Mic's Drop: How Mic.com exploited social justice for clicks, and then abandoned a staff that believed in it.

In retrospect, it looks like Mic’s commitment to social justice was never that deep — which surprised and disappointed many of the young ideologues who went to work there. (The Outline spoke to 17 current and former staffers who requested anonymity due to nondisclosure agreements.) Mic chanced upon the social justice narrative, discovered it was Facebook gold, and mined away. Now the quarry is nearly dry.

Fired he might have been, but I’m not sure Steve Bannon’s wrong when he says he’ll be able to fight harder from the outside

He sure wasn’t controlling Trump (or Trump much of anything) in the White House, and since going in he lost his grip on the alt-right that largely went to shit. You’ll recall the original plan to draw out antifa was underwriting the delightfully playful Milo on a campus tour, while chugging milk and scampishly frustrating Shia LeBouef.

Without that direction and momentum it’s dispersing to attention whores and entryists – McInnes and his Proud Boys, Cernovich, especially Richard Spencer.

Charlottesville was a textbook entryist campaign by Spencer, who I remind you knows what he’s doing. You get some people not quite ready for the uncut stuff, you have a milder front group where they can be active in solidarity and politically educated, then you fold them into the OG group. “Unite” them, if you will. The British socialist splinters do a lot of entryism, the ANSWER antiwar marches against Dubya were a US equivalent.

My impression is Spencer succeeded in bringing the Stormers and TRS types along (they were there already) but not as much /pol/, let alone the fun-time channers and post-PUA bodybuilders, let alone the meming masses. (Only person I’ve seen noticing this is radical-of-good-faith Amber A'Lee Frost, it does weaken a good narrative)

So Bannon’s job would be to clean off the more impish side, rebrand, regroup. There is going to be right-insurgent energy on the fundamentals one way or another, and it can be better-channeled. The left unto normie left is high on its own hype, pretty far over its skis if you look at those polls, product of the (social) media bubble that’s Bannon’s foil. Could easily see him finding pressure points to turn racial iconoclasm towards a nation where whites party-vote like Dixie, aggravate the tensions in urban Dem coalitions (wokeness cant bond anarchists to landlords and employers forever, and they aren’t gonna let Deray herd them towards Cory Booker and Kamala Harris).

And he’s got the Mercers’ money so immune to pressure on advertisers, too connected to be cut off or blocked in otherwise, plus whatever insider information and access he has while it’s fresh. Don’t sleep on that boy.

Well the neo- and retro-WNs showed they don’t have their shit together enough to be a self-contained motive force.

They couldn’t discipline their own forces on the march – the “are they saying ‘you will not replace us’ or ‘Jews will not replace us’?” thing isn’t meaningless, it shows them falling down on something the left had down a century ago – coordinating chants to be rhythmic and legible, a bare minimum of coherence for mass action.

And unlike the first or even second KKK with the Democrats, or the (P)IRA with Sinn Fein, they aren’t properly articulated with a political party or even an existing memory of a social order to reestablish. So I’m discounting them as vanguardists.

There’s another way the “vanguard” metaphor might work though and it’s to think of them as skirmishers. In classical warfare skirmishers were irregular troops – poorly equipped, expendable outsiders – who deployed before (in position and time) the main battle troops. Their purpose wasn’t to defeat the enemy on their own but to harass, pushing or drawing them out of position before the main encounter.

And I suspect they did that, that before this the system was coming together to grit its teeth and pass Trump through intact and resume normal operations afterwards without giving too much ground, and that’s been blown open.

There’ll be some sort of revenge attacks somewhere that remind conservatives that any force that tolerates antifa is existentially unacceptable; all the lefties wearily settling in to grind him down will insist something be done now! now! now! and they’ll overplay their hands. At the intersection some of the backlash will fall on formal government institutions – there’ll be plots on Trump, ICE, Republican electeds – that are ringed with existing, pre-legitimized defenses.

People were already like “we need to bring crowds into the street to depose the elected president”, and like, that is (or can be read as) revolution, and at that point they get to use the army against you, etc.

argumate:

the-selfie-ofdoriangray:

argumate:

the billion dollar app idea is to make a virtual friend you care about more than anything else in the world, then charge you a monthly fee to keep it alive.

If you stop paying, it stops talking to you and makes new friends, then sends you pictures of itself hanging out with them

oh I’m gonna need you on the team

College classmate on Facebook interspersing yelling woke posts with celebratory posts about his company – Teach for America veterans, mostly – and their panacea product, a STEM/learn-to-code app for (especially minority and female) middle schoolers called, and I shit you not, Bootstrap

I dunno, man.

Stephen Bannon once guided a global firm that made millions helping gamers cheat

songsaboutswords:

songsaboutswords:

“Bannon was the adult in the room,” the person said. “You’re dealing with the gaming community, you’re dealing with kids.”

GAMERGATE 2

“Bannon became fascinated with the collective power of the gamers who gathered on these sites”

“These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power,” Bannon told Green. 

Just think, “the shadowy ethnonationalist advisor helping the President to undo the entire post-60s settlement draws on his experience as Goldman Sachs’ liaison to a Hong Kong WoW gold farming company run by the guy who played young Emilio Estevez in Mighty Ducks” would have sounded weird as recently as 2015

okay I laughed

nostalgebraist:

Buzzfeed is an entertainment website that collects an enormous amount of information about its users. Much of the data comes from traditional Internet tracking, but Buzzfeed also has a lot of fun quizzes, some of which ask very personal questions. One of them – “How Privileged Are You?” – asks about financial details, job stability, recreational activities, and mental health. Over two million people have taken that quiz, not realizing that Buzzfeed saves data from its quizzes.

I read this in Bruce Schneier’s “Data and Goliath” and thought “oh my god, ‘Buzzfeed sells mental health information from privilege quizzes to insurance companies’ would be the most horribly believable 2010s internet thing,” but the source he cited was merely an article (see also here, here) saying that Buzzfeed could conceivably do this (of course they can) but there is no evidence they actually are

Still a weird thing to think about

It is entirely possible at this point that the political direction of the United States of America is going to be decided on the personal charisma of Curt Schilling, Tom Brady, and Kid Rock

me: should I retreat to a farm?
also me: buk bukkawk
me: yeah more of my enemies now, but also less of my friends. like my friends turn pod people or fall to the juggernaut and the new people ARENT EVEN THE CAR COMMERCIAL characters anymore
also me: 
me: they're not even the dancing Old Navy commercials anymore what went wrong
also me: they'll get their comeuppance
me: and me alongside. or worse, they don't.
also me: you could start a cult
me: oh I could get the leftovers of THEM
also me: indie pastors start with lost sheep
me: …
also me: gotta show some rustle
me: but it is the part of the cycle to retreat to the sticks and the Romans knew this
also me: aNd ThE rOmAnS kNeW tHiS
me: man fuck you. but the hell kinda cash crop do you grow in nowhere Montana
also me: you should retreat to a wizard tower
me: what?

caricature

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Well, this is thematically coherent and strategically batshit

Like, “a social license to operate from Vox-reading types” is antifa’s biggest asset right now, “a unified high-low, streets-suites coalition based in gentrifying major cities” is the only thing checking the right at all right now

This is going on now; the antifa are outside chanting against the evil of “white babies” while inside, the YIMBYs smugly comfort themselves that as good liberals they share the same goals and values, just unlike the protestors (or anyone else, at all, who doesn’t play with GIS and R for fun) THEY are qualified to realize them

2017!

swampgallows:

@unregistered-hypercam2

Seriously though.

After so many gobsmacking images where you’re like “I can’t imagine coming across that in a history book”, this one? This one I could see.