Tech will have to deconstruct media in great depth to build its own media arm
A spectre haunts the West, the spectre of civil war over who dominates Twitter hashtags. Coinbase is creating its own media arm. It came from the CEO’s social media handle. The move was billed as a kind of revolution. Andreessen Horowitz launched its publishing arm, Future, weeks ago. The cynic might be tempted to call it tech discovering content marketing and think tanks, in the manner of a Dutch sailor in 1606 discovering Australia, a patch of pebble and grass with half-a-million people. But that would be a mistake. Tech indeed is looking to circumvent Big Media and go straight to the reader. A quarter century since the web made the paper route redundant, the New York Times imprimatur still carries weight. Tech sees this as wrong, and believes its own voice should carry as much weight.
Tech first forays into media have been rather lukewarm
Results have been modest so far. You’d expect a16z’s missives to the world to be dense with insights. Its portfolio company founders are in the trenches, soaked in mud, at the frontiers of tech. Their GPs are at the very top of the capitalist food chain, affording sweeping views few have. The two surely can be combined to write the definitive account of the 2020s? Alas, no. Articles in the ‘future’ subdomain read like primers on the subject the firm is invested in. This tells me Tech has not cared to deconstruct media. Or the essay. Or writing. Or the art and science of analysis. I cannot unknow that in private engineers denounce all non-STEM disciplines as frivolous.
Tech’s self-serving view of media is based on the latter’s worst, in fact the very things that are dilutive of Big Media’s authority — opinion columns, clickbait headlines, and ideological slants. These can be done away with. Maybe.
But there is more.
The most damning indictments of media do not pertain to its peripheries, to its bad apples, to the infraction of its rules. The indictments pertain to the rules themselves, to the industry’s innate, inextricable core, to the very things that make media, media.
You see, media is predicated on playing the access game. The access game is a complex dance of feigning neutrality, feigning solidarity, and even feigning intimate friendships. And what is perhaps worse, media for the lay reader (even for the New Yorker-reading lay reader) must abhor depth. Lastly, there is the infinite condescension of pessimism. The permabear is insufferable. But media thinks it is dull when cheerleading.
Tech — with the certitude of youth — believes these core underpinnings of media are not immutable; that media can be reinvented while eschewing its necessary evils.
So you have read Janet Malcolm?
You might think I am talking about Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer. Malcolm’s story is about the access game played on a man convicted of the murder of his pregnant wife and children. The journalist makes the subject believe right until publication that he is convinced of the latter’s innocence, only to do a complete volte-face after, all in the name of that last refuge — press freedom. It is an extreme that illustrates the norm. Reader, perchance if you were to speak to a journalist about using ML for IT operations that groups semantically similar events together or AWS egress data pricing, you too would witness the dance of the access game.
Every journalistic story represents a successful magic trick of misdirection, a kind of legerdemain of trust. The expert whose perspective is sought with solemn deference and the characters in the story are made to believe that their point of view in the story matters, and how they see the story unfold is the truth (or at least consequential to the narrative). The assumption hangs in the air. The conversations are polite. Sometimes they are warm. Nobody is prepared for the jolt of surprise when the rolled up paper flies through the air and hits the porch on Saturday morning. The expert, still bleary eyed, picks up the paper and sees that the journalist has used an entire day of conversations as a minor peg holding up an argument that is balderdash.
Then there is the dilettantism. Journalists identify as writers, not as experts. They call the product a story, not a report or a paper. The issue is not that they do not have the practitioner’s grasp on the subject. One should not have to be a central banker to comment on the dangers of expansionary monetary policy. But the discipline seems to make a clear break between itself and those it considers authorities on the subject, even while opining overtly on matters of great importance, and often when surreptitiously privileging a point of view. Opinion is welcome. Things that require the mere chronicling of facts and events are in the domain of wire services. But it is strange that the media thinks it is kosher to push deep convictions in the public domain without staking a claim on expertise, while recognising the importance of experts, a group it relies on for the scaffolding of its stories. The nebulous abstraction that is “writer” allows continuous vacillation between two vantage points, that of the flaneur who is merely passing by and reporting on the tableaus that he sees with a naive, dispassionate eye — the everyman standby for the reader, and that of the omniscient third-party who is sees things that nobody in the scene does.
Media’s essential evils cannot be wished away
The above trifecta of media evil cannot be solved. Coinbase will not build street creds with the general readership if it has an unqualified pollyannaish view of crypto. You get content farms and trade journals with that. The Coinbase writer will have to say, possibly while appearing rather shrill, that proof-of-stake is a bad idea. And, they have to unravel dubious ICOs. To do so, the Coinbase writer will have to nod patiently as the CEO doing the ICO plays the tech savant, the benevolent libertarian, and extolls the virtue of circumventing IPO regulations built on the accumulated knowledge of a century of securities fraud. Without that bit of performative trust building, the cross over article will not be written. The access game endures not because journalists lack self-awareness. Janet Malcolm wasn’t an outsider. She was an industry behemoth. The book was published in 1989. The work is part of the standard J-school curriculum. The access game endures because there is no other way.
About the dilettantism, CoinBase or a16z will presumably field tech heavyweights as writers. The idea is that the sports broadcaster must be an ex-NFLer, and not a mere scribe. But an ageing technologist with a US$100 million exit will write a 500-word opinion piece. That is it. In addition, there is the question of the size of the talent pool. NFLers retire young. There is a large supply of former practitioners who can shoot the breeze on air. But 45-year old programmers are doing just fine, thank you, and most will not deign to do anything as soft as writing.
Tech is blind to its adversary’s best, the things that are accretive to Big Media’s authority. Judging media by Paul Krugman’s column is like judging software by Siebel CRM from the mid-aughts. The best is the long form feature, the field research-based definitive accounts of an event, issue, or subculture. The best is investigative journalism. Media’s clout wasn’t built on opinion pieces and lightly researched stories. The answer is not Substack. Substack has individual former journalists, who too can rarely go beyond the opinion piece. It takes a village to do what the media does well, to do what built The New York Times’ 50 million Twitter followers and The New Yorker’s 8.9 million. Their authority comes from a record of anti-authoritarianism, the investigative journalists who have broken the law, done time, risked time, died, risked death, checked into madhouses, worked at meat packing facilities, and worked undercover in fulfilment warehouses. Stories have reportedly turned the tide on the Vietnam war, unseated an American president, made the Alcoholics Anonymous go mainstream, and helped knock Standard Oil off the monopoly perch. While a tech-owned media outfit will have to operate within the ambit of broad tech optimism, it must be given the freedom to muckrake within that realm. Part of it is questioning whether crypto will be able to survive the surfeit of fraud that is surely coming. Part of it is questioning whether the market, afloat on DeFi now, will continue to soar unless DAOs emerge that generate real economic activity well in time before the next long winter. Part of it is questioning whether decentralised stablecoins can survive an extreme event, even in theory. Tech owned media must be allowed to hold a mirror to itself. It bears repetition that Janet Malcolm was not an outsider, but a legend in her own time, among her own.
The citizen journalist is as likely as the citizen site reliability engineer
Also, logistics. Path breaking stories, such as those based on the Wikileaks diplomatic cables and the war logs scoop involved the partner publications — Der Spiegel, The Guardian, and the New York Times — processing the metadata of over 250,000 documents. The citizen journalist is as likely as the citizen site reliability engineer. .
Next comes the feature. The long form feature is among the best things about Big Media. But to replicate it, Tech will have to accept that what strikes the tech mind as the flaws of the genre are actually its strengths. What engineering utilitarianism rejects as superfluous, the world celebrates as art. The staff writer in tech-owned media must be an engineer among artists, and an artist among engineers.
A feature by the Times or the Post or the New Yorker about the role of containers in globalisation or urban beekeeping can be a terrific way to end a winter day snuggled under the quilt. The lay reader would experience the vulgar joy that comes from pure entertainment, tempered by the sense of having been enlightened that assuages the guilt that comes gratis with mere joy.
Except that if you work in logistics or beekeeping it would read like a word postcard on the subject: beautiful but lightweight. There will be metaphors galore; extravagant ones, and ones of great beauty. But if you have even a passing familiarity with the subject, you’d wonder if the writer has actual understanding and is using metaphors as an explanatory device, or if comprehension has been at the level of the metaphor. Research papers would have been read, but rarely understood. The math would be skipped. Scientists would be met, their beards, gait, demeanour described, but the wisdom received and transcribed would be at the level of the sound byte. The writer would have worked six months on the story, sometimes travelling continents. Chances are the trip from the airport to the bee farm would be detailed. The oddball beekeeper would gently be made fun of. Sometimes a personal story would be weaved in, of the author’s youthful sojourns into the urban beekeeping underbelly of Tokyo. You’d feel good, but the analytically inclined (the demographic that thinks Soylent and perma-WFH are good ideas) would wonder if Wikipedia would have been a better use of their time.
Except that these tropes of serious journalistic writing are necessary if tech has to convert thinking classes outside of tech. The Coinbase writer needs to understand the relative merits of Solana and Ethereum in terms of managing the trilemma. The lack of such understanding among the Times and the Post bothers the tech crowd no end. But the Coinbase writer also has to have a grip over the dark arts of the writing craft: narrative, characterisation, imagery, metaphor, plot, conflict, theme, world building, turn of phrase, and aphorism. These are essential elements of not just novels, but also authoritative non-fiction. Coinbase will have to let its writers spend months on such stories, fly them across continents, and let them…be.
The genre of literary nonfiction has earned its authority over fifty years. It goes back at least to the time of Tom Wolfe who led the New Journalism movement. A pantheon of writers during Tom Wolfe’s time such as Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Gay Talese used the dark arts to bring to the attention of American elites the oddities of their time. And many have since, like John McPhee, Adam Gopnik, D.T. Max, Jill Lepore, David Foster Wallace, and Raffi Khatchadourian.
Writing is a technical skill
Creative disciplines require far more technical skills than creative people let on (just as technical disciplines require far more creativity than technical people allow). The dark arts of writing are technical skills. In the absence of these skills, tech content looks like posts on the Forbes Contributor Network. Or those from the HubSpot content factory. These help with SEO juice. These help with a SaaS leads pipeline. Laudable goals. But slaying Big Media will require more serious weaponry. Big tech will require professionals. The citizen journalist is as likely as the citizen product manager.
It would be a difficult matter to get members of the Old Media to cross over. Many are doom mongers by disposition. But there is no dearth of legit critiques of tech. The task is to find the right ally among the critiques.
A technology revolution with possibly cataclysmic consequences (such as AGI) surfaces two different archetypes, which the Atlantic writer Charles C. Mann calls the Prophet and the Wizard. The Prophet believes deliverance lies in restoring the present to a simpler past. The Wizard believes it is technology that threw us over the abyss, and it is technology that will give us not just parachutes, but wingsuits and jetpacks, well in time before the Big Thud.
Charles C. Mann’s Prophet is William Vogt who argued from the quasi-moral position that humankind risks surpassing the carrying capacity of earth, and that there might be no redemption. Mr. Mann’s Wizard is Norman Borlaug who did stellar work on agricultural productivity, creating hardy wheat breeds that wrung more out of the soil, possibly saving a billion lives in India, Pakistan, Mexico and much of the developing world. The Wizard did in fact increase the carrying capacity of the earth.
It is the wizard that tech must target as writers. Science writers are the best bet. Oliver Morton authored the definitive account of geo-engineering — “The Planet Remade”. There is Siddharta Mukherjee who is a working oncologist and has written a bestseller on cancer. Oliver Morton, Charles C. Mann (mentioned earlier), and Siddharta Mukherjee are the full-stack decathletes of the craft. They can parse the most abstruse technical literature and are masters of narrative. Just as Adele can sing the phone book and squeeze tears out of you, Messrs Morton and Mukherjee can take in research papers by the gigabyte and output pacy thrillers. It is Morton and Mukherjee, alongside an openness to learn from the interlocutor, that will see tech through.
