Ben Collins (Massachusetts, 1988) is the CEO of The onion, major satirical media in the United States. “Let’s say we’re like Charlie Hebdobut better,” he warns so that the European public understands what they do in The onion. Collins has been a technology journalist for more than a decade focused on misinformation and conspiracies in the industry Daily beast and the NBC network.
In 2024 he changed profession. I wanted to take a step back and republish the paperback edition of The onionwhich they abandoned in 2013. Now that monthly magazine has more than 50,000 subscribers and is their main financial support. But the elections changed their hopes for calm. “I had to go back and do everything I already knew how to do: how to make a story big, the old fashioned way,” he says, partly in reference to the attempted purchase by The onion From infowarsthe conspiracy website run by Alex Jones, who owed $1.5 billion to the families of child shooting victims after repeatedly denying it had occurred.
Here’s how he describes his work now: “It’s about taking a headline or a perfectly written story by someone else and letting everyone see it.” He spoke with EL PAÍS in Barcelona, where he participated in the Mozilla Festival with a speech entitled “Why is satire important for good technology?”
Ask. Why is satire in technology important?
Answer. If you don’t laugh a little at the exorbitant valuations of artificial intelligence (AI) companies and the people who run them, you’re not showing everything that’s going on. It is clear that we are in a bubble and we have to make fun of them. One of my favorite titles The onion is, “Gee, that’s too bad as a person, he sees huge potential in AI,” and I would say that’s how a lot of people feel right now. We must make power responsible, this is the rule of jesters and journalists. Where is the real power now, if not in those companies?
Q. They don’t like jokes.
R. Elon Musk has already tried to ban it The onion in X and failed. His inability to be Cold It affects everyone’s life. We receive removal requests from everyone from Democratic governors to Donald Trump.
Q. But you already know it’s all a joke.
R. But they get very offended. The case of Donald Trump dates back to before he ran for president, in 2013. The headline read: “If you ever feel depressed, remember that in 10 or 15 years I will be dead.” We received a crazy letter from Michael Cohen, his lawyer, and we framed it.
Q. He didn’t like the title.
R. At the origin of all these people there are stories of mockery. Trump ran for president because Barack Obama made fun of him. Elon Musk bought Twitter because he thought there was some kind of magic button that could do it Cold. It’s all just a revenge fantasy against a world that didn’t accept them. We need to do a better job of trying to accept people who are weird or who have social problems. But they have more power than anyone else, and in the end, what they do is revenge.
Q. Revenge of the geeks?
R. That would be unfair to geeks. Fools are better. I wrote an article about Palmer Luckey (creator of Oculus and former Meta executive) in which he claimed to have funded “The Donald,” a Trump support forum, which ultimately became a planning location for the January 6 attack on the Capitol. He now runs a drone and weapons company. Everyone has an origin and all these people in power have been rejected by polite society. There are two ways to handle the situation: you can reform yourself and be a better person and look inward, or you can become a total fascist authoritarian. The majority chose the second option.
Q. Donald Trump jokes about everything. Reality seems like satire. That’s not the job of The onion more difficult?
R. People say Trump is funny. But have you ever heard Trump actually laugh? Like a genuine laugh, the kind that can’t be contained. It never happened. His jokes are like “that’s fat” or “that’s stupid”. It’s a bully’s attitude. We are something else.
Q. Which?
R. People always say that the world has become what it is. The onion He’s been doing it for 37 years. I’d say it’s much worse. I don’t like it The onion I have to start saying sentences that seem truer than what comes out in the New York Times. But who else will? It’s not that we have changed, it’s that the media around us has changed. If what we write seems more real than the news, it is a reflection of how the media is doing, not of us.
Q. And what is the media like?
R. Things have changed a lot. Almost all of my friends are journalists and have two options: keep their heads down in the media they work for and keep their good salary, or go out on their own and report what is really happening. I know for a fact that all the media that reemerged in the early Trump years fired all the great reporters or told them to shut up.
Q. This is a favor The onion?
R. People literally tell us things like “I canceled my subscription to Washington Post Why The onion It’s healthier.” They’re right. I don’t think it does anyone any good to spend all day looking at pictures of children taken in daycare centers. Obviously you need to know that this happens, but to process the news on a larger scale, it’s probably best to receive The onion Once a month spend the day watching CNN.
Q. It’s a real trend. People ignore the news.
R. Yes, but at the same time they are re-engaging in civic life, at least in Chicago. I’m not just saying this because my girlfriend is running for Congress (Kat Abughazaleh in Illinois). People already know enough to realize that things are going terribly wrong, and seeing another person kidnapped on the street isn’t going to change their opinion. They are already completely fed up. Now I’m in action mode. You see it, for example, with Zohran Mamdani (recently elected mayor of New York) and all the people who volunteer. The same thing happens in Chicago, but against ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement): everyone has a 3D printed whistle for when they are out and about in the neighborhood. People have gone from consuming news to find out “what is happening” to looking for “how can I change the situation”. We don’t offer “how to change things,” but we provide catharsis. We give the feeling of “you’re right, everything is terrible, but here are some jokes and something you can put on a banner.” We offer a way to vent, because people already know that the world is a mess and that there are eight guys running the world and they’re all bad.
Q. As a journalist, he covered disinformation. There are those who can see the funny titles of The onion as misinformation.
R. Misinformation is designed to mislead, and the misinformation I talked about targeted those with fewer rights: trans people, immigrants, and was used for political gain. The onion it doesn’t. It is said that “we punch upwards”, but not only that. We try to get to the heart of the matter by making fun of it, which is different from making up lies about someone. In general, the quality of the joke reflects the quality of the person. For example, we would never make a video about artificial intelligence where we shit all over American cities.
Q. What impact will AI have? The onion?
R. It helps us. AI humor is so bad that anything we do seems like the smartest thing ever done. AI isn’t just a plagiarism machine, it’s a machine that sucks the personality out of any text or art. When we do things ourselves, you can see that they have heart and soul, and that makes us stand out.
Q. AI is terrible at pranks.
R. Go to ChatGPT now and ask him for a joke about what’s going on – your eyes will pop out of their sockets and roll out the window.
The war with Infowars
Q. The hustle with infowars A few months ago it was extraordinary.
R. It was huge. We had no idea if we would make it.
Q. Days had passed since Trump’s election.
R. We made our offer, they also made theirs, but it was lower. That day was crazy, because we too, almost as a joke, bid on all their supplements and suddenly we had a warehouse full of erection pills and no idea what to do with them. It was chaos. Meanwhile, we watched Alex Jones go crazy. Then we went to trial, but we didn’t have a traditional bankruptcy lawyer, because, well, we just didn’t have one.
Q. Was it improvised?
R. We had been preparing the offer for a while, we wanted to make sure the families were on board (Alex Jones was sued by the families of the Sandy Hook shooting for saying it didn’t happen). We asked them if it was okay for us to make an offer and they took it very well, they were excited. Then the judge said it wasn’t enough money. We thought, “This isn’t really worth anything, but okay, okay.” At this point it became a sort of pride issue. If this man can get what he wants, if he can manipulate the legal system not to pay, when he owes $1.5 billion and hasn’t paid anything, then it’s okay to move forward. It’s simply the right thing to do. We don’t know what will happen now.
Q. Is the legal battle still open?
R. Yes, let’s keep trying.
Q. And what’s the plan if you get it?
R. Create a website focused on showing how everything in American life is a scam and how these people contribute in many different ways. Not just Alex Jones. Almost all Internet gurus sell you something behind the scenes, using their charisma as a tool.
