S5E13: Gashed Hull: Media: Ben Smith

This is Larry Lessig. The way to understand media today is through the lens of AI, Though, again, as I said earlier in this series, AI, broadly conceived, corporate media, commercial media, these are instances of AI. In this sense, they are both artificial intelligences, each with objective functions. Increasingly, that objective function is simply to maximize engagement. In the last episode, we talked a bit about how far we've come in the evolution of this business and business model, and specifically about some of its harms. But in this episode we're going to step back and look at the story from its very beginning, because at the birth of social media, there was the birth of viral media, media that spread itself because consumers became invested in sharing content broadly. I still remember one of the most famous of these episodes, the what Colors Are this Dress Challenge. A Scottish folk singer named Caitlin McNeill had a badly lit picture of a dress, and it discovered that people had wildly different views about what colors were on the dress. Some saw it as black and blue, and others saw it as white and gold, and none could believe that anyone could disagree with what they individually saw. The picture found its way onto buzzfeed and the Internet broke, broke. Millions shared the image for free, obviously, and many millions were drawn into the most harmless but deeply polarizing fights between the blue seers and the white seers. It was a pattern that had happened many times before, and it would become the paradigm of the pattern that a whole business was built around. In his book released earlier this year, Traffic, Ben Smith tells this story of the growing industry of viral media. He tells it as a journalist and a historian and also as a participant. Because Ben was in the room as much of this story unfolded. He saw it rise and then crash. And in his new role as a founding editor at Semaphore, he reflects back in this conversation on what made that media possible and what that media will make possible for democracy now. I tested ChatGPT to write an intro

for Ben primed for a podcast.

It was pretty good.

Here's what it said. Welcome back to and our podcast name, which they want me to insert, is Another Way.

The show where we delve into the pressing issues of politics and the forces that shape our democracy should be a

little suspicious when you hear people talk like that. Where did they get those words?

Today we have a very special guest with us, Ben Smith, a journalistic powerhouse whose work has been instrumental in shaping modern news reporting. Ben began his journalism career as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, and his rise through the rank of media organizations has been nothing short of meteoric. He served as the editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, where he was known for fostering a team that pushed the boundaries of digital reporting. That's interesting way of putting that. Under his leadership, Ben buzzfeed broke major stories that captivated national intention, including exclusives on political scandals and groundbreaking investigative pieces. It was at buzzfeed that Ben embraced the power of social media and new Age technologies, redefining how news be sourced, reported and shared in the digital age. After nearly a decade at buzzfeed, Ben moved to the New York Times as their media columnist, providing sharp and insightful commentary on the state of journalism ethics and the broader media landscape. His columns are essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the intricacies of media politics. Known for his fearless report.

Okay, this is just too much, right?

But here's the point. Here's actually the arc of his career.

Let's understand ChatGPT's limitation.

It's missing a bit. Ben's a graduate of Yale. His first job was not the Wall Street Journal, it was the Indianapolis Star. And there he moved to Latvia to take a position in the Baltic Times. And then he began reporting for Wall Street Journal Europe, which he did until about 2001. He's also written for the New York sun, the New York observer, and the New York Daily News. Between 2004 and 2006, he started three New York City political blogs, the Politicker, the Daily Politics, and the Room 8. Smith wrote also for POLITICO from 2008 to 2011, a really significant contribution to that site and what it would become. He had joined Politico from the New York Daily News and he had covered the presidential primary in the Democratic Party for POLITICO in 2008. He therefore had lots of contact with Barack Obama's campaign and the so called scandals of that campaign. Also the John Edwards, remember John Edwards scandal, leading him to drop out of that race. And in 2010, he had reported on a confidential RNC Republican National Committee fundraising presentation, counseling the party to capitalize on fear, as if anyone needed to see a presentation to understand that strategy. In 2011, he was named the editor in chief of the BuzzFeed News. He explained he would be leaving his Politico blog but still write for the publication. But while working at buzzfeed, he focused on strengthening that organization's investigative journalism unit. That was his deal, as you'll hear and read in the book. He interviewed Obama in 2015 for the Buzzfeed presidential interview, the first in that series. And and in 2017 as the editor of Buzzfeed News published the Steele dossier, which was a 35 page dossier about Donald Trump, which other major news organizations like the New York Times and NBC News refused to publish because of the lack of credible corroborating evidence. Smith defended that decision by saying, we have always erred on the side of Publishing. In 2020, he was named the media columnist at the New York Times, replacing Jim Rutenberg in 2020. In May 2020, he published an article titled Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?

Arguing that some of his journalism, Ferro's journalism, didn't hold up to scrutiny.

In 2021, he reported that Ozzy, a media company, had attempted to deceive its investors and advertiser. That led to a flurry of additional investigations, culminating in Ozzy's board of directors announcing their intention to shut the company down. And then in 2022 January, Smith announced he would be leaving the New York Times to start a global news venture aimed at 200 million college educated English readers. Justin Smith would be the lead business side of this new venture and it said that the site would break news and supplant complex news stories with a reimagined quality of global journalism, aiming at an educated slice of the world, maybe mainly America. Okay, so here's what's important in this conversation. Something I want to emphasize coming in, and I hope you'll hear it as you come out. There's an activity that there were savants capable of engaging at the beginning of the arc of this kind of journalism and media. And that activity was the ability to pick out stories that would turn viral. That ability originally was an art. Some people were good at it, other people were not. And what made you good at it was hard to tell. But the history of social media is the history of that art being replaced with AI technology. With the machine increasingly figuring out in ways no one really understands exactly which stories are going to spread and which audiences they will spread to. So this activity that begins as a really artistic endeavor where people are able to identify the zeitgeist of a slice of America or the world at a particular time evolves into a media where the machine outperforms the human. The consequences of that for democracy in particular, we're going to consider not just in this episode, but in episodes to follow.

Here's Ben Smith.

Great.

So Ben, thank you so much for joining me. This is a terrifying book traffic. It feels a little bit like, you know, if you were the victims of that air crash on the Andes and you were handed a copy of the book alive. And the first part is describing how you got to that place. But there's no clear picture of like where do we go? And so that's really what I want to punch on at the end of our or the last part of our conversation. But I want to make sure people understand just how significant this story is and you, and you know, part of the significance, significance of having telling that story with you is that you've had a kind of front row seat in this development, evolution, devolution, however we want to see it. But the way I really see the story being told is this extraordinary recognition that people have early on. Jonah Peretti is one of the key players in your story. And you begin the process book by telling the story in 2001, January of 2001 of him circulating an email which recounted the exchange he had had with Nike. And of course he couldn't get it posted anywhere so he just circulated it as an email. And very quickly his friend circulated and his friend circulated it. And what he at that time called micromedia, I think in his piece of the nation described this enormous potential for bottom up sharing of creative work or ideas and the inspiration that really triggered to think about how the media, the future media could be radically different. The story begins there and ends in your book with the story of January 6th, but we could bring it all the way to today where that reality, that different, that unrecognizably uncontrollable media has now none of the hopeful story attached to it. It's a kind of terrifying story attached to it. Now you're going to tell us a happy story at the end because you've started a new media platform.

Yeah, we've solved it all.

But let's start at the beginning. So as you think about those moments, what do you really, how do you tell the story about how hopeful it was and what exactly they were missing?

Yeah, I mean, I believe you were a bit of a utopian at the time too, as was I. And there was this. And I think it's really hard in a way to get your head back into the early 2000s, partly because there's so much nostalgia now in media for how great it was back, back in the old days, back in the good old days when, you know, when we had a sort of small number of trusted organizations, you know, essentially feeding us lies about the Iraq war. Like those were the good old days. And I think people have sort of written that out of the story. It's often told as a purely technological story. And it is largely there was these new publishing tools that democratized the ability to publish. But it also. It came at a time of really broad distrust of the mainstream media. Distrust from the right that had been brewing for a long time for a bunch of reasons, and very deliberate. And distrust from the left and the center, specifically around the media's missing the biggest story of, you know, that generation, which was the Iraq War. And so the notion that these. That, you know, that these big legacy platforms, they were both technically, wildly out of touch with the way, you know, you and I actually communicated with each other on email, on the web. They just weren't there. They were putting up their edition hours and hours after the news happened, and then they were out of touch with people's sentiment and had gotten. And particularly around the Iraq war. And I think those two things combined for reasonable people to think, wow, this is this opportunity to challenge these kind of sclerotic, corrupt platforms and build something new and better.

But what I was observing about this original moment was really kind of just the excitement of imagining you could trigger people's interest in all sorts of surprising ways. And this kind of desire to figure out how to inspire virality, that wasn't really originally about politics so much. I mean, there were political issues, but it was just about, how do you get people excited and interesting. Justin and Cher, right?

Yeah. And I think Jonah Peretti's sort of key insight was just that when he did this stunt that went viral that he saw, oh, there's this totally new way of distributing media, and you don't need a broadcast tower, you don't need a printing press. If you can get people to share a thing with each other on email, you can reach tens of millions of people.

And that sharing is because people identified with the content or the emotion of the content. They wanted to be connected to it. And that was a power that media had never really had to think about before, because they didn't really depend upon people identifying to share. It was more, you know, it was broadcast into their move. So the psychology of this became really critical to how he did what he did.

Yeah. Traditional media consumption had been in some ways fundamentally private. You know, this was. You picked up the newspaper, you read it, maybe you went to a movie with other people, but it didn't. It wasn't a statement of your identity, whereas what you choose to share with your friends, with your family, says something about you. And this sort of. And the thing that he kind of hacked was, how do we. How do I get people? How do I Make things that people want to share with other people because it'll make them look good in some sense. And, I mean, that did lead to a bunch of mistakes. I mean, among other things, there was, you know, there was a theory that people would share, you know, inspiring photographs that redeem your faith in humanity, and they would share sweet jokes and pictures of cute animals, but they would never share, like, screamy political content because you look like an asshole when you do that. And who wants to look like that? Turns out that was not. Yeah,

right, right. So you. So early on, you said. You say Jonah had learned people shared not because of the content, but because of what it would say about them or themselves. And then later, you say he thought about the psychological effect rather than what it was about. This is all about believing that you had hacked a special way to fuel the spread of content and that there was a hopeful story about how that content would spread. And you tell this story. I mean, there are obviously more complicating figures in the story. Nick Denton, who you nicely characterized. The difference between Nick and Jonah is Jonah was keenly focused on how a single idea could spread, and Nick was focused on the idea how you could make a sticky platform that would bring people back and make them focused. Those are very different. But all of these, in some sense, were thought that we had a new way to develop the spread and engagement with content leading to the happiest day in the life of the the Internet, which is February 26, 2015, when the number one story, when the number one thing people are talking about and doing is trying to decide what the color of a dress is. This is the point where this hopefulness seems to be at its maximum. And that's an appropriate day, because very shortly afterwards, the darkness descends. The gold escalator in New York.

Yeah. And I was the editor of buzzfeed of a. So this was like Christmas for us. It was this day in 2015 where I think in the morning, actually, if anyone remembers this, some llamas had gotten loose in Arizona, and we all watched sheriffs chase llamas around and tweeted about it. And then. Yeah. And then in the afternoon, basically, a woman had gone to a wedding, I think, in the Hebrides in Scotland, and come back with a photo and started arguing with her mom and her friends about what color this dress was. Sent it to an editor at buzzfeed. Buzzfeed, who posted it. And soon everyone in the world is arguing about it. And to me, one of the most interesting things was Jonas. We thought this was this very sweet, fun, harmless kind of triumph of kind of dumb, fun global culture. Jonah Peretti, the founder of buzzfeed, runs into somebody from Facebook soon after that and says, wasn't that cool? And the person's reaction was like, well, we're not so sure. How often do you think we should permit that to happen? Because I think they were starting to see, oh, we totally lost control of this platform in this situation. And when I think about the dress, which was this very fun thing, the other thing about it is that it was incredibly divisive. I mean, it was literally divisive. Two thirds people thought it was white and gold. One third thought it was blue and black. People argued about it. The reason it went so viral was because it divided people, and they argued about it. Now, this was divisive in the sweetest, most harmless imaginable meaning of that word. But it did sort of illustrate this core mechanic of Facebook, which is that if you could get people to fight with each other, you could go viral

right now, the point I want to emphasize here is there are two ways in which you can leverage that insight, and one is a human leveraging that insight, like learning that if you're Breitbart, you can Breitbart media long after Andrew had passed, really. But you could spike a story in a way that would infuriate people, and it would divide people and it would drive attention. And then the other way, and you

could identify the topics that would do that, being for Breitbart, crime committed by black people. They had a black crime vertical and undocumented immigrants committing crimes. Those were the two.

Right, Right. So you knew what would get people angry, but you knew you was a person. But the other part about this, which I think Facebook discovered and was terrified by, was that it wasn't just people who were discovering this. It was machines that were discovering this. The great story that your book is putting a narrative over is an evolution away from humans sitting there figuring out what is the way to go go viral to machines figuring out what's the way to make things viral. And as that shift happens, there's a kind of terrifying way in which we lose control like we can, almost cannot, Especially when you're inside of publicly traded companies, and you can't help but turn the engine in the direction that will get the most engagement. This. This changes the very character of what this media is going to do.

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think it was the intersection of those two things, of seeing this real anger really out there. In the world and tapping into it in a way that particularly the Republican Party had been afraid to do before for various reasons. And then the features of the technical features of a platform that were kind of built to spread it.

Yeah. But I guess the question, I wonder is when you think about this transition, do you think there was a point at which you could have steered it in a different direction, or do you think it's just a feature or a bug of us humans in our brains, that the thing that's going to actually trigger the most engagement turns out to be like fast food, the thing that's not so great for our society?

I mean, I think the answer is both. But I do think that there was a lot of writing after 2016 that suggested that blamed it all on Facebook and suggested that Trump's election, the global rise of the right wing populism, was a technical phenomenon. That's just clearly nonsense. And a lot of these politics is a single factor. And a lot of these, like the anger about globalization and the Great Recession, were not created by Facebook and migration globally.

Right.

So there are a bunch of issues that people are genuinely going to be triggerable about, and there's a technology that enables them to be triggered, and there's a business model that depends upon people being triggered so they're engaged so that they continue to watch ads. Those three things together create the perfect storm for the capacity of democracy to be a place where we can, like, confront the same world and decide on what we should do.

That's right. And that third thing is not being driven by, you know, political technologists who are trying to destroy democracy. It's being driven by engineers who are. It's like often we're sort of looking from the wrong end of the telescope. Like, what they're thinking about is you spend 14 minutes a day on Facebook, they'd like to get you to 14 minutes and 30 seconds. How can they do that? And they're not really thinking at all about social consequences. And I mean, I do think one thing that it's easy to. It's easy to be very cynical about, as you said, sort of Facebook's motives to, you know, create advertising, keep you on there. But obviously, Facebook's goal was not actually to destroy its own business and platform, which it wound up doing here. This was not like a great business decision to light its entire business on fire and destroy it, which it has, you know, it will have wound up doing.

Right.

I mean, because it's pursuing the business objectives. I mean, I was for a brief time helping by representing Frances Haugen when she came out as a Facebook whistleblower. So I spent a lot of time in the depths of the Facebook files, and a really striking feature of that was Facebook's engineers were really trying to figure out how to make the place safe, to make sure it doesn't destroy democracy or run out of control.

And as they did that, they were

constantly being checked by their management, whether it was Zuckerberg who was insisting that they couldn't slow engagement growth, or the political team who said you couldn't piss off Trump's team. But the point is, they were struggling to try to make it so the platform, which on its own would become so bloody and ugly to make it so. It wasn't quite that bloody and ugly, but the business model types just couldn't let that happen. And the political types who also were also deeply tied to the business model.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think in the end, again, I don't think that people will look back on this and say, well, you know what? These guys took some PR hits, but it was great for their business. I mean, they were obsessively optimizing on this one metric of engagement, and it wound up doing massive harm to their business as well as to democracy.

Right. So we've got a lot of people who, at this stage, when your book comes out, we can actually look at the up and the fall, who at early stages had a conception of what their business would look like, who've now been taught by the market that that's not quite what their business is. And, you know, Jonah Peretti is a pretty good example of that, who 10 years ago this year turns down $450 million from Disney, partly maybe because Marc Andreessen had convinced him that its valuation was actually closer to $850 million. I just looked before we got online. Today, its market cap is about 88 million share price, you know, below a dollar, risking its removal from its. From the exchange. When you imagine what Peretti imagined this could become, he obviously never imagined it would become this ugly thing that it would be, but what would it become? What do we imagine it would be?

So this is another place where you sort of have to put your head back in the early 2 2000s, because it's hard to picture, but basically the answer is MTV and the people who were hanging around, and particularly people who were putting money into that early Internet universe. The chairman of Vice, Tom Freston, was the founder of mtv. The chairman of Buzzfeed, Ken Lehrer, had been instrumental in the early days of MTV. And what they'd seen in that moment in the 80s was some entrepreneurs lay wires in the ground and they need something on the, and they need content on there. And they could have said, you know what, we're just going to have it be advertising and public access and we won't pay anything and maybe people will pay us a few bucks. But instead they said, you know what, we're going to try to produce very expensive, high quality things. We're going to buy sports rights, we're going to have mtv, we're going to have cnn. We're going to pay quite a lot of money to people like Ted Turner and Sumner Redstone, who ultimately build these massive businesses on the backs of the people who laid the wires. And the people who laid the wires and the people who make the shows fight over the share of the revenue all the time. But they both get very rich. And the way that generation of entrepreneurs saw the Internet was, as did I, by the way. I mean I bought this thesis was okay, there's this new form of distribution. And inevitably, as they compete with one another, but also as they compete with nascent Netflix, as they compete with television, as they compete with everything else, they're going to need to move. They're not going to be able to just rely on low quality user generated content. They're going to kind of move up that ladder. And companies that get really good at making kind of purpose built content for these platforms are going to wind up being their suppliers. The way Viacom was the supplier to cable. And that was the story under which Disney's throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at buzzfeed.

Okay, but that story as it applies to cable in some sense didn't destroy the democracy within which it operated.

I mean, I think a lot of people thought that cable news did a lot of damage, come to think of it.

Well, now it has. I mean, there's a really wild, wildly interesting account of cable news itself evolving. Right? So in 2001, the ideological content of the three major cable channels is basically the same. And then it begins to veer quite dramatically. Until now, the ideological content of Fox News and MSNBC is wildly different. And CNN's not quite clear what its place is. But that that evolution, you're right, that that becomes quite pronounced later as well. But in the early days of Sumner and mtv, nobody's growing in a way that's like three threatening the environment, the cultural, political environment.

I mean, I basically agree with you, although I think I would refer you to 9 million words written in the 90s about how cable was destroying the youth.

Yeah. As it changed broadcasting. Because I think there's a big story, and the book that I hope this story, this conversation is part of is really trying to work through this consequence of leaving this one weird moment in American in human history, what Marcus Pryor calls broadcast democracy. 35 years of the whole world watching a very limited number of news sources and understanding the world in light of those news sources and then shifting, you know, you could say back to frack fragmented media or forward to fragmented media. But the point is moving away from that into. Into a media where nobody is watching. You can't count on anybody, any story actually being understood in the same way by any significant proportion of the public and. Or at least not across partisan division. And so that creates the world that we're in right now. So you're absolutely right. Cable contributes to that. But there's a way in which the Internet is just, you know, a crack version of cable. Right. It becomes much more essential quickly to become as engaged in ways that become unproductive and politically destructive.

And it also has a centralizing quality that cable doesn't. I think we. Part of our theory was that Facebook, Twitter, Snap, Pinterest, and a handful of others would be competing head to head with one another and trying to buy content to lure people from one to the other. But Facebook dominated.

And so it changed what you could do because you had to. I mean, BuzzFeed partnered with Facebook in 2015, so you had to be inside as well as compete. But there was a confidence, I think, Even there in 2015, this kind of weird year when Trump announces New York Times is asking Buzzfeed for advice. What's the color of the dress? You know, it's the moment of the Internet. There's so much hopefulness at that particular moment as its conception of what the future is going to look like is clear. And then it quickly spirals from that, that moment. Maybe Trump fuels the spiral, but it's a spiral.

Yeah. And I think, you know, in retrospect, of, obviously we should have seen it coming, but it is sort of strange to remember that it was conventional wisdom probably through 2012, 2013, maybe 2015, that the Internet was a progressive space. Barack Obama visited in 2011, Facebook, and didn't have to say, I'm here because you guys are on my team. But it's like visiting Madison, Wisconsin. It's just where young liberal people are. And, yeah, then that changed very fast.

Right.

I mean, Barack Obama is The focus of, I mean, the media that supports Barack Obama is the focus of much of the book Huffington Post. It really gets its go, gets its real force when it backs Obama and Obama becomes the president. So there's this whole period where things sound like they're very positive from the liberal side. But your book is fantastic in telling the story of the other side of this as well, the conservative side, which is learning to use this media in very powerful ways. From early stage of Drudge, who almost brings Clinton down as a president, but later stage with Breitbart, and the evolving understanding that core people in Breitbart, including Steve Bannon, who learns a lot from the early success of liberal Internet, to turn it into something very different. So these things are developing in this period. We don't really know where it's going to go, but obviously we see where it went after at least the election of Trump.

Yeah. And the biggest surprise to me from the start in going back and reporting was to see, oh, these guys were there right from the start. The guy who started 4chan worked out of Buzzfeed's office, Breitbart was a co founder of Huffington Post. Bannon was hanging around, watching and learning in that moment. The founder of the Proud Boys also co founded Vice. And a lot of the ideas and ways of thinking, in fact, you know, we of I think in some ways those companies, we thought we'd brought them to their logical conclusion, but actually we were constrained by a set of norms and by, I think, a kind of ambivalence about institutions in a way that Steve Bannon was not. And Breitbart's great success under him was to just discard all the norms, wage war on all institutions, and just follow the kind of traffic to its logical conclusion.

This is at a critical point, right, that in fact, so much on the right right now succeeds by just being liberated from norms that we would have taken for granted from the basic norm of telling the truth, which obviously Trump was pretty good in steering far from. But now much on the right is just committed to the idea that the truth doesn't really matter. It doesn't really constrain here. And those norms also in what you would show and what you would demonstrate in your fight for attention, obviously is throughout this period central, but maybe most extreme in the way that right develops it.

And there is something about, I think, Trump, but also far right figures around the world or the sort of new right figures around the world where the lying, the saying outrageous stuff, grossly sexist stuff is a style of politics aimed at showing that you. You're an outsider, you transgress, and all of us wave our fingers at you. And that shows to people who feel alienated that, oh, he really is one of us. He really is an outsider. I think that was true for Duterte. It's true for Boris Johnson. I mean, it's really not particularly an American thing, but it did just flow exactly into what worked on Facebook. If you were doing divisive stuff, just nothing could work better on Facebook in that period.

Yeah. And that continues to today, where you have a presidential candidate shipping people to states like California now being threatened with arrest for kidnapping as the upping of the political battle happens. But this is all about the politics of outrage that continues to fuel this. I want to ask about one particular episode that you were right at the center of. Obviously, you help bring Buzzfeed into a political space. And then in 2017, you guys have to decide what to do with the dossier. And I think what you ultimately decide to do with the dossier is as respectful of the norms of proper journalism as it could be, given the time and what was happening. But I wonder, when you think back on the dossier and why, what we should have learned from it, whether there are things you wish you had done differently or whether there are ways in which you think you could have deployed it more effectively.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I guess I'd say. I mean, I would say, like, I also was. I was sort of broadly kind of utopian about the possibility that you publish a document that is. And, you know, we published it because we knew it had been read by everybody in power who are talking about it, who are making decisions based on it. CNN then reports it's been briefed to two presidents. I believed, as a court later ruled, this is ultimately like a document of public interest that people. You can't just stand there in television wave around a document that says that the president's been compromised by the Russians. It's at that point, you need to show it to people. And we did it in a way that, yes, that we thought was sort of treating the audience with respect, but also saying, we know this is. This isn't verified. In fact, there's some minor errors on the surface of it that made us nervous. But in the end, I mean, and I think there are things we could have done differently. We could have tried to sort of staple, technically digitally staple those caveats to the document itself, print them on top of it, basically might have helped. But the way I didn't anticipate. I mean, my sort of philosophical view then and to some degree now is, look, like, if I can look at it, why can't, like, a teacher look at it or a lawyer, a doctor, a construction worker? Like, are they. It's gonna burn their eyes out to look at it, but I can look at it. Like, I don't. You know, that doesn't make any sense to me. There is something about the way this kind of document, I mean, WikiLeaks was. This gets sort of just transformed into kind of a talisman, totally independent of what's in it, that I didn't really anticipate and should have. And definitely, you know, when we published it, there was a consensus, certainly led by Trump, who called us a failing pile of garbage, that this was an attack on Donald Trump. I think now there's a consensus that ultimately this helped Trump because these allegations were largely false and kind of ludicrous in a way that set the bar too high for anything else to hit. I'm not. I don't. And I think that's a reasonable point.

Yeah. I mean, the point is, I guess

I would say I still think. I still think it was the right thing to do, but I don't feel so great about it now.

Yeah. Because it wasn't one talisman, it was two talismans. Each side used it for exactly what they're trying to show. I mean, forever. On the left, the dossier proved that Trump was a traitor, and for everybody on the right, it just proved the hoax and the continued effort of what eventually became Deep State to bring him down. But isn't this a story about just anything in the context of. Of media that has become divided like this, that every single story gets used in completely opposite ways? The very impeachment of. The impeachments of Trump. Exactly that. I mean, there is an impeachment that reinforces the people's view on the left, the guy should not be president. It's reused and spun differently on the right, so that if you look at Donald Trump's support among Republicans and among the Democrats across the whole of his presidency, it never really changes. There are blips, but nothing more than blips, as opposed to Nixon, who gets impeached in the middle of the broadcast democracy, where everybody's watching basically the same story, and you see a collapse in support for Nixon among Republicans, Democrats and Independents. That's almost perfectly correlated. So it's the fact that we live in this media ecosystem that divides and reinterprets and then feeds you how you want to understand it. That makes this inevitable, whether it's the dossier or whatever. The fact is.

Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. I think. I mean, I think it is very. It is most true of things close to Donald Trump that it's not universally true of media. If there's a big controversy in the Boston mayors race, likely it will cut through in the way things used to cut through and, you know, one side will collapse and the other won't. I mean, the sort of mirror image quality to national specific bits of national politics these days is unique, and it isn't true of other kinds of media in other areas. And if you do an expose about sexual abuse at a high school and the principal says it's fake news, no one's listening.

Okay, that's great. That's a great point. But the, but the point is, though, that the media in those cases doesn't have almost an interest to tell the story in a way that reinforces its bottom line. I mean, the play that Fox News had in the evolution of American politics after Donald Trump's election was a constant recognition. We need to tell this story in a way that continues to keep our base. And then a fear because of Breitbart, that if they didn't do that, they would lose their audience to even more extreme.

Yeah, that's right. Which now does seem to be happening.

Yeah. Okay, so we started. You promised we'd solve this problem, that the book is the sad story about how the problem blew up, and January 6th is the last chapter, Baked Alaska. And the consequence of that, what's special about semaphore? What's going to make semaphore different? Are you a solution? Are you a part of a solution? What do you imagine this does?

I mean, I hope we're part of a solution. I mean, I think that one of the things, I mean, I think you see this very clearly and just talked about it, is this return to fragmentation. I mean, you can. It's too soon to tell whether it's going to make things better or worse, but the sort of overwhelming feature of the media landscape right now is that people are moving away from these big broadcast outlets and toward a range of silos. I mean, the New York Times is one of the biggest silos in audio. Fascinating statistic. Joe Rogan is the biggest. If you ask people who's the biggest podcast, who's your favorite podcast? Joe Rogan is number one. But that number one spot only gets you 5% of the subset of people who say they Have a favorite podcast and everybody. Everything else is kind of in the mid tail and the long tail. So it's a just much more splintered environment. I mean, I think we see ourselves as trying to talk to a reader who feels really overwhelmed by the amount of incoming, doesn't know what to trust, doesn't necessarily think that like you're. That we're gonna. That isn't necessarily looking for someone to resolve every question, give them a pat solution, but wants a sense that we're leveling with them as human beings. Among other things. It's sort of human intelligence, not artificial intelligence, and saying, here's what our reporting says, here's what. I think as someone who's pretty expert in this, but here's somebody smart, here's Larry Lessig who disagrees with me and I think trying to be, trying to take, I mean, the sort of legacy of digital media, which is this openness to a broad conversation, not to race back into the sort of narrow single perspective of the old media and to do it in a human way. And people do seem to like it. But I do think the notion in a incredibly splintered landscape that anything is kind of the solution is overly optimistic.

Right, but you could set a pattern,

which obviously the early Internet media also set a pattern. But is the pattern to talk across or is the pattern to talk more effectively to a particular demographic?

Well, let's see. I mean, I think that we are in some ways, you can read us if you go to our website and hope you'll see great stories and think of it, oh, this is like a broad news company. But ultimately the nature of the Internet now and of the way people do media is that we're in a bunch of niches and we're pretty deep in these niches in AI in Washington and the sort of inner story of Washington in media, which I write about in Wall street and finance, in a certain kind of global African conversation, we've picked a set of niches where we want to really do incredible work there. But each of those is not for everybody. It's for people who are at a pretty high level conversation in those spaces.

Okay, so what's the business model? What fuels it?

This is sort of going to be an unsatisfying answer, but I think successful news businesses don't get too ideological about their business models and have diversified revenue streams. And so. And anybody who tells you that advertising is the best or advertising is a curse is talking their book. You know, we're in the advertising business, we're in the Events, business. We hope to be in the subscriptions business. If people have other business ideas, that'll finance journalism, we're all for them.

Okay, so you're going to be in a niche that is not harmful, that's attempting to go deep in ways that are constructive from this niche, from this place, from building something new. Are you hopeful that there's a way that the most poisonous platforms might evolve so that they're not so poisonous anymore? I mean, is there. Is there a picture of what cable news looks like or Facebook looks like? That's not what it is right now.

Yeah, they can be smaller. That's the way they can evolve and be less harmful is they can be smaller. And that is going to happen to all. I think it's inevitable. You can just see it. I mean, I think you just sort of. You see Twitter and Facebook unraveling right now. I mean, Facebook is nothing like the cultural relevance it used to. It's still a lot of people on it, but it is back to pictures of your friends, kids. Nobody's really seeing political news on there anymore. They're neighborhood groups. Sometimes they're toxic. I lost my dog the other day and I went to the neighborhood group and someone had found it. Incredible service. I think Twitter again isn't going to die. Not going away, but it has lost its centrality. There isn't a central conversation anymore. I miss it. I love Twitter, but. But Rip. And I'm still on it, but it's not the place you can just go to find out the news every morning and to see a central thing that everyone else is seeing. I think cable is obviously. I talked to the president of one of the cable networks a while ago, told me, well, we're melting in the shade. We're not too worried. We're melting in the shade. And I mean, I thought about. That's pretty persuasive. Then you think about it, it's like, wait, no, you still melt in the shade. That's a big problem. And I think you're seeing that now. Where in a way, a lot of the drama in CNN recently was that Jeff Zucker, who's a brilliant television programmer, looked around at the landscape and said, huh, there is a limited number of people who are ever going to watch cable news. And the way that I can get more to CNN is to raid msnbc. And we're just going to go right at that. We're going to. We're fighting over the same shrinking group of older people who watch that, who watch television and stole a bunch of viewers from MSNBC at the expense of CNN's brand. And now the new management, which wants to sell advertising, among other things, worries that it's too partisan and says, oh, never mind about that, let's go back to the center. But there's no one there. There are no people there. They're watching TikTok or reading the New York Times or whatever. And I think you see it with Fox too. It's not like Tucker Carlson on Twitter is going to replace Fox. It's like he's going to take a small bite out of Fox, as is Newsmax, as are a million other things. And the sort of centrality of those platforms is fading.

Okay, and then Reddit 2, maybe today's January, June 12th is a good day to reflect on this. Reddit too is self destructing in its.

Do you, I think red, I mean it's really interesting because if you'd asked me three days ago what was going to become of Twitter, I would have said, well, Reddit is actually a great example of a wonderful platform that thrives and is vibrant and is not centrally culturally relevant. People who are not on it are not hearing about it all the time. I mean, I guess I'm optimistic that Reddit, this is like a strike, it's a labor conflict of sorts where that will ultimately resolve itself and compromise. Because I think both the mods and the company's management have like a profoundly shared interest in the thing thriving. Maybe they'll screw it up, but do you think it's that apocalyptic?

I don't know.

The CEO, they've not been very good at being sensitive to exactly what people are angry about. You know, we saw the same dynamic in Twitter and the, and then Twitter blows up in this really ugly way. I think people who invested an enormous amount in Reddit are, are deeply frustrated that management would have the capacity to do this. And that's why these kind of open source alternative to Reddit, I think are now discussed in really powerfully effective ways. Because like why do we make our, why don't we put ourselves in a place where we can be destroyed like this. Right. This is the constant promise that open source has had in this space.

Right. And I think it's a, you know, but you also have management that are trying to keep the lights on and pay the bills. Right. I mean that's a real. So I, it's a very challenging situation. But I do think that Reddit, if they can get through this crisis, is a model for a medium sized social network that I think you could imagine Twitter becoming. You could snap. Has sort of become, you know, in a more splintered universe without any central thing.

Okay, so, so what you're describing is we're going back to the late 19th century, maybe with not as significant in AP. But there are two big differences between now and the late 19th century. One big difference is their political parties. Now, the late 19th century actually made politics work. They actually had policies, they had programs that they would bring people to Washington or to the state capitals. They would actually act on them. So there was policy making, even if it wasn't populist policymaking. And the second big difference is the public is legible in 2023 and in 1899 the public was not legible. So, you know, I'm sure you spoke to many of the Republicans who on January 6 said, oh my God, thank God we are done with that guy. Like Donald Trump is now history. And then the overnights came back and showed that the base loved him even more. There was no escaping him because democracy says you have to do what the people want. And we can actually see what the people want. So James Bryce in the 19th century writes this amazing work about American democracy and talks about the final stage of democracy when the views of the people could be known at any moment. That would be democracy's perfection. But in some sense that's democracy's curse. We have no capacity to do anything sensible if we constantly reacting to what the latest sort of flash of anger produces. So in this world where we're back in the the 19th century, but we don't have political parties and we do have a perpetually legible public, what's the hope for national democracy to function? Like, how do you tell a story to your optimistic story to a sixth grade class about what their future is going to look like?

I mean, it is incredible. God, what a good question. I mean, I do think that in a way the great power of the social media is to destroy institutions. If you look closely enough at an institution, you'll just see it's a bunch of idiots running around trying to do something. I'm sure you know that from the highest levels of academia. I know it from the highest levels of journalism. Of course it is. It's just a bunch of people doing their best and screwing up a lot. Not even always doing their best. Right. But pre social media, you can sort of project a mystique that, that social media makes very difficult to and digital media and sort of to maintain. I mean, I think that there's a shift in the shift in power, from institutions to individuals. That is pretty irreversible right now, or at least it's clearly where things are headed, where it's true in media as it is. And we're certainly kind of building around that notion that you're more likely to kind of to trust a human voice than a faceless brand. But how do you sort of. I don't really know. I mean, I guess I have some optimism that those sixth graders will be kind of acclimated to this world in a way that maybe our generation and older, we're all sort of losing our minds over it and overreacting to things. But I think what you said, I mean, I think there is this real crisis of faith in democracy. I think it gets written about a lot on the right where people know where in particular you. You see attempts at times to reject the popular vote, particularly when you lose elections. But I think it's broader than that. You just basically voiced. You weren't saying there was. I mean, I think what you were saying wasn't there was a flaw in democracy. You were saying that there was too much democracy.

Well, the way we represent what democracy believes right now is just wrong. I mean, the idea that sometimes, I think the way to think about it is we have this presumption that everybody is relevant at any moment to determining what our government should be doing. Like, if we could just take a poll and say, what do these people think? But what we know is that everybody's not informed. It's not that they're stupid, they're ignorant. They just don't know what we should be doing. They have no capacity because they're like spending their time doing a million other things. And so that doesn't mean you give up on democracy, but maybe it means you think about how do you produce the view of the people differently? Like, what is the way to produce a view of the people that's actually informed and reflective? And so it's an impossible challenge to figure out how you build that against the dominant view that exists right now. But I think that's got to be part of the challenge. But when you think about it, I mean, so here's the. I think this is a stark way that a Democrat would look at it. And I'll just embrace being a Democrat, even though they've not been nice to me. But. But, you know, if you say as a Democrat, it's hard to imagine a president in the Potter era who accomplishes more than Joe Biden has accomplished, yet he has a approval rating of Donald Trump's approval rating. You know, people sometimes look at that and think, that's Joe Biden. That's just a problem with Joe Biden. But I think it's something much more fundamental. We're never going to have a president that's loved, period. Now, you know, from the, from the left, we look at Donald Trump and says, you know, his hate, the hatred of Donald Trump was earned, and the hatred of Joe Biden was not earned. But it doesn't matter, really, if we're going to have a future where we will never have a public that kind of embraces a national public. Something really scary about the potential to continue to function as a national public, doesn't it?

Oh, yeah. I mean, profoundly. And I guess, I mean, I think, you know, countries in the world have gone through moments of deep division and then somewhat less division. And I don't know if you can kind of imagine a presidential candidate who's at 60 or 70%. I don't know, maybe. Maybe the rock. It's my only. My only bid. But it's, it's, it's very. But I think in this moment, in this sort of media moment, it's very hard to picture, but I do think it's a moment of really major change in how people are consuming politics and media. And I don't feel like I have a clear. I don't really think I understand what comes out the other side, but I don't necessarily think. I think there's this impulse to take to always refight the last war, to always see the ills of social media and say. I mean, AI in particular, people are just constantly sort of projecting forward that the problems with AI are going to be exactly the same as the problems with social media media, just because we're familiar with them. And I'm sure they'll be terrible, but likely quite different and confusing. And I don't quite know what this level of fragmentation means for national politics. Maybe it makes it harder, although it's actually hard to imagine national politics being harder and less functional. But I guess you go back to the 1850s and there it is.

Yeah, well, I mean, so you've been

doing a lot with AI. Obviously, AI has been with us in politics for a long time. I mean, AI was driving the Facebook ads. And in 2016, Trump's team bragged that they had made it so they could produce 70,000 unique ads every day. AI will now enable, if politics deploys it, enable them to deploy 100,000 ads every minute. I mean, the point is, there's no limit to the ability of AD to begin to engage in what will start off in a completely misleading way with people. So there we have an example of the business model of AI, you know, business model tied to politics, which seems pretty depressing, even though there's lots of context. Like, I think the law is a perfect context where AI can radically lower the cost of law. And that's just a universally good thing. Half the lawyers will lose their jobs. And that's. That's wonderful. That's like the future of progress. So I'm not saying in every context

you really hate paralegals. Eh? It's.

Right now it's paralegals, but not for long. It's not just that.

Yeah, no, right, right. I think in journalism, I think also it'll. I mean, my sort of optimistic thing is that journalism is dominated by slick writers with college educations. And that's not. Those are not really prerequisites for the core of the job of gathering information, figuring out what's going on.

Right.

And if there are writing tools that allow people who have high school educations to write perfectly good news articles, which are not like poetry anyway, that's great. I'm for that. Yeah. I mean, I think as you said, the thing that you just said like that it's just gonna be sort of ad targeting on social media, but worse. Like that's probably true, but that's a little bit the last war, because I do think, where exactly is that gonna happen? Is it happen on your iPhone that has blocked most of that kind of targeting, for instance? Probably not. Probably won't happen in Europe quite so much where there's a lot of stuff very heavily regulated might happen on Google. But actually Google's ad product is falling apart. Right. Is under massive threat from AI. I think this ecosystem is changing really fast. And I think the sort of the big sort of malignant force of the 2010s, which was AD tech, is not necessarily going to be as important an industry in the next 10 years.

Right. So business cares about ad tech, but I'm talking about politics. So politics wants to be right.

But what we were talking about is ad tech in politics. I mean, I think, I do think there's a level of personalization that's a little like true personalization. I mean, the dumbest and most malign use that I've sort of immediately comes to mind is you can really destroy public comment on regulations by sending a million email emails. The Astroturf campaign sending a million identical emails to the FCC will be replaced by astroturf campaigns sending a million nuanced and slightly different emails. And the FCC will have to develop its own AI that tries to screen those out. And I mean, it muddles certain kinds of actually pretty honestly already muddled and useless bits of the democratic system around legislators getting what seems like human feedback. I think you can really see that getting degraded. I mean, I think that the deep fake, the questions around deepfakes, I don't really buy. There's gonna be a video of Joe Biden falling off, off the stage and we'll all be tricked because there are huge amounts of antibodies around presidential politics. And in fact, Ron DeSantis used a deep fake the other day and got pounded. And it turned out it was a total mistake. And I think it'll be a topic of conversation at that very high cable news level, you know, but. But not probably a subject of massive persuasion. But I think you could imagine in a city council race, in a student body president race, in somebody's divorce, there's going to be really, really malicious uses where nobody's watching.

Yeah, but the public gets their information now in this decentralized way. And if you can plug into that decentralized channel and begin to target much more effectively in ways that seem like other humans engaging with you, at least presumptively, it's something we ought to be anxious about, right? I mean, whether it proves to be a bad.

For sure. No, it could. I mean, honestly, it could. I mean, there are a lot of ways it could play out. If you like, if you want Twitter to be destroyed, like, this could really accelerate. Like an effective new fleet of artificial humans could really totally destroy Twitter and render it useless. Same with Facebook. And it's. In fact, those companies are going to have to figure out artificial intelligence defenses really fast if they want to survive. Because ultimately there's not a lot of. I mean, there's this weird moment where I think the two poles in media are in these opposite directions. One is these powerful new artificial agents that can be very useful, can be very scary. And the other is this obvious trend among consumers that they want to talk to individual humans like real ones, not much less. They don't want to talk to, like, the New York Times. They want to talk to Maggie Haberman. Much less do they want to talk to the New York Times bot. And so I don't think there's a lot of demand from consumers to live in a world populated largely by bots. And if they feel like that their shopping mall is actually full of non player characters, they're going to leave. And so, I don't know. I think it's a very complicated situation. I'm not sure where the equilibrium is at all.

So if you're right, the most effective regulation here would be that every political bot has to say, I'm a bot, just like every ad has to say, say, this ad's paid for by the Sam Watson campaign for Congress.

That seems like a good idea.

Sure.

Yeah. Ben, your. Your book is fantastic. I'm. I was so eager to read it, and I was so happy to have a chance to talk to you about it. The book is traffic, and it's much more than a story of the past. It's a reason to rethink what everything in the future could be. And I'm grateful you've started. You've continued to try to remake media with semaphore, which I've been a supporter of from the beginning. And I read more than the New York Times every single day, so thank you for that, too.

Well, you've been incredibly gracious, including in your unheralded role in getting semaphore off the ground. So thank you so much, Larry.

Okay, thank you.

This has been the 13th episode of

season five of the podcast Another Way.

These episodes are produced by Equal Citizens, physically produced by Josh Elstro of Elstro Productions. You can find out more about Equal Citizens at equalcitizens us there. You can give us your feedback and you can also give us your support. Though we have a small, small team. They do need to eat. Some of them are really very thin. So you can donate to help us keep them fed and keep the work of the organization going. Not just the podcast, but also the work to save democracy. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned for the next episode.

Sam.