The candid inside tale of two online media rivals Jonah Peretti of HuffPost and Buzzfeed and
Nick Denton of Gawker Media whose delirious pursuit of attention at scale in the first two
decades of the 21st century helped release the dark forces that would overtake the Internet and
American society... The curtain opens in Soho in the early 2000's in that brief moment after
the first dotcom crash and before Google Apple and Facebook exploded when it seemed that New
York City rather than Silicon Valley might become tech's center of gravity. There within a few
square blocks Nick Denton's merry band of nihilists at his growing Gawker empire and Jonah
Peretti's sunnier crew at HuffPost and Buzzfeed were building the foundations of click-bait
media. It was tech's age of innocence: the old establishment might have been discredited by the
Iraq War but digital news would facilitate the spread of truth. Progressive activists were
first to the scene and for a while it seemed they were the scene... Ben Smith who would go on
to earn a controversial reputation as Buzzfeed's editor-in-chief was either there or talked to
everyone who was and in his trademark fashion he chronicles it all with marvelous lucidity
scored with dark wit sparing no one--and certainly not himself... At the heart of Traffic is
one of the great ironies of our time: the Internet which was going to help the left remake the
world in its image has become the motive force of right populism. As Smith and his colleagues
and rivals thought they were inventing digital media other figures flickering around the
margins of their story had different designs. People like Steve Bannon and Andrew Breitbart
and Gavin McInnes and Chris Poole the creator of 4chan all seemed like minor characters in
the narrative in which Nick and Jonah and crew were the stars. By 2020 any reasonable observer
might wonder if the opposite wasn't the case--
