The most interesting thing you will learn from Ben Smith’s Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral is that Jonah Peretti, Smith’s former boss at BuzzFeed, once possessed the ability to dunk a basketball. The second-most-interesting thing you will learn is that one of Smith’s proudest achievements as the editor of BuzzFeed was the day of The Dress.
You might remember the warmed-over meme: an image of an ugly striped dress that some people saw as black and blue and others as white and gold. It was a trick of the light, the glare of an optical illusion, that Smith claims furnished his world-historical contribution to humanity—“the last, greatest, totally harmless moment of global internet culture.” It’s all gone downhill from there.
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