Ben Smith’s Traffic bears no relation to Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 war-on-drugs epic of the same title, a film about the absurd and society-rending lengths people will go to profit from the self-obliteration of others. But it might as well. Subtitled “Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral,” the debut book from the former BuzzFeed News chief, New York Times media columnist, and Semafor co-founder tells the story of the Obama-Trump era’s click-driven revolution in digital news. I trust it’s not spoiling anything to say the story doesn’t end well.
While he’s not “the Tom Wolfe of our digital age,” as he’s breathlessly described on the book’s back jacket, Smith is a reporter’s reporter who also happens to be capable of telling a good story. The book is an ensemble dramedy with a cast of characters both familiar (hello, Steve Bannon) and forgotten (if you’ve thought about Ze Frank in the past half-decade, congratulations, you’re more online than your author), and Smith wisely chooses twin protagonists, Gawker founder Nick Denton and BuzzFeed impresario Jonah Peretti, two men whose move-fast-and-break-things recklessness defined the era.
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The first half of the story focuses on Denton’s New York City media scene surrounding “peak Gawker” in the waning years of “indie sleaze,” with a healthy dose of coke, booze, sex, and fortifying, self-righteous idealism to help the inside-baseball media-biz narrative go down. Denton’s social milieu and his vision for the news business were an odd combination of “grubby” and “utopian.” He imagined a world where in the flickering, cleansing light of a leaked sex tape, the mighty would be brought low and the low made mighty.
Peretti’s approach to the media couldn’t have been more different. An MIT Media Lab graduate with a single-minded, nigh-autistic obsession with manipulating and driving web traffic, Peretti’s vision for online news was summed up in BuzzFeed’s once-ubiquitous red-and-white arrow logo, a symbol for a chart of webpage views going eternally up.
BuzzFeed News, the honest-to-God newsroom that brought Smith into the Buzzfeed fold (and shuttered less than two weeks before Traffic was published), was essentially an ornament to help the website more famous for publishing articles like “50 Toddlers Who Are Best Friends With Their Dogs” find some ad-sales-driving legitimacy. “No more explaining memes to ad buyers for the phone company,” Smith writes, “even as most of the traffic did, in fact, continue to come from the lists of memes whose reach grew with Facebook’s.”
The true story of Traffic, more than Denton and Peretti’s behind-the-scenes exploits (and Smith’s picaresque self-insertion into the narrative), is how that economic equation eventually inverted in favor of “traditional” media. But to get there, we have to understand the force that stalked Denton, Peretti, Smith, and their peers through the otherwise hopey-and-changey Obama era: the stubborn insistence of America’s right wing on crashing the digital party.
Conservative gadflies like Matt Drudge and Andrew Breitbart haunt their mainstream counterparts throughout the narrative. For every Denton, with his self-righteous crusade to find a closeted gay conservative Christian to out, the New York City downtown scene has someone like Gavin McInnes, the Vice founder and later Proud Boy whose “anarchist” Republicanism became less and less ironic. Ariana Huffington, an early patron of Peretti’s mad scientist traffic-driving efforts, was nakedly imitating the Drudge Report with her Huffington Post. (One of her co-founders was named … Andrew Breitbart.) Later, Breitbart modeled early incarnations of his news website on Gawker’s pioneering, stylish blogginess. But he actually figured out how to make money from it.
Nearly all of these conflicts ended up shaking out in the Right’s favor. Smith is painfully, if not quite guiltily, aware of this, devoting entire chapters to the legacies of figures like the plagiarist Benny Johnson (a onetime BuzzFeed News employee and now Turning Point USA maven) and livestreamer Baked Alaska (another former BuzzFeed-er, last seen in federal prison for his participation in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots). The Jonah Perettis of the world saw the book’s titular traffic as a utopian, cleansing force that would erase political division and bring us all together to look at cute puppies or even stop African warlords. Breitbart and his heirs were cannier: They clocked it immediately as a neutral, world-breakingly powerful tool to wield against their enemies.
But not every way online media warped politics favored the Right. Years later, Peretti would warn in an internal BuzzFeed email that “racially controversial content” like “21 Things That Almost All White People Are Guilty of Saying” was dominating Facebook. The article’s substance was totally anodyne and inoffensive, but its basic premise provided an irresistible opportunity for users to fling accusations of racial bias in all directions. The incentives of web traffic, and the nebulous metric of “engagement,” rewarded the flame wars that ensued in the comments sections of said articles, rendering their content all but irrelevant. Sound familiar?
Maybe the most intriguing political argument Smith advances is that Jezebel, Gawker’s feminist-oriented sister website, catalyzed the pugilistic, social justice-minded tone that now dominates online progressive discourse. Reflected in the site’s mobbish, bloodthirsty comments sections that foreshadowed the “cancel culture” firestorms that would come soon to Twitter and Facebook, former Jezebel writer Moe Tkacik tells Smith, “It felt like we had unleashed something that was more volatile than we realized.”
“[Right-wing] leaders’ success on Facebook was no more complicated than their success on the mainstream media: They fed controversy and engagement,” Smith writes. “But while CNN and other mainstream broadcasters eventually began to rein in their own hunger for ratings … Facebook had no comparable mechanism. … Trump wasn’t doing anything to game Facebook. He simply was what Facebook liked.”
We all know what happened next. Trump won, the media freaked out, and Facebook disincentivized viral content in favor of “meaningful social interactions” with friends and family, helping send BuzzFeed into a spiral of layoffs that most recently culminated in its news division’s shuttering. Gawker’s bratty tabloid ethos caught up with it in the form of the Peter Thiel-Hulk Hogan legal saga that put the company out of business in 2016. Traditional media institutions like the New York Times reinvented themselves for the digital era with far more sustainable business models than their would-have-been disruptors ever boasted.
“The best even a genius can do, most of the time, is usually to see those forces coming and catch their drag,” Smith writes in conclusion about the populism that this new internet unleashed. It’s a somewhat remarkable note to end on for someone who has now launched a media company that explicitly aims to earn readers’ trust by demystifying the journalistic process. There’s something noble about Smith’s impulse to downplay the impact of the media, contra the industry’s usual grandiosity and hyperfixation on its own importance. And it’s refreshing to see information looked at from the demand side, not the supply side, in the age of “misinformation” being blamed for every social ill. Still, it’s an awfully convenient stance for the publisher of the Steele dossier to take despite the ambivalent reevaluation of that episode Smith provides.
It’s surely true that, as Traffic suggests, bigger cultural, economic, and geopolitical forces shape our lives more than the media we consume. But if Peretti, Denton, et al. had the power to remake the media landscape thoroughly enough that it justified an entire book, it beggars belief to claim there was really nothing they could have done differently to make it more worthy of America. It would take a reader with colder blood than mine not to damn them for lack of effort.
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Derek Robertson co-authors Politico’s Digital Future Daily newsletter and is a contributor to Politico Magazine.
