The tech news cycle is a desperate bitch, as we’ve brought up before; A brief rundown of yesterday’s bitchmeme sparked by a mere tweet from my colleague MG Siegler once again proves how absurd it is.
“I used to love to plant one really weird bit of random information (sometimes even false) into stories to catch the rewrites,” MG wrote in response to developer Marco Arment’s concise analysis of the insatiable tech news beast.
As fast as a fractal, the tweet was quickly turned into a blog post, Betabeat’s Adrianne Jeffries asserted that MG “couldn’t be trusted,” based on his own admission that he couldn’t be trusted?! What’s shocking is that Jeffries didn’t think once about the Liar’s Paradox: What happens when a pathological liar tells you that they’re a pathological liar?
What’s weirder is that MG himself had broken this piece of “news” back in October, when Jeffries perhaps wasn’t online to jump on it. Well now, most likely because it’s summer, the same item of (true? false?) information sets off a media firestorm because people still working the holiday shift don’t have anything better to do. (Siegler is, poetically enough, on vacation.)
When Jeffries asked me yesterday via email whether or not this “random information” thing was still going on at TechCrunch, my response was, “I’m not sure if it was even happening then.”
“Did I actually plant fake information on TechCrunch or elsewhere to catch asshats in action?
Get ready for the real mindfuck: what if it was my tweet that was filled with false information in order to expose bullshit bloggers who have nothing better to do than write about nothing with absolutely no basis for doing so?” — MG Siegler