Economic Collapse

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Who’s Left to Embarrass Silicon Valley Now That Peter Thiel Has Killed Gawker?

By Will Oremus
Aug. 19 2016 5:45 AM

Thursday, the fallout from Peter Thiel’s vendetta against Gawker Media continued with the news that the company’s flagship blog, Gawker, will shut down, even as its other properties live on under new ownership. That sounds like a nail in the coffin for the brand of hypocrisy-shaming dirt-dishing that Gawker and its defunct sibling Valleywag pioneered. Which is, of course, exactly what Thiel intended.
In a New York Times op-ed earlier this week, the PayPal and Palantir co-founder argued that his backing of Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker wasn’t simply an act of revenge for a 2007 Valleywag post that outed him as gay. Rather, he argued, it was a defense of online privacy, and therefore no one need fear a broader chilling effect on America’s press freedom. “As for Gawker,” he added, “whatever good work it did will continue in the future, and suggesting otherwise would be an insult to its writers and to readers.” What exactly Thiel meant by that particular sentence is hard to parse. What good work does he think Gawker did? What made him think that good work would continue following the company’s bankruptcy? And exactly when did the man who crushed Gawker grow so concerned about people insulting it?


https://www.google.com/amp/amp.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/08/19/gawker_and_valleywag_are_dead_who_s_left_to_embarrass_silicon_valley.html?client=safari