Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator Paperback – July 2, 2013

Ryan Holiday is truly the Machiavelli of the digital age. He is the man who is responsible for building up and tearing down some of today's biggest and most controversial brands. More specifically, this is the guy responsible for the risqué ads at American Apparel and all of the media drama/scandal that surrounds that company. He is a master at creating the type of controversy that leads to headlines which leads to money. Lots of money.

Trust Me I'm Lying is without a doubt my favorite nonfiction book of the year. It is extremely well written, packaged, researched, thought out and guaranteed to be incredibly controversial. In the book Holiday explains the media cycle in depth and, more importantly, how to hijack the system to drive clicks, page views and purchases to your site. The book is filled with case studies and examples of not only his PR/Marketing stunts but the nefarious exploits of some of the other "heavy hitters" in this "media underground".

Some of my favorite quotes

* "Michael Arrington, the loudmouth founder and former editor in chief of TechCrunch, is famous for investing in the start-ups that his blogs would then cover.... In other words, even when he is not a direct investor he has connections or interests in dozens of companies on his beat, and his insider knowledge helps turn profits for the firm" pg. 38

* "If you invest in a blogger, you can buy your influence very cheaply" - pg. 46

* "Once during a lawsuit I needed to get some information into the public discussion of it, so I dashed off a fake internal memo, printed it out, scanned it, and sent the file to a bunch of blogs as if I were an employee leaking a "memo we'd gotten from our boss" - pg. 51

* "Our knowledge and understanding is the final empty, hollow shell. What we think we know turns out to be based on nothing, or worse than nothing - misdirection and embellishment. Our facts aren't facts, they are emotions that feel like opinions. Our information isn't information; it's just hastily assembled symbols" - pg. 228

Highly Recommended!!

Since 2008 you've probably gathered that Wall Street and the entire economic system that props it up is horribly corrupt and broken, in "Trust Me, I'm Lying" Ryan Holiday follows in the footsteps of Lewis and Perkins, painstakingly and yet engagingly laying bare a systemic case of dangerous and soulless hypocrisy. In Holiday's case it's the deception and immorality that's fueled the rise of Huff-Po, Gawker, and every other website that's cashed in on the rise of the Cthulhuian blogosphere. It does for the new era of social media and internet marketing what "Liar's Poker" did for the rise of Wall Street back in the 1980s, and "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" did for American foreign policy a decade later. And not only is it just as readable and impossible to put down as those largely autobiographical premiere books, but it may run the risk of serving as a siren-song instead of heeded as a warning in just the same way - at least if you put any credence into the initial reviews the book is getting.

Although to a much greater extent than Lewis, Holiday falls more in line with Perkins and goes out of his way to decry his old way of life and attempts to implode the whole rotten house of crap-stained cards in on itself before it impacts the discourse of the mainstream media anymore than it already has.

On Wall Street it was the trade of empty derivatives, bets about the results of other bets, none of which were rooted in the actual production of capital. Bernie Madoff may be the most recognizable name associated with Ponzi schemes, but in a sense just about everyone working in the financial trade of derivatives, CDOs, and default swaps was pushing their own version of Ponzi marketing. And so it goes on the web, as online "each blog is its own mini-Ponzi scheme, for which traffic growth is more important than solid financials, brand recognition more important than trust, and scale more important than business sense. Blogs are built so someone else will want it - one stupid buyer cashing out the previous ones - and millions of dollars are exchanged for essentially worthless assets."

And in the same way that Wall Street's malfeasance cost people their homes and their livelihoods, the intentional manipulation of mass market blogs has driven companies to ruin, lead to deadly riots abroad, and helped march America off to war with Iraq. In both cases, there's much more at stake than simply doing the Right Thing. As you read, it's hard not to imagine the startled and shameful look on a cannibalistic serial killer's face after you stumble onto him tearing into a pile of dead babies, limbs and viscera spread across the table - I never meant for it to get this far, Oh God what have I done?

At times Holiday's logic is a touch circuitous, not too long after boasting about artificially rallying negative media coverage for Tucker Max's failed movie, he notes that making viewers feel uncomfortable is not solid marketing, that "unsettling images are not conducive to sharing" and asks "why would anyone - bloggers or readers - want to pass along bad feelings?" And although he carefully lays out how he "leaked" fake American Apparel ads in an effort to cheaply drive sales, he later laments that they were later used by blogs to case the company in a negative light - despite later observing that in the blogosphere the line between real and unreal is continuously blurred into oblivion. But these small slips don't detract from his arguments, if anything they bolster them - Holiday was submerged so deep into the cesspool for so long that he doesn't seem to have been able to shake off its last remaining tendrils just yet.

Holiday's utterly compelling book uses a mix of anecdote, history, and philosophy to peel back the veneer of legitimacy that mass market blogs swath themselves in. Their cloak of "iterative journalism" which supposedly breaks and refines news faster and better than traditional journalism is shown to be nothing more than a Vegas pastie, meant only to help turn a cheap buck and having nothing to do with decency or service.

"Trust Me, I'm Lying" is an immensely entertaining and informative read, Holiday's brutal honesty and impressive intellect combine into a thrilling and startling confessional that you won't be able to put down. Not, at least, until that blog page you have open right now refreshes itself with an EXCLUSIVE story about Kim Kardashian smuggling Suri Cruise out of the country by clenching the little tyke firmly between her butt-cheeks as she makes her way to the Paris premiere of "The Jersey Shore" movie.

(And to see what Holiday did to mass market blogs done to international terrorism, check out: Tremble the Devil: "the story of terrorism as Jesus Christ, James Bond, and Osama bin Ladin would tell it."