Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (39 page)

My definition is a little simpler: You know you’re dealing with snark when you attempt to respond to a comment and realize that there is nothing you can say. The remark doesn’t mean anything—though it still hurts—and the person saying it doesn’t care enough about what they said, or anything else for that matter, that would allow you to criticize them back. If I call you a douche, how would you defend yourself without making it worse? You couldn’t.

Yet a snark victim’s first instinct is to appeal to reason—to tell the crowd, Hey, that’s not true! They’re making this up! Or appeal to the humanity of the writer by contacting them personally to ask, Why are you doing this to me? I try to stop these clients. I tell them, I know this must hurt, but there’s nothing you can do. It’s like jujitsu: The energy you’d exert in your defense will be used against you to make the embarrassment worse.

I’m not always successful. Once, in the middle of some ridiculous controversy, Dov put out a statement that said that anyone who actually believed any of it could call his personal cell phone to talk about it. All this did was create something else for blogs to make fun of—the CEO posting his cell phone number online!—and generate about a thousand prank phone calls.

Snark is profitable and easy for blogs. It’s the perfect device for people with nothing to say but who
have
to talk (blog) for a living. Snark is the grease of the wheels of the web. Discussing issues fairly would take time and cognitive bandwidth that blogs just don’t have. It’s the style of choice because it’s click-friendly, cheap, and fast.

Bloggers love to hide snark in adjectives, to cut an entire person down with just a few words. You find it in nonsensical mock superlatives: Obama is the “compromiser in chief.” Jennifer Lopez is Hennifa Yopez. Dov Charney is pervy and lives in a “masturbatorium.” Jennifer Love Hewitt gains a few pounds and becomes Jennifer Love Chewitt. Tucker Max is rapey. What do these words mean? Why do bloggers use them? Lines such as these are intended not so much to wound as to prick. Not to humiliate but to befuddle. Not to make people laugh but to make them smirk or chuckle. To annihilate without effort.

SNARK IN ACTION: A MOST EFFECTIVE WEAPON

You can see snark (and its problems) embodied in Nikki Finke, the notorious Hollywood blogger, and her annual tradition of “live snarking” Hollywood award shows on the blog
DeadlineHollywood.
One year, Finke’s live snarking of the Academy Awards was filled with constant criticism that the show was “gay,” because it had too much singing and dancing. Funny, right? The height of incisive comedy, to be sure. After repeatedly calling it the “
GAYEST OSCARS EVER,
” Finke turned around and railed against the academy’s choice to recognize comedian Jerry Lewis with a humanitarian award because of “antigay slurs”—jokes he’d told during his telethon that raised
more than $60 million
for muscular dystrophy. “Humanitarian my ass,” she wrote. Good one, Nikki.

This is snark in its purest form: aggressively, self-righteously full of shit. Finke had made her own gay jokes just minutes before, but somehow she’s not only
not
a hypocrite, she’s superior to Lewis, even though he actually got off his ass and helped people. Snark is magical that way. You can see why bloggers love to use it.

Denby said that snark is an attempt to “annihilate someone’s effectiveness.” Well, that’s exactly what happened to Scott Adams, the famed creator of
Dilbert
. In addition to the massive audience he had through his comic, Adams became popular online as a blogger, due to his controversial opinions. By all accounts he relished this ascendancy—going so far, I think, as to deliberately stir people up through politically incorrect posts. He loved the attention and traffic that blogs gave him.

Then, in 2011 Adams published a series of posts on his blogs about supposedly unfair restrictions society puts on men regarding sex and gender roles. Although his post was poorly thought out, it was by no means a new topic. Many people—from evolutionary biologists to feminists to comedians—have attributed social problems like infidelity and violence to repressed male emotions and genetics. But the blog cycle lined up so that Adams was wrong for touching the subject. He had set himself up to be snarked.

By that I mean he became a victim of relentless, vitriolic attacks. According to
Jezebel
, Adams’s post could best be paraphrased as: “Now I am going to reveal my deeply-held douchebag beliefs.” (
Bitch
magazine snarkily reduced it further: “Scott Adams, Douchetoonist.”) Or as another blog began, “Let’s check in with our old pal Scott Adams—Dilbert creator, former Seattleite, and raving lunatic who spends his days being his own best friend. What’s that crazy kook talking about now? Rape? Dick Tweets? This should be good.”

Adams said some dumb things, but he had not said any of that. He was accused of advocating rape. Though he’d actually said nothing close, he was misquoted and mischaracterized, first humorously and then in serious outrage. A petition titled “Tell Scott Adams that raping a woman is not a natural instinct” was started and got more than two thousand online signatures.

The response utterly disoriented and overwhelmed Adams. First he tried to delete his post, but that just brought more attention to it. Then he repeatedly tried to defend himself and clarify what he’d really meant. As I tell my clients, that’s the equivalent of a squeaky cry of,
“Why is everyone making fun of me?!”
on the playground. Whether it happens in front of snarky blogs or a real-life bully, the result is the same: Everyone makes fun of you even more.

So it went for Scott Adams, no longer best known online as a famous, generation-defining cartoonist but a cross between a buffoon and a misogynistic rape apologist. Everything he does is now a convenient chance for blogs to link readers to their hilarious past coverage, to rehash the same jokes, and to repeat the same accusations. It’s a hole Adams simply cannot dig himself out of.

If I had been advising Adams, I would have told him that you lived by the sword of online attention, and now you may have to die by it. In other words, I would tell him to bend over and take it. And then I’d apologize. I’d tell him the whole system is broken and evil, and I’m sorry it’s attacking him. But there’s nothing that can be done.

SNARK IS HOLLOW AND EMPTY

Unsurprisingly, many bloggers defend snark. According to Adam Sternbergh in
New York
magazine, the standard criticism of snark is wrong, because snark is actually a good thing. “When no one—from politicians to pundits—says what he actually means,” he wrote, “irony becomes a logical self-inoculation. Similarly, snark, irony’s brat, flourishes in an age of doublespeak and idiocy that’s too rarely called out elsewhere. Snark is not a honk of blasé detachment; it’s a clarion call of frustrated outrage.”

To call this “snark is actually good” interpretation generous would be an understatement. Of course the snarky are dissatisfied and disillusioned—who isn’t? The mistake is to assume blogs are crying for change or proposing a solution. There is no admirable “call of frustrated outrage”; it is just shouting for the sake of getting clicks and raising their profile. It’s a cheap way to write without thinking while still sounding clever. The contention is ridiculous, that the real reason bloggers make fun of everything is because they hope it will change things.

Snark is intrinsically destructive. It breaks things; it does not build. No politician has ever responded to a joke about his inconsistent policy positions or demagoguery—and certainly not one about his weight or receding hairline—by saying, “You know what?
They’re right!
I’m going to be different now!”

If snark was really about change, then bloggers would need to actually believe in what they were saying beneath the humor. It wouldn’t change from day to day—we would expect to find consistency in their criticisms, like we do with brilliant satirists like Jon Stewart. But we don’t.

An example from my personal experience: After years of joking that Dov Charney was a rapist, a failed businessman, an idiot, a monster, a stock manipulator, and a million other things,
Gawker
nevertheless invited him and American Apparel to their first annual Fleshbot Awards to be given the honor of Sexiest Advertiser. Tucker Max, who
Gawker
had accused of equally defamatory things, was invited too. Why would they invite and reward the people they regularly mock so much? I think part of it is that
Gawker
believes we’re all so addicted to feeding the monster that we’ll endure any awkward indignity just to get a little more attention. Tucker told them to go fuck themselves, which made me proud.

I did attend to accept the award on Dov’s behalf (purely for reconnaissance purposes). I was shocked to find out how smart and friendly in person the bloggers who had said these horrible things were. Then it hit me: They hadn’t meant anything they wrote. It had all been a game. If Dov hadn’t been a convenient target, they’d have just said the same stuff about someone else.
Gawker
even e-mailed me afterward to ask if we’d sponsor next year’s show, as if to say, “We’re happy to pick on someone else if you’ll be our friend.”

WHAT’S THE POINT?

The argument breaks down anyway, even if it wasn’t hypocritical. The proper response to fakeness is not to ineffectually lob rocks at palace windows but to coherently and ceaselessly articulate the problems with the dominant institutions. To stand
for
and not simply
against
. But bloggers of this generation, of my generation, are not those types of people. They are not leaders. They lack the strength and energy to
do
anything about “the age of doublespeak and idiocy.” All that is left is derision.

Snark offers an outlet for their frustration. Instead of channeling their energy toward productive means, snark dissipates it by throwing itself against anything powerful or successful. If you are big enough to absorb the blows, they think, you deserve them.

For the outsiders without access, snark is their only refuge. And bloggers are outsiders by choice. (Part of
Deadspin
’s tagline is actually, “Sports News without Access….”) They can only mock, scorn, lie, and disrupt. They cannot serve their readers, expose corruption, or support causes. Bloggers are disaffected and angry, and their medium enables it.

As an astute college journalist at Columbia University, who saw through the faux bravery of blogging and the supposed boldness and social value in jabbing from the sidelines, observed:

Snark is not the response of “the masses” to the inane doublespeak of politicians. It’s a defense mechanism for writers who, having nothing to say, are absolutely terrified of being criticized or derided. Snarky writing reflects a primal fear—the fear of being laughed at. Snarky writers don’t want to be mocked, so they strike first by mocking everyone in sight.
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