Midweek Update: Theft in the Attention Economy

On Sunday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was moving on from his proposed fight with noted doofus Elon Musk. While I never had much interest in seeing such a fight (I’m not much for combat sports, but they tend to be more appealing when they’re between athletes and not dilettantes), Zuckerberg did seize on the fact that Musk is, more than anything, a lot of talk:

Making promises he never keeps is part of Musk’s brand. While his followers like to imagine him as a real-life Tony Stark, in reality, he’s Justin Hammer—a guy who loves the spotlight but doesn’t have the talent or the intelligence to make anything of value. Musk does have companies likes Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink, and should be content to try and make those businesses as successful and rock solid as human possibly instead of running over crash test dummies, exploding on launch, or subjecting war zones to his pique. Instead, he keeps blasting a steady stream of self-hype. As Trevor Noah points out in this video, Musk “is the guy at the strip club making it rain with IOUs.”

And yet the media continues to credulously repeat everything Musk or his proxies (like X/Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino) say like “seamless video calls” are coming to the app or that X will be utilized for banking despite constant security failures.

The reasoning seems to be that because Musk is a major figure in the tech space, what he says demands reporting. The problem is that headlines and reporting are different things. You can add nuance all day in the body of the article, but the way we process news is through headlines and chyrons. While the headline is trying to lure you to the story, in an age where we’re getting constant news, headlines become consumed on their own separate from the reporting beneath them. That means spinning the media simply becomes a matter of a big, catchy proclamation and not sweating the details.

This was a similar strategy employed by Donald Trump during his entire life, but notably through his 2016 Presidential Campaign where he would say outlandish things and then outlets would report first and fact-check later. Like with Musk, the argument seems to be that because Trump was a major figure, his utterances had to be documented. The rich man was saying something loudly and confidently, so someone has to write a news article.

Because the Internet is limitless, there’s no one to say, “We don’t have the space for that.” In a pre-Internet time, an editor has to consider how much space there is in their publication or a producer has to consider how many minutes they have in a program. Stories have to be compelling, but it can’t just be, “Guy who says a lot of untrue things said another untrue thing.” Internet incentives are different because you’re simply trying to scrape as much traffic as possible. If a noted liar says something false, as long as it was good enough to get a click, the article gets posted. That’s how you pay the bills in an attention economy.

However, I would counter that this is theft, and the media doesn’t have to be an active participant in deceiving readers. I understand that if your beat is tech and Musk unveils some new venture (or, as is more likely, describes a new venture that will arrive at some unspecified point in the future), then you’re supposed to provide coverage. After all, he’s a tech mogul and he says there will be new tech. But this isn’t like when Apple unveiled Apple Vision Pro earlier this year, which, for all of its possible drawbacks, is a thing that exists and will likely be sold sometime in the next 12 months. If Apple kept promising products that never came to fruition, people would rightly call out the company for producing vaporware.

Musk doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, and yet Yaccarino’s statements were repeated at face value in headlines. This simply meant free marketing for X based on promises that seem to have no basis in reality. Do we really think that a company that doesn’t pay its rent and is defending an account that hosted child sex abuse material is going to be a trusted name in online banking?

If the only currency in the attention economy is who can make the biggest statement, then guys like Musk are thieves who know they can gain headlines, notoriety, and ultimately power without having anything to show for it. We already saw this play out when he proposed a “hyper loop” for California, but all that accomplished was standing in the way of high-speed rail for the state. At some point, the media needs to stop chasing the shiny object simply because they fear they might lose our attention for a nanosecond.

Recommendations

Asteroid City arrived on Blu-ray yesterday, and it’s currently my favorite film of 2023. I imagine that placement could change with the arrival of award season contenders, but I’d be shocked if Wes Anderson’s latest didn’t at least land in my Top 10 of the year. You may be worried that purchasing this Blu-ray is premature since Anderson’s movies end up on Criterion, but consider that it takes a while for that to happen. Isle of Dogs was released five years ago and it still hasn’t entered the Criterion Collection.

What I’m Watching

I started watching Jury Duty yesterday, and it’s not bad. The premise is kind of an inverse Candid Camera where instead of one person knowing that they’re being filmed and everyone else being the mark, in Jury Duty, everyone knows they’re being filmed (and are acting a part) except for one person (Ronald). It’s an interesting setup, but if there’s one qualm I have after the first episode is that it feels pretty transparent that the other jurors are characters with the only signifier of them being “regular people” is that they’re not Hollywood handsome. Perhaps that’s where James Marsden comes in as a distraction. Marsden is playing “himself” and perhaps by luring Ronald’s attention he makes it easier to not raise Ronald’s suspicions.

What I’m Reading

I started reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin after hearing raves about it in 2022. After only 50 pages, I’ve fallen in love with it. Part of the reason is that it’s speaking my language (two characters who love video games and want to be game designers), but the way Zevin draws her leads is already so rich and nuanced that I can’t wait to find out what happens next.

In other reads:

'Blind Side' subject Oher alleges adoption was lie by Michael A. Fletcher [ESPN] - This is an absolute bombshell. It’s not that The Blind Side was ever a great story, but Oher’s allegations are heartbreaking. Rather than adopting him, Oher alleges that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy placed him in a conservatorship, essentially turning him into a commodity. Furthermore, the profits they made from Michael Lewis’ book, the film adaptation, speaking engagements, etc, went to the Tuohys and their birth children, but not Oher even though he was supposed to receive 20% of the revenue (which still seems low! It’s his story!). It will be interesting to see the fallout from this including Lewis (who has a new book coming out in October, so he’ll likely be doing press), writer-director John Lee Hancock, and star Sandra Bullock, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy.

A Seat At The Table Of Success by David J. Roth [Defector] - I really wish I understood New York City politics better because it seems like despite being a so-called liberal haven, the city keeps electing progressively worse mayors. Roth’s article is based on Ian Parker’s recent New Yorker feature on Eric Adams, but Roth seizes upon the certain character attributes that go into making a big city mayor and why Adams is a complete buffoon who poses like a tough guy while having the thinnest skin imaginable.

Why Is America Such a Deadly Place? by David Wallace-Wells [The New York Times] - This article is a huge bummer, but the numbers are worth examining. America is a “developed” nation, but the only thing we seem to excel at is killing our own citizens through systems of neglect and violence. Part of this makes more sense when you see America as a young country and an even younger democracy (it’s difficult to see anything before the Voting Rights Act as representative democracy if you’re cutting out entire swaths of people based on the color of their skin), but you can also see a bunch of toxic streams intersecting from our celebration of individualism at the expense of others to our low-road capitalism that emphasizes exploitation to our media outlets that calcify our differences for entertainment rather than solutions. While it’s easy to place the burden on individuals (whether it be elected officials or ourselves), we should endeavor to fixing the systems in place that perpetuate these outcomes rather than throwing up our hands and saying we’re doomed.

What I’m Hearing

Maintenance Phase recently had an interesting two-part episode on Mad Cow and how the cattle industry sued Oprah Winfrey for her segment on the disease and the potential threat of a contagion here in the U.S. Part One does a good job of not only outlining libel law, but how libel laws were updated in the wake of a 60 Minutes report that serious harmed the apple industry.

What I’m Playing

I’m still making my way through Hitman and Tekken, but I made an interesting discovery while playing Tekken. Games I typically play are not about fast responses. Sure, there’s your typical hand-eye movement, but nothing fast. Meanwhile, over in Tekken 7, I’m furiously mashing buttons to do moves, and working up a sweat. The fact that playing a fighting game makes me sweaty means I’m horribly out of shape. Hooray!