The degree to which digital media has—or more often, has not—grappled with these questions animates former BuzzFeed News editor Ben Smith’s new book, Traffic. Through the stories of BuzzFeed and Gawker, Smith aims to show how the media, high on the early internet’s spirit of creative adventure and freedom, got hooked on traffic, unleashing volatile social and cultural forces it could no longer control. This was, Smith claims, the “false promise of traffic”—the book’s grand theme. But if his book portrays an executive class mostly unbothered by the potential consequences of the digital era’s popularity contest, it also suggests that journalists—in particular those named Ben Smith—remain confused about their own role in this shrill and data-saturated new world.
Jonah Peretti helped create The Huffington Post in 2005, then launched BuzzFeed a year later. But, as Smith tells it, Peretti has been thinking deeply about online attention’s basic purpose since the earliest days of the internet. In 1996, shortly after graduating from the University of California, Santa Cruz, Peretti published a long paper in the online journal Negations with the title “CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA.” Drawing on Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and sounding very much like one of his own future critics, Peretti argued that “late capitalism” both “accelerates the flow of capital” and “accelerates the rate at which subjects assume identities.” Brands, he continued, had exploited the “visual cacophony” of popular culture—including traditional print publications, cable TV, and the nascent internet—to sell stuff: The acceleration of visual culture enabled the acceleration of consumerism. The paper was not simply diagnostic but prescriptive: Might it not be possible, Peretti wondered, to reorient visual culture in a different direction, toward the formation of identities that “oppose those offered by the capitalist media”? There was, he concluded, “no reason” that “radical groups” could not use “similar methods” to those advancing hyper-consumerism to “challenge capitalism and develop alternative collective identities.” Indeed, the mediated anti-capitalist resistance was already underway: Peretti identified queer activists, slackers, and postmodern artists as among the groups who had begun to turn capitalism’s methods on itself.