TRUST ME I'M LYING

Reading TRUST ME I'M LYING is an exercise in refraining myself from getting angry.  No wonder Ryan Holiday has gotten such polarized reviews, and I hope that he is capitalizing on it.  Wait. What? Of course he is capitalizing! Ryan knows how media works. As is. Today. Good for  him!

It's difficult to look at things as they are, isn't it?   Yet I think Ryan is right on point.  He is showing us in raw terms how the news are created these days, how what you talk about and what I talk about in social conversations is no accident.

And it turns out that news that make it to the front page of online publications, hence creating what we talk about, are mostly pre-fabricated. They are designed to get us to click. To create controversy. They seldom tell the truth. They are not meant to.

But you knew that, right?  Or did you?

Let's see: when I say to you the word: "Toyota", what do you think?

It was user error

Only a week ago I thought of Toyota as a forbidden line of cars, the type I would never buy because of those horror stories I read a few years (?) (months?) ago of people being trapped to death with the accelerator getting stuck.

Did you know that NASA got involved in that investigation and it turns out that the people involved in those "accidents" were actually pressing the accelerator INSTEAD of the break?

It was user error. As the report run by NASA says:

The failure effect can be removed by releasing the accelerator pedal or overridden by the breaking system. 

That's right, you could have stopped the car if you pressed the breaks. Uh Oh.

How come I did not hear THAT?  Could it be because we as a collective group LIKE to hear bad news and don't want a follow up?  It was Ryan's book that told me that. Now I think differently of Toyota, but, had I not read this, I would have never known.

Journalism is Dying

Ryan himself acknowledges that media manipulation is nothing new, the newspapers of the 1800's were using some of this tactics, is just that the Internet is highlighting the capacity for an individual with the right information to make and manipulate news.

What has changed is the value of the scoop.  It used to be that reporters would be sent to find news, but in the era of Twitter the scoop is being broad casted as it happens.  An explosion in Iraq? There is people there on the ground telling it, An airport security issue?  People are Twitting and Facebook-ing it... it happens in real time.  Journalism is loosing its capacity to report.

PageViews are KING, not the story.  Highlights that drive traffic and pay bloggers' salaries. Stories that hurt people  and consequently sell, regardless of truth.

Ryan Creating Controversy

Ryan has worked for Tucker Max, the author of the book "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell" which did NOT sit well among many communities of women.  Using this, Ryan vandalized some street advertising posters of the movie which was made out of the book, and then he proceeded to take photographs and mail them to a news-starved local reporter who all of suddenly had a story to tell!

From the book:

"I guess it is safe to admit now that the entire firestorm was, essentially, fake. I designed the advertisements.... left anonymous complaints about them... alerted college LGVT and women's right groups to screenings.."

And:

"I pulled this off with no connections, no money, and no footsteps to follow. But because of the way that blogging is structured.... this was all very easy to do"

Ryan in Action

Recently Ryan twitted how he "finally made it to the New York Times", although he would have liked to have made it in a more positive light.  What happened was that he registered for a website in which "experts" give advise and then are quoted in major publications.  The publications get credibility, the so-called "experts" exposure.

Ryan gave expert advise on a field he knew nothing about, matter of fact he even delegated this task to an assistant.  The New York Times rectified that, but who will ever know?

Here is Ryan himself talking about his book at Tim Ferris' blog.  And if you are ready, here is the book trailer:




The table of contents, for a taste of the book:


If you would rather look inside at Amazon, click here

Book One: Feeding the Monster, How Blogs Work
1- Blogs Make News
2- How to Turn Nothing into Something in Three Way-Too-Easy Steps
3- The Blog Con How Publishers Make Money Online
4- Tactic #1 Bloggers Are Poor; Help Pay Their Bills
5- Tactic #2 Tell Them What They Want To Hear
6- Tactic #3 Give Them What Spreads, Not What's Good
7- Tactic #4 Help Them Trick Their Readers
8- Tactic #5 Sell Them Something They Can Sell
9- Tactic #6 Make it All About the Headline
10- Tactic #7 Kill Them With Pageview Kindness
11- Tactic #8 Use The Technology Against Itself
12- Tactic #9 Just Make Stuff Up (Everyone Is Doing It)

Book Two: What Blogs Mean
13 - Iron Carmon, The Daily Show and Me: The Perfect Storm of How Toxic Blogging Can Be
14 - There are Others: the Manipulator Hall of Fame
15-  Cute But Evil: Online Entertainment Tactics That Drug You And Me
16- The Link Economy: The Leveraged Illusion of Sourcing
17- Extortion Via The Web: Facing the Online Shakedown
18- The Iterative Hustle: Online Journalism's Bogus Philosophy
19- The Myth of Corrections
20- Cheering On Our Own Deception
21- The Dark Side of Snark: When Internet Humour Attacks
22- The 21st Century Degradation Ceremony: Blogs As Machines of Hatred and Punishment
23- Welcome to Unreality
24- How to Rad a Blog: An Update on Account of all the Lies

Conclusion: So... Where To From Here?

Here is the book, the image also takes you to Amazon if you want to peak inside...

For me the most important lesson of the book is to see things a bit closer to what they are.  To understand that the value of my click on articles is perhaps a bit greater than I thought, and to never, ever believe anything I read but rather become more and more of a skeptic.