Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday

Author:Ryan Holiday
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-02-27T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

The Ties That Bind

Most conspiracies are not found out. They are betrayed. Or they collapse from within, a betrayal of the cause itself.

In ancient Rome, slaves who revealed conspiracies were often given their freedom in exchange. The conspiracy against Nero collapsed when a plotter named Scaevinus asked his servant to sharpen his dagger and hosted a generous dinner where he gave away most of his fortune. The servant took news of this strange behavior to the emperor. An insider to the Gunpowder Plot to assassinate King James I would write an anonymous letter that exposed Guy Fawkes’s involvement in 1605 and earned Fawkes a one-way trip to the gallows. François Picaud, the man who inspired the story that became The Count of Monte Cristo, found his revenge plot partly thwarted when he was betrayed by a collaborator who attempted to blackmail him. In the end, this blackmailer murders Picaud himself and relays the whole story on his own deathbed a few decades later, turning the most famous revenge plot in the history of literature into a meta-warning to every would-be conspirator today: beware your allies.

The secrecy of a conspiracy and its execution, then, is not purely a matter of planning and discipline, but also a matter of the bonds that bind the conspirators together. Once you get everyone on the bus, how do you keep them onboard? How do you reward them for loyalty? How do you get the best out of them? How do you trust them, knowing as you do the lengths to which they’re willing to go and secrets they’re willing to keep?

Terry Bollea had been an eager recruit in 2012 because he had no other options. He was desperate. He wanted to get a tape off the internet. Thiel wanted to destroy Gawker. These goals overlap, but only insofar as Peter’s target is one of the parties responsible for the Bollea tape’s being on the internet. By 2015, it turns out, Hogan is getting tired. Gawker’s legal strategy of attrition—delay at every step, challenge at every issue, appeal at every defeat—is nearly, clearly, barely, almost working. Because Thiel is tired, too. So is Mr. A. Harder isn’t tired, but he’s a lawyer, and their game is played by the hour. How are these men going to fight through the exhaustion that comes with attrition?

The line attributed to the management guru Peter Drucker is that culture eats strategy. It’s a truism that applies as much to conspiracies as it does to businesses. It doesn’t matter how great your plan is, it doesn’t matter who your people are, if what binds them all together is weak or toxic, so, too, will be the outcome—if you even get that far. But if the ties that bind you together are strong, if you have a sense of purpose and mission, you can withstand great trials.

Gawker once had a strong mission, an animating force that brought everyone together in a similar fashion and moved them forward. It was them against the world.

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