Tuesday News: Gawker’s last post, silent book club, and first color photograph
Publishing Newsbook clubs / Free Speech / Gawker / History / photography / privacy14 Comments
How Things Work – Gawker’s Nick Denton wrote the site’s last post yesterday, a chronicle of his thoughts about the Hulk Hogan suit, Peter Thiel, and the philosophy behind Gawker, from his perspective. It is chilling to think about the fact that basically one really rich person could finance Gawker’s demise, although I don’t think the case is as clean as Denton wants it to be, on any level. For example, it’s difficult to reconcile Denton’s thoughts below with the confessions of a Deadspin writer who makes it all sound very thoughtless, random, and gleefully mean. And unfortunately, Gawker’s demise hasn’t really helped to clarify much around how we should balance privacy and free speech in an environment as immediate and indelible as the Internet.
Gawker was not the first blog launched by the company. That was Gizmodo, the technology news site that is the company’s largest property. Gawker was an outlier in what became a collection of bloggy lifestyle magazines covering reader interests like video games, sports, and cars.
But Gawker was the one with the most powerful personality, the most extreme expression of the rebellious writer’s id. It absorbed the century-old tabloid cynicism about human nature, reinforced by instant data about what people actually wanted to read. As a group of journalists who had grown up on the web, it also subscribed to the internet’s most radical ideology, that information wants to be free, and that the truth shall set us free. This was a potent but dangerous combination. . . .
But even Gawker’s natural allies had no enthusiasm for a free press defense of a story about a sex tape. Journalists were aware of the public’s growing sensitivity to anything that could be characterized as revenge porn or cyber bullying. As John Herrman noted, the public climate had changed, even in the four years since the Hogan story. Privacy, especially internet privacy, had become the biggest challenge to freedom of expression. When time came to scurry under the shelter of the First Amendment, we did not have that much institutional support. You can’t easily get the privileges of the profession if you pour scorn on its luminaries. – Gawker
Silent Book Club Is Coming to L.A., and It’s an Introvert’s Dream – So do you HAVE to be quiet? What is actual book conversation breaks out?
Silent Book Club is a multi-city movement to take the pressure—and the whole having-to-talk-to-people thing — out of book clubs. At their monthly events, you bring your own book, you meet a group of fellow literary types at a bar, and you sit with them in solidarity and read. It’s like a regular book club minus the obligations and the structure and the inevitable self-loathing. According to the group’s website, Silent Book Club is something you can even do “on your own.” Personally, I’m not sure if reading “on your own” counts as a book club anymore (I think that’s just called “reading”), but the beautiful thing about Silent Book Club is that it’s basically anything you want it to be. – Los Angeles Magazine
Behold the Very First Color Photograph (1861): Taken by Scottish Physicist (and Poet!) James Clerk Maxwell – One of the reasons I love these kinds of posts is that they shatter any sense that “we” (and you can substitute any generation for that pronoun) think we invented everything of importance or technological sophistication.
Between the time of the first photograph in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and 1861, photography had advanced sufficiently that physicist James Clerk Maxwell—known for his “Maxwell’s Demon” thought experiment—produced the first color photograph that did not immediately fade or require hand painting (above). The Scottish scientist chose to take a picture of a tartan ribbon, “created,” writes National Geographic, “by photographing it three times through red, blue, and yellow filters, then recombining the images into one color composite.” Maxwell’s three-color method was intended to mimic the way the eye processes color, based on theories he had elaborated in an 1855 paper. – Open Culture
After reading the article and visiting the website, I’m still not clear about what the Silent Book Club meetings involve. Is it okay to ask someone about the book they’re reading, or are you really supposed to stay silent? It sounds interesting, but I’d be afraid of committing some kind of faux pas.
*rolls eyes* When I was in elementary school we just called it Silent Reading Time.
I guess I can kind of see the point of the silent book club, if you need an excuse to schedule uninterrupted reading time. Other than that, I don’t see any point. I know where and when I can go to read and be left alone, most of the time. (Library, Burger King, several parks, various places around the house.)
I wonder how many of us would be able to withstand public scrutiny of our unfiltered communications with friends and trusted coworkers? Burneko got burned by a dumb game the Gawker folks played, which is a shame because for the most part I’ve not found his posts to be “thoughtless, random, and gleefully mean.” I loved Foodspin, for example.
But even if every post by him and everyone else at Gawker had those qualities, what Thiel did is precedent-setting in a deeply dangerous way. This decision is almost certainly going to be overturned on appeal, but meanwhile Thiel has succeeded through venue-shopping, burning money, and petty, vindictive uses of the judicial system. And he’s shown every thin-skinned billionaire and multi-millionaire how to get back at coverage they don’t like.
It was bad for romance reviewing and blogging when EC went after Jane, and it is bad for everyone when rich men with exaggerated self-regard go after media outlets for skewering them. This isn’t about Hulk Hogan. This is about Peter Thiel not getting to control his public narrative.
A couple of people who defended Gawker have said publicly that they’ve received more blowback for those positions than anything else they’ve talked about. I get why people hate Gawker. I don’t get why that hatred is trumping understanding of the larger issues. The Freedom of the Press Foundation has an excellent post on the ramifications.
Thanks for that link, Sunita. Although I wasn’t a fan of Gawker, I supported them 100% in this instance. Thiel and Hogan make me want to vomit.
And I really don’t get the silent book club. If I’m going to quietly read, I’d just as soon do it at home, lying on the sofa in my jammies with the cat.
@Sunita: As you know, it’s often the case that 1st Amendment defendants are among the most offensive (thus their need for legal protection), and I don’t think Gawker is an exception (including Denton personally, whose snarky comment about children was like WHATTHEEVERLOVINGF?!). While I continue to enjoy a lot of the (previously) Gawker-owned sites, I often found the parent site, well, icky. And the fact that Burneko’s self-described “extremely mean spirited” post came from a “game” made me wonder how much material made it on to the parent site in the same way. But still, I’d definitely take Gawker.com over Thiel’s actions here any day of the week. And while I would not place the Gawker case side by side with the EC case, for a bunch of reasons (and I’m not saying you were doing that), I do agree that Thiel’s actions are chilling, and the implications have only begun to play out.
What I have been thinking about is whether someone with a personal axe to grind, like Thiel, is better or worse than someone like Edward Blum, who may be seen as more cynical or more idealistic, depending on your perspective. And what would the Gawker case have looked like if it wasn’t Hulk Hogan, but someone like Zoe Quinn who had that snippet of tape posted on the site – or a female celebrity whose ex leaked the tape in an act of revenge porn and who would have been happy to have Thiel finance the suit.
@Janet: If we’re talking about the same comment about age thresholds for sex tapes, that was AJ Daulerio, not Denton. I hold zero brief for Daulerio but Thiel’s lawyer’s successful argument to deny him representation by Gawker lawyers is disgusting, as is going after his almost non-existent assets. This is a scorch-earth level of revenge, pure and simple, and the judge is facilitating it. But maybe you’re talking about a different comment?
I almost added an ETA to my comment to ensure that people understood I wasn’t making a comparison between Gawker and Jane, but between Thiel and EC, who seem to share a number of relevant attributes. The implications are already playing out, given the same lawyer is now serving notice to Politico and other media outlets generally regarded as “real” journalism that they are in trouble for reporting on Melania Trump’s misrepresentations of her education.
I have no trouble distinguishing between Thiel and Blum. Blum, however deplorable I find his strategy, is carrying out an idea-based agenda, or at least an agenda that is consistent with a worldview. Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP chipped away at Plessy with an explicit strategy of case and issue selection (Mark Tushnet has a great book on it). But Thiel, to me, is not trying to push forward a different way to frame and ajudicate issues. He wants to make sure journalists stop afflicting the comfortable, and he has enough money to do it.
I don’t know how the conversation would have been framed with a different case. But the case is just the vehicle. I’m shocked, to be honest, at how many people who are supposedly educated about journalism (and have media jobs) are unaware of how high a price they may wind up paying for their schadenfreude. How can they not see that this is the 2016 version of Nazis marching in Skokie?
@Susan: I found many of Gawker’s posts to be at best tolerable and at worst cringeworthy. On the other hand, I’ve used Adrien Chen’s post outing ViolentAcrez in a class I teach on privacy in the digital age, and it’s motivated really good conversations about doxxing, free speech, etc. And Chen now writes for The New Yorker. So, I’m ambivalent about the site. But like you, I’m not ambivalent about Thiel and Hogan. As Robin says, the implications are just beginning to play out, and they aren’t good.
@Sunita: Yes, you’re right – it was Daulerio, and my only point was that it’s sometimes those who are the most offensive who are defending the 1st amendment at such a visible level, and I think that’s why it can be more difficult for people to cleanly focus on the overarching legal issues and implications. Which is, of course, something Thiel and his lawyers are capitalizing on, further perpetuating the conflation.
The reason I’ve been thinking about Blum v. Thiel and about the other people involved is because I find the whole Thiel thing to be horrific, but I also think that the case itself – and what could, in some circumstances, test the line between protected speech and revenge porn, is more complicated and legally interesting. So it frustrates me on many levels, because Thiel has not only, as you say, given other thin-skinned million/billionaires a blueprint for the kind of revenge that has frightening implications for speech and journalism, but he has IMO made it virtually impossible to actually discuss some of the more important questions this type of case could/does raise about privacy and speech rights in an online environment.
@Janet: It was brilliant to get Hogan to sign on, because the sex-tape aspect (which highlights all the things people hate about Gawker) overshadowed the underlying motivation, which was Thiel’s anger at being sort-of outed (given he was out to people who knew him, or at least some of those people). Because Denton has a consistent, principled position on outing and the closet. He has the right to use his media property to make his case.
I honestly think it took someone like Hogan to be willing to sit through everything a fully argued and presented case requires. Which also makes me wonder how the jury bought the argument that he was harmed. This is more publicity than he’s received in YEARS. And he was willing to be dissected in court to get it.
@Sunita: I don’t see case as merely a vehicle for Thiel’s revenge, although I think that has become the upshot of the situation. Nor do I see this just as a matter of what people hate about Gawker, although clearly that’s in play. Rather, I think there are some very real privacy v. speech questions that the publication of a sex tape raise (http://www.nationallawjournal.com/id=1202762656886/Proposed-Revenge-Porn-Law-Sparks-Fresh-Debate). That Hogan was willing to submit to the legal and public dissection is a double-edged sword, IMO, because the cynical take is that he has gotten so much publicity (and he has hardly shied away from publicity), while the reality is that so many female victims of revenge porn can’t/won’t stand for being subjected to that scrutiny (as well as the fact that it’s always so much worse for female victims). So I guess you can either argue that the case cheapened those issues by having Hogan + Thiel, but I hate the idea that those issues are being seen as merely a carrier for Thiel’s revenge, if that makes sense.
I thought I read that they couldn’t appeal the Gawker decision because they couldn’t raise money ($50 million, I think) for a bond pending appeal.
@Meg: Gawker has appealed the decision. The problem for them was that the judge refused to reduce or stay the judgement during the appeal process, so rather than post the $50 million bond they declared bankruptcy. This path shielded their assets from their creditors (including Hogan) and gave them more options, including selling the company. The Washington Post has a story that goes into more detail .
@Janet: I don’t think the issues you care about are being seen merely as a vehicle for Thiel’s revenge. What I meant by “vehicle” was that the process was set in motion by Thiel’s desire to get back at Gawker, and so he was dependent on finding cases that were at the borders of protected speech (or not protected), unlike the story about him. Remember that he has financed a number of nuisance lawsuits against Gawker, most of which are not getting any traction. He got lucky with Hogan.
I don’t disagree that the questions you focus on are important. What I’m focusing on is the effect on journalism of Thiel’s attack on Gawker. It’s much harder to discuss stories that aren’t being told, and that’s what I see as a key outcome of Thiel’s behavior.