How We Got From Wall Street’s Big Swinging Dicks to Silicon Valley’s Big Swinging Brains
By: Andrew Marantz
Tags: Startups, Wall Street, Entrepreneur, Silicon Valley, Industry

Business was tech, and tech was media. Content was content was content, and coders controlled the sluices through which all content flowed. The Renaissance men of Silicon Valley — and they were, like the Big Swinging Dicks, almost exclusively men — didn’t hesitate to offer their bold opinions on almost every subject. And yet, when it came to basic questions about the future of media, their rhetoric turned fuzzy. Businesses should give customers what they want. Media companies should meet audiences where they are. Journalism should be objective and thorough. These truisms seemed unobjectionable enough until they came into conflict with one another, which happened all the time. What if your customers claimed to want rigorous, dispassionate journalism, but their browsing habits revealed that they actually wanted hot takes and salacious hate-reads? What if, in order to meet customers where they were, you had to bowdlerize your writing, or give up on writing altogether and pivot to video? What if quality and popularity were sometimes correlated negatively, or not at all?

In early 2016, I was invited to an off-the-record lunch discussion in an executive boardroom. At the head of the table, a Big Swinging Brain — one of the Biggest — talked for more than an hour without touching his sandwich. He dilated on a wide array of topics (state health care exchanges, the future of the trucking industry, the panic of 1873), displaying uncanny recall and mental acuity. He acknowledged dilemmas and contradictions in his thinking; he even pointed out awkward conflicts between what he found preferable economically and what might be preferable civically, even morally. I began to wonder whether I’d underestimated the Big Swinging Brains. Maybe I should learn to stop worrying and love my overlords.

Then I asked him a question about the importance of good journalism and good art, the corrosive effects of bad journalism and bad art, and the best way to prevent our online environments from growing ever more ruthlessly Darwinian. It seemed clear — not just to me, but to anyone who was paying attention — that things were drifting in an unnerving direction. How would humanity avoid a clickbait death spiral?

“I don’t think there’s an answer to that,” he said, his tone suddenly turning flinty. Apparently I had revealed myself to be a Luddite. “If I were in the media business, I would focus on making a product that people actually want. Because that’s how business works.”

I couldn’t imagine him being so flippantly fatalistic about any other civilizational hazard that the free market had failed to address. In their free time, he and the other luminaries of Silicon Valley were known for spending an unusual amount of time and money addressing thorny existential problems, such as the achievement gap in American public schools and the excess of carbon in the atmosphere. They even invested millions of dollars in problems that hadn’t come into existence yet, such as hostile A.I. One BSB-funded nonprofit would soon announce its intention to “help cure, prevent, and manage all disease”; several well-capitalized bioengineering startups, including a $1.5 billion initiative at Google, went even further, resolving to cure death.

But somehow the BSBs balked at the problem of addictive, low-quality clickbait. They had taken control of the media industry, then moved fast and broken it; now they claimed no responsibility for fixing it. When the prospect of a clickbait death spiral came up, they tended to affect an odd sanguinity. They didn’t quite deny the existence of the problem — they just did their best to ignore it, or to reframe it as either trivial or inevitable.

At our lunch, the Big Swinging Brain at the head of the table characterized my critique by way of a food analogy. “So you’re saying that people like milkshakes and onion rings, and you want them to eat kale,” he said. “Well, good luck with that.”

I found this strange, given that an ambitious initiative to prevent obesity — to alter various incentives, both governmental and nongovernmental, with the goal of helping people resist the natural self-destructive urge to binge on sugar and fat — seemed like precisely the sort of initiative that a civic-minded Silicon Valley philanthropist like himself might support, unless he happened to own stock in McDonald’s. (Later, through a spokesperson, I offered to let the BSB defend his arguments, either on or off the record, but he declined.)

Our conversation took place in the spring of 2016. Donald Trump, the consummate milkshake-and-onion-rings candidate, was the front-runner in every Republican poll.