Smugness As Business Model

I don’t visit Vox.com very frequently because every time I do it’s quite obvious that I’m not its target audience. At Quillette Batya Ungar-Sargon analyzes how Ezra Klein and his partners (which used to include Matthew Yglesias) have turned their characteristic smugness into a business model:

Vox’s trademark style would be a cheeky, barely concealed smugness that flatters its readers into believing that by reading the website—which, not coincidentally, would sustain all of the liberal opinions that young, affluent, educated people already hold—they can rest assured that they are among the ranks of the correct, the informed, rather than one of the stupids.

In combining that smugness with a youthful, Whiggish optimism that equates information with progress, Klein figured out how to commodify being in the know in the social media age. After all, the point is not to know things so much as it is to broadcast that you know them. And the folks at Vox realized there was a goldmine to be had if they could turn sharing a Vox article on social media into the method whereby someone signaled their identity, the way a certain kind of person used to walk around with a New Yorker magazine peeking out of her handbag. In other words, Vox capitalized on one of the mainstays of the journalism status revolution: the anxiety members of broader elite classes have about whether they are elite enough.

Obviously, it’s a winning formula. There’s nothing like reinforcing what people already believe as self-evident unassailable fact to be popular with those people. Actual education requires changing what people already believe rather than challenging it.