It was certainly not where I planned to go with it, but as I’m reporting out just what was happening in this world that I had been kind of aware of and adjacent to but had never totally dug into, it’s like, “Oh, wow. Because it was, to me, the most interesting part of the book actually. I think I don’t buy the premise, but let me tell the story a little. But it is also really about culture and politics and the whole world that we’re living in at the moment. But I think that is what makes them a really interesting place to tell a story that isn’t really fundamentally, to me, about the dollars and cents of the media business, although that runs through it and is ultimately what raises them up and brings them down. They cared a lot about culture and society and politics, sometimes too much and sometimes more than they cared about operating their businesses. Because they were pretty ideological, and they had these really clear views about what digital media would, could, and should do to culture. They were there at the very beginning, and they were people who had thought really deeply, maybe too deeply maybe they thought too hard about what they were doing to be good businessmen. But I think what interested me about those two was that they were really personal rivals. And there was an infinity of other people.
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