Book

Conspiracy

: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue

A stunning story about how power works in the modern age--the book the New York Times called "one helluva page-turner" and The Sunday Times of London celebrated as "riveting...an astonishing modern media conspiracy that is a fantastic read." Pick up th

(22 total)

Characters

Ryan Holiday (15)Peter Thiel (4)Nick Denton (1)Peter Theil (1)AJ Daulerio (1)

“At some point the word ‘strategy’ becomes a euphemism for procrastination.”

— Peter Theil, amazon.com

Tagged: strategy, Gawker, Media

“Discretion is the responsibility of freedom.”

— Ryan Holiday, amazon.com

Tagged: Freedom, trolling, Social Media

“Loss inherently makes the loser sympathetic. We can easily be made to feel bad for the person on the other side of a true catastrophe, even if just minutes before we thought they had it coming to them.”

— Ryan Holiday,

Tagged: Human Nature, Looking at Loss, vulnerability, Pity

“To try to break a man is one thing, to see him broken before you is another.”

— Ryan Holiday, amazon.com

Tagged: Doing Harm, Fighting, Knocking Someone Out

“When everyone tells you you’re wrong and you turn out to be right, you learn a dangerous lesson: Never listen to warnings.”

— Ryan Holiday, amazon.com

Tagged: Contrarian, thinking differently, Ego Boosters

“The alt-right leaders are the most like Gawker.”

— Peter Thiel, amazon.com

Tagged: Gawker Media, Alt-Right

“I came to believe that the nastiness of the internet was not a function of a technology or various things that have gone wrong, but the function of one particularly nasty media company led by a particularly sociopathic individual and that if I defeated Gawker, it would actually change the media land…”

— Peter Thiel, amazon.com

Tagged: Gawker Media, Technological Problem vs. Human Agency Problem, Media Cliff Notes

“We live in a world where people don’t think conspiracies are possible. We tend to denounce ‘conspiracy theories’ because we are skeptical of privileged claims to knowledge and of strong claims of human agency. Many people think they are not possible, that they can’t be pulled off.”

— Peter Thiel, amazon.com

Tagged: In Defense of Individual Autonomy, Singular Agency, Conspiraces, Quote of the Moment

“I felt like I was in a Black Mirror episode, trapped in my own Gawker story and I can’t say anything.”

— AJ Daulerio, amazon.com

Tagged: Gawker, Black Mirror

“But a trial is not about a judge— who is an arbiter in matters of law. It’s about a jury— who are arbiters in matters of fact, but make decisions, like all human beings, based on emotion.”

— Ryan Holiday, amazon.com

Tagged: Law, The justice system, Reason, Emotion vs. reason, Decisions

“It would be like the scene in Sweet Smell of Success where the baby-faced challenger stands up to the terrible and powerful gossip columnist who treats people like playthings: “The terrible thing about people like you is that decent people have to become so much like you in order to stop you— in ord…”

— Ryan Holiday, amazon.com

Tagged: Good Vs Evil, Why people are such dicks

“When someone categorizes something evil, as Sherman did, as Peter and Mr. A repeatedly did, he implicitly gives himself permission to do what needs to be done to destroy it.”

— Ryan Holiday, amazon.com

Tagged: Ethics, Morality, Evil, Justice, Redemption vs Revenge

“The job of a journalist would be unbearable if one was always to put oneself in the shoes of a subject.”

— Nick Denton, amazon.com

Tagged: Gawker, News, Media

“By 1939, Franz Halder, a German general, had taken to carrying a pistol so that when he was in the room with Hitler, he might assassinate him. But he could never pull the trigger. He could not reconcile how he could take up as “human being and a Christian to shoot down an unarmed man.””

— Ryan Holiday, amazon.com

Tagged: Hitler, Ethics, Morality, Utilitarianism

“They find that Gawker’s female writers relished going after people, too, particularly other women: “Christina Hendricks Says These Giant Naked Boobs Aren’t Hers, But Everything Else Is”: 280,000 page views. “Olivia Munn’s Super Dirty Alleged Naked Pics:”: 680,000 page views. They discover that Gawke…”

— Ryan Holiday, amazon.com

Tagged: Gawker, Media, Jezebel

“It was founded, remember, by paying writers for each morsel they dropped into it, not how nutritious each morsel was.”

— Ryan Holiday, amazon.com

Tagged: Gawker, Media, News

“I came to believe that the nastiness of the internet was not a function of a technology or various things that have gone wrong, but the function of one particularly nasty media company led by a particularly sociopathic individual and that if I defeated Gawker, it would actually change the media land…”

— Peter Thiel, amazon.com

Tagged: Gawker, Media, Technology, The internet

“If the continued effect of Valleywag is that it makes Silicon Valley 1 percent less ambitious, what is that cost?”

— Ryan Holiday, amazon.com

Tagged: Gawker, Media, Valleywag

“What he knew was that most people did not have the stomach— or the cash— to actually take it very far against a media outlet. He felt protected by the moat explained in the old twentieth-century proverb: Never fight a battle against someone who buys ink by the barrel. It’s easier to just let the who…”

— Ryan Holiday, amazon.com

Tagged: Gawker, Media

“Gawker’s first editor, Elizabeth Spiers, was paid $ 2,000 per month for twelve posts a day, seven days a week.”

— Ryan Holiday, amazon.com

Tagged: Money, Gawker, Writers and money