Ryan Holiday

We have to be able to handle that—as adults—and forgive and forget the occasional stupid remark. We can’t turn everyone into a laughingstock, or pretty soon the only type of person left will be Donald Trump.* Because you know who doesn’t mind snark or mockery? Who likes it? The answer is obvious: People with nothing to lose. People who need to be talked about, like attention-hungry reality stars.

Our online culture is both fueled by and ruled by this bitterness and anger that pretend that other people aren’t human beings.

Blogs, I understand from Wilde and Cromer, serve 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: 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.

Once the mind has accepted a plausible explanation for something, it becomes a framework for all the information that is perceived afterward. We’re drawn, subconsciously, to fit and contort all the subsequent knowledge we receive into our framework, whether it fits or not. Psychologists call this cognitive rigidity. The facts that built an original premise are gone, but the conclusion remains

Suppressing one’s instinct to interpret and speculate, until the totality of evidence arrives, is a skill that detectives and doctors train for years to develop. This is not something we regular humans are good at; in fact, we’re wired to do the opposite.

Do you make a habit of checking back on Wikipedia pages just to make sure nothing has changed? The reality is that while the internet allows content to be written iteratively, the audience does not read or consume it iteratively. Each member usually sees what he or she sees a single time—a snapshot of the process—and draws his or her conclusions from that.

It’s a real golden age for journalists when they not only get traffic by posting jaw-dropping rumors, but then also get traffic the next day by shooting down the same rumors they created.

How can any person prepare for or defend themselves against scandal or innuendo when the media have utterly abdicated their role in vetting the information they publish?

Alarmist? Maybe. But I have seen hundreds of millions of dollars of market cap evaporate on the news of some bogus blog post. When the blog Engadget posted a fake e-mail announcing a supposed delay in the release of a new iPhone and Apple operating system, it knocked more than $ 4 billion off Apple’s stock price.

Blogs criticize companies, politicians, and personalities for being artificial but mock them ruthlessly for engaging in media stunts and blame them for even the slightest mistake. Nuance is a weakness. As a result, politicians must stick even more closely to their prepared remarks. Companies bury their essence in even more convoluted marketing-speak. Public figures cannot answer a question with anything but “No comment.” Everyone limits their exposure to risk by being fake.

The Russian tactic of kompromat—releasing controversial information about public figures—is real and only more dangerous in an era where blogs publish first and verify second (if at all). The essence of kompromat is that it doesn’t matter if the information is true or not, or whatever disturbing means it was acquired, it just matters that it can intimidate and embarrass. And the media enables this tactic—they thrive on it.

Today, even a company with little interest in self-promotion must hire one, simply to make sure people don’t say untrue things about their company. If it was once about spreading the word, now it’s as much about stopping the spread of inaccurate and damaging words. When the entire system is designed to quickly repeat and sensationalize whatever random information it can find, it makes sense that companies would need someone on call 24/ 7 to put out fires before they start.

The link economy encourages bloggers to repeat what “other people are saying” and link to it instead of doing their own reporting and standing behind it. This changes the news from what has happened into what someone said the news is.

“Getting it right is expensive, getting it first is cheap.”* And by extension, since it doesn’t cost him anything to be wrong, he presumably doesn’t bother trying to avoid it. It’s not just less costly; it makes more money, because every time a blog has to correct itself, it gets another post out of it—more pageviews.

One of the ways that journalists justify their laziness today is by claiming that breaking news deserves special exemptions from their normal obligations to, you know, actually be right and pass along correct information. That during a mass shooting, a fast-moving election night, some unexpected controversy, there isn’t time to do real reporting and so it’s better to just pass along the information they have to readers and viewers as it comes in.

Blogs have long traded on the principle that links imply credibility. Even Google exploits this perception. The search engine, founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were Stanford students, copies a standard practice from academia in which the number of citations a scientific paper gets is an indicator of how influential or important it is. But academic papers are reviewed by peers and editorial boards—shaky citations are hard to get away with.

Apparently we live in a world where at even the highest and most sensitive level information is passed on without being vetted, where the final judgment of truth or falsity does not fall on the outlet reporting it or the person spreading it but on the readers themselves.

How can anyone maintain their sanity when everything you read, see, and hear is designed to make you stop whatever you’re doing and consume because the world is supposedly ending?

Their subtle felonies against the truth are deliberate and premeditated. The way to beat them is not by freaking out.

Charles Johnson doesn’t care that you hate them—they like it. It’s proof to their followers that they are doing something subversive and meaningful. It gives their followers something to talk about. It imbues the whole movement with a sense of urgency and action—it creates purpose and meaning. The only way to beat them is by controlling your reaction and letting them embarrass themselves, as they inevitably will.