The problem with anarchy is that you can’t control it.
That’s the lesson (hopefully) learned by Gawker and its techno-optimist founder, Nick Denton, after publishing an atrocious post outing a media executive for no other reason than sport, and having since been the center of a shitstorm fueled by what’s apparently a mass delusion inside the company.
In a 2014 Playboy Q&A conducted by Jeff Bercovici, Denton extolled the virtues of the radical transparency and the “natural monopolies” of Google, Uber and Amazon, seemingly without realizing this new order could also cause injury. Two excerpts follow.
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Playboy:
What are the implications for the broader society? What does America look like from inside the Panopticon?
Nick Denton:
When people take a look at the change in attitudes toward gay rights or gay marriage, they talk about the example of people who came out, celebrities who came out. That has a pretty powerful effect. But even more powerful are all the friends and relatives, people you know. When it’s no longer some weird group of faggots on Christopher Street but actually people you know, that’s when attitudes change, and my presumption is the internet is going to be a big part of that. You’re going to be bombarded with news you wouldn’t necessarily have consumed—information, humanity, texture. I think Facebook, more than anything else, and the internet have been responsible for a large part of the liberalization of the past five or 10 years when it comes to sex, when it comes to drinking. Five years ago it was embarrassing when somebody had photographs of somebody drunk as a student. There was actually a discussion about whether a whole generation of kids had damaged their career prospects because they put up too much information about themselves in social media. What actually happened was that institutions and organizations changed, and frankly any organization that didn’t change was going to handicap itself because everyone, every normal person, gets drunk in college. There are stupid pictures or sex pictures of pretty much everybody. And if those things are leaked or deliberately shared, I think the effect is to change the institutions rather than to damage the individuals. The internet is a secret-spilling machine, and the spilling of secrets has been very healthy for a lot of people’s lives.
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Playboy:
You’re more willing than most people to organize your life according to principle and see how the experiment turns out.
Nick Denton:
You could argue that privacy has never really existed. Usually people’s friends or others in the village had a pretty good idea what was going on. You could look at this as the resurrection of or a return to the essential nature of human existence: We were surrounded by obvious scandal throughout most of human existence, when everybody knew everything. Then there was a brief period when people moved to the cities and social connections were frayed, and there was a brief period of sufficient anonymity to allow for transgressive behavior no one ever found out about. That brief era is now coming to an end.•