Gawker careers
A few years ago, he says, he had reason to believe someone was about to publish private “sex pictures” stolen from his phone. One thing that separates Denton from earlier gossip barons is his willingness to turn his principles on himself. The internet is a secret-spilling machine, and the spilling of secrets has been very healthy for a lot of people’s lives. And if those things are leaked or deliberately shared, I think the effect is to change the institutions rather than to damage the individuals. There are stupid pictures or sex pictures of pretty much everybody. What actually happened was that institutions and organizations changed, and frankly any organization that didn’t change was going to handicap itself because everyone, every normal person, gets drunk in college. There was actually a discussion about whether a whole generation of kids had damaged their career prospects because they put up too much information about themselves in social media. Five years ago it was embarrassing when somebody had photographs of somebody drunk as a student. I think Facebook, more than anything else, and the internet have been responsible for a large part of the liberalization of the past five or 10 years when it comes to sex, when it comes to drinking. You’re going to be bombarded with news you wouldn’t necessarily have consumed - information, humanity, texture.