I Hate Journalism’s Culture Of Casual Calumny

Earlier this week, Taylor Lorenz sent out a newsletter accusing Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares of being “anti-AI grifters.” It neatly captures a style of journalism that drives me crazy.

Lorenz’s newsletter begins:

On Friday, there was a big event in L.A. for a widely-panned book supposedly critiquing the AI industry called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. I don’t cover the nuances of the AI industry much, but the PR person for the book invited me and I said ‘sure.’ I and a few other tech reporters RSVPd and received confirmation that we’d be attending. A few days later, however, the PR person called and said, actually, I was DISINVITED for being too critical of Silicon Valley. Apparently my reporting on tech billionaires had angered the organizers.

I thought this was pretty wild. I’m broadly critical of Silicon Valley, but I’m also very pro-technology, especially compared to others on the left. I believe in a better world through technology, just not technology controlled by the current class of Silicon Valley billionaires. I’ve never been disinvited from a book event for my tech criticism, and myself and a bunch of tech journalists laughed about it.

It was very silly for the organizers of this party to invite and then disinvite Lorenz; they’re basically asking for negative coverage, and Lorenz has every right to go public about this strange turn of events. What bothers me is the way Lorenz can’t just tell the story, but seems intent on inflicting maximum reputational damage on Yudkowsky, Soares, and other people in their orbit — she just takes every last possible swipe at this crew, many of them unfair. This is part of what I call the culture of casual calumny in journalism, and it really sucks.

The CCC is a style of journalism and punditry (these days, the two bleed into one another more often than not, including in this newsletter) that is very attack-dog, very fuck these guys, very quick to render judgment and to privilege accusation over levelheaded attempts at understanding and explanation. It could be seen as a natural outgrowth of what I call rightside journalism, or journalism geared more at demonstrating one’s ideological bona fides than getting at the truth or explaining the world. It’s natural, if you write from the stance of needing to demonstrate that you are