Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (40 page)

There is a reason that the weak are drawn to snark while the strong simply say what they mean. Snark makes the speaker feel a strength they know deep down they do not possess. It shields their insecurity and makes the writer feel like they are in control. Snark is the ideal intellectual position. It can criticize, but it cannot be criticized.

Consider Nikki Finke again, who by all accounts is an incredibly vain and perpetually sensitive person. She demands studio heads pay her the proper respect (under the implied threat of bad coverage), and she’s filed numerous civil lawsuits for the most trivial of offenses (E*TRADE for $7.5 million for recording a phone call without the “This call may be recorded” warning; a car dealership over the terms of her extended warranty; the
Hollywood Reporter
for supposedly stealing her story ideas; and according to her rival and colleague Sharon Waxman, a hotel for giving her food poisoning). She rarely leaves her home and abstains from essentially all public appearances. She deliberately made sure that there is only one photo of her available online—and it’s very old. It is clear that Finke is a deeply insecure and miserable person.

When we give her a podium, this is the baggage that comes along with it. And every so often it falls on an unsuspecting person or group like the pile of self-loathing and jealous bricks that it is. Could one of the producers of the “gayest Oscars ever” respond by saying that Finke’s attack clearly came from such a place? No, because then they would be “whiny,” “humorless,” or “old.” God forbid they make a typo in their reply—because then it is all over.

In my experience, it doesn’t end with Nikki Finke. Sports bloggers are clearly jealous of the athletic abilities and fame of the professionals they cover;
Pitchfork
album reviews are a sad attempt by the writers to show how many big words they know;
Gawker
writers bitterly lament that some people get to be socialites and celebrities while they have to work for a living. None of this can be used as a response by people like me, of course—“Hey! This guy is a human too, he messes up, he’s a hypocrite!” “They’re just jealous” is too trite to work as an explanation (even when it’s true), and so the snark stands. To respond is merely to expose the jugular once more—to show that you’re human and vulnerable and easily rattled.

This is why blogs love to call people douchebags
*
:

Your Daily Douchebag: John Mayer Edition (PerezHilton.com)

Meanwhile…McCain Locks Up the Notorious Douchebag Demographic (
Huffington Post
)

Are MGMT Douchebags? Does it Matter? (
Huffington Post
)

Bud Selig Is Bad for Baseball, a Douchebag (
SB Nation
)

Internet “douchebag” Allthis responds to controversy (
VentureBeat
)

Andrew Breitbart: Death of a Douche (
Rolling Stone
blog)

To be called a douche is to be branded with all the characteristics of what society deigns to hate but can’t define. It’s a way to dismiss someone entirely without doing any of the work or providing any of the reasons. It says, You are a fool, and everyone thinks it. It is the ultimate insult, because it deprives the recipient of the credentials of being taken seriously.

Roger Ebert calls snarking “cultural vandalism.” He’s right. Snark makes culture impossible, or rather, it makes the conditions that make culture possible impossible. Earnestness, honesty, vulnerability: These are the targets of snark. “Snark functions as a device to punish human spontaneity, eccentricity, nonconformity, and simple error. Everyone is being snarked into line,” he wrote. Yet even Ebert couldn’t resist the temptation to snark over the tragic death of
Jackass
star Ryan Dunn. On Twitter, which cries out for snide one-liners, Ebert wrote: “Friends don’t let jackasses drink and drive.” He apologized shortly afterward, but I doubt that make Dunn’s family or friends feel any better.

His remark illustrates the cycle beautifully. For his snarky joke, Ebert was gleefully punished by the angry online horde, who rushed to hurt his feelings in return. (They ignored that Ebert was a recovering alcoholic and may have gotten carried away.) Hackers had his Facebook fan page temporarily deleted, and the second comment atop the apology he was essentially extorted to give still says, “Glad your Facebook page is gone!…just like your career.” And the snarker is snarked.

As Scott Adams said later in an interview: “Ideas are society’s fuel. I drill a lot of wells; most of them are dry. Sometimes they produce. Sometimes the well catches on fire.” What
Jezebel
did with their fury and snark was eliminate the freedom of that process. They didn’t simply attack Adams by demanding that papers stop publishing his comics but pulled the ultimate grim trigger: They turned him into a laughingstock.

If controversial ideas are the victims of snark, who benefits from it? Who doesn’t mind snark? Who likes it? The answer is obvious: People with nothing to lose. People who need to be talked about, like attention-hungry reality stars. There is nothing that you could say that would hurt the cast of
Jersey Shore
. They need you to talk about them, to insult them, and to make fun of them is to do that. They have no reputation to ruin, only notoriety to gain.

So the people who thrive under snark are exactly those who we wish would go away, and the people we value most as cultural contributors lurk in the back of the room, hoping not to get noticed and hurt. Everything in-between may as well not exist. Snark encourages the fakeness and stupidity it is supposedly trying to rail against.

I once saw snark as an opportunity to advance narratives in the media cheaply. But I have been burned by it enough, seen enough of its victims’ shell-shocked faces, to know that it is not worth it.

*
Gawker
held a user poll (see: pseudo-events) for the Douche of the Decade in 2010. It turned out that I had worked for or advised
three
of the ten finalists. Apparently I have a thing for douchebags and didn’t even know it.

XXII

THE 21
ST
-CENTURY DEGRADATION CEREMONY

BLOGS AS MACHINES OF HATRED AND PUNISHMENT

SOCIOLOGIST GERALD CROMER ONCE NOTED THAT the decline of public executions coincided almost exactly with the rise of the mass newspaper. Oscar Wilde said it better: “In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.”

If only they knew what was coming next:

Online lynch mobs. Attack blogs. Smear campaigns. Snark. Cyberbullying. Distributed denial of service attempts. Internet meltdowns. Anonymous tipsters. Blog wars. Trolls. Trial by comment section.

It is clear to me that the online media cycle is not a process for developing truth but for performing a kind of cultural catharsis. Blogs, I understood from Wilde and Cromer, served the hidden function of dispensing public punishments. Think of the Salem witch trials: They weren’t court proceedings but ceremonies. In that light, the events three hundred years ago suddenly feel very real and current: Oh, they were doing with trumped-up evidence and the gallows what we do with speculation and sensationalism. Ours is just a more civilized way to tear someone to pieces.

My experience with digital lynch mobs is unique. I get frantic calls from sensitive millionaires and billionaires who want me to fend one off. Occasionally they ask that I discreetly direct this mob toward one of their enemies. I am not afraid to say I have done both. I feel I can honestly look myself in the mirror and say the people I protected deserved my efforts—and so did the people I set my sights on. But it is a power I don’t relish using, because once I start, I don’t stop.

Ask the blogger we went after during Tucker’s movie campaign. The ad I ran, which the blog
MediaElites
later called “one of the most despicable personal attacks” they’d ever seen, read in part: “Tucker Max Facts #47: Domestic violence is not funny. Unless
Gawker
editor Richard Blakeley gets arrested for it.”
*
The
New York Post
once caught wind of a campaign of mine against an enemy after my e-mail account was hacked. They were so appalled that they ran a full-page article about it in their Sunday addition: “Charney [really, me] Wages Bizarre Cyber Battle.” This article, along with the press I’d bagged to embarrass our target, hangs on my wall like a hunting trophy.

THE DEGRADATION CEREMONY

These acts of ritualized destruction are known by anthropologists as “degradation ceremonies.” Their purpose is to allow the public to single out and denounce one of its members. To lower their status or expel them from the group. To collectively take out our anger at them by stripping them of their dignity. It is a we-versus-you scenario with deep biological roots. By the end of it the disgraced person’s status is cemented as “not one of us.” Everything about them is torn down and rewritten.