I just finished reading Eoin Higgins’ new book Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, and I cannot recommend it enough for anyone who wants to understand the New Right media landscape. The book tells two parallel stories: first, about the rise of our Silicon Valley oligarchs and their efforts to refashion the media in their image; and second, about the decline and fall of journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, two ostensibly left journalists who have today ended up as reliable voices for the right.
I have to admit that I hate reading (and writing) narrative-form book reviews, so I think we’ll all be a lot happier if I just post my notes instead.
1.
Whenever some political figure lurches to the right, the online left loves to play a game called Who Saw It Coming? The rules are simple: if you can demonstrate that you anticipated their turn to the right beforehand, you win. If you were provably naive about them — if you were caught associating with them, or even worse, defending them — you lose. I’ve always considered this a ridiculous and toxic game, first because it begins with the premise that people don’t change; and second, because it always suggests that some people have greater insight into the dark souls of future apostates than others, and that we all ought to defer to their premonitions.
Higgins thankfully avoids this game. Owned acknowledges that both Greenwald and Taibbi have always had certain conservative leanings, but it also — particularly in the case of Greenwald — talks about how their politics have changed over time. This is a crucial part of the story because it accounts for the way that various incentives in the media can warp our politics. The most accessible money in media (contrary to what Greenwald would have you believe) is on the right, and that tempts journalists to follow it. Meanwhile, social media platforms can impose feedback and accountability from the left on journalists with skins that are too thin to handle it — and that pushes them to the right, too.
In my view, both Taibbi and Greenwald had eras in their careers where the left could count them as allies. For Taibbi, it came during his ferocious (if somewhat superficial) reporting on finance; for Greenwald it came during the early Bernie era, neatly bookmarked between Bernie’s 2015 campaign launch and the first election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That those eras ended, particularly as they have, is a genuine tragedy.
2.
This is a book about personalities. It revolves around Greenwald and Taibbi, but also around Silicon Valley oligarchs like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen. Higgins walks us through limited biographies of their careers and persuasively shows us how their stories gave us the media we have today. Musk, we learn, is embarrassingly insecure and has been driven to his politics and media ventures through his social life as much as anything; Taibbi, who refuses comment throughout the book, comes off as a prickly careerist with few significant political commitments beyond a growing midlife conservative streak.
I would not call this a critique of Owned because the picture Higgins paints of his subjects is valuable and informative — but this approach also has a disadvantage. When one reads about Thiel’s rivalry with Gawker media, for example, and about how this evolved into a broader war on the media, one is tempted to conclude that perhaps if Peter Thiel were never born; or if he weren’t so intolerant of criticism; or if Valleywag hadn’t decided to publish the Hulk Hogan story that Thiel would use as a pretext to bring Gawker down — one is tempted to conclude that if any one of these things hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have the right-wing media complex that we have today.
This is just a disadvantage of personality-driven narratives in general: they aren’t structural. Owned is only an account of how capitalism gives us reactionary media in subtext and implication. In the final paragraphs Higgins talks more explicitly about how the problem of this book can only be solved by getting rid of the billionaire class, but for the most part this is a story about the specific threat of the PayPal Mafia. And this is an important story to tell — it just isn’t the whole story.
A structural account, I think, would go something like this. For centuries, the United States has relied on a legacy media that emerged from pre-capitalist norms about truth-telling and Enlightenment rationalism. Capitalism, however, has been giving us a world where all norms and values are giving way to the central imperative of profit for the ruling class. And in recent decades, it has given us a ruling class that is both technologically equipped and obscenely wealthy enough to overthrow the norms of journalism and the institutions built around them. Figures like Greenwald and Taibbi are just symptoms of this transition between the old world of journalistic integrity and the new world of ruling class stenography. If it weren’t them selling out, it would be someone else. Figures like Musk and Thiel are just expressions of the ascendant wealth and technological prowess of the bourgeoisie. If they weren’t waging war on behalf of their business interests against journalism, someone else would be.
Again, I do not consider this a criticism of Owned; Higgins is recounting history, not giving us a treatise on Marxist media theory. But I think the latter can provide some illuminating context to the former.
3.
There are parts of history that I wish Higgins had uncovered, though it is understandable why he did not. The great mystery of Owned has to do with Greenwald and Taibbi’s specific relationship to their patrons. Obviously there does not need to be any formal agreements or explicit understandings in place for these journalists to know what they should say and should not say. And yet the question remains: do these agreements exist? What, for example, were the specific terms of Taibbi’s arrangement with Musk when he was publishing the Twitter Files? Has Greenwald ever had any conversations with Thiel (or associates like Eric Weinstein, for example, who often seems to serve as an intermediary)?
My guess is that no formal agreements exist, but that there have probably been conversations that neither Greenwald nor Taibbi would want to see the light of day. But this is just a guess, and in any case such conversations aren’t necessary for all parties involved to develop an unspoken understanding about what is expected of who.
There are a few other specifics that I would still like to know about but that Owned was unable to provide. For example, Peter Thiel’s Rockbridge Network, which the New York Times reported is working to set up
a new conservative ecosystem by sponsoring several initiatives: public relations and messaging, a rapid response communications team for conservative activists and leaders, funding of polling, sponsorship of area-specific coverage and influencer programs, investigative journalism, documentaries and other projects for cultural influence and renewal.
What exactly have they been up to? I have some strong educated guesses, but as of now no journalists have made further headway on the project. Hopefully someone eventually will.
4.
One thing I really appreciated about this book is the rare perspective Higgins voices — which I essentially share — on Russiagate. He writes:
The central conceit of this Russiagate theory held that there was no way American voters would elect Donald Trump without nefarious, outside interference. It was a fundamental misunderstanding of US politics and history.
This point is crucial to understanding Russiagate’s primary function in our discourse, which was to deflect responsibility for the catastrophic failure of Hillary Clinton’s campaign away from her neoliberal platform. Which in turn undermined what should have been the central lesson of 2016: Bernie would have won. Blaming Russia for the Democrats’ loss allowed their voters to convince themselves that the party’s politics were still fundamentally sound, an assessment that would come back to haunt them at the end of 2024.
But the Russiagate controversy didn’t just radicalize liberals — it also radicalized some of their critics into the arms of reactionaries. One could watch this happening in realtime with Matt Taibbi. “By rejecting Russiagate,” Higgins writes, “Taibbi was accused by liberals of taking the side of Trump and the Kremlin.” But in response,
Taibbi turned to a new right-wing audience and became increasingly beholden to their priorities. They liked that he didn’t blame Russia…but this was not because they agreed with or particularly cared about Taibbi’s claim that Trump was elected without Russia’s help. Instead, they shared Vladimir Putin’s belief that Russia is the savior of white Christendom and that the revolutionary Russian Empire was superior to the USSR.
I don’t think this is quite right. Most Republicans do not, in my experience, have these Dugin-adjacent ideas about Russia as the savior of the Western world; this is the province of a sect of extremely online trads. What they do appreciate about Taibbi, however, is precisely that he gives Trump full credit for his win — and more importantly, that he owns the libs while doing it.
But what Higgins does get correct here is the way that Taibbi reacted to attacks by the libs by lurching to the right. This was absolutely not necessary — there are plenty of Russiagate critics who did not react by lurching right — but Matt’s skin was just too thin to take the heat. Alas, he isn’t the only such case.
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