Weddings Used To Be Sacred And Other Lessons About Internet Journalism
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
First off, I am not at all impressed how Mr. Parker shifts the blame onto the property owners and others. I did see some of the inflammatory comments on early stories where people assumed it was public land. But even as private land, its use is still restricted by regulations because it is in the coastal zone. Just because it is private land doesn't mean owners and their renters can do anything they wan with it--thank goodness. California recognizes the fragility and ecological value of the coastal areas and regulates them. I don't care whether he knew about that or not, he, his hired staff, and the owners he worked with are all to blame for not knowing and following regulations.
He also tries to dodge blame for the campground issues and the owners' responsibility, then get sympathy for being strong-armed by the owners into paying up or getting cancelled. All I can say is that he could afford the lawyers, and if you want grandiose, you have to deal with ALL of the issues. His failure to do that does not garner my sympathy.
I would also take issue with "It was an homage to the natural environment," when he admitted the whole scenery and costumes were fake. In other words, it was quite literally the Hollywoodization of the natural environment, not an homage. What he fails to understand, ultimately, is that a an all-night costume party for 350+ people is not compatible with the natural environment--no matter how much he wants the reader to believe so or how much he has paid to make it so.
A lot of HN commenter also seem bowled over by all these words, and just because someone says they didn't harm the redwoods, they believe him.
I'm holding out for a scientific assessment of the situation. I do know redwoods (and sequoia) have shallow roots and can be harmed by trampling. So, were the root areas (usually within a 20-30 ft radius) of the trees properly protected during the decoration and the event?
One of the first stories I saw about this had pictures of the fake walls right up to a tree. So, in the opinion of an arborist specialized in these trees, is that damaging or not?
Same for the trout and other riparian species. Are they present or is this potential habitat? Did the setup or the event or the dissasembly impact the streams or drainages? One original article said they diverted streams; was that accurate or not? Mr. Parkers explanations about different kinds of trout and what's endangered or protected are not very clear--in fact they seem intentionally confusing. He does say that biologists inspected the streams and found no sedimentation. OK, what about immediately before the event (since decorations weren't finished until the last minute) and after the event, and again during the tear-down.
I'm totally willing to believe the environmental damage was minimal. The campground had been recently repaved and bulldozed in places. The set-up crew was at least aware of environmental concerns, regulatory agencies were keeping watch, etc. And yes the media reaction was totally overblown, but doesn't that go with the territory of being rich and somewhat famous, especially when pulling off high-profile events? But I'd still like to see the official report about the damage before believing this one-sided argument.
These are not mutually exclusive, you know.
In the words of Jeffrey Lebowski: "What are you, a fuckin' park ranger now?"
From TFA: "I strongly believe that redwood forest should be a protected ecosystem, but that is not true today."
So, even if he did damage these things on private land - he's not breaking any laws. Take it up with the legislature if you're so inclined.
Fact is, these roots go 5-6 feet deep and no amount of people walking on them is going to harm them, with the possible exception that if you scrape the surface of the root, you can get an infestation (disease or pests).
But when you go back and look at SP's article, the entire wedding was held on cleared (or paved) ground. No roots.
Game over. Insert quarter.
People don't like SP because he's rich. Fuck them.
If you've ever been up against the wall with one of these little fiefdoms of government, the ones with nearly unlimited resources, who perpetuate themselves with 'fines', you don't know the meaning of terror. (Unless you're in the military, or one of the relatively few terror incidents on US soil.)
As for Parker's absurdly long article, I dug into one of his more verifiable defenses and found that he's full of it:
"The media reported that this fish was an “endangered” species whose spawning ground was a creek near our wedding site. Yet a simple Google query of “steelhead trout” reveals that this fish is not, as the media had reported, a truly “endangered” species, but rather a fancy variant of the common “rainbow trout” that is abundant across North America — so abundant, in fact, that it is sometimes considered a pest species. "
Steelhead/Rainbow Trout is listed here on the NOAA website:
http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/species/fish/steelheadtrout.htm
This web page says that 1 "distinct population segment" is endangered, 10 are threatened, and 1 is a species of concern. And they kindly point to a report listing which is which:
http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/fr/fr71-834.pdf
Lo and behold, the Steelhead along the Northern and Central California coasts are on the "threatened" list. So the "pest" bit was just empty rhetoric.
I'm struck by this quote: Economically speaking, I profited handsomely from the destruction of the media as we knew it. The rest of the world did not make out so well, and society certainly got the worse end of the bargain. The decentralization of media got off to a promising start, but like so many other half-baked revolutions, it never fulfilled its early promise. In its present form, social media may be doing more harm than good.
I think this is rather true. Although there was stupid tabloid media long before social media came along, it's increasingly become the norm on the internet. I know a little of how he feels as I spent years trumpeting the idea f public comments on newspaper articles and so on....and now I use Stylebot to hide them from me, because 99% of what's written in news article comments is hideously stupid. Rather than elevating society, the internet and social media has basically digitized the mob and given everyone a megaphone.
Back in 1798, no less a person than George Washington was griping that the Democrats (under Thomas Jefferson - not to be confused with today's Democratic party) were a bunch of malcontents whose primary object was to overturn the government: http://www.pbs.org/georgewashington/collection/post_pres_179...
The first part of this statement is tricky to validate. "The media" constitutes a much broader set these days, with lower barriers to qualification as part of that set. When you say that the media made "just as many mistakes," I suspect you're really trying to say that they "were equally susceptible to mistakes" -- lending weight to the second part of your statement, i.e., that Old Media were less accountable for any mistakes they made, simply because the Old Media were a smaller and more exclusive club, exercising proportionally greater control over the message.
I don't think your first statement is easily supported, or even theoretically supportable. But the second statement is interesting, and is worthy of some serious, in-depth study. Basically: we've got more people running around calling themselves journalists these days, and we've got all sorts of platforms that give the voice of the mob a lot more firing power. Is this a net- good thing or a net- bad thing w/r/t accountability? What about quality? Crowdsourcing can cut both ways, for good (scale, scale, scale) and for bad (variance, mob mindset, etc.).
We're trading the tyranny of the minority for the tyranny of the majority, and which tyrant is actually worse? I suspect the answer isn't as obvious as it may appear.
''' The more we depend on social networks and other online services to share content with friends and family, the more we risk that our content inadvertently becomes public. The enforceability of intellectual property laws around user-generated content — our photos, videos, and other content — is one of the best protections we have. The media has, in many cases, chosen to broadly construe all content shared via these networks as “public” when in fact much of it is private, and the copyright on that private material belongs to the creator. Sharing photos on Facebook should no more constitute a public license to use those photos than sending them over email.
The ubiquitous license agreements and privacy policies that online services force their users to enter into should be scrutinized by the courts around the principle of adhesion, and if the courts are unwilling to reconsider the status quo then congress should intervene with legislation limiting the scope and enforceability of these agreements. We also need to be willing to consider that only Congress can prevent the abuse of governmental power that is used to coerce online services into to turning over data in a wholesale manner.
I am certain that social networks, technology companies, and telecommunications companies would prefer not to kowtow to governments around the world, but operating a service on the scale of Facebook or Google puts these companies in the crosshairs of governmental agencies of all kinds. Once a company has reached this scale, only governments pose a meaningful existential threat. It is therefore incumbent upon the legislature to craft appropriate boundaries that strike a balance between the valid needs of governmental authorities and the equally valid privacy demands of Internet users.
In the end, the lesson learned from my wedding was something much less obvious than the “parable of excess” that was claimed. Rather, the democratization of the media that I idealized in my youth when it was just a distant, blurry dream, suddenly seems much less worthy of idolatry now that it’s become a stark reality. The lesson for me, felt acutely over the past two weeks, ended up being a familiar moral to a familiar story: “Be careful what you wish for — you might just get it.” '''
And I'm willing to bet that Facebook's user agreement, in so far as copyright is concerned, is entirely enforceable, because the service couldn't operate otherwise and also because, no, you're not forced to agree to it, you're not forced to use Facebook and you're not forced to distribute pictures from your wedding on Facebook.
This isn't to say that we don't need privacy in the online world. We do need it, but you also can't reasonably expect to be protected by privacy laws, once you distribute your pictures to a big list of people, many of which are probably strangers. Once that distribution happens, your pictures are no longer private, no matter what you think about it.
Even if governments and technology manage to somehow eliminate the unauthorized redistribution of photos (something unlikely because it's a people problem, not a technological one), people can always describe what they've seen in freaking words and other people can always take those stories, flourish them a little and redistribute them further. And what then? Put a ban on freedom of speech?
This is a slippery slope, because really, the need for protecting intellectual property is very, very different from our need of privacy and privacy is totally incompatible with wilful distribution of info to other people.
TL;DR:
Summary Points
- The wedding site was chosen because it had been previously developed, so there was no environmental impact. The site was not public property, it was a private, for-profit, campground, which was mostly paved in asphalt and or cleared of all foliage. Development only occurred in cleared dirt and asphalt areas.
- The natural environment was not harmed, despite widespread claims to the contrary. There was no harm done to redwood trees, other plants, or animals. There were no endangered species on or near the property.
- We were conscientious about protecting the environment, locating the site with the help of Save the Redwoods League and soliciting advice about how to avoid harming the redwood habitat.
- Hundreds of articles were written in the days following the wedding, yet only one reporter contacted us for comment. Most of the information contained in these articles was erroneous. No original reporting was done, no interviews were conducted, and no fact checking occurred.
- We voluntarily agreed to cover $1 million in penalties related to the Ventana’s lack of development permits and past violations. We also volunteered to contribute $1.5 million in charitable contributions serving the coastal region of the Monterey Peninsula.
You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
Um, what?
In the end, the lesson learned from my wedding was something much less obvious than the “parable of excess” that was claimed. Rather, the democratization of the media that I idealized in my youth when it was just a distant, blurry dream, suddenly seems much less worthy of idolatry now that it’s become a stark reality. The lesson for me, felt acutely over the past two weeks, ended up being a familiar moral to a familiar story: “Be careful what you wish for — you might just get it.”
and
In particular, we need to consider stronger privacy laws here in the U.S., a basic right to privacy along the lines of the laws enjoyed by the citizens of most Western European nations. We are all at risk of becoming “public figures” in a world where the media has expanded to include nearly everyone. In such a world, our defamation laws need to be updated to provide individuals with the protection from public persecution that they deserve. We also need to reinforce our personal privacy by beefing up the intellectual property laws that govern the personal content that we generate and share via services like Facebook.
EDIT: and
Economically speaking, I profited handsomely from the destruction of the media as we knew it. The rest of the world did not make out so well, and society certainly got the worse end of the bargain. The decentralization of media got off to a promising start, but like so many other half-baked revolutions, it never fulfilled its early promise. In its present form, social media may be doing more harm than good. Perhaps we should have expected this — technology always leads the way, society and government inevitably play catch-up.
Edit: The additional quote does nothing to change my point. He doesn't dispute what I said about him profiting from his actions – but he still wants personal sympathy.
I agree with his larger point, privacy matters, but I find this messenger to be distinctly self-serving in all of his actions.
It's hardly (just?) a high moral horse. I dislike the whole do as I say and not as I do attitude.
It is fair to point out the observation post introspection of being on both sides of the equation, exploiter and exploited.
It is not be fair to ask for compensation for exploitation and not willing to give compensation for exploiting.
General rule: if you possess millions of dollars because of your association with Facebook, your sudden personal revelation that people can talk about you on Facebook in ways that might hurt your feelings makes you sound like an entitled idiot circa 2006.
That said, it does sound like a pretty extravagant over-the-top wedding, if a more tasteful one than your typical Kardashian affair. I suspect people latched onto that bit and just ran with it. I can't reconcile his talk of nature and sanctuary with the extremely manufactured and "faked" nature of the event. Why not have a low-key ceremony in an actual beautiful natural area?
I'm with you on the sensationalist bit, and would take it the additional step of assuming we have no right to barge in & opine over someone else's wedding... so long as they're not hurting anyone (or any trees). I'm guessing that last bit is the sticking point :)
I think we should all expect the right to spend our money the way we choose (within legal and ethical boundaries) without being second guessed and attacked by a public mob.
Now, if you had wanted to, you could have penned an editorial exploring whether there's hypocrisy in his decision to "manufacture" the scenery. But the real issue is why so many people who call themselves members of "the media" get to publish scathing blog posts that they pass off as news articles without doing any actual journalistic research.
To make such a suggestion, you'd have to claim that they shouldn't have invited nearly so many people, which is an uncomfortable claim to make.
Why should anyone have to subject their ideals of what their wedding, a deeply personal experience to them, and basically nobody else, ought to look like?
Why should the extravagance of their wedding be cause for anyone to criticize them? It wasn't tax dollars being spent, nor was the money stolen from any of the complainants. The cost of the Parker wedding doesn't affect anybody else, and could arguably seen as a beneficial set of activities as pertaining to trickle-down economics.
Because self will, opinion and free speech are VASTLY more important and sacred then someone's feelings. The internet is the MOST public medium imaginable. When talking in public expect the public to respond.
Fair enough. Perhaps I'm overly cynical and jaded but lamenting that is like lamenting rain is wet.
I mostly (at least try to) ascribe to the Thomas Jefferson ideal of "if it neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket, then it matters not to me" style of involvement with other people's business.
Aside from that, I worry about the growing perception of a media/government encouraged class war, which feeds mostly on people's completely unjustified jealousy.
Apologies for unfairly representing your message. Perhaps I, too, was oversensitive to the subject - though not being a rich white guy with a history of opulent marriages, I don't know what specifically I reacted to.
I'm confused - how exactly was anything they did talking in public?
> We chose a remote location (Big Sur), invited no press, and did our best to conceal that location from the press. We didn’t court attention — quite the opposite, we asked guests to check their cell phones and cameras at the door and we didn’t sell our photos to tabloids.
I wish there was a sort of pinned story feature to offer a community retraction that stays on the front page for a substantial amount of time. Sort of a group apology for promoting comments like "I disagree. To me, this is the story of a single a-hole." and "Fuck you Sean Parker."
If the NY Times wrote an article claiming that Sergey Brin dumped raw sewage from his yacht, the responses would be based upon the assumption of accuracy of that story. If the story isn't accurate, it will quickly be corrected (and legal avenues should be exercised, such as libel lawsuits), which has to some degree happened in this case.
But what are people really supposed to do? For every story everyone must stay quiet? Let claims bake for a period? Put a disclaimer "If this story is accurate..." before every statement? That should be presumed.
In the end, though, while I had no comment on the original story (it seemed like a classic "they're rich...get 'em!" kind of story), I certainly don't find Parker a more reasonable chap after this 10,000 word outing. His argument is essentially-
a) Steelhead trout are stupid anyways. I'm humorously paraphrasing, but they are an endangered/threatened species, and you can't simply lump them in with Rainbow trout and pretend it's all good regardless.
b) Ignorance of the law is no defense. Saying that a group was formed before you were born makes one sound a bit like a jackass (maybe that's what the NSA is claiming? The various rights were written before they were born, so...)
c) He's good because he leveraged someone else's significant mismanagement of the forest, therefore he has no culpability. This is a bit of a tragedy of the commons thing, but his argument seems to be that all of this development happened in a vacuum and he just happened to be a sad passerby who might as well make use of it.
I don't think he needs to apologize to anyone, and it sounds like the land was horrendously mismanaged by the company that owns it, however this doesn't get sympathy.
This is why very wealthy people have to have lawyers to circumscribe their actions, and security guards to protect them, and ... Not a wonderful way to go through life, I suppose, and unfortunate that we live in a world that requires things like that.
Every time he wants to have an event on private property, he has to check that the owner isn't violating any of a myriad regulations imposed by countless regulatory bodies?
He had a multi-million dollar event. Yes, in such cases -- especially where the use is atypical -- the event planners do perform significant legal and liability checks to ensure that the use is compliant with all laws and regulations.
Also, there's some irony that Parker chose to publish this rant about click bait (and other journalistic sins) in Techcrunch.
You should not assume the news is accurate. Read the news for entertainment, not facts.
In EVERY single case where I have been involved in something that later got on the news it was reported incorrectly. Every single time.
The news is not accurate because they don't care about that. They care about being interesting, and that's how you should read it.
It gets really sad when wikipedia editors force incorrect information to stay in an article because a news source said so. Even when it's wrong.
People should be taught from a young age: "The majority of what you hear and learn will be wrong."
In this case that hotel was very guilty of years of violations, and got away free. Didn't cost them a penny. You see those settlements all the time where the guilty party made a payment but admitted no guilt. And of course the government has unlimited deep legal pockets and can make life hell for people. It is in their interest to overreach which makes it even more expensive and threatening for the innocent or those guilty of only a little bit.
The median cost of a wedding is somewhere around $18,000 according to TheKnot.com while the median net worth is around $57,000. In other words, the median wedding cost / net worth ratio is around 1/3.
Mr. Parker's wedding costs were around 1/168th of his net worth. It wasn't extravagant by that measure.
That's a silly measure, thought, because it would imply that a $1 billion dollar wedding for a $3 billion dollar net worth guy would not be "extravagant".
The costs are not tied to the net worth, they are about sitting so many people, feeding them, closing the venue, the flowers, photographer etc. Poorer people make do with less expensive restaurants and venues, and richer people go for more expensive. Still, there's only so much you can spend of a venue, food, wine, etc before it becomes extravagant.
Similarly, a guy that makes $100 million per year does not eat meals that are 2500 times more costly than those of a guy that makes $40.000 a year.
If he did, that would put those meals in the 25.000-50.000 dollars per meal region. Which would be extravagant by any measure.
According to the receipts posted to rich kids of instagram, many actually do!
How willfully ignorant of humanity do you have to be to think that a wedding like that was going to just go without comment?
As for Catholicism, since it's a sacrament, I'd say since the inception of that religion which was some time ago.
>How willfully ignorant of humanity do you have to be to think that a wedding like that was going to just go without comment?
Victim blaming, but to answer your question at face value, somewhat ignorant.
Actually, I doubt that. I'm willing to concede that it has become more prevalent recently, but it seems more likely that this level of irresponsibility has always been present in the media to some degree.
The California Coastal Commission waited until 20 days before the wedding to blackmail him for one million dollars, simply because he could afford it. How on earth do they get away with this abuse of power?
My take away from this is that the hotel is to blame. They did not have the required permits (despite an assumption on Parker's part that they did), and they refused to rectify the situation when it was discovered that there were issues. Parker seems to go easy on them, my guess is because he has some connections to the owners (in my opinion, his best defense would be to turn around and point fingers at the Hotel owners).
Second, "Our wedding was the antithesis of the technology-infested world we live in; a world that I have played a role in creating." No, not really, any more than Marie Antoinette was a milkmaid. In a world insufficiently infested with technology, rich people don't get married in the woods. In fact, apart from the men going there to hunt, they don't spend much time in the woods.
The very rich are different from you and me... no one dare edit them for length.
That said, I am sympathetic to Parker's point that social media/journalism has, with all its benefits, also introduced certain pathologies for which we haven't yet evolved countermeasures.
But, as one comment said, if that story were printed on paper it would have needed a redwood to make the sheets. Probably longer than it needed to be.
The proof lies with the people making the extraordinary claims. Reporters could have easily waited to get all of the facts and if that means waiting to their are back from their honeymoon, so be it. Why give a pass to incompetent reporters?