Dirty Laundry
“The internet is the best place for someone to stick one’s foot in his or hers mouth.” — me
“Never post anything you wouldn’t be okay with seeing on the front page of your favorite online news site.” — also me
The internet is, for better or for worse, the place where secrets go so that they never die and words are said in such a way that you can never, ever, ever take them back.
The internet is a thing of beauty. It’s pretty much a living, ever-evolving hybrid of chaos and brilliance shot directly into most humans of the developed world.
The internet is one of the best things ever created, but it comes saddled with the baggage of all the humanity’s ugliness that seems to thrive in it like fungus in a damp, dark place.
And recently, we’ve been airing a serious amount of dirty laundry by way of the internet.
When reddit imploded earlier this year I watched with equal parts horror, fascination, and giddy glee. I watched the power of internet communities come together and do a lot of good and a lot of bad. We saw people who are in positions of extreme power at reddit (in this example, the co-founder) say really stupid stuff in an offhanded and flippant way without realizing the ramifications of their thoughtless and callous comment. This was despite the fact said person created the website and thusly should probably understand how that site’s community would react to his words and the sentiment behind them. (It took a long time for the appended edit to appear below the original comment — too long to really matter, in my opinion.)
While reddit burned and the internet watched, cheered, and essentially rioted (as much as one can riot in a non-physical space) I contemplated writing about the drama and refrained because, well, everyone had already written every side of the issue and what would my voice add to the situation? Reddit’s meltdown was a very public airing of dirty laundry. Reddit is, by its very nature, a very public and realtime forum for these kinds of situations to play out, particularly when they involve public-facing individuals from reddit itself. Coupled with the fact that the players involved are young and have grown up in this culture that the internet has fostered makes the reddit fiasco a perfect example of internet dirty laundry.
Should it have been so public, volatile, and soap opera like? No, probably not. Would that have been easily avoidable, knowing all the players and personalities and the technology and culture they lived day in and day out? Also probably not.
And then, there was Amazon and the New York Times.
Long form investigative pieces that uncover ugliness about a person or company aren’t new or novel. The New York Times piece on the brutality of Amazon’s workplace and culture was enlightening, intense, and worthy of the emotions it evoked (and those can vary wildly depending on who you are and what your stance is on business, journalism, and perhaps life in general) It definitely was not a revolutionary event that had never happened before. A large, powerful, and generally well-respected company got a serious black eye from that article. It happens. Words were said, thought pieces written by all sides, and the world moved on.
August turns into September which turns into October…
…And then the real dirty laundry came out.
In a move that still befuddles me, the Senior VP of Global Corporate Affairs at Amazon (Jay Carney, also a former White House Press Secretary and reporter) used Medium to fire perhaps the most belated retort in the history of internet fights. I could go on at length about how disgusted I am by the tone and content of this article, and how such a high ranking professional would stoop to these levels and air such personal data about current and former employees, but you’ve probably heard all that before. It’s already a well-worn path.
So instead, I’ll focus on how late this rebuttal was delivered. In the age of the internet, the focus and ire of the masses moves on in a couple weeks at most. Yes, of course there are far-reaching and long-lasting ramifications of an article such as the one the New York Times published and of course a company like Amazon will have to spend months, maybe years, cleaning up their image after such a blow.
But that’s not what this Medium article was about. It wasn’t targeted at the people who will care about image and integrity in a way that warrants a reply article three months after the fact. This was a potshot taken at an attacker, just like we normal folk do to each other when we get in online fights. Instead of two friends fighting on Facebook or two gamers sparring on a forum, an Amazon head decided to stoop to the level of internet arguments with the Executive Editor of the New York Times.
I will give Jay Carney some credit: he picked Medium, which means he understands something about where new media is trending and at least had an inkling of the power of Medium’s platform. But that might have been largely dumb luck, because he also turned off the ability to read replies to his article, a move that I think outweighs any of his other genius. By doing this, he in essence said “I will use this platform meant for meaningful thought and discussion, but I only want it to be my voice and I don’t want to use the community aspects built into the fiber of this platform’s being.”
It was a move that made him appear fearful of the responses he’d receive. It was a move that made him appear arrogant because he used a platform built for people to speak intelligently to authors and about authors’ writing. It made him appear ignorant because he wrote a piece and published it in a place with the internet of getting his message out to the internet masses that feed on this kind of dirty laundry but he cut off the most powerful tools to mobilize that base.
By comparison, the New York Times reponse, also on Medium, looks nothing short of brilliant. Not only did a company that is a publishing entity in its own right decide to respond to Jay Carney within Medium, but they also used the proper tools within the platform and kept open the option for the Medium community to reply to them and even recommended some of those best replies. The New York Times is a dinosaur in the publishing industry: a powerful and well-respected dinosaur, yes, but every time I go to an article online and see that damned “this is 3 out of 10 free articles you can read this month” prompt I curse under my breath that they are a dying breed and need to get with the program. And yet, they won this war swiftly and elegantly by replying quickly, using the platform’s tools to get the most bang for their message’s buck, and showed respect and knowledge not just for Medium but for Medium’s community for whom the article was created.
I’m a big believer in making the internet a better place in general. I really don’t like internet mobs and I also am not a fan of dirty laundry. I try not to watch these dramas play out for entertainment: it makes me feel like I’m driving by a terrible car wreck, craning my neck out the window to see the gore.
But when people take their dirty laundry to the court of public internet opinion, I’m damned well going to hold them accountable for what they say and how they say it. Jay Carney, you decided to stir up this shitstorm again so that the internet masses could judge the New York Times for the crimes they had committed. In doing this, you opened yourself up to the same scrutiny you want to bring upon your foe: what you say and how you say it can and will be used against you in this court of public opinion — and this court has no rules and we do not pull our punches.
I never thought I’d say this, but Jay, maybe you should take a cue from the co-founder of reddit, find some humility, and edit your replies once you figure out the err of your ways.
Take your time. That seems like your style.
We’ll be here if you decide to come back for round three.
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