Michael Wolff: disgraced NetGuide impresario, failed Internet industrialist, tragically out-of-depth digital pundit, pariah to venture capitalists across the nation. There are already so many reasons to feel sorry for the guy that sometimes you almost forget to dislike him. He has disgruntled former employees grumbling for a pound of his flesh. Brill's Content has shattered (or tried to shatter) the house of glass Wolff built up in his unsexy tell-all book, Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet. The book itself spends so much time building up to a "liquidity event" that you can't help but feel a pang of sympathy when the only liquidity event ends up happening in Wolff's trousers, and he's stuck with nothing to do but write a catty memoir about his unreliable bladder.
But then, our sympathy isn't worth much, squandered as it usually is on the foiled villains in Walker, Texas Ranger. The real reason to feel sorry for Michael Wolff is that he seems to be married to the most unpleasant woman ever to wield a rolling pin. Wolff may think his wife Alison's lawyerly lines of inquiry in the pages of Burn Rate reveal a common-sense approach to the belabored craziness of the Internet, but all it tells us is what an incorrigible shrew she is: I called Alison, who was annoyed by my panic. "What do you mean you're going to get squeezed?" "Who exactly do you think you are?" she asked, in a tone that was not entirely flattering. "Do you have any idea how to play this game?" It's a measure of what a sourpuss Wolff is that the one person he likes comes across in his book as a cross between Alice Kramden and Hitler. With a henpeck like that waiting for him at the end of every day, it's no wonder Wolff turns so sullen over the course of his book -- doodling half-assed epiphanies in his day planner during meetings where he's supposed to be keeping his company, Wolff New Media, alive. (Most of these epiphanies seem to be about how physically unattractive everybody else is -- an odd concern, given the author's resemblance to Simon Birch.) Eventually, Alison has to remind him, "This is not high school. This is business."
High school can be tough, though, and now that he's graduated from his so-called Internet life into a career as an illiterary memoirist, Wolff seems to be in better spirits -- though he still strains visibly to seem like a cool kid. In a pre-emptive strike against Brill, he wrote a column for his new overlords at New York magazine in which he warned, "It's a funny book." When you have to tell people you're funny, it's usually a sign that you're not -- and Wolff, whose book is filled with references to how he said this thing "playfully" or that thing "teasingly," tries harder than most. Indeed, it's a little disappointing that Content confined itself to boilerplate "So-and-so denies making these quotes" fact checking. Given Wolff's hack thriller habit of ending every chapter on a portentous piece of dialog ("You don't want to know," our banker said. "You really don't." "Rest in peace, baby." "You little fucking shit! I'm going to get you! I'll get you!"), finding misquotes in Burn Rate is about as impressive as finding Nick in a Greek restaurant. The only real scoop would have been to discover that the people Wolff is writing about really do talk like characters in a Clive Cussler potboiler.
Still, we're happy for Wolff's success because -- we'll just come out and say it -- Wolff is something of a hero to us, a Platonic Ideal of incompetence, myopia, and attitude on an improbable collision course with unearned cash and credibility. Maybe we're charmed by his toffish manner in drawing the split between Content and Technology as an online version of the East Coast/West Coast hip- hop wars ("Not just creepy but provincial," he sniffs about Seattle.) Maybe it's that, much as we like ad hominem attacks on one's moral, intellectual, and fiscal superiors, we like a whole book of them even more. Maybe the combination of accusations that Wolff embezzled his employees' salaries and the fact that he sees himself as the Candide of the Web just proves our long-held belief that stupid people are even sneakier than smart people. Maybe we're just connoisseurs of bad business plans, of which Wolff's NetGuide Web site (an editor's dream search engine that appealed not just to sellers, advertisers, or surfing soccer moms, but to none of the above) was certainly one of the worst -- a fact painfully obvious to most everyone well before the effort tanked.
Most of all, though, our adulation pivots on our admiration for Wolff's grasp of the laws of career journalism. The book climaxes when Wolff defiantly declares his true calling to his lead investor: "I'm a writer. If this company goes down, I will continue to do what I have always done, which is write. Perhaps about you." Apparently the author believes this will make the reader stab a fist in the air and declare, "Yeah! You tell the bastard, Michael!" But the real fascination here is Wolff's ability to do what journalists do best -- turn a dearth of talent and a gift for failure into a career advancement. Among certain Internet commentators -- the ones who like to crack wise beyond their Internet years -- Wolff's dour* oeuvre* offers a pain-free perspective on the "craziness" of the Internet industry. Precisely the same empty perspective, ironically, that Wolff's own Net Business once offered clueless executives looking for "experts" who "get the Internet." (Kurt Andersen, who, like Wolff, has made a second career of channeling 1995-era Suck, blurbs the book as "the real deal.")
Wolff's real genius, in fact, rests in demonstrating that it's still possible not to get the Internet. For all his ass-swaddling elisions (he tells you his company "ran out of money" the way an 8-year-old tells you the window "got broke"), Wolff barely lets on that he failed because he had a monumentally sucky product, no business plan, no real grasp of finance, and a "character issue." Yet somehow (and here's where the hero factor comes in), he's leveraged that failure into a job punditeering about what a crazy industry the Internet is. In effect, he got scammed in a game of three-card monte, then appointed himself head of the Casino Control Commission. "The real job," Wolff admits early in his book, "was just to keep the cash coming while you shifted with the paradigm." Whatever lessons Wolff may have drawn from his Internet misadventures, he clearly hasn't lost his shifty streak.
In the real world of business, this combination of spite, sneakiness, stupidity, cupidity, and sucking up (the book is well stained by Walter Isaacson's DNA samples) would carry liabilities -- it takes a certain generosity of spirit to run a company, for instance. But journalism turns all vices into virtues. In interviews, Wolff responds to the embezzlement claims by noting that his underachieving employees should take their lumps and be grateful for the experience. Last week in The Red Herring, he made fun of the business partners who are mad that he squandered their investments on his Tuscan vacation. (Wolff's economic ethic is roughly equal to that of a real college freshman: "It's OK to waste my dad's money 'cause he's, like, just some big business asshole.")
And by journalism's inevitable law of increasing bile, Wolff's stinker attitude has paid off. It's odd that a guy who has such contempt for the actual content providers in his own company should find his only real métier as a content provider himself; but where content is concerned, contempt is the whole point. We'd love to have Wolff's catbird-seat column in New York (a magazine careless newsstand shoppers sometimes even buy, in the mistaken belief that it is The New Yorker), where his duties seem to consist of talking about himself and pointing out that Rupert Murdoch is a powerful guy. Hell, we wouldn't even say no to his inane column in the Industry Standard (which careless investors sometimes put money into in the mistaken belief that they're investing in toilet industry giant American Standard), where all he has to do is steal ideas from other columnists.
But most important, Wolff has that industry expert spot we've been coveting for years. And we'd be jealous of his success in our chosen field, except that we know he encompasses the Whitmanesque multitudes of journalistic success in ways we never could. In a profession where a second language and an econ minor can put you at the top of your field, a reporter who is also a liar, a narcissist, a blithering incompetent, a self-pitying Sally Anne, and a thief must be some kind of quintuple threat. No wonder Wolff's got such a great future behind him.
This article was republished from Suck.com.
