“I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest. “It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence,” Thiel said in the interview. The newspaper said he was driven to mount a clandestine war against Gawker due to a 2007 article published by Gawker ’s Valleywag blog, headlined “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people” and articles about his friends that “ruined people’s lives for no reason.” Thiel confirmed this week in an interview with The New York Times that he had paid $10 million in legal expenses to finance several lawsuits brought by others, including the Hogan lawsuit, against Gawker Media. A Florida judge upheld the verdict on Wednesday. Hogan won a $140 million verdict in March in a defamation suit against Gawker Media after it posted parts of a sex tape showing Hogan with a friend’s wife. We call upon Peter Thiel to reveal all of the lawsuits he has funded.” “It is imperative that the public know the extent of his efforts to silence the press. It's not snark, after all, that is the problem so much as all the sound and fury signifying nothing, the tendency of the media to comment less on the world than on themselves.“We cannot let Peter Thiel heedlessly destroy one of the most original, intrepid digital media companies in modern journalism - regardless of whether or not we like everything that gets published there,” the guild said. More to the point, the problem with Snark is that Denby doesn't take it far enough. It's a stretch from "For the Snark was a Boojum, you see," the last line of Carroll's epic, to Denby's assertion that "he snark is the thing that makes you disappear" - a reference to both the fate of Carroll's snark hunters and the effects of modern snark. Which is, of course, exactly what Thiel intended. Still, even though all that suggests some sort of loose context, the book ultimately doesn't hang together, since Juvenal was less a writer of snark than of invective (related but not the same), while Carroll's poem was about a mythical beast that, despite Denby's best efforts to connect it, has nothing to do with attitude. That sounds like a nail in the coffin for the brand of hypocrisy-shaming dirt-dishing that Gawker and its defunct sibling Valleywag pioneered. To mitigate that, he tries to frame a capsule history of the subject, beginning with Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark - Carroll's subtitle was "An Agony, in Eight Fits" Denby constructs his book in seven "fits" - before moving on to touchstones as diverse as the Roman satirist Juvenal, Alexander Pope and Spy magazine. For one thing, he never fully defines his terms, using snark as a convenient catch-all for a media culture gone out of control. Yet if he means Snark as a corrective, it's a corrective that comes with problems of its own. This makes for a self-fulfilling prophecy, since anyone who offers a critique clearly doesn't get it, which renders the act of criticism moot.ĭenby, of course, is a prime target for such dismissal in his 60s, the longtime film critic at The New Yorker is likely to be written off in certain quarters by virtue of demographics alone. That's an excellent observation, evoking not only the contemptuousness of our culture, but also its justification, the illusion that it's all a big in-joke. The joke - attempted joke - disguises the bizarre rancor from both parties." Yet what is the source of this ridicule, and of the dissatisfaction that fuels it? For Denby, it's a function of "what might be called 'superfluous anger,' which presents itself to the snarker and his fans as entirely justified nastiness.
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