Traffic

If attention is the new oil, Ben Smith's Traffic is the story of the time between the first gusher and the perceptible impact of climate change. The curtain opens in Soho in the early 2000s, after the first dot-com 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. There, within a few square blocks, Nick Denton's merry band of nihilists at his growing Gawker empire and Jonah Peretti's sunnier team at HuffPost and BuzzFeed were building the foundations of viral internet media. It was tech's age of innocence: The old establishment might have been discredited by the Iraq War, but digital news would empower the spread of truth. After all, didn't the progressive internet get Barack Obama elected? Ben Smith, who would go on to earn a controversial reputation as BuzzFeed's editor in chief, was there to see it, and he chronicles it all with marvelous lucidity underscored by dark wit, sparing no one - and certainly not himself. Smith tells a nuanced story: Yes, Denton's ideology of radical transparency was problematic, but at least he had an ideology. Jonah Peretti survived long after Denton's Gawker perished because his focus on clicks was relentlessly content-agnostic, but unintended consequences began to snowball. Traffic explores one of the great ironies of our time: The internet, which was going to help the left remake the world in its image, has become the motive force of right populism. People like Steve Bannon and Andrew Breitbart and Chris Poole, the creator of 4chan, all initially seemed like minor characters in the narrative in which Nick, Jonah, and crew were the stars. But today, any reasonable observer might wonder if the opposite wasn't the case. To understand how we got here, Traffic is essential and enthralling reading.