Trust Me I'm Lying (5th Anniversary Edition) Read online

  Where it all goes from here, for me, for the media, who knows? Could it actually get worse? I’ve said no before, and look how that turned out. I suppose that future, then, remains up to you. To us.

  Ryan Holiday

  Austin, Texas

  Summer 2017

  *Gawker was itself later sued for $100 million for publishing a stolen sex tape of a professional wrestler, but we’ll talk more about that later.

  TRUST ME,

  I’M LYING

  INTRODUCTION

  IF YOU WERE BEING KIND, YOU WOULD SAY MY JOB is in marketing and public relations, or online strategy and advertising. But that’s a polite veneer to hide the harsh truth. I am, to put it bluntly, a media manipulator—I’m paid to deceive. My job is to lie to the media so they can lie to you. I cheat, bribe, and connive for bestselling authors and billion-dollar brands and abuse my understanding of the internet to do it.

  I am most certainly not the only one.

  People like me funnel millions of dollars to online publications to fuel their enormous appetite for pageviews. We control the scoops and breaking news that fill your Facebook feed, that get your coworkers chattering. I have flown bloggers across the country, boosted their revenue by buying fake traffic, written their stories for them, fabricated elaborate ruses to capture their attention, and even hired their family members. I’ve probably sent enough gift cards and T-shirts to fashion bloggers to clothe a small country. Why did I do all this? Because it was the best way to get what I wanted for my clients: attention. I did it to build these writers and influencers as sources, sources that now have access to millions of people at some of the biggest media outlets and platforms in the world. I used blogs to control the news.

  It’s why I found myself at 2:00 a.m. one morning, at a deserted intersection in Los Angeles, dressed in all black. In my hand I had tape and some obscene stickers made at Kinko’s earlier in the afternoon. What was I doing here? I was there to deface billboards, specifically billboards I had designed and paid for. Not that I’d expected to do anything like this, but there I was, doing it. My then-girlfriend and future wife, coaxed into being my accomplice, was behind the wheel of the getaway car.

  After I finished, we circled the block and I took photos of my work from the passenger window as if I had spotted it from the road. Across the billboards was now a two-foot-long sticker that implied that the movie’s creator—my client Tucker Max—deserved to have his dick caught in a trap with sharp metal hooks. Or something like that.

  As soon as I got home I dashed off two e-mails to two major blogs. Under the fake name Evan Meyer I wrote, “I saw these on my way home last night. It was on 3rd and Crescent Heights, I think. Good to know Los Angeles hates Tucker Max too,” and attached the photos.

  One blog wrote back: “You’re not messing with me, are you?”

  No, I said. Trust me, I’m not lying . . .

  The vandalized billboards and the coverage that my photos received were just a small part of the deliberately provocative campaign I did for the movie I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Tucker, the client, had asked me to create some controversy around the movie, which was based on his bestselling book, and I did—somewhat effortlessly, it turns out. It is one of many campaigns I have done in my career, and by no means an unusual one. But it illustrates a part of the media system that is hidden from your view: how the news is created and driven by marketers, and that no one does anything to stop it.

  In under two weeks, and with no budget, thousands of college students protested the movie on their campuses nationwide, angry citizens vandalized our billboards in multiple neighborhoods, FoxNews.com ran a front-page story about the backlash, Page Six of the New York Post made their first of many mentions of Tucker, and the Chicago Transit Authority banned and stripped the movie’s advertisements from their buses. To cap it all off, two different editorials railing against the film ran in the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune the week it was released. The outrage about Tucker was great enough that a few years later it was written into the television show Portlandia.

  I guess it is safe to admit now that the entire firestorm was, essentially, fake.

  I designed the advertisements, which I bought and placed around the country, and then promptly called and left anonymous complaints about them (and leaked copies of my complaints to blogs for support). I alerted college LGBT and women’s rights groups to screenings in their area and baited them to protest our offensive movie at the theater, knowing that the nightly news would cover it. I started a boycott group on Facebook. I orchestrated fake tweets and posted fake comments to articles online. I even won a contest for being the first one to send in a picture of a defaced ad in Chicago. (Thanks for the free T-shirt, Chicago RedEye. Oh, also, that photo was from New York.) I manufactured preposterous stories about Tucker’s behavior on and off the movie set and reported them to gossip websites, which gleefully repeated them. I paid for anti-woman ads on feminist websites and anti-religion ads on Christian websites, knowing each would write about it. Sometimes I just Photoshopped ads onto screenshots of websites and got coverage for controversial ads that never actually ran. The loop became final when, for the first time in history, I put out a press release to answer my own manufactured criticism: tucker max responds to cta decision: “blow me,” the headline read.

  Hello, shitstorm of press. Hello, number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

  I pulled this off with no connections, no money, and no footsteps to follow. But because of the way that blogging is structured—from the way bloggers are paid by the pageview to the way blog posts must be written to catch the reader’s attention—this was all very easy to do. The system eats up the kind of material I produce. So as the manufactured storm I created played itself out in the press, real people started believing it, and it became true.

  My full-time job then was director of marketing for American Apparel, a clothing company known for its provocative imagery and unconventional business practices, and I would go on to found my own marketing company, Brass Check, which would orchestrate stunts and marketing trickery for other high-profile clients, from authors who sell millions of books to entrepreneurs worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I create and shape the news for them.

  Usually, it is a simple hustle. Someone pays me, I manufacture a story for them, and we trade it up the chain—from a tiny blog to a website of a local news network to Reddit to the Huffington Post to the major newspapers to cable news and back again, until the unreal becomes real.* Sometimes I start by planting a story. Sometimes I put out a press release or ask a friend to break a story on their blog. Sometimes I “leak” a document. Sometimes I fabricate a document and leak that. Really, it can be anything, from vandalizing a Wikipedia page to producing an expensive viral video. However the play starts, the end is the same: The economics of the internet are exploited to change public perception—and sell product.

  Now, I was hardly a wide-eyed kid when I entered this world. I grew up online, and I knew that in every community there were trolls and tricksters. Like many people, I remained a believer. I thought the web was a meritocracy, and that the good stuff generally rose to the top. But spending serious time in the media underworld, watching as the same outlets who fell for easy marketing stunts seriously report on matters of policy or culture will disabuse you of that naïveté. It will turn that hope into cynicism.

  Though I wish I could pinpoint the moment when it all fell apart, when I realized that the whole thing was a giant con, I can’t. All I know is that, eventually, I did. It’s what ultimately put me on the path to write this book.

  I studied the economics and the ecology of online media deeply in the pursuit of my craft. I wanted to understand not just how but why it worked—from the technology down to the personalities of the people who use it. As an insider with access, I saw things that academics and gurus and many journalists themselves will never see. Publishers liked to talk to me, because I controlled multimil-lion-dollar online
advertising budgets, and they were often shockingly honest.

  I began to make connections among these pieces of information and see patterns in history. In books decades out of print I saw criticism of media loopholes that had now reopened. I watched as basic psychological precepts were violated or ignored by bloggers as they reported the “news” (and the so-called fake news). Having seen that much of the edifice of online publishing was based on faulty assumptions and self-serving logic, I had learned that I could out-smart it. This knowledge both scared and emboldened me at the same time. I confess, I turned around and used this knowledge against the public interest, and for my own gain.

  An obscure item I found in the course of my research has always stayed with me. It was a mention of a 1913 editorial cartoon published in the long since defunct Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper. The cartoon, it said, showed a businessman throwing coins into the mouth of a giant fang-bared monster of many arms, which stood menacingly in front of him. Each of its tentacle-like arms, which were destroying the city around it, was tattooed with the words like: “Cultivating Hate,” “Distorting Facts,” and “Slush to Inflame.” The man was an advertiser and the mouth belonged to the malicious yellow press that needed his money to survive. Underneath was a caption: the fool who feeds the monster.

  I knew I had to find this century-old drawing, though I wasn’t sure why. As I rode the escalator through the glass canyon atrium and into the bowels of the central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library to search for it, it struck me that I wasn’t just looking for some rare old newspaper. I was looking for myself. I knew who that fool was. He was me.

  In addiction circles, those in recovery also use the image of the monster as a warning. They tell the story of a man who found a package on his porch. Inside was a little monster, but it was cute, like a puppy. He kept it and raised it. The more he fed it, the bigger it got and the more it needed to be fed. He ignored his worries as it grew bigger, more intimidating, demanding, and unpredictable, until one day, as he was playing with it, the monster attacked and nearly killed him. The realization that the situation was more than he could handle came too late—the man was no longer in control. The monster had a life of its own.

  The story of the monster is a lot like my story. Except my story is not about drugs or the yellow press but a bigger and much more modern monster—my monster is the brave new world of new media—one that I often fed and thought I controlled. I lived high and well in that world, and I believed in it until it no longer looked the same to me. Many things went down. I’m not sure where my responsibility for them begins or ends, but I am ready to talk about what happened.

  I created false perceptions through blogs, which led to bad conclusions and wrong decisions—real decisions in the real world that had consequences for real people. Phrases like “known rapist” began to follow what were once playfully encouraged rumors of bad or shocking behavior designed to get blog publicity for clients. American Apparel, the company whose CEO loved to encourage controversy, eventually tired of it and fired him—and was sent reeling into bankruptcy and, sadly, irrelevancy. Friends were ruined and broken. Gradually I began to notice work just like mine appearing everywhere, and no one catching on to it or repairing the damage. Stocks took major hits, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, on news from the same unreliable sources I’d often trick with fake stories. I’ve even seen some of those same sites take unfair shots at me, accusing me of this or that, because there was traffic in it for them.

  I don’t think it’s controversial now, looking at the collapse of our political discourse, when a reality-television star has been elected to the presidency, to say that everyone is starting to learn what the consequences of feeding the monster are. We can’t even talk to each other anymore, each of us running our own polarized little world on Facebook. Both sides throw the label “fake news” at each other because we can’t even agree on basic truth anymore. Winston Churchill wrote of the appeasers of his age that “each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.” I thought I could skip being devoured entirely. Maybe you did too. We thought we were in control. I was wrong. We all were wrong.

  WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

  I didn’t need to write this book. Financially, that is. I could have made a lot more money as a media manipulator, working with politicians and businessmen. I could have remained nameless, touching your life only through the news stories I created. I chose not to do that. I didn’t write this book for free, of course, and no narrator is fully trustworthy, myself included. I’m simply speaking personally and frankly about what I know, and I know this space well. Some have tried to claim that I was lying even in this book but my reply remains the same: Why would I bother?

  I wrote the original edition of this book because I was genuinely tired of how the things were. A good question about the ethics of a certain profession or activity is: What would the world look like if more people behaved like you? In my case, the answer was: “A lot worse.”

  I wrote this book then not as an apology but as a warning. I have updated it twice because my warnings have turned out not to be serious enough. Because it’s turned out worse than I expected. I don’t think you can argue with that.

  Sitting in a drawer in my office is a large box filled with hundreds of articles I have printed over the last several years. The articles show all the trademarks of the fakes and scams I myself have run, yet they involve many of the biggest news and entertainment stories of the decade. The margins are filled with angry little notes and question marks. The satirist Juvenal wrote of “cramming whole notebooks with scribbled invective” amid the corrupt opulence of Rome; that box and this book are my notebooks from my own days inside such a world. Collectively, it was this process that opened my eyes. I hope it will have the same effect for you.

  Some of you, by the time you are done with this book, will probably hate me for ruining things for you too. Or accuse me of exaggerating. You may not want me to expose the people behind your favorite websites or politicians as the imbeciles, charlatans, and pompous frauds they are. You don’t have to like me, but you should listen. We live in a world of many hustlers, and you are the mark. The con is to build a brand off the backs of others. Your attention and your credulity are being stolen.

  This book isn’t structured like typical business books. Instead of extended chapters, it is split into two parts, and each part is made up of short, overlapping, and reinforcing vignettes. In the first part I explain why blogs and social media matter, how they drive the news, and how they can be manipulated. In the second I show what happens when you do this, how it backfires, and the dangerous consequences of our current system. And then, in the back, I have some extra materials and interviews that might be of use to you.

  Every one of the tactics in this book reveals a critical vulnerability in our media system. I will show you where they are and what can be done with them, and help you recognize when they’re being used on you. Sure, I am explaining how to take advantage of these weaknesses, but mostly I am saying that these vulnerabilities exist. It is the first time that these gaps have ever been exposed, by a critic or otherwise. Hopefully, once in the open, they’ll no longer work as well. I understand that there is some contradiction in this position, as there has long been in me. My dis-integration wasn’t always healthy, but it does allow me to explain our problems from a unique perspective.

  By the end of this book, you’ll see that we have a media system designed to trick, cajole, and steal every second of the most precious resource in the world—people’s time. I’m going to show you every single one of these tricks, and what they mean.

  What you choose to do with this information is up to you.

  *By “real” I mean that people believe it and act on it. I am saying that the infrastructure of the internet can be used against itself to turn a manufactured piece of nonsense into widespread outrage and then action. It happens every day. Every single day.

>   I

  BLOGS MAKE THE NEWS

  It is not news that sells papers, but papers that sell news.

  —BILL BONNER, MOBS, MESSIAHS, AND MARKETS

  I CALL TO YOUR ATTENTION AN ARTICLE IN THE New York Times written at the earliest of the earliest junctures of the 2012 presidential election, nearly two years before votes would be cast.1*

  It told of a then obscure figure, Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota. Pawlenty was not yet a presidential candidate. He had no campaign director, no bus, few donors, and little name recognition. In fact, he did not even have a campaign. It was January 2011, after all. What he did have was a beat reporter from the blog Politico following him from town to town with a camera and a laptop, reporting every moment of his noncampaign.

  It’s a bit peculiar, if you think about it. Even the New York Times, the newspaper that spends millions of dollars a year for a Baghdad bureau, which can fund investigative reports five or ten years in the making, didn’t have a reporter covering Pawlenty. Yet Politico, a blog with only a fraction of the resources of a major newspaper, did. The Times was covering Politico covering a noncandidate.

  It was a little like a Ponzi scheme, and like all such schemes, it went from boom to bust. Pawlenty became a candidate, coverage of him generated millions of impressions online, then in print, and finally on television, before he flamed out and withdrew from the race. Despite all of this, his candidacy’s impact on the election was significant and real enough that the next Republican front-runner courted Pawlenty’s endorsement.