Review: Trust Me, I’m Lying

I should start off by saying that as a computational social scientist, I greatly appreciate the title of Ryan Holiday’s book due to its relation to a problem with some rich history in computing and cognitive science. It is also why this review obviously will try to avoid talking too much about aspects of the book that stem from Holiday’s non-falsifiable accounts of his own personal experiences. After all, if I took Holiday’s word for it, I’d be just another one of the dupes he writes about! Given that Holiday devotes an entire chapter to how bloggers may be greased by sending them free things, I should also mention that he sent a review copy to me after we got introduced via an mutual friend.

Disclaimers aside, however, Trust Me, I’m Lying is more than just a tawdry memoir of a self-proclaimed “media manipulator.” Holiday reminds me of many of the people that I went to school with prior to my move from Los Angeles to Washington — conversant in the arts of public relations and media (he cites, directly, or parenthetically, several of my favorite authors on the subject) but also knowledgeable of academic research and writing in history, philosophy, and culture. His book, though perhaps dated in some of its references, has only been reinforced in core message by changes in the media landscape since it was first published. Holiday, in the acerbic style of critics such as Neil Postman and Evgeny Morozov, produces a complex explanation for why our present media landscape is so decrepit and frequently disappointing. Rather than leading to a growth of knowledge and discourse, Holiday convincingly argues that blogging and the “link economy” has instead resulted in a cesspool. Instead of reporting on events, people, or places, Holiday argues, modern media as we understand it boils down to the generation of the pseudo-event, an idea he borrows from a classic 1962 study of media culture.

We see this today in the “hot take,” the outrage-for-clicks-economy, and the manner in which feverish conspiracies and revelations about ideological enemies leverage a hypercharged online variant of the classic paranoid style in American life. Perhaps the centerpiece of Holiday’s angst, however, is the manner in which the pseudo-event becomes a tool for bloggers (as well as people in his former profession) to manipulate the public. Holiday describes incidents in which bloggers attempt to essentially extort large corporate or governmental entities, creating a situation in which the blogger can extract rents from that institution. The “iterative hustle” that Holiday describes suggests bloggers play fast and loose with accuracy and corrections and use such a cavalier attitude as a tool of extortion and leverage. “Feed me and pay attention to me or tomorrow I have an online mob at your doorstep,” the blogger says. Or, more common: “what a nice business you have. A real shame if something were to happen to it.”

Second, Holiday also describes the peculiarly opaque nature of how this sort of shell game works — the blogger demands a level of transparency from the target institution while nonetheless keeping his or her own sources, evaluation criteria, and evidence opaque and hidden. No one, however, asks who watches the watcher. Finally, Holiday describes in excruciating detail how this kind of cynical and irresponsibe manipulation is cloaked in the language of the public interest. One may counter, of course, that a marketing flack like Holiday would be predisposed to make this point due to his need to protect his clients’ interests, but Holiday ably parries this by pointing out how such a state of affairs benefits him (and his clients) as much as it harms. He — and others — may apply the same techniques that these new media figures employ to manipulate them into furthering his clients’ interests.

From the perspective of social science and technology, however, I have several major questions and uncertainties about his thesis.

First, it is very reliant on the new media economy circa the 2010s as a framing device. There were many parts of his book where I was reminded of the argument in The Rebel Sell about the manner in which competitive, hyper-individualistic rebellion is a mechanism of consumer capitalism writ large. While not totally incompatible with Holiday’s thesis, it also suggests an alternative explanation that competes with the primacy of pseudo-events and the link economy. The idea, instead, is that media outlets sell cultural consumption goods that grant some form of exclusivity to the buyer (identities, culture jamming, indie vs. corporate products, high vs. low culture, etc). The enigmatic tdaxp, for example, wrote about the role of exclusivity and niche markets in gaming journalism. Independent gaming media outlets could not leverage access to key elites within the entertainment industry characteristic of larger publications and they never quite connected with a reader base that trusted citizen journalists and Twitch streamers as more trustworthy and valuable. So they rebranded themselves as oppositional entities in the hope of developing an audience and brand around an exclusive and elitist identity. However, as Slate’s David Auerbach observed, this if anything merely accelerated the audience flight towards competing alternative forms of media. However, just because the individuals that tdaxp and Auerbach describe failed to pull such a manuever off does not mean that it wasn’t possible to achieve in the first place.

One flaw in Holiday’s work stems from the way in which it does not emphasize enough the manner in which pseudo-events play to niches or beliefs that people want to have about themselves. Surely a man as cynical as Holiday is familiar with the idea that every con game has a conman and a willing mark that wants to believe. Holiday catalogs, in exhaustive and often depressing detail, how structural features of the information ecosystem coupled with a combination of blogger rent-seeking, flimsy ethics, and self-righteousness incentivize harmful and disgusting online spectacles. He knows well how content can be crafted to play on the emotions, to exploit weaknesses in human psychology, and thus go viral. And he understands an enormous amount of the dark arts of the media manipulator or the entrepreneurial new media agitator. However, the actual readers and consumers of such content are more abstract and covered in less detail. Yes, one comes away with a bad image of certain web 2.0 celebrities after reading Holiday’s book. But who are their readers? What is it, exactly, that the bloggers or the manipulators offer that is so persuasive and enticing to them? Is it just playing to base human instincts?

Holiday is persuasive about how a skilled manipulator may exploit abstract characteristics of the online mob such as emotion and short attention spans, but that mob is nonetheless composed of real people with agency and motivations of their own. That’s a large part of why I’m curious about the audience for Holiday’s pseudo-events. Perhaps there is something more to them then the image he casts of them as marionettes on the string of new media puppetteers. The closest that Holiday comes to this is when he notes that a key aspect of media manipulation is the manner in which successful manipulators make the target feel like they are rationally sitting above a intellectual bubble when they are in fact smack dab in the middle of one. This has relevance to debates about “epistemic closure” in both conservative and liberal social media circles respectively — perhaps the impact of media manipulation varies when the manipulator aims to enhance some pre-existing form of bias or epistemic closure or even satisfy a kind of basic motivation, drive, or need.

Perhaps that might also be a product of social relationships and hierarchies that govern how information is consumed and produced, as seen in this study of social media manipulation and astroturf networks in Digg and other social media forums. The reason why this dimension is so important is that it has very big implications for the validity of Holiday’s ideas both about the nature of the problem (the modern information ecosystem) and the empirical validity of his posited repetoire of media dark arts. If we changed the technologies and economics completely, would Holiday-like tactics work as well? Holiday does note a qualitative — if not total — distinction between old and new media manipulation dynamics, but one wonders how much of the phenomena he describes really stems from the explanations and motivations he chooses to privilege in his book. If we transported Holiday back in time to an era of media he views as supposedly more enlightened, what would it mean for his explanation if he had a similar level of success in media manipulation? If Holiday can fool suckers just as easily and explain his success in the same terms, there is a major problem with his argument.

Finally, I’ll observe something interesting as well that came to my mind when I read the book. One controversial idea that has been part of the overall “Machiavellian intelligence” hypothesis in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology is that the capacity for lying to oneself is a prequisite for the ability to lie to others. Holiday talks a lot about the mechanisms of the manipulator but not as much about the kind of person that succeeds at it. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the adaptive self-deception hypothesis, first formulated by Robert Trivers in the 1980s, was that you have to be first capable of bullshitting yourself before you can bullshit someone else. Yet, obviously, bullshitting yourself may detract from the task of bullshitting others — how do you know that you are not bullshitting yourself about your ability to really bullshit others? Holiday is surely familiar with the novelistic cliche of the would-be Machiavellian that finds himself outfoxed by someone at a higher level of intelligence and cunning. So one wonders, in the midst of so much noise, spin, misdirection, and a kind of clickbait equivalent of the Cold War “hall of mirrors,” how Holiday’s titular manipulator keeps his or her hold on reality. After all, even Holiday himself ended up quitting.

Despite these ambiguities, I was pleasantly surprised by Holiday’s book. It had a depth and self-awareness that I did not expect in a short text on the black arts of public relations and scandal-mongering, and much of what Holiday writes could be of use to those seeking to build agent-based or cellular automata simulations of opinion dynamics, gossip, information diffusions. And the aspiring empirical big data social science scholar is recommended to see how much of Holiday’s ideas could be empirically tested either through experiments or large-scale observational social network research. It also made for a cathartic read in a social media climate quite potentially worse than the one Holiday described at the time of the book’s publication.