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Yesterday CBS’s Temu Leni Riefenstahl Bari Weiss fired everyone at 60 Minutes who had demonstrated they were willing to stand up to her and her paymasters David Ellison, his daddy Larry Ellison, and the Ellisons’ daddy Donald Trump. Then Weiss announced her new pick to lead the show: Nick Bilton.
The two reactions to this news were either “who?” or “him?” depending on how closely you followed tech journalism in the twenty-teens. If you weren’t following it, good call! Luckily you know a guy who was following it and regrettably that is me. Let’s visit the archives.
Who is Nick Bilton?
Bilton was born at the New York Times and grew up as “a design editor in the newsroom and a researcher in the research and development labs,” which are real jobs according to Wikipedia, before he became a Times technology columnist writing asinine takes like “what if Trayvon Martin had been wearing Google glasses when he was murdered” and “is your smartwatch giving you CANCER?” The latter was roasted so hard by The Verge’s Russell Brandom that it accreted a full page of editorial notes and corrections walking back the entire premise of the piece.
In 2013 Bilton published a book about the founding of Twitter and an anonymous hater collected some of the clunkiest sentences in a Tumblr titled “Nick Can’t Write.” Bilton was a pioneer of the kind of baffling metaphor that now plagues so much A.I. writing, such as:
In “Nick Bilton’s series of technology columns for idiots” he was also ahead of his time in producing the kind of aggressively vapid A.I. doom-marketing that has since become omnipresent. In a 2014 piece about the risks of out of control machine super-intelligence, he wrote:
Ok! You might expect him nail down a little more specifically what he means by “A.I.” but that’s not Bilton’s vibe. Instead he barrels ahead with speculation about a hypothetical cancer-curing medical robot, “self-replicating nanobots,” and autonomous weapons, apparently unaware that the first real victims of A.I. would turn out to be writers of baffling metaphor.
In 2016 Bilton left his childhood home, The New York Times, and went off to Vanity Fair where they let him pretend he discovered the Theranos fraud that John Carreyrou actually discovered, and ask “Will Mark Zuckerberg Be Our Next President?” You can tell that’s a serious question because the first sentence of the subhed is: “It’s a serious question.” He returned to A.I. again in 2023 seemingly for the first time, asking the same questions he had asked in 2014 but this time about technologies “most of which have been realized in just under six months.” Which six months did he mean, of the intervening decade? Who knows. Bilton’s post-Times style got so florid and overwrought that while I was writing about it in Tabs:
There may only be a single person about whom me, hyperglocal thinkfluencer Professor Jeff Jarvis, and circa 2014 Leah Finnegan would all say “wow, that guy sucks” and it’s Nick Bilton. He was the kind of tech commentator anti-talent who makes a smooth and remunerative career for himself by being enthusiastic about gadgets while seeming think-y and writing at a low fourth grade level. Sometimes these guys ascend to their proper heaven and become venture capitalists, like Josh Constine. Sometimes they stick it out in print media and torment us for decades, like Kevin Roose. Not smart enough for the former or likable enough for the latter, instead Nick Bilton went into TV.
Nick’s Television Experience
Michael Calderone, Bilton’s former editor at Vanity Fair now at New York Magazine, reported that Bilton has “a decade of experience in documentaries.” I guess! In the New York Times Benjamin Mullin and Michael Grynbaum summarized his film career this way:
And he told Semafor’s Max Tani much the same thing:
This is all true, as far as it goes. Bilton has been involved in a couple of documentary projects in the last few years. But oddly I haven’t seen him mention his highest profile television credit: staff writer for all five episodes of Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye’s egregious 2023 flop “The Idol.” The Guardian called it “one of the worst shows ever made,” and the Hollywood Reporter said it was “dogged by a thin plot and an incoherent narrative.” Rolling Stone reported that a member of the production described the show as: “like any rape fantasy that any toxic man would have,” and eventually even The Weeknd himself admitted it was very bad.
Bilton’s new job at CBS leaves the status of his upcoming collaboration with Martin Scorsese and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in “Untitled Hawaii-Set Crime Drama” up in the air unless Scorsese can find another writer to take over—perhaps a rhesus macaque with a severe brain injury, or Claude.
“Walking into this building and putting my name on this job is the honor of my career,” wrote Bilton in his characteristically almost-but-not-quite-coherent introductory message to 60 Minutes’ staff. “There are more red flags flying over this memo than a Soviet military parade” observed Hamilton Nolan, who points out that the only reason someone so unqualified gets hired for a job like this is as a hatchet man, just like Bari Weiss was herself. In a parenthetical Nolan also writes:
Weiss has already made the CBS Evening News dumb and pointless, and CBS has replaced Stephen Colbert with something dumb and pointless, so I don’t think it’s particularly speculative to say Weiss is now hard at work doing the same to 60 Minutes. Max Read pointed out the essentially confusing nature of the hire: “Has the 60 Minutes well has been so poisoned that Bilton was the biggest name they could convince take the job on the terms offered? Or do they actually think he will do a good job on the merits, such as they are?” As the adage goes: “A’s hire A’s, and B’s hire C’s.” Bari Weisses hire Nick Biltons. It’s hard to imagine what kind of people Nick Bilton will hire.
Today’s Song: Elliott Smith, “Ballad of a Big Nothing”
You can do what you want to, there’s no one to stop you…
This kind of deep historical perspective on the terrible people that are running hog wild in our collapsing society doesn’t just happen by itself. It takes a lot of coffee and snacks and mortgage payments to review just one dopey tech columnist’s entire career of bad tabs. Please help fund it, by becoming a paid subscriber.
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