Gabe of Penny Arcade summed up Ryan Holiday’s Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue as ‘what happens when bad meets evil.’ I was struck enough by that comparison to pick up the book — which, indeed, is about what’s in the title — and it is not dull reading. It’s also not completely comfortable reading, either. Back in the day, I never did anything remotely as awful as the stuff Gawker did, every day. But I watched them do it, didn’t I? And I never lost a night’s sleep over the things that they did.
Continue reading Book of the Week: Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue.Tag: hulk hogan
Gawker gets taken to the cleaners.
I’m weeping inside, I truly am: “Weighing free speech against privacy, a Florida jury has decided to uphold the sanctity of the latter by turning in a $115 million verdict against Gawker over its 2012 posting of a Hulk Hogan sex tape.” Not least because this entire episode was cheap, tawdry, reflected well on nobody, and was so easily preventable. I mean, I can absolutely understand why people might still argue that free speech could legitimately trump privacy, even under circumstances that were this unappealing. But as Dennis Miller once noted about 2 Live Crew and their lawsuit: they were objectively awful. Couldn’t we have gone to the wall for Layla or Purple Haze?
Quote of the Day, Never Forget This About Gawker edition.
Penny Arcade, on the Hulk Hogan / Gawker affair:
I don’t wish ill on anyone who works there, obviously. I mean, I guess their every action technically does sustain a legitimately evil beast of legend, some Revelations type shit, and they ruin lives for profit whenever they aren’t simply wasting your time. It’s like, oh, this other Gawker site does that. That’s not the site I read. Well, no, it’s all one site. It’s just the one site. Oh, but I only detest the mouth of the lion, where its fangs are kept; I do not detest the ear of the lion, nor its tail. But the ear is how he found your brother, and when he leapt on your sister, the tail kept him straight.
…That last bit is rather good, isn’t it? If Tycho came up with that, that’s some primo literary stuff, right there. I approve.