"Going Direct" — Notes on the ideology of authenticity, part 1

Bypassing journalism and killing PR, from "op-ads" to podcasts

“You are so much more than the media now” — Elon Musk

The currently ongoing techno-Faustian revamp of the US government is at least in part a result of the success of an audacious communications strategy. Defined by Lulu Cheng Meservey (founder of ROSTRA, formerly at Activision and Substack), going direct by bypassing traditional media and corporate PR approaches is the technique of the moment, peaking with Elon Musk's transmutation of Twitter into "X" and the rise of direct communications and founder-led media such as the All-In Podcast and Pirate Wires.

“Going direct to the people who matter is how founders retain control over their narratives and preserve their companies’ uniqueness”, Meservey wrote in her manifesto on the topic. “Those who are stubborn, unorthodox, and disagreeable should never have their edges filed down for fear of offending entrenched interests”. “Go direct” — or, as the defeated Kamala Harris now must be preparing to do — “go home”.

“Creative Confrontation”

Although it has been accelerated by the invention of social media — which allows founders to completely bypass traditional channels — and has been grotesquely misportrayed by many political and media writers in the reaction to Donald Trump’s re-election as just a matter of a move towards “young male” podcasts or so-called “alt media”, "going direct" as a matter of corporate communications strategy has a series of relevant antecedents dating back to the 1970s, at a time when American businesses and institutions found themselves opposed by activist social movements as well as a suspicious general public amidst inflation and unpopular overseas wars.

On September 21, 1970 the New York Times debuted its op-ed page, with the stated aim of introducing a greater diversity of viewpoints. In reality, is best understood as a similar move to the more recent combination of various Substacks into dedicated professional websites (such as Pirate Wires or The Free Press), or in an even stronger parallel, the move of the most successful bloggers of the 2000s into the established media as columnists. At the height of the Vietnam War, the Times, and by extension the American Establishment it represented, had become subject of distrust and anger among both left-wing anti-war activists, and — as the opinions of the centrist "Wise Men" gradually turned against the conflict — the ultra-hawks of the radical right. The creation of a guest house for dissenters — many of the early op-ed contributors were politically at the fringes of the Overton Window — was as much a classic act of recuperation as it was an antinomian flex from the Times, as the domestic embers of the Vietnam clash died out and leading war opponents were re-incorporated into the system.

However, in the eyes of many Americans, the conflict had left the reputation of institutions, in particular businesses, in tatters. This was soon to be made much worse with consecutive oil crises and resulting skyrocketing inflation through the end of the 1970s.

With people lining up at gas stations in countries across the First World (the "three worlds" were never more real as a concept than at this precise moment), the oil companies became a target of paranoia and conspiracy theories. They were accused of everything ranging from deliberately inventing the oil crisis in order to make money to large-scale bribery and control of elected political officials and even intelligence agencies.

In this environment, the job of Herbert Schmertz — corporate vice-president for Mobil Oil in command of public affairs — was not an easy one.

But Schmertz was a clever and canny executive. He theorised that appealing to the public directly would cut through suspicion and address public criticism of his company head-on. Under his tenure, Mobil began running “op-ads” — paid advertisements by the corporation designed to look like editorials — in the New York Times’s new section. The op-ads took a highly aggressive and strongly-argued style, addressing high-profile issues directly as opposed to the traditional corporate strategy of avoiding controversy and dispelling as much as possible the notion a company and its people had positions or opinions.

Above- Mobil’s first “op-ad”, in the October 19, 1970 issue of The New York Times, positioned among the editorials

Schmertz explained his technique in a book titled "Good-bye to the Low Profile-The Art of Creative Confrontation" In its pages, Schmertz wrote that the press "has grown increasingly adversarial toward the people and institutions it covers. As a result, business and other institutional executives have two choices: they can allow the press to do whatever it wants, or they can confront the press when confrontation is necessary".

"Reporters are not surrogates of the public", Schmertz argued, adding that they were demographic and ideological outliers from the American mainstream, disproportionately educated, irreligious, and Democratic. Add to this a business model based on targeting a professional class audience and the media could not but be woefully out of touch. (Schmertz went so far as to suggest media leaned in to coverage of then-controversial social issues such as sex education so more conservative low-income readers would unsubscribe, and this would boost a magazine's demographic profile for advertisers).

Schmertz concluded that this meant media was just a business, and its self-appointed mission as a protector of the public was unwarranted. He also wrote that the media’s background meant journalists have little understanding of business and are biased towards negative stories and social crusades.

Instead of sticking to a cautious, curated, and risk-reducing reactive approach, Schmertz advocated corporate executives should put their case unapologetically before the public and call out purportedly inaccurate coverage and alleged hit pieces. "You actually have as much power as the reporter" he argued. By going direct to the public with so-called op-ads and other methods, business leaders could “speak our mind to opinion leaders” and the quizzical public alike reading the Times. He added that this improved company recruiting of the most talented people and increased morale. Mobil did not stick only to arguing for its own position as a corporation but also addressed public policy issues Schmertz argued were a threat to the U.S. capitalist system.

Accompanying the hardball approach in “op-ads” and direct appeals, Schmertz also became known for heavily bankrolling U.S. public television in a more highbrow and subtle pitch to paint the oil company as a patron of the arts.

Schmertz’s sponsorship of shows such as PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre saw the channel tarred as “the Petroleum Broadcasting Network” by viewers and critics concerned by the idea of an oil company exploiting goodwill towards public media to artwash its reputation. Hans Haacke, a totemic figure in the Institutional Critique art movement, produced a series titled “Upstairs at Mobile - Musings of a Shareholder, 1982”, detailing the company’s dual strategies of going direct while also continuing to launder its reputation by appealing to the prestige of some institutions. “It was Herb who made Mobil a columnist of the New York Times”, the works read. “Mobil’s public relations people make a killing through the support of the arts”.

“If you can find a better car, buy it” - Lee Iacocca and Chrysler’s TV Crusade

It was Lee Iacocca, CEO of Chrysler from 1979 to 1992, who truly pioneered the idea of a celebrity CEO in the eyes of the American public, and took the concept of “going direct” to the medium of television. Even more than Jack Welch - who became a star thorough stock price mania and extensive cheerleading reporting of his transformation of GE - Iacocca appealed not to reporters in newspapers or broadcast media but to the public, making himself the centre of perception of the corporation by appearing in TV ads hawking (less than mediocre at best) Chrysler products.

This bold and confrontational style often showcased Iacocca attacking the media for supposedly biased coverage of U.S. industry in general and Chrysler in particular. It was considered a tightrope strategy, especially because the company had only recently been bailed out by taxpayers — in retrospect, not for the last time.

Like Schmertz, Iacocca did not stick only to arguing on behalf of his company and its products, but sought to influence government. Among Iacocca’s most frequent targets was U.S. trade policy, which he argued allowed the country to be taken advantage of by the currency-manipulating, allegedly unscrupulous Japanese bogeyman.

Iacocca’s constant TV appearances, along with leading to a revival of sales and profits at Chrysler, led to him becoming an icon of the 1980s, and his autobiography became a best-seller. The book was co-written alongside William Novak, also co-author of Schmertz’s “Art of Creative Confrontation”.

In a chapter titled “Making America Great Again”, Iacocca wrote “I get a lot of mail about running for President. It's made me aware that there's a real vacuum out there. People are hungry for somebody to tell them the truth — that America isn't bad, it's great — or at least that it can be made great again if we just get back on track”. Iacocca was indeed considered a possible candidate in the 1988 presidential election.

Bob Lutz, executive vice president of Chrysler under Iacocca, remarked in a 2018 article in The Wall Street Journal that his former boss often sounded like Donald Trump. The two TV businessmen had a relationship marked by mutual admiration. “Many of his actions reflect what Iacocca would have done,” Lutz said.

The publicity-obsessed Trump — who in the 1980s, like Schmertz, took out ads in major newspapers calling for various political decisions — learned from Iacocca that a businessperson could get on television and gain the country’s attention as someone to be taken seriously by making remarks about trade protectionism and American greatnesses. To this day, these egoistical short-cuts to publicity became his strongest-held views, even as he has flip-flopped or deviated on almost all others, so much so that rhetoric attacking Japanese automakers specifically has continued to be part of his rhetoric decades after Japan-bashing went out of fashion.

Lutz himself took “going direct” into the digital age with the GM Fastlane blog in the 2000s, after he became a vice-chairman at that company. The blog, which Lutz personally wrote for, had a comments section where even vitriolic and angry commentary about GM was allowed to stand and some of which Lutz attempted to respond to in regular posts. His stated reason for doing so was, once again, supposed media inaccuracy and bias in covering the company, which he argued unfairly coloured consumer perceptions.

Elon Musk and the All-In Podcast

Unlike other social media executives, Elon Musk – who at Tesla from the beginning has never engaged in traditional marketing – has not styled himself as an impartial, Olympian overlord, but as an active presence and personality. Even before he became the owner of Twitter, he engaged in constant dialogue with the users of the website, in a demotic and personal manner even to seemingly dubious, random, and low-ranking users. This has led many users to mention @elonmusk in their tweets, as though attempting to attract his attention. He has also personally acted as an MC for everything from certain Twitter spaces to polls on key site decisions. His companies have replied to traditional media requests for comment, in some cases, with vulgar emojis. Under his tenure, billionaire allies such as David Sacks and Bill Ackman have either continued or begun similar posting habits.

They have also been leading figures in the rise of founder-led media. The lack of major and regular coverage among traditional business publications such as the Financial Times, New York Times Dealbook, and Bloomberg of the popularity and reach of the All-In Podcast through 2021-2023 and even much of 2024 remains startling. The podcast featuring four venture capitalists has been the engine room of Silicon Valley discourse, tracking the arc of a “vibe shift” throughout key moments of the Clubhouse-era ZIRP meme stock craze, the fall of Silicon Valley Bank, the leadership turmoil at OpenAI, and the rise in support for Donald Trump and the GOP among sections of the tech community. A listener to the podcast would have been aware long ago of the changing views and debates being held among the tech elite, including frustrations with pandemic-era policies and institutional narratives that were often treated as unwise to cover by many in prestige media.

“Going Direct” As Ideology – Why it Works

Business leaders "going direct" dazzles or disarms a central weapon of theoretical critique, often from academia or critical journalism, of asserting an underlying class interest or covert agenda behind purportedly innocuous or independent news or entertainment. But exactly whose message is being delivered can hardly be said to be hidden when a venture capitalist is speaking directly to the camera and addressing an audience, even if ideological and possibly misleading concepts and paradigms are of course still are present in their language (one could think here of Musk hailing the "free market" and Milton Friedman while his companies are major beneficiaries of government contracts and corporate subsidies).

In an era where so much about the communications environment seems opaque and "behind the curtain" — with public understanding of the ever changing, ever-shifting algorithms and SEO logic based mostly on colloquial knowledge or rumours — a straightforward "appearance" of the technology leader projects the impression that all conflicts of interest and agendas are, at least on the surface, completely transparent. The four hosts of the All-In Podcast regularly mention if they have personally invested in or worked with a company they are discussing on screen. Of course, it could be argued that the general trajectory and framing of the discourse minimises these disclaimers and upholds an overall set of vested interests and beliefs, about, say the viability of technology hype cycles (naysayers have doubted the idea AI is significantly different than previous fads around the Metaverse and NFTs, although the sheer amount of physical capital investment in AI-related projects and attention from veteran policymakers like Larry Summers and the now-deceased Henry Kissinger suggest that this time there really is something serious at work).

"Going direct" on podcasts or on social media also creates a demotic impression, demonstrating for better or worse that the most skilled individuals in the world — as measured by the principles of the market economy and norms of U.S. executive compensation, at any rate — express themselves in a manner that is at times jarringly similar to the style of a normal American shitposter, with seemingly no greater level of discernment or culture. The lack of discipline in compulsive Twitter posting and especially the seemingly mindless recirculation of meme content from low-quality, inflammatory, and dubious sources by some extremely online founders has led prestige media¹ writers who themselves began their careers as bloggers such as Matt Yglesias to claim the likes of Bill Ackman have devolved into “brain-fried wingnut[s]”. This decidedly non-demure use of the vulgate of the posting masses – despite, or perhaps because, of the fact that it horrifies prestige media and institutional opinion – resonates among those who have built their entire lives around social media, lack in-person friends, see themselves as victims of “the system”, and others at this point who when combined consist of a vocal percentage of the overall public. It also leads to speculation as to how much of this “authenticity” is calculated (“did he really just tweet that himself?”).

A seemingly never-ending conga line of corporate and financial bailouts and more than 15 years of easy money policy only briefly halted have resulted in a level of inequality of status and wealth the majority of people are aware of and resigned to. In this environment, the pseudodemotic equality of a "monarch among his people" may give many people the nearest sense they have of peer egalitarianism with the leaders of the digital age, and the impression they can cut through layers of communicative bureaucracy to engage in discourse with the overlords themselves. The old peasant's myth of “bad boyars, good tsar,” (or “bad advisors, good emperor”) that the king is surrounded by corrupt and venal officials deceiving His Majesty, and that if only he could be met directly by a delegation of common people would he understand and set things right, has returned in what critics have described as a newly feudal or neo-plebeian economy (though the idea the world has actually entered into a phase distinct from capitalism post-1789 is questionable).

A much-ballyhooed promise of the digital age was the idea hierarchies of place, upbringing, and nation would be flattened by equal access to digital technologies and skills. The superstar effect of digital economy jobs has complicated this picture, but in a period where the operations of what is claimed to be a meritocracy appear rigged in favour of incumbents via nepotism, connections, and wealth, short-circuiting “the system” by directly catching the attention of an Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Garry Tan, Peter Thiel, or Tyler Cowen is a seductive and tantalising possibility, made legitimately plausible on the account such things do in some cases really happen. If, as the trope goes, we live in an attention economy, attention is not a fungible currency, and being noticed by some individuals matters more than the total sum of one’s mentions, follows, and notifications, even if the chance one is among the lucky and talented few of those “seen by power” still amounts to a lottery ticket.

“Experts” vs “expertise”

The “death of expertise” has been bemoaned by established institutions, writers, and publications, with populist rhetoric highlighting instances both devastatingly real and considerably exaggerated of elite failure, exemplified by government and health system blunders during the coronavirus pandemic.

Those that have chosen to go direct, nonetheless, have made the argument that their corporate business skills and necessarily requisite knowledge of abstract scientific, mathematical, market, and/or technical competence make them experts who should be listened to over and above the media or academics. Musk has written that Twitter users should trust those “actually on the scene and those who actually are subject-matter experts!”

This rhetoric and imagery has been present throughout the history of the technique. Iacocca’s Chrysler commercials depicted the company's serious, lab-coated manufacturing staff at work with Iacocca ending the commercial stating “if we don’t believe in our products, why should you?” In her manifesto on the topic, Meservey suggests that “the best spokesperson for any endeavor is not the one who has the most polish, the longest tenure, or the “right” credentials. It’s the person who holds the secret knowledge upon which the enterprise is built”.

It perhaps isn’t entirely surprising that founders of high-growth start-ups and giant tech firms have been able to lay claim to an almost occult know-how even as trust in political leaders and institutions has fallen because America’s leading industries are among the only things in the country that seem to work with any degree of efficiency. Even privacy scandals, best-selling books claiming social media ruins the mental health of kids, and the aforementioned conflicts of interest among venture capitalists when discussing topics like AI can be repurposed using the argument that, at the very least, no-one can accuse them of being ineffectual or unsophisticated. As publisher Doug Henwood recently wrote, “We should recall the words of dot.com-era star analyst Jack Grubman from 2000: “What used to be a conflict is now a synergy”. By appealing directly to the viewers arguing that they’ve seen how the game is played from within, founders and others that “go direct” align themselves with the structural and long-term tendency of visual media since 1990s, which has been fixated on the notion of "insiderness" or viewing the daily lives of celebrities behind the curtain. The equivalent of knowing the diet or beauty routine of a celebrity becomes knowing the corporate and technical playbooks of venture capitalists and technology bosses.

Thus, ultimately, at the ideological core of the “founder letting the masses behind the curtain”, is a digital-age gnosticism that asserts the supposed fundamental ignorance of independent media, academia, institutions, or civil society, and therefore, their base illegitimacy, or at best, obsolescence. Appeals by prestige media and to the concept of a stable and thus seemingly massaged and “official” reality in contrast to the “disinformation”, hoaxes, and lies on social media and podcasts has been unable to adequately address the attraction and methods of those who “go direct”; indeed, many of their efforts have backfired spectacularly. They will have to change their approach fundamentally to do so. Their failure to do so has resulted in significant challenges and threats to the institutions, habits, and ways of life underlying liberal pluralism, civil society, and Enlightenment values.

Traditional public relations and marketing not only have declined because of declining readership of traditional prestige media, but because a de-risked, conflict-avoiding, and highly-scripted presentation of everything from consumer products to political candidates and public service announcements appears more artificial than ever in a world where delineating between internet media technologies and "real life" makes advertising and PR seem even more artificial by comparison. Absurdly, there are still journalists, commentators, and academics who position “official” reality as seen on TV with “the digital world”, considered as a separate entity from “real life”, even as influencers “manifest” visions of the world to their followers be in tens or millions.

Shaping perceptions of the boundaries between the digital and the real are at the core of understanding and adequately critiquing “authenticity”, and will be discussed in a following post…..

1. I use the phrase “prestige media” instead of legacy media on the account I can’t possibly comprehend how traditional media crown jewels like the New York Times, TIME, CBS, etc could have ever allowed themselves to be branded “legacy” by newer rivals, and reified that description by repeating it themselves. Arguably this is in and of itself a measure of their declining influence among some sectors of the U.S. public.