporality, a trance-like “dead zone” of indistinguishably urgent stimulus. Seymour compares the “different, timeless, time zone” of the Twittering Machine to what the gambling-addiction expert Natasha Dow Schüll calls the “machine zone,” in which “time, space, and social identity are suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process.” You might say that “Twitter is not real life,” a line intended as a kind of cutting warning, serves equally as an advertisement for the platform. But what is at stake here is not “reality.” It’s time. Seymour compares the Twittering Machine to the chronophage, “a monster that eats time.” We give ourselves over to it “because of whatever is disappointing in the world of the living,” but we do so at great cost. “Given the time this addiction demands of us,” Seymour writes, “we are entitled to ask what else we might be doing, what else we could be addicted to.”

Max Read, Going Postal: A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive

[luxe-pauvre]

Perhaps the best lens to examine compulsive, unproductive, inexplicable use of social media is not technical, or sociological, or economic, but psychoanalytic. In which case, rather than asking what is wrong with these systems, we might ask, “What is wrong with us?” […] The writing and thinking emerging from the anti-social-media “techlash” of the past few years has tended to focus on malevolent design choices and business models that supposedly keep users hooked on the big platforms. “The problem,” ex-Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris told Wired in 2017, “is the hijacking of the human mind.” According to tech critics and industry apostates like Harris and former Facebookers Sean Parker and Chamath Palihapitiya, the brains of users are overtaken by “dopamine feedback loops” “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” to reap profits from an attention-driven business model. But as radical (and conspiratorial) as such explanations of social media’s power might sound, they rely on the same techno-determinism that Silicon Valley’s boosters have been pushing for decades: just as networks would inevitably turn everyone into a liberal democratic subject, they now inevitably turn us into slavering zombies. Fundamentally conservative, this school of thought finds its solutions in narrow technical reformism: tweak this algorithm, move these numbers, ban these users, and everything will be fixed. It’s not that the accounts of people like Harris are illegitimate—the social industry was designed as a behavioralist casino; it relates to us, even constitutes us, as addicts, “users” whose natural state is devoted attention to the object of our addiction. But such techno-determinism renders all of us passive objects, our very brain chemistry at the mercy of a small handful of Harvard dorks with admin privileges. Are we really captive to our devices in quite so direct or helpless away? [Richard] Seymour doesn’t buy it, and worries that just-so stories about addiction are disempowering and limiting. “To reduce experience to chemistry”—those dreaded dopamine feedback loops—“is to bypass what is essential to it: its meaning,” he writes. His rejection of determinism isn’t a recourse to personal responsibility, but a warning: regulation will not cure us, and reform won’t save us. If we live in a “horror story, the horror must partly lie in the user.”

Max Read, Going Postal: A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive

[zurcnaaitsirhc]

Decoding the AI hype cycle.

[doubledaybooks]

Praise for SECOND LIFE by Amanda Hess “There is no better chaperone than Amanda Hess through the strange world of surveillance, monetization, bureaucracy, and alternative medicine to which pregnant people and mothers are subjected.” —Max Read, editor of Read Max and former editor-in-chief of Gawker

[lamajaoscura]

What's the deal with weird wrong-number texts?

Digging into the world of "pig-butchering" scams

[st-just]

By 2021, when Buzzfeed finally went public, it was clear that the scale→???→profit model was not going to work out. The 2010s are over; subscriptions are the future (for now); for advertising-based businesses, the best bet is to build reliably visited homepages like it’s 1997 again. At Slate Hillary Frey calls the decade “a detour” for journalism, which is fine as a quick and dirty metaphor but I think suggests too much that newsmedia is a powerful agent bushwacking a path to success, instead of a pathetic, sweaty interloper trying to outrun a big boulder like Indiana Jones.

-Max Read, Buzzfeed, Gawker, and the end of the 2010s