Trust Me I'm Lying: A Summary and Review
Trust Me I'm Lying, by Ryan Holiday, is probably the most influential book I've read in the past two years. This book is a guidebook to the twenty-first century media ecosystem, and shows how the structures and incentives of online media serve to polarize us by stoking fear and anger. First published in 2012, the book is eerily prophetic in many places, as it talks about the toxic influence of online publishing on politics and society. Ryan Holiday is a marketer and publicist who specializes in manipulating blogs in service of his clients. So what is a blog? A blog is any online publishing platform which derives its revenue from advertising. Blogs range in size from small, fly-by-night local publications all the way up to multi million dollar properties like Gawker and the Huffington Post. Blogs may be independent, such as Huffington Post or Politico or they may be associated with an existing media franchise. For example the Monkey Cage politics blog is hosted by the Washington Post, and MoneyWatch is a financial blog hosted by CBS. The key observation that Ryan makes is that all blogs, no matter how large or small they are, no matter if they're associated with an existing media franchise or not, are driven by the same economic incentives. The revenue a blog makes can be expressed as (price per page-view) × (number of page-views). Since blogs have little control over how much they are paid per reader, blogs universally tend to work to maximize the number of readers they get. Moreover the sheer number of blogs, and the extremely low barrier to entry creates a brutally Darwinian marketplace where any content that doesn't maximize page-views is rapidly superseded by content that does. In order to maximize the number of people clicking on their stories (and thus viewing the ads on those stories), blogs exploit every flaw in human psychology they can find. Chief among these is provocation. Ryan cites a study by Berger and Milkman from 2012 which shows that content wit
These are fictional examples. In reality, like at the Battle of Cannae, for example, the Carthaginian force, led by Hannibal Barca, was outnumbered by the Romans by nearly 2:1 (roughly 40,000 Carthaginians against around 80,000 Romans). And yet the Carthaginians won by trapping the Romans in a double-envelopment and attacking them from all sides, preventing the Romans from concentrating their superior numbers, allowing Hannibal's forces to slaughter the Romans. Although Hannibal's forces may have outnumbered the Romans at the actual line of contact, no one claims that the Carthaginians had numerical superiority at Cannae.
Similarly, at Agincourt, the English were outnumbered by the French by approximately 2:1. The French were defeated because the... (read more)