Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral

The Origin Story of the Age of Disinformation

The candid inside tale of two online media rivals, Jonah Peretti of HuffPost and BuzzFeed, and Nick Denton of Gawker Media, whose delirious pursuit of attention at scale helped release the dark forces that would overtake the internet and American society.

If attention is the new oil, Ben Smith's Traffic is the story of the time between the first gusher and the impact of climate change.

The curtain opens in Soho in the early 2000s, after the first dotcom crash but before Google, Apple, and Facebook exploded—when it seemed that New York City, rather than Silicon Valley, might become tech's center of gravity. Within a few square blocks, Nick Denton's merry band of nihilists at his growing Gawker empire and Jonah Peretti's sunnier crew at HuffPost and BuzzFeed were building the foundations of viral internet media.

It was tech's age of innocence:

• The old establishment had been discredited by the Iraq War.
• Digital news promised to facilitate the spread of truth.
• Progressive activists online had seemingly helped get Barack Obama elected.

A Nuanced Chronicle of the Viral Media Era

Ben Smith, who would go on to earn a controversial reputation as BuzzFeed's editor-in-chief, witnessed it all firsthand. He chronicles the rise of viral media with marvelous lucidity, scored with dark wit, sparing no one—and certainly not himself.

Smith tells a nuanced story:

• Nick Denton's ideology of radical transparency was problematic, but at least he had an ideology.
• Jonah Peretti, on the other hand, survived long after Denton's Gawker perished because his focus on clicks was relentlessly content-agnostic.

But as the pursuit of attention grew, unintended consequences began to snowball.

The Great Irony of Our Time

Traffic explores one of the great ironies of the internet age: the very tool that was supposed to help the left remake the world in its image became the driving force of right-wing populism.

Figures like Steve Bannon, Andrew Breitbart, Gavin McInnes, and Chris Poole (creator of 4chan) once seemed like minor characters in the narrative where Nick Denton, Jonah Peretti, and their teams were the stars. Yet by 2020, any reasonable observer might wonder if the opposite wasn’t true.

To understand how we got here, Traffic is essential and enthralling reading.